Day 40 - The end is really just the beginning.

The end! Today was our last official day at the internship! I really can not believe how quickly this time has gone by and I am so fortunate to have had this experience. Whenever our students complain about how they don't get paid to go to school (entitlement issues much?) we remind them that we paid UF $3,000 to let us get to teach them, but this internship was really worth every penny. I can't even begin to express how much I have learned- I have started a list of things to focus on in the first few weeks of school, I have a better idea of how teenagers think and act, and I know I will be more confident entering a job than I would be otherwise.

Today we talked about plagiarism, which is a tough and often confusing issue. We tried our best to let the students know that we were not yelling at them, criticizing them, or accusing them of plagiarism on their projects, but that we wanted to inform them, so that they could not use ignorance as an excuse for plagiarizing. Many of them seemed frustrated and confused at first, but I think everyone started to come around by the end of class. Several students asked us, "Why has no one ever told us this stuff before?" That made me feel good, knowing that we had correctly guessed that many students had little idea what constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it. We may not have made expert researchers today, but we did teach our students something valuable that applies outside of the social studies bubble. Learning how to write and use citations properly is a skill that takes time and practice to master; I hope we began pushing our students in the right direction today.

During lunch and after school, Carrie and I administered some make-up work to the responsible students (if you can call taking a test 2 months late responsible) who came in to take care of things before we give the reigns back to our supervising teacher. We cleaned the dry erase boards, cleared out our supplies, and basically cleaned up after ourselves. It is going to be sad not going back to that classroom and seeing the students everyday, because as much as they aggravated me sometimes, there is a rewarding feeling of fulfillment and  hidden within the challenge of teaching these hard-headed, opinionated, sometimes immature and irrational, but overall genuinely good-hearted students.

The ending of this internship experience is really just the beginning of the rest of my career- can you believe that?!? Now it is time to begin the job search. I have already nearly completed one application and will continue to do more in the next few weeks. I am going to try to utilize the few connections I have and make as many more as I can. Being a "grown up" is right around the corner. I have been thinking about and planning for this for probably the last 7 years or so and I can't believe it is finally here : )

Day 39 - Madness. March Madness.

Today we began 1st period with a very nice announcement about plagiarism. Surprisingly, the students seemed rather attentive. I guess that 8:30AM and plagiarism are a subduing combination. The students, or most of them anyway, spent the rest of the period working on their projects. I had a near heart attack when I heard my computer fall off a desk and onto the floor, but it's alright (or so I pray). With 10 minutes left in class we told the students that they had until Monday morning to get their projects completed and turned in. Hopefully they pull through.

For second period, we went to observe the intern for 11th grade English so we could see our students outside their history portable. They were a little confused to see us and it was interesting to watch them. The make-up of the class was not quite the same as in our classes so we got to see different cliques and behaviors. Maybe it was the shape/design of the different classroom, but the students seemed a little quieter than in our classroom. They had a pretty laid back day, so for about the last 30 minutes of class, several students (all boys, mind you) decided to give us advice on teaching. A little bit of it made sense, but I think they said a lot of things to see our reactions. They said they wanted to prepare us for the "real deal" when we have our own classrooms. Plus, and I really don't want to sound vain here, many of these teenage boys seem to enjoy talking to us lately. They have gotten comfortable having us around- time for us to get out! Haha. It is nice, though, to hear that many of the students (both boys and girls) don't want us to leave yet.

During our planning period and lunch we went with our teacher to a very important off campus meeting at a location where they serve food and have many televisions tuned into NCAA March Madness wonderfulness. Our students probably won't be pleased that we weren't there to answer questions immediately after school, but some of them need to make up quizzes/tests from over a month ago and our supervising teacher instructed us to not feel guilty at all. They will have tomorrow and Monday to talk to us and it will be all good.

TOMORROW IS MY LAST DAY TEACHING!!!!! While this makes me want to jump for joy, it also makes very real the fact that I need to find a job. I am starting to feel the stress of this and I am trying really hard to trust in God's plan for me and put in all the effort I can to meet him halfway here in this job search thing. The online portion of one of my applications will be ready to go tomorrow so that is a relief. Say some extra prayers for me if you can!

Day 38 - Final Projects and the "P" Word

Fortunately for Carrie and I, the 11th graders took the science FCAT yesterday, so our supervising teacher told us not to even bother showing up at school since we would be doing nothing productive with our time anyway. That certainly is making this week go by quickly.

Today in and of itself, though, felt like a lifetime. Both 4th and 5th periods had the whole 100 minutes to work on their projects. Our UF supervisor was there for about half of 4th period. I felt bad that she had to sit there while we basically ran around from student to student answering questions. On the up-side, she did get to see us in the midst of major classroom management and individual interaction with students. She left us a nice note and when she emailed us our observation forms, we had passed all the "benchmark" criteria : )

Now, for the "P" word part of the day . . . Let me preface this by saying that in our class at UF last night we discussed plagiarism (the "P" word) and what we would do to handle plagiarism in our classrooms someday. Carrie and I made eye contact during class and I know we were both wondering if we had set ourselves up for a disaster with the project we had assigned. Just you wait and see.

We began class with a few announcements/reminders about the requirements for the project, including a do-not-copy-someone-else's-work-and-cite-the-sources-you-reference caveat. Carrie and I felt pretty good about the students' projects . . . until we started grading them. Out of the four or five we have graded already, one or two would qualify as pretty well done. The others are examples of extreme plagiarism. We are talking like 90% of the work was copied directly from one or more sources and not cited properly. Even if it was cited properly, as was one that I began grading, it is unacceptable for your "work" to be only a shortened version of someone else's words.

Carrie and I reflected on our plagiarism discussions from class last night. We thought about what the students' prior knowledge on plagiarism might be and how we had prepared them to avoid doing it. We don't really know the answer to the first part, but we do know that we only briefly told them not to do it. You can not expect someone to do something when you haven't told them how to do it. Being the nice and inexperienced teachers that we are, we are taking the "we didn't prepare you well enough" approach and on Friday we will be doing a lesson on avoiding plagiarism followed by giving the students the opportunity to redo their work. Sounds like a fun way to spend our last day teaching, right? Not really, but we were wondering how we were going to fill that last day, and now we have a plan. Fortunately we caught this now, before we see 1st period tomorrow. We will give them the plagiarism crash course before they finish their projects. I would dread telling them that they had to rewrite their assignment.

This internship has truly been a learning experience and I am so glad to have had the chance to make these mistakes now, under the guidance of a mentor teacher, rather than later when I am on my own. Moral of the story- never assume that teenagers know anything.

Day 37 - LAST Monday!!

Today is the Ides of March. Et tu, Brute?
Also, more importantly, IT'S MY LAST MONDAY!!!! WOOOOOHOOOOOO!!!!! Because, if you haven't figured it out already, I really don't like Mondays.
Today Carrie and I arrived at school expecting to have a mobile computer lab for our students to use to continue their research and work on their projects. However, it seems that some other teachers are hoarding the labs and so we couldn't get on a schedule to use one. It would be helpful if we just had one or two classroom computers, but we are not so fortunate out in portable land. So, we got to tell our students that we did not have the mobile lab, as promised, and they would have to make do with the resources we had printed, and their textbooks. Some students had laptops with them that they could use, I let students use my own laptop, and I let a student use his iPhone to look stuff up, too. Many students decided to use their time wisely by planning their article or designing their magazine cover. Well, they get 100 more in-class minutes to work on it and then it is due by the end of the class period, so hopefully they use the rest of their time wisely, or put in some good time at home. The day didn't go quite as planned, but we made it work as best we could. When life gives you lemons, make something tasty, right?

Day 36 - Fridays are the best.

I love Fridays. Every week they seem like this new and special phenomenon, created just for me :)
I began class with my review of the "woman question" followed by the timeline challenge activity that I did with first period. 4th period handled the timeline just fine, but 5th period is just a little too goofy to do something like that. Oh well, we survived.
Today was the day we introduced the final project of our internship to 4th and 5th period. Carrie found a Roaring 1920s WebQuest (which is a internet based inquiry project) and we decided to adapt it for our students. The idea is that students pick one of seven themes from the 1920s (things like, fashion, sports, crime, business and technology, cars, etc.) and create a magazine cover and article related to their chosen theme. Their magazine cover needs to include at least 7 facts connected to their theme and their article is likely to be focused on a more specific aspect of that theme. The students really have a lot of freedom with this project because they get to pick a topic that interests them, and within each topic there are many different topics/issues they can choose to investigate. Knowing that we would not have computers for the students, Carrie and I printed out some information to get the students started. They could also find a lot of information in their textbooks. This counts as a test grade for them, but this is significantly easier than a test, so if they follow all the directions and do well, many grades will be helped by this project.
One cool moment of the day happened during 4th period. I was talking to some kids about cars or crime or something, and I told them that I saw the car that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was in when he was shot, as well as the uniform that he was wearing (his assassination was the event that triggered World War I) that day. As I was looking up the pictures of them on my computer I was telling the students about what it was like to see these things in person and they could tell I was getting really excited. When I found the picture I said, "When I saw his car and uniform I almost peed my pants." Some of the students just chuckled and I said, "I know, I know. I am giant nerd." But they got interested in the pictures because I was so excited about it, and then other students wanted to see what their classmates were looking at. It was really neat to see all of that happen. Plus, any time I get to talk about studying abroad I get really happy :)
I left school after 5th period to go take my Professional Education exam for Florida teacher certification and passed! Woohoo! So now once I officially graduate I can apply for my teaching certificate!! I can't believe it! Ahhh!

Day 35 - The "Woman Question"

Today we hurried 1st period through women's suffrage with a lecture and a couple of activities. The lecture was an overview of three sections in the textbook that cover the women's rights movement, starting with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and going through the 19th Amendment in 1920. It was a nice review for students who saw "Iron Jawed Angels" earlier this week and a very quick overview for everyone else. To see how well they were paying attention I created a "timeline challenge" activity. Ten volunteers each got a piece of paper with an event on it. The rest of the students in the class had to arrange the ten volunteers in chronological order. I don't know whether they actually learned anything from this, but it got some of the students out of their seats and moving around and gave others the chance to test how well they paid attention during the lecture, so I would consider doing something like it again in the future.
After this we spent the second half of class doing the For/Against chart activity followed by the "imagine" letter. It was a lot to pack into one day, but it kept the students busy, which is the most important thing as far as 1st period is concerned.

Day 34 - And the ridiculousness continues.

Today was just like yesterday, except we watched the movie once, instead of one and a half times.

Day 33 - FCAT ridiculousness

Today was an FCAT day for 9th and 10th grade (as is tomorrow) so the 11th and 12th graders needed to be off campus from 8:30 until just after noon. Instead of just telling them to not come to school until noon, administration decided that the students needed to go to school and be "productive" for three and a half hours. The catch though, was that they couldn't be on campus during the test. How does this work, you ask? Well, the 12th graders arranged to spend one day volunteering and another day doing a field trip or something. 11th grade was not so lucky. They are lucky enough, however, to be within walking distance of UF's College of Education, so I spent the morning at my other home away from home watching Iron Jawed Angels and grading papers. It was a pretty easy day and I even got to go home early, but it was so painfully unproductive that it's aggravating. Oh well, tomorrow is more of the same so I guess I just have to deal with it. Thank you, No Child Left Behind and standardized testing.

Day 32 - Monday. Ugh.

I don't like Mondays. I know I say this every Monday, but I really don't like having one day with 50 minute classes. I also get used to not seeing all my students in a single day, so Monday's really throw me off. Oh well, it was an alright day. 1st period got to have their lecture with Carrie, which took the entire class period. I then spent 2 hours planning for 4th and 5th period. They needed to finish their activity from last week, but then I needed to fill up the second part of class. I made up another writing activity for them, which I think they took at least somewhat seriously. They had to write an "Imagine" letter. They were supposed to imagine that they lived in the early 1900s, when the women's suffrage movement was gaining a lot of support. They were supposed to write a letter to a future grandchild explaining the issue, their opinion of it, and make "predictions" for the future. We'll see how it goes when I grade their responses.

Day 31 - Friday! Friday! Friday!

Oh, Friday! I was ready to go home before I even left the apartment Friday morning, haha. But you can't act that way as a teacher, and as it turns out, I enjoyed our classes that day. We started our Women's Suffrage unit with Carrie giving an overview of three sections of the next chapter in a one hour lecture. That seemed to be a little long for some of the students, but others seemed to enjoy it. I thought it was interesting, anyway. I planned the other half of the lesson, getting students to start thinking about what it was like to be a woman before the mid 1800s and what was starting to change in the lives of American women after the Civil War. I then wanted the students to use their textbooks and some supplementary materials to list arguments for and against women's rights. I never took classes on this in college and only just started learning about it last week (I planned one lesson on women's rights in October, but that was a while ago). As I was telling some stories to the students, I found myself smiling more than usual and really wanting to convey the information to the students. After doing the activity I think some of them are hopefully more interested in the topic. For more details on some of the anti-suffrage arguments, check out these two sites:
The Arguments of the Anti-Suffragists
Other Fears the Antis' Had if Women Were Considered Equals

Pretty entertaining stuff, or at least I think so. Next week is going to be a mess because of the FCAT (or as a classmate recently called it, the F-That) so we are probably going to show the movie Iron Jawed Angels on the days that are really messed up. It is a powerful movie that I definitely recommend, especially if you are a woman. There are some rock-star women in the past who fought long and hard for suffrage and this movie honors them.

Okay, here was the most entertaining part of the day:
The two students who came to our classroom during third period came back on Friday during lunch. We had some students in the room making up quizzes and other work and didn't really want the boys in there being obnoxious, but we decided to see if they could handle it. After about 10 minutes it was evident that they could not and we sent them out of the room. They whined as they left, but they did indeed leave. Not 5 minutes later, we heard banging on the outside wall of the portable, and a framed poster fell from its perch on the windowsill. I got up and went outside to track down the little boogers, because I knew exactly who had done it. I found them and called them to come talk to me. When one boy tried to excuse himself, another teacher told him to stay because it looked like he "needed to be part of this conversation." I said to both boys, "Stand here and don't talk for the next few minutes. See if you can do that, okay? You can nod and shake your head, and that's it." I asked them if what they had done was considerate and respectful. They of course shook their heads. I said to them, "First of all, your classmate was sitting right there making up her quizzes. Second, you just hit school property who knows how hard. And, third, you made your teacher's poster fall because you hit the building." They looked moderately ashamed, but I could tell that they just wanted to laugh- I guess that's just how they deal with life. Anyway, they were relieved that their regular teacher had not been in the room when it happened. However, on my way back to the portable (after reminding the boys to make smart decisions and to be respectful) I saw my supervising teacher carrying his poster and asking for his mischievous students. He gave them the poster and told them to return it when the frame was fixed. Well, two girls brought the poster back, having fixed it themselves. The boys came and apologized after school, which was proper of them. I feel bad that I had to go all "Ms. St. George" on them, but it was entertaining for me and hopefully made an impression on them. They are good kids and I am in no way upset at them, but MAN teenagers are a handful.

Day 30 - Chapter 15 test, day 2. And a substitute.

I got to school Thursday morning to find our supervising teacher making arrangements to bring in a substitute teacher because his son had gotten sick after arriving at school. This wasn't a big deal- all we had planned for our kids was to review and give their test. We just now had to supervise the AP class for the day.

1st period went pretty well. Some of the students did not seem to appreciate that we wanted to give them time to review, but they didn't fight it that badly. There was some chatter at the start of the test, but as we discovered, our substitute for the day was the mother of one of our students and that might have caused some of the chattiness and giggling. Once they settled down though, they once again proved that even though they can be the most difficult on a normal day, 1st period is the most well-behaved on test day. Assessments subdue them. Let's give a test every day, muwahaha.

During 2nd period I thought the AP students were going to execute a full-out rebellion. We were instructed to give them a "quick-write"- they have 40 minutes to answer an essay question. They get two days to prepare for three questions and then are given one question on which to write. WELL, Carrie and I weren't really in a position to review with them, not really knowing what our supervising teacher expects from them. We are usually grading or planning during their class, not paying attention to what he tells them, and we are certainly not reading the chapters in their textbook. Anyway, some of them did their best on their assignment, others blew it off halfheartedly, and others refused to do it. In response to being told that we were becoming like their teacher I said, "That's okay, it's not my job to make you like me. I am doing what your teacher asked me to do. You can take it up with him when he gets back to school." They weren't mad at me, just frustrated at the situation, and I don't really blame them. But it was nice to be able to stand in front of the students and let them know that they can't make me do what they want by begging and whining. Carrie and I didn't back down and they either did their work or they didn't. It was up to them and their grade will reflect their choice.

Thursday was a weird day, not just because we had a substitute. The 12th grade students were presenting their "Senior Projects". Certain rooms were designated for this event and other teachers were acting as judges. Thus, we had a math class in our portable during 3rd period, which is usually time free from students for us. Many non-senior students were also going to watch their senior friends give their presentations. Therefore, there were students everywhere and it was just a weird day. After lunch (3rd period is split in the middle by lunch) Two of our students, one from 1st period and one from 4th period decided to pay us a visit. Thank goodness they are not in the same class!! As we discovered, all they do when they are together is talk talk talk talk and crack jokes and act like 16 year old boys. Apparently they couldn't find any girls their own age to harass, so they came to pester us. Get excited for Friday's post, because they came back to visit during lunch the next day.

Day 29 - Chapter 15 test, Day 1

On Wednesday, 4th and 5th periods took the test for Chapter 15. We spent the beginning of class reviewing vocab and then the essay questions (they have 4 essays to study and have to write two of them on the test). For the most part the grades were pretty good and several students were surprised by their grades being better than they expected. For the most part, Carrie and I were happy with the students' grades. Some students did better than we anticipated and we know others could have done better, but one thing that we are sure of is that nearly every student wrote longer essay responses than they did on the previous tests we have graded. This is one area where I definitely feel like Carrie and I can take credit. The lesson I planned for my second observation was the writing exercise, and we set out very explicit expectations for this test. As we have been taught and now learned first hand, when you expect a certain standard, students tend to live up to it. 

Day 28 - Getting caught up

Today was a pretty good day with first period. This morning, one of our school's ESE/maybe psych. specialists came in with her intern to introduce some new strategies for studying vocab. She showed the students a website called Quizlet.com which is really pretty neat and I will seriously consider using it in my own future classroom. Basically, the teacher and/or the students can use the site to create vocab flashcards and play games to study and master the words. I hope some of the students actually use it, if not for this test coming up, then in the future. After that, we did an activity called quiz-quiz-trade. We took the normal structure and made it our own to suit the characteristics of our large and sometimes chaotic classroom. Here was the gist of it:
- The students were split into two groups of 12. One group stood in a circle and the other group matched up with a partner and you end up with an inner circle and an outer circle.
- Each student received flashcard with a vocab word from chapter 15, on which they are being tested this week.
- In their pairs, the students take turns quizzing each other on their words. The person in the inner circle goes first, then the person in the outer circle.
- We gave the pairs 30 seconds to do this. When they heard the chimes of the timer going off, they swapped flashcards and the inner circle shifted over one person to their right and the process repeats.

They caught on pretty quickly and we repeated it somewhere between 5 and 8 times, and ended just before the activity would have broken down due to the students' waning interest. Quiz-quiz-trade is normally a much more free form activity, but we have a large group of students. We probably could have worked the logistics better, so I have no idea if they got anything out of the activity, but it went alright and I would consider using this again in the future if I modified it for even smaller groups of students.

We spent the next few minutes going over the review packet and then spent the rest of the period working on the essay posters. We did not finish with presentations, so that gives us plenty to do Thursday morning before the test. 


With all the business of preparing for this week's test and such, Carrie and I fell a little bit behind in updating our students' grades. We had almost all of their work graded, but we hadn't put it in the paper gradebook or the online gradebook yet. There was a giant stack of papers to be put in, but we developed a good system: I made sure it got in the paper gradebook and then Carrie updated it online. It was such a relief to get all caught up on that. And lo and behold, almost all of our students got A's on their last quiz! I was shouting with joy in our empty classroom this afternoon. Granted, there is no excuse for any student to get below an 80 on their open-note journal quizzes (because we take 8 out of 10 questions from the work they are supposed to have done in their journals), but to have nearly all A's was a great feeling. When quizzes make up 40% of the total grade, a good quiz score makes a huge difference for some students.

And in semi-related news, I registered this evening for my last required teacher test! I might still take at least one more, but this is the last test I am forced to pay for, haha.
Send happy thoughts my way on March 12th at 2:30pm!!

Day 27 - Happy Monday (and progess reports!)

Mondays are so weird. Seeing all of my students in one day, get out of here! It was also an interesting day, because each class was doing something different.

1st period reviewed for and took their 15.3/4 quiz.
4th period went over their review packets, essay posters, and then played vocab bingo.
5th period went reviewed for and took their quiz.

Carrie and I also got to take the 2nd period AP students to a presentation about class rings. Fascinating.

But the best part of the day was after school. Carrie and I were grading quizzes and two our students came in to make up a previous quiz. One of them was a student who usually seems to pay no attention in class. He almost never turns in homework and rarely takes notes. BUT, he got a 95 on his quiz without the use of his journal (which was allowed on this quiz). I was impressed not just with this, but also because he said that he is trying to make some changes in his life and it appears that he wants to improve his grades. If he does I will be so very happy.

Carrie and I had a good time grading the quizzes. Here are some of the things that made us laugh (some of the answers may be paraphrased, due to my lack of memory):
Q: What are suburbs?
A: Neighborhoods outside a city, usually full of wealthy people and dead ends.

Q: Why did some people criticize graft?
A: Because when you giving graft you be bribing.

Q: Define vice AND give an example.
A: Vice is all the little things you could see on the street corner, like prostitution, gambling, and drugs.

Haha, we had some good laughs.

Not too many students seemed to be surprised by their progress reports, and I think seeing their grades as they currently stand kicked some people in the seat of their pants a bit, thank goodness.

Happy Monday!

Day 26 - 2 good days in a row!

Friday was anther good day. It seemed like the week took forever, but by the time Friday arrived it seemed like time had flown. I remember this feeling as a student; I guess it doesn't go away when you become a teacher.

4th period opted to take their section 15.3/4 quiz on Friday, so they did that, followed by making essay posters to get ready for their chapter test. Some of the students were very giggly, but in the end everyone did well and we finished everything just before the bell rang. Way to go Carrie and I on timing!

5th period spent time taking review quizzes and doing their essay posters as well. As usual, they were more talkative than 4th period, but they also got their work done on time.

Hooray for Fridays and good weeks!