Student Teaching: Am I Supposed to be THIS miserable?

[cbish]

Yeah, I retract that last post. After reading 140+ essays on Gatsby, I got pretty tired and grumpy. (Confusing report with rapport should have been a sign of it all.)

I actually do play nice with others, I promise.

PS. Now bring that beer over! I sure need it after the week I had. And don't forget the dirty pics.

I know you play nice! And, I forgot to mention that I'm trying to recruit Roadtoads son to teach at your school!

 

[Roadtoad]

Yeah, I retract that last post. After reading 140+ essays on Gatsby, I got pretty tired and grumpy. (Confusing report with rapport should have been a sign of it all.)

I actually do play nice with others, I promise.

PS. Now bring that beer over! I sure need it after the week I had. And don't forget the dirty pics.

My condolences. Even ONE essay on Gatsby would make damned near anyone irritable. (Then again, reading Gatsby pretty much has the same effect.)

 

[Pragmatist]

Pragmatist (how apt):

What excellent advice. Mind if I cut and paste it for a little manual I can keep?

I do have a passion for my subject. I am English, in all its aspects. I love literature, poetry, analysis, grammar, spelling, writing, composing, editing....I love words and wordsmiths. I can't do anything else; there is nothing else. Nothing else enthralls me as reading, writing, and mechanics do.

Some of what you suggest, I'm doing. The rest, I can learn to do.

Thanks. You should write a book, and I'm serious.

Please feel free to do what you want with it! And if it works for you, pass it on!

Your passion for your subject means that you are a teacher. That's all there is to it! Your mission (should you choose to accept it! ) is to pass on your passion.

It's funny, people are always telling me I should write books (on all kinds of things) unfortunately I never seem to have the time...maybe one day.

Oh, and thanks to Athon too for the kind words.

 

[Skeptic]

Slingblade:

Perhaps I'm wrong here, but it seems to me your mentors are doing just what they're supposed to be doing. They help you with stuff like start time and schedules, which is nice, but leave you to deal with difficult students on your own since that's just what you're supposed to be learning to do.

I don't think they're trying to hurt you at all, just to teach you. (By the way, how do you call someone who teaches a student teacher? A student teacher's teacher?)

Again I could be wrong.

 

[slingblade]

Slingblade:

Perhaps I'm wrong here, but it seems to me your mentors are doing just what they're supposed to be doing. They help you with stuff like start time and schedules, which is nice, but leave you to deal with difficult students on your own since that's just what you're supposed to be learning to do.

I don't think they're trying to hurt you at all, just to teach you. (By the way, how do you call someone who teaches a student teacher? A student teacher's teacher?)

Again I could be wrong.

They're called "mentor teachers."

First, you're only getting my side of things. My account is obviously biased, though I'm trying to tell what I think happened, the best I can.

Second, student teaching is part of my education. I paid a full semester's tuition for this experience. I'm still being taught how to teach. Telling me to guess at things I don't yet know isn't the most effective way to teach me anything. Everyone is different, however. Maybe such a method would work for you. But it doesn't work for me, and I'm paying for this. I'd like my teachers to use effective methods from which I can learn, since it's my money and my career, not theirs. If guessing is all that's needed, why should I even have a mentor?

Since I began receiving solid strategies both here and there, my teaching and my confidence has improved. At first, this was so hard, I wanted only to quit, and only my student loans were keeping me there. Naturally, I hated it all.

Now, after only a week of real help from several sources, I'm enjoying this and hoping I can get hired soon. I want to do this for as long as I am able to do it.

What teachers do is too serious a matter to leave to mere rookie guesswork, IMO.

YMMV.

ETA: I didn't think they were necessarily trying to hurt me, either....though some days, I did wonder....

 

[alfaniner]

The only thing I remember about Spoon River Anthology is wondering when we'd get to the part about the spoon.

Perhaps you want to address that up front.

 

[drkitten]

Perhaps I'm wrong here, but it seems to me your mentors are doing just what they're supposed to be doing. They help you with stuff like start time and schedules, which is nice, but leave you to deal with difficult students on your own since that's just what you're supposed to be learning to do.

That's a piss-poor mentor -- or teacher --, then.

My partner is taking a non-credit class on peb page design at a local technical school. I woudn't feel that the value-for-service was justifiable if all the tech school did was to take care of "start time and schedules," but otherwise was just throwing the students into a lab full of computer equipment and software and saying "hey, deal with web page design on your own since that's just what you're supposed to be learning."

A teacher is supposed to instruct. At the very least, a teacher should give examples of how to do a task, and feedback about how the students' initial attempts at the task were/weren't effective and how it could be improved. If slingblade is having trouble dealing with difficult students, teach her/him how to deal with difficult students, dammit!

 

[slingblade]

Is there a book one would recommend on how to grade an essay?
I think I grade at a college level, and don't know how to do it for HS students.

Do I mark all their errors, or not? They can have a lot of errors, and marking them all feels too harsh to me, but letting some things go allows them to say "I thought it was correct, or you would have marked it off, right?"

How can I find out what they know, before we write? I did some pre-assessment at the start of the semester, but I didn't think to include essay mechanics and forms.
I thought they were familiar with MLA style, and some of the other Eng. teachers at my school now (after my disaster) tell me it's been taught before, but that students forget it so fast that when it's brought up again, they feel as if they've never seen it. I briefly went over in-text citations and works cited pages before the last essay, and they seemed to be familiar with it--when I asked for questions or concerns, there were none.

Now that they've gotten their research papers back, they issued howls of outrage that I would mark them off for not having these things they say they don't know how to do. I asked one class why they didn't speak up when I asked if they understood, and they told me they didn't know enough to know what questions to ask. I've been there before, myself, but can I consider they're telling the truth?

My mentors tell me to watch out for students playing dumb in an effort to get out of doing something. How can I tell the difference, or is this another one of those "only after years of experience" types of learning they keep telling me about?

So, is there a book on the subject?
Thanks.

 

[Roadtoad]

Chris had a similar problem with students in his website building class. They'd play stupid, thinking he'd let them slide. Then, he'd sit down right next to them, show them he knew what they were doing, and they'd wind up looking foolish in addition to having to do the assignment they were given in the first place.

You can't afford to play it soft, Sling, nor can they. If you let them slide on grammar, spelling, factuality, and that sort of thing, it's going to hurt them further on down the road. You know this, and so should they. In the end, they'll appreciate an honest teacher far more than an easy one.

 

[cbish]

The problem RT is time. This is a fundamental problem with English teaching, and to some degree, teaching in general; too many students to give quality feedback (at least written feedback). If you had 10 students, you'd be Teacher of the World. With 180 students, you're going to kill yourself, which has been known to happen to beginning teachers. My Master Teacher told me it was my job to exercise them, not the other way around.

As far as grading, there are many rubricks available. Try on-line. Your school should have some standards in this area (but, I can't say I'd be suprised if they don't or if it's not uniform). One way we do it here is 50% grammar, 50% content (for which a rubrick is followed and you have a check list).

Another thing would be to limit the number of large essays and have more small ones. What I have found, is high school students need repitition in small bites. Writing two big essays a semester doesn't teach anyone to write. Writing two one-pagers a week, does.

 

[Jeff Corey]

I second the notion of small assignments, especially at first. I teach a lab with reports due in APA style. The first lab was 4 pages - no introduction or references. The next is longer, with internal footnotes and references. Even with a manual on APA style required, they still have problems with it.

 

[jj]

My condolences. Even ONE essay on Gatsby would make damned near anyone irritable. (Then again, reading Gatsby pretty much has the same effect.)

I'll ask my 15 year old if I can post what she wrote about Gatsby. It was sorta scathing, really.

 

[Roadtoad]

I'll ask my 15 year old if I can post what she wrote about Gatsby. It was sorta scathing, really.

I can imagine that. Your munchkins don't seem to be the type to tolerate fools. And in the end, Gatby was a fool. A romantic fool, but still a fool.

(The fact that Tom and Daisy simply walk away from the mess they created is more than enough reason for Jordan to make the declaration at the end that she does. And frankly, I don't blame her.)

 

[Renfield]

6. Make it fun! I had a group of guys who wouldn't stop swearing. Every second word was c___, f___ or s___. In the end we made a card game where we each started with ten cards and you gave a card to someone else if you heard them swear. At the end of each session we gave out a prize to who ever had the least cards.

So kids are dropping F bombs in class, and you end up rewarding the one who does it the least? I knew things had changed since my day, but that's something. A student would have been sent to ISS at the very least if that had happened once in my day. And you know, it very rarely happened in any class I remember. How much class time gets spent going back and forth with these students?

Guess I'm just an old cermudgeon, but I'm not sure about some of these new education philosophies that deny any kind of negative consequences for problem students.

 

[screw_dog]

So kids are dropping F bombs in class, and you end up rewarding the one who does it the least? I knew things had changed since my day, but that's something. A student would have been sent to ISS at the very least if that had happened once in my day. And you know, it very rarely happened in any class I remember. How much class time gets spent going back and forth with these students?

You must have missed the part where I mentioned that I work with offenders. Violent, adult, male offenders in a prison. I'm trying to rehabilitate them, so sometimes one has to get a bit creative...

 

[screw_dog]

I should add a little more about that actvity with the cards.

The point of the activity was simply to raise the guys awareness of their swearing. It appeared to be very automatic, with most of them struggling to even recognise the amount of swearing they were doing. Actual transcript:

...
Him: He wouldn't f**ing let her!"
Me: Please watch your language.
Him: I didn't swear.
Me: What did you say?
Him: I said "He wouldn't f**ing let her!"
Me: Please don't swear.
Him: I didn't f***ing swear!
...

With growing anger on his part. Using the card system actually helped these guys become a lot more aware of what they were saying. Then, at least, they only swore when they meant it.

 

[slingblade]

Sixth hour gave me hell again today.

I dared to tell them that the Great Depression is considered to have begun on Black Tuesday, Oct. 29th, and they immediately began to get angry, tell me I was wrong, and thrust their history books under my nose to show me the date was actually Oct. 24th, and I should have said Black Thursday.

I explained to them that both dates are correct, depending on what one means. Oct. 24th is the first day of the stock market crash, but Oct. 29 is considered the actual "day" the Great Depression began.

I tried to explain the importance of my use of the word "considered." In point of fact, the Depression did not begin on a particular day, but was the culmination of years of careless financial "strategies." However, historians generally point to Oct. 29, 1929 and say, "That was the day it all crashed."

They wouldn't even let me get the first sentence out of my mouth. They verbally ganged up on me and I couldn't do a thing about it.

I feel so stupid.

 

[rjh01]

At least they knew enough to know something about the depression. After all how many of them lived though it? Or even their parents?

Maybe give them another lesson about how you can get more than one correct answer for a question.

I am sure the teachers will be able to give you more advice. I am not a teacher.

 

[slingblade]

What I need to know are ways in which to effectively deal with a class that has mutinied. They know I am unskilled, and they know in my place they would be uncertain, and I am, and so they have decided to have fun with me.

I need to know what teachers do when this occurs.

They are at the point where they simply shout me down, so lecturing won't help now. I'm outnumbered one to thirty, and they have discovered they can simply drown me out. I don't know how to manage this classroom. I need strategies.

Thanks, though.

 

[TragicMonkey]

Fire, and lots of it!