Snow Daysss.

This was my first week of student teaching with full control over the class… And although it was great I don't think it's an accurate representation of what it will look like for the next nine weeks. The first two days were snow days and while I loved getting to know my teacher and working through plans with her during these days, I realized the toll that it took on our schedule and pacing. It pushed us back 3 whole days of instruction and started to stress me out. It was nice because I was able to simply push back my original plans three days back, but also threw me off because we had planned to do things such as check out iPads, or align a day with a certain activity and it simply didn't work out that way. 

I learned so much this week about the flexibility of teachers and how you truly have to reflect on what's best for your students even if that means scratching an entire days worth of plans (NCPTS 5). And let me tell you this wasn't an easy decision because I make many of my lessons from scratch. I create PowerPoint's and smart board slides and I play games with them that I create through SmartBoard and when I have to rework the way these are, I get a little irritated as you can imagine. 

I was very impressed however with my students. I was expecting them to terrorize the room because not only was it the "transfer of power" over to me, but they only had 1 day of school last week... My students acted responsibly and they participated in activities as instructed and they were excited to be back.

For the most part...

I did recognize that one student had no interest in being at school that day. I would catch him in math class and social studies class zoning off into space and looking the complete opposite direction of the board. I had to redirect him many times in class and this became a problem. I noticed that he was missing much of the math lesson because of his daydreaming, so I reworked my lesson the next day to review a little bit more.

I'm so excited to see what a full week looks like for me even if this does mean I need to plan for more naps as well. 

To teaching and beyond,
Brittany Kertesz