Grading Papers & Lesson Planning

Today marked the first Saturday morning of my student teaching in which I graded papers without the joy of watching soccer at the same time. That’s right, we no longer have Fox Soccer Channel at our house. :-( At the beginning of the year, my mom and I revamped our budget and alas, FSC was one of the little “extras” I had enjoyed that needed to go. Yet, it took until the end of February to finally make this much needed cut. How sad it is that I cling to worldly things with such a vice-like grip.

In other news, student teaching is still going well, but has gotten progressively more difficult with each passing day. My students have “cabin fever” because of the long, hard winter which makes classroom management a moment-by-moment (exhausting) battle. Last week the students were so off the hook when I was teaching them about figurative language that I finally just shouted, “Everyone stand up!” I then proceeded to label three corners of my classroom , “Simile,” “Metaphor,” and “Idiom.” Then I read the sentence containing the use of figurative language and had the students move to the corner they thought was the right answer. It was such a simple activity (an adaptation of a teaching strategy called 4 Corners), but you would have thought I’d just awarded my students a million dollars. One of my especially challenging students asked me the next day if we could practice identifying figurative language again. They were so excited to be out of the seats and competing against one another and as an added bonus, by the end of class, I think about eighty percent of them fully understood what a simile, metaphor, and idiom is. I’ll still have to do a considerable amount of follow-up work to get the other twenty percent. But that activity was so not a part of the original lesson plan that I had spent over an hour planning the previous weekend. We also finally finished reading the novel Hatchet by Gary Paulsen in three of my ELA classes. It’s taken us two months to wade through this novel (after snow days and standardized test interruptions). To celebrate the conclusion of the novel and review for the test, I created a Jeopardy review game last weekend using PowerPoint (complete with the fun Jeopardy music) and then went to Staples and bought three desktop call bells (to use for buzzers). Then on Wednesday we spent the hour playing the game (i.e. reviewing for the test). The kids loved it and what was even more exciting; they turned around and collectively did quite well on their unit test. And I had at least two dozen of the students ask me on Friday if we could play Jeopardy again to review for our next unit test. Yay, my students interested and excited about reviewing for a test! What more could I ask for?!

All right, enough about teaching. Carter’s home this weekend! He’s been working so many weekend hours at Detroit Metro the past few months that I feel as if I haven’t seen him in years! :-) So off I go to enjoy him being home. Enjoy your Saturday!