Week Two!

I have made it to the other side of week two of Institute! Houston is still blazing hot and the buildings are still freezing, but at least this week I met my kids! I started my teaching career with 3rd grade science, which is kind of ironic, given my persistent discomfort with the subject. All it took for me to have horrifying flashbacks to years of struggling with science concepts was to attempt to teach the scientific method to 8-year-olds! But I can happily say that I managed to pull through, and the students hopefully learned a few things along the way.

I started the week by giving the students a diagnostic test, which we will use to track their growth while they are in our inexperienced hands. My students did horribly on the test, which immediately made me frantic about the challenges we would all face together as a class, but I also realized that meant that we had plenty of room for improvement. With that in mind, I entered class on Tuesday completely unprepared for the dynamics of a science class that happens to fall after lunch and before dismissal. In other words, the students had checked out intellectually for the day way before they came to me. So the first two days of the week were a complete struggle in classroom management. The kids were restless, energetic in the wrong way, and dying to socialize--in both the positive and negative aspects. They wanted to talk with some and to bully others. We had several issues with bickering back and forth, and then it escalated into a shocking incident for a third grade classroom: one of the students left a nasty note that read "F*** you" in the locker of another student. NOT going to happen in my classroom!

I went home and spent a great deal of time that night reflecting on how best to handle the situation the next morning. I can't really say that I stressed about it, because I knew what had to happen and I had a general idea of how I would say it, but I could not predict how this serious talk would be received. To my surprise, the community circle was all it took to bring my kids back into line. By the end of the week, all I had to do was say a name, look in the direction of the behavior chart, and that child would quietly get up to give himself his own punishment (in this case, a card on the behavior chart, which was connected to other penalties). Unbelieveable, right?

Aside from classroom management, I do not feel that I made significant gains with my class. I was quitely literally a fish out of water for the entire time I was teaching the scientific method. I had no idea how to make it interesting or applicable to third graders, who are too young to understand the concept in its necessary entirety. I spent all week thinking back to my third grade experience and tried to remember how I had learned the scientific method, but all I could remember was that I had learned the steps and then the information got increasingly complicated with every passing year. I certainly did not remember making my own questions, hypotheses, identifying materials for the experiment, analyzing data, or making conclusions! I think those objectives (which TFA supplied) are far more fifth grade concepts than third, but we did our best to grasp the information, and I think my kids will walk away with at least a little more than they came to me with.

This coming week, I am teaching math, which will be a welcome change. We will be focusing on the customary and metric systems of mass and liquid volume, which has plenty of opportunities for hands-on learning.

I feel obligated to say, in case you were wondering, that I have no life outside of TFA; I was thinking the other day that when I am done, people back home will ask me, how was Houston? Did you like it? But I will have no response for you at all, other than, well, the skyline from my window was pretty cool. So I warn you now: if you have a burning desire to learn about Houston, I would recommend that you google it! :)