Week 19 – Rock Bottom and Back Up Again!

Introduction

I am currently writing this with overwhelmingly consuming stomach pain… not sure why this is the case, but it was bad last night too! I seriously considered not going into school this morning but, as I didn’t feel too bad this morning, I decided to go in! Annoyingly I’ve felt ok all day… I’ve got a lot to do this weekend, so I better get better!

Anyway, on a lighter note, teaching has been going well this week! I am finally starting to get my head back around planning and teaching and everything in between. The main comments coming out from my observations at the moment is to draw everything together… easier said than done!

Tech fail 2.0

My not so lovely work laptop is the bane of my life at the moment! It has many, many quirks that I am beginning to get my head around, such as changing the display settings every time I plug it in. On the whole, however, I can cope with what it throws with me in a 6-hour school day,

Monday was definitely a case of having to think on my feet – I merely shut my laptop and it decided to completely turn off and not save/ recover any of the files I had open ready for the lesson. Things were the wrong way around on my PowerPoint (and I had been very excited about teaching this lesson – journalist writing about New Zealand!), I couldn’t open SIMS for love nor money (thanks to the teacher I was with for getting it up on her laptop!) and it had decided to make a weird noise when I plugged the sound in to watch a video. The laptop is already very slow, and this completely shook my confidence. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I managed to adapt my way around this, thinking on my feet as it were. It is more that I completely lost face in front of my class! It led to a few dips in the lesson, meaning they just talked over me – more so than they usually would. 

It wasn’t the end of the world, but, due to my stressed state, my explanations were anything but clear and I ended up forgetting bits of the lesson I had meticulously planned in.

New Planning Style

In light of how long it had been taking me to write a plan, I decided to use a different pro forma, that I designed myself.  So far, it has been quicker àI use a key instead of writing everything out. However, I have been finding myself short of time for planning and, with two assignments on the horizon, I may end up adapting it once more.

Rock Bottom on Tuesday

Following my tech fail on Monday, my confidence was not very high on Tuesday. My 9X lesson went well but my 9Y lesson, on language analysis in the opening of Bleak House, was definitely not. To the extent where I could not say if my students had successfully met the lesson objectives or not. On reflection with my AT, he gave my lesson a 5/10…. Compared to the much higher I had been doing the previous week.

This led me to think about why it had happened. In theory I know what I am doing, I know the aspects to include in a lesson and I know how to present it – I learned all that in P1. So now, I feel, this placement is more about harmonising the different aspects which, I’m hoping, will result in teaching feeling more natural and less of a brain explosion. I felt as if I knew that lesson plan inside out but, when it came to teaching it, I had left out crucial afl pitstops as well as information that would’ve been useful to tell them. 

I am lucky to have such a diligent class in most respects, however this was not the case in a lesson like this. The higher attaining students get on with it with no problem, and the lower ability students constantly asked questions and eventually got there. Unfortunately, I had no idea about what was being (or wasn’t being) learned until I flicked through their books at the end. So I am taking this hit as an important one for my journey into a teacher! 

Another struggle I face is that the small ways of running things are slightly different to P1… so here is a list for me to look back to if I forget!

• Always include a starter and a plenary task – even in the lessons when I feel like they may need a bit more time writing.
• Always keep the lesson objective on the board, as well as activity timings and whether they are working in pairs, groups or individually.
• Make sure the powerpoint is clear about all (or mostly all) details for that part of the lesson, including differentiation parts. 
• Remember that different teachers have different ways of teaching their classes and expect feedback that differs widely!!

Pulling myself back up!

That’s enough of the negative points from this week now! There were also a lot of things that went fantastically this week and now, starting as I am writing this, I am going to move on from the bad and focus on the good this week.

I taught my bottom set year 10s this week and completely loved it! They are so lush, yes they chat a bit and do take a lot of nagging to stay on task… but they are so much fun to teach! One of my highlights this week is one of the boys in that group turning the visualiser round to show the whole class his face on the whiteboard. Probably doesn’t sound all that funny but it certainly tickled me! I also did my first bit of marking and ‘reflecting and improvement’ time with them. I feel as if this will be where the challenge lies – they can annotate the poems fine, it’s just knowing how to translate this knowledge into a cohesive paragraph – any tips on teaching this (whilst keeping their engagement!) would be handy! 

I also had my first official lesson observation on Thursday, with the 9y class. This lesson will definitely be one of my favourite lessons I have taught so far. Firstly, I got them to go back to the language analysis sheets we did on the Tuesday and use a red pen to improve what we did. I saw improvements first hand – always good to see! This was a very promising start, leading quite nicely into an introduction to satire. 

Now, I feel as if satire is one of those things that once you get it you completely get it, but it is pretty challenging to understand. I have also found that the difference between satire and parody is very subtle – and often comes down to the objectivity! This lesson consisted of watching Tom and Jerry, then Itchy and Scratchy – discussing how violence for children is a bad thing. Then looking at Mr Tumble and how we might write a satire of him. All in all – I had fun, they had fun and actually had a lesson essential to their progress!

However, upon discussion that following evening, myself and my AT decide that Mr Tumble/ Justin is hard to satirise – yes he doesn’t care about the children he spends time with when he films something at schools (first-hand information from my cousin, who was working at a SEN school when he came to film there) and yes he is probably just in it for the money. However, is this something that would be worth satirising? We felt that it was in fact more of a parody, which lead to my first sort of ‘off topic’ medium term plan change – looking at the differences between parody and satire.

This then led to another fun lesson today, looking at a parody for an iPhone advert and a SNL satirisation of Trump. After talking through the differences (and a lovely explanation given to the group by one of my HA students!) the class made a unanimous decision that their Mr Tumble satires were in fact parodies. At this point, I said to them that they could create their own satire or parody about anything they wanted. I had some very interesting responses to this, some rather dark! But on the whole, I am looking forward to marking them! (I did have the intentions of doing that this weekend, but I left in a hurry (eager to be home and just have a rest) leading me to conveniently remember half way home – although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! I also have to write plans/ make PowerPoints for next week, polish off my medium term plans look at some assignment readings amongst a sackful of other things… so I’m taking this as a good thing on this occasion (even if I do end up having a lot of work on Monday!).

Teaching Targets

Due to my increasing work load, I will be now cutting this part of my blog – I go through it with my AT in our weekly meetings, so I still have a record of it!

J

Currently Reading:

To also cut down on my time spent writing blogs, I will only write a mini-review when I have finished a book/ play/ poetry.

Poetry – Focused on Exposure again this week, as I was teaching it.

The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Girlhood– Cat Clarke