Thursday, September 10, 2009

For that Bug Under a Magnifying Glass Feel

Today was the day of my first observation.  My boss, the principal, sat in on my first kindergarten class today for roughly 20-25 minutes (and she'll be sitting in again tomorrow to observe one of the kids).  I'm just glad that I'm used to having people sitting in to watch me teach (due to my internship last spring), or I might have felt nervous about more than a just faint fear of the class' behavior.  Luckily, this first class was very well behaved, as they generally are.

Once again, the project was sponge printing.  This time, I was better prepared.  I found my rags (which had been in plain sight in my supply closet the whole time, of course) and so was able to conduct a much smoother clean up.  My Love & Logic strategy feels like it's starting to work.  I still need to finish the book, of course, and it will take some time before I truly begin to get the hang of it, but I ended on a good note today.

Now, I think I need to rewind and go back to the first class of the day.

I had 2nd, 1st, and kindergarten today, in that order.  2nd grade is doing a contour line project right now.  They have a piece of standard sized paper and write their names on it in big block or bubble letters.  Then, they color with colored pencils.  A wonderful, no mess project, but something I can still work on reinforcing classroom procedures on.  Plus, it was one worry taken away from all the rest, which is never a bad thing!

This class is one of my rowdier ones, but they actually did quite well.  There is a table that I am pretty sure needs to be broken up and spread out, so sometime before next Thursday, I need to break out my seating chart and switch people around.  There was a whole lot of "they're pushing the table into me!" and "he kicked me!" and squabbling going on.  I ended up moving one girl to work at a desk alone, and another boy moved to a single desk --his own decision-- to work.  But sadly, despite how well the class worked after this problem got figured out, I still ended up feeling like a complete heel.

Early in the class, I had given the little girl I moved a check mark because she wasn't paying attention.  Later she had been working so well that I told her she could put her name on the Star Board.  Unfortunately, my own criteria is that if the student gets a check at any time, they are no longer eligible for the Star Board.  (Incidentally, another boy got his name up and then got it taken down because he got a check mark right at the end of class.)  I later had to go back and take her name off the board because it should never have been there at all.  Of course she started silently weeping.  And what could I do?  I felt awful, but it is very clear that if they have a check they can't get a star.  I couldn't just let it go, could I?  Ooohh....  That was a big lesson for me, I guess.  I really need to be consistent, but I have GOT to pay attention to things like that so that I don't end up being inconsistent or just plain "mean".  If I had never told her to put her name up (because I remembered her check mark), she would have been just fine at the end of class.  Instead, I am now a horrible, horrible Indian giver.  Woe!

Fast forward back to kindergarten...

My last class was my third worst class.  (Why are they always the last class?  Why can't they be the first class, so that I can end on a good note?)  When I arrived, their teacher was very obviously at the end of her rope.  I figured, "Oh man, they are gonna be crazy!"  But they did really well today!  I was so excited, I had to brag to their teacher (who really needed to hear that) and to the principal and office ladies.  They were a lot more talkative than some classes, but they listened really well for the most part.  Everyone finished their project.  There was no big scary clean up chaos (except for the two inch dead roach I found floating in my water bucked after school--eeeeeeewww).  And miracle of miracles, they walked back to class quietly.  I only had to stop a couple times and ask those who were horsing around, "Will you settle down better here or at the end of the line?"  I think we all know what their answer to that was.  Joy!

Really, the only thing I have to deal with now is putting my drying rack together; so far, it's not working so well.  I think I need to put some WD-40 in the screw holes to deal with the rust, first of all.  Then I can deal with the pain of trying to hold the parts together while getting a screw in correctly.  Blah.  Fortunately, I'm done with painting for at least a week.  Tomorrow is the Monday/Friday group, and they are doing very basic collage right now.

.....until Monday, anyway.  Painting paper for the Hungry Caterpillar collage, I recall now.  So I do kind of need my drying rack.  Oh well.  That's what the weekend is for!

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

The Metaphorical Straw

As the days have passed, I've been noticing something of a trend within my classes.  Namely, my most frustrating classes seem to be solely kindergarten.  Now I love those little guys, but there are classroom management issues that make me want to tear my hair out.  Or cry, which was something I expounded upon in a post on my livejournal here.  Essentially, there are certain classes that get so out of hand that I end up shouting.  They just ignore me, or they forget about it by the next time they come to class, and all I end up with is a sore throat, a headache, and the urge to cry (or scream, depending upon the day).  This is unacceptable to me.

I know that as a new teacher I'm going to run into problems like this.  Not only are these kiddies very new to school in general (I've been told that many didn't even go to Pre-K), but they almost certainly have not been sequestered with twenty other excitable children on a too small stage doing structured art lessons.  That is not to say that all my classes are bad.  Most of them go quite well, in truth.  But the ones that don't...those are the ones that really get me.

When I was in school, my professors touched upon the Love & Logic style of teaching.  We were even required to get the book for class.  But, it was never something that I truly understood.  We didn't read much more than a few passages, and talking about it in class proved a bit too abstract to digest.  It's something that I need to attempt to put into practice to really get the gist of.  Well I kept that book, and I've been reading it more and more voraciously as the days pass.  You see, I don't want to be the teacher who yells all the time and who must resort to threats and bribery to gain a shakey control over her students.  I want to be the teacher whose students CHOOSE to behave, because it's my classroom and because they are making good choices (an oft used phrase in our school district's classrooms).

Having sworn to immediately attempt to put into practice Love & Logic, I went so far as to highlight important parts of my book and even take notes, as though I were back in college!  But it helped.  Today was the day I only have 3 classes, so it seemed easy to start off with.  And it is also the day that I have the kindergarten class I consider the second most unruly.  Here's the rundown:

At the elementary (1-4) I had only a 1st grade class.  They are currently doing a Kandinsky based project meant to introduce them primarily to lines.  It was one of the better behaved classes.  I began conciously trying to use Love & Logic phrases (or Thinking Words, as the book calls them) when speaking with my students.  I tried to give both the class and individual students choices several times during the class (for example: "You may choose to use a minimum of three lines up to a maximum of all the lines we talked about.  It's up to you.").  I also tried to use the strategy detailed in the book for garnering my class's attention.  Using a phrase like, "When everyone is sitting quietly, I will be glad to tell you what we're doing today."  Seemed to work pretty well.

After this, I left for the Learning Center to teach my two Kindergarten classes of the day.  The kids are doing sponge monoprints this week, and focusing on basic shapes.  So, painting. (And let's keep in mind that I do not yet have any drying racks--unless you count spare bookshelf space.)  Right off the bat, I made a few mistakes in terms of procedures.  For one, I could not find the rags I intended to use in class for clean up and had forgotten to bring the ones in my classroom at the other school.  This means that clean up involved a stop at the bathrooms to wash hands.  Having never needed to do this before, I had only the vaguest of ideas on procedure, gained by idle observation of classroom teachers as I went to pick up my class of the day.  The first class, having been mostly calm, was relatively okay.  But my last class....well.  Back to that in a moment.

As I said, the first class was pretty well behaved.  I began by using the same strategies that I did for first grade.  I had some gratifying successes as well.  A couple of boys were pushing each other and horsing around in line on the way to class.  I stopped the line and spoke to them calmly.  I said, "Boys, we're supposed to be making our quiet signs in the hallway.  Do you think you will settle down better here or at the end of the line?"  Of course, no 5 year old wants to go to the end of the line!  They both felt they could calm down where they were--and they did.  The class as a whole went well.  They were all highly excited to paint (it seems like all these kids want to know is if they will be able to paint), and they responded very nicely to my strategy to get them quiet.  I didn't have to raise my voice unneccarily at all. Then there was the mild chaos of clean up, as mentioned above.

The second class started out just as well.  I had a few more talkers in this one and a couple who liked to get up and wander (and mess with other kids' art, sadly), but everything went rather smoothly until clean up time.  While nowhere near the level of chaos of yesterday's class, it was still rather bad.  I still did not need to really raise my voice (though I will admit to curbing the urge to yell once or twice), and we managed to get lined up and to the bathrooms alright.  This is where it was just awful.  They were loud and crazy, and their teacher came to help me out because she could hear them down the hall.  Talk about embarrassing. And yet, not, because I was frankly kind of relieved!

I was just worn out after that, and again, tense and headachey.  But something about trying with the Love & Logic helped me to be less stressed and upset than I would have been otherwise.  Tomorrow will go more smoothly, I think.  For one thing, I'll have my washrags!

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

An Introduction, of Sorts

For anyone who may stop by, let me first welcome you to my blog.  It's purpose is this:  to allow myself an easy method for reflection and to perhaps give others ideas and help in their own classrooms.

When I was interning this past Spring, one of my standing assignments was the completion of several journal entries throughout the semester detailing my experiences during the course of the internship.  I was to examine the good, the bad and the ugly, as it were, and if so desired, my thoughts and feelings as well.  I discovered it to be a highly useful tool for improving my performance as a teacher and a wonderful way to organize my thoughts.  Having been long accustomed to blogging about my life in general, I felt that blogging about my classroom experiences would be no hardship, allowing me to continue the "journaling" experience more easily.

In addition to reflecting upon my teaching, I want to use this journal as a place to put lesson plans that I create and, hopefully, find successful.  For any future visitors to my blog, I hope these things are both enjoyable and helpful.

Moving on...

Somehow, it seems that I would have done better to start this blog before or during the first week of school, so as to better record the events therein.  But as most ought to know, the classroom can be pretty crazy at the start!  Well it's now heading into the third week of school; I finally feel able to start this thing up.

So maybe a bit of a recap is in order?

As a new teacher, there were several things to take up my time at the beginning of the school year, not the least of which was packing and moving six hours away to my new home.  I have found myself rooming with the other art teacher at my school, which has been fortuitous.  From inservices to paperwork to lesson planning for that first week of school, life was a chaotic mess.  Much of it is a blur now as I focus on other things.

Perhaps one of the most daunting tasks I faced was, believe it or not, setting up my classroom.  Now, coming into this position in place of a previous teacher, there are certain things that are different from how I would have imagined.  First, my current room was, at the time of my interview earlier in the year, a music room.  So some things had yet to be moved to the NEW music room.  Easily taken care of.  Secondly, I had to utilize my new teacher budget and buy office supplies.  As many know, braving Wal-Mart at the height of the Back-to-School sales pitch is a long journey, fraught with peril.  I had to learn all about requisition forms (and word to the wise, the office secretaries are smart ladies--they know the answer to a great many things), bringing me to my third task:  inventory.

I currently teach at two schools: the elementary (grades 1-4) and the learning center (Pre-K and Kindergarten).  I had to visit both places and make a list of what supplies I did and did not have (or perhaps that should be DO not have, as I am still waiting for my final supplies to arrive).  When you come into a teaching job, at my district at least, you rely on the person(s) who preceded you to handle things like ordering supplies for the new school year.  So while I had a great many supplies, there were still things missing which I felt I needed in order facilitate a more productive and meaningful art experience.

This is where, while waiting for my supplies, I have to think outside the box.  I have hardly any white drawing paper right now, but there is more pink paper than I can shake a stick at.  So that can be used for pre-sketching and free-draw with no problem, saving the better quality white paper for the "actual" projects.

There is also the decision to make on what needs to go with me in the afternoons when I leave to go teach Kindergarten.  For one thing, at the learning center, my classroom is on a stage in the cafeteria.  So, no, not technically a classroom as most people know them.  I have no sink readily at hand and no drying racks or counters.  This is another area where I must think creatively.  And at the moment, I'm still trying to get it all figured out!

As I go, I feel like things are getting easier to manage (though maybe a little more slowly with Kindergarten).  I think that so far, I've found that feedback is worth more than gold.  Being able to bounce ideas off of and relate experiences to other teachers has been a wonderful help.  But that is a post for another time.