Student Teaching - Weeks #13 & #14

by Kathryn Williams - Taft High School

Well, Spring Break is over, and we are back in the swing of things—sort of.  For us secondary teachers, we have had two or three full days of testing this week.  The students take the ACT (for free) at school as part of the Prairie State Exam.  So the juniors have two days of testing where the other students are not required to come to school.  At some of the other schools they are testing freshmen and sophomores on Friday, but for me, all the students are “required” to come on Friday, but few of them will show up after their two days off.

However, with Spring Break over, I am no longer teaching any lessons, I gave my cooperating teacher full control back.  My duties consist of communicating with students about work they still have out from the last chapter I taught and sometimes putting in attendance.  It is really nice to have a lot less responsibility!

Grant Park

I have attached some pictures of spring, all from a few blocks away from my apartment.  I thought you would like to know that even though we’re in the city, we can still see a lot of beauty as spring comes!  It is really nice. 



Tulips on the sidewalk



As the semester closes, it is a little sad to be saying goodbye to everyone, but I feel extremely prepared for what is ahead of me.  I am still job hunting, but I am confident in my ability to be a good teacher next year.  I am glad that I chose to participate in Chicago Semester, because there is no way I would have had a similar experience anywhere else.

Student Teaching - Week #12

by Kathryn Williams - Taft High School

The Teaching Week

POW:  I have now applied for all of the available positions (that I am aware of) in the area that I am going to be living in.  It is a big letdown to have sent off the applications.  After spending hours compiling them and making them the best I could at the time, I have to send them off and wait, hoping that I will get a phone call or an email sometime soon.  The only thing I have left to do is to confirm that my application has been received.  Otherwise it is all waiting.  I’d much rather have something to do; I prefer working over waiting.

WOW:  I’m officially done teaching!  It is weird, but also nice.  I have finished teaching both pre-calculus and college algebra, so after break all I have to do is pass back some work and watch my CT teach.  It’s still going to be fun for me, because she is a good teacher and we get along really well, so I will be able to chime in as I want and it will be a lot more like co-teaching than observing.  So it will be less stressful for the next couple of weeks and I try to get ready for moving out, returning to campus, and graduation.  I’m sure that I will not get bored!

The Rest of My Week

It’s spring break!  I am headed to Iowa for my long-awaited week-long spring break.  I have applied for three jobs in Iowa now, and I’m hoping that someone might call for an interview.  If not, that is OK.  I still have plenty of things to do to keep me busy.  I am doing some wedding planning as well as working on my portfolio for seminar.  Besides taking time to enjoy my family!

Below is a picture of all of us at seminar this week.  Five of us have birthdays this semester and we celebrated with birthday brownies!  

Student Teaching - Weeks #10 & #11

by Kathryn Williams - Taft High School

The Teaching Week

POW:  This week on Thursday we had Report Card Pick-up, or parent-teacher conferences.  Everything went OK except that we had a little bit of trouble getting there at a different time.  The Blue Line apparently runs significantly slower later in the day than it does at 6:30 in the morning when we are usually on it.  So we missed the bus we wanted to catch, and had to wait around at Jefferson Park for nearly 30 minutes waiting for the next bus.  But the parents were all pretty good to meet with and the worst part of it was that we had to be there until 7pm.

WOW:  This week I compiled my first application and sent it off.  It feels really good to have gotten it all together, and I think it will help me get some other applications in at the beginning of this coming week.  I should really just need to complete the corresponding application forms and write new cover letters, but sometimes schools ask for different things.  I am hoping to be able to do an interview or two over spring break.  I would really like to have a job by graduation, especially since I have to plan my wedding as well as find a job!  It would be good to have one stressful decision made!

The Rest of My Week

Last weekend I had the opportunity to go home for my brother’s wedding.  This was very important to me, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make it work, since my family is from northern Minnesota.  I do not have a car in Chicago, as most Chicago Semester students do not, so getting to northern Minnesota can be extremely challenging.  The way I worked it out was to take the Megabus to Minneapolis and then have my fiancé (who is living in Iowa) pick me up and drive with me the rest of the way to my hometown.  It was fairly complicated, but it worked well to get me home, and I had a really good time with my family.

Also last week another student teacher and I stayed after school to watch some of our students perform in a musical.  I am so glad that we got to go.  It was evident that my students had to put a lot of work into the play and it was really good for me to see them working so hard at something.  It was also evident that it meant a lot to my students that I went.  Several of my students were in the audience on Wednesday night also, so I said, "Hi" to them and they seemed surprised to see me.  I loved seeing them in the show and being able to expand my role at the school.

Once Upon A Mattress

 

Student Teaching - Week #9

by Kathryn Williams - Taft High School

The Teaching Week

POW:  I’m still going full time, and it is a lot of work.  I have started teaching my thematic unit with my pre-calculus students and that takes a lot of other work outside of the regular planning and grading work.  One of the things I’m integrating into my thematic unit is a problem of the day.  Students take the problem home on a half-sheet of paper, and then as they enter the classroom the following day, they hand it in to me.  They are graded and worth five points each.  So far they have been doing pretty well with getting them handed in, and I think it is a good way of including a problems that involve a little bit more critical thinking.  Ideally, the problem would be a bridge between the current day’s lesson and the upcoming lesson, but I don’t have it down that good yet!

WOW:  I have been trying several different methods to keep my seventh period class under control.  They like to talk a lot during the lesson and are not the best at paying attention or following directions.  I have been trying a couple of different things to get them to stop talking because it is really rude to both me and the other students who are actually trying to learn.  This week I tried some new stuff and I felt like it was actually beginning to work by the end of the week.  I felt as though I was the one in control on Friday in class, and that was really good.  Hopefully things will transition into this coming week well.

The Museum of Science and Industry

A couple of my friends visited this weekend and we did a couple of fun things, one of which was going to the Museum of Science and Industry.  I had not been there since I got here this semester, so I was pretty excited to see it.  However, it was extremely busy with lots of little children, so we did not get to enjoy all of the interactive exhibits as much as we would have liked.  That’s what we get from going on a Saturday, I suppose!

Student Teaching - Weeks #7 & #8

by Kathryn Williams - Taft High School

Sorry about last week.  I have been extremely busy with full time teaching.  I am totally enjoying myself, but things are crazy busy.  Here is a picture from last weekend.  I went to see the river dyed green for St. Patrick's Day.  It was a lot of fun!

But now onto this week!

Teaching Week

POW:  Half of the students in my fifth period class are failing right now.  Several students have As, so it is more for lack of motivation than lack of understanding (although it is a combination as they are unmotivated to learn).  I am trying to find ways to motivate them, but it is affecting the majority of the class, so they have the fact that they are in the majority to convince themselves that what they are doing is acceptable.  I gave them an opportunity to do corrections on a quiz to earn some of their points back, but only one person in the class chose to do the corrections.  It was very disappointing.

WOW:  This isn’t necessarily about student teaching, but I have noticed that a lot of schools have begun posting job openings.  I am working on getting my application all set to go, and it’s pretty exciting to think about having my own classroom.  I have been offered a lot of freedom here, but it is a lot harder to do something new in someone else’s classroom than it seems at first, so it is really exciting to think about finding a job.  I am looking for positions in southwest Iowa, because my school is from Iowa and that is where my fiancé lives, and it’s kind of nice to know that although there are not a lot of districts in that area, there are already two schools that I will be applying to.

Student Teaching - Week #6

By Kathryn Williams -Taft High School

Teaching Week

WOW:  My College Algebra students seemed to need a little bit of humorous motivation, and when I stumbled across this website it seemed perfect. I modified it to better fit the needs of the students in my classes (and to have more standard American English grammar), and this is what I came up with:

How Not to Pass a Math Course

1.      Talk instead of working in class--your current socializing is more important than your future.

2.      Don't worry if you're failing at mid-year.  You still have half a year to learn a year's work.

3.      Do as few problems as you can--after all, practice only counts in sports and music.

4.      Leave all assignments to the last minute.  Then you will spend less time worrying about them.

5.      Never bring your textbook to class.  If you do, someone might expect you to do some work.

6.      Only study for the classes you like.  You are planning on failing the others anyway.

7.      Never bring a pencil to class.  Then you can't take notes and will have an excuse for not knowing how to do your homework.

8.      Never arrive on time to class.  Then when you are lost during the lesson it clearly isn't your fault.

I waited until the end of the period to give them this, and then I had the students take turns reading each point.  It went best in fifth period, because the students are a little bit rowdier (thus more energetic).  The funniest part was that the student who never brings his pencil to class volunteered to read number six after someone else had, so I told him he could read number seven.  As he was reading he laughed so loudly and said, "This is me.  This is totally me!"  The whole class laughed and we had a great time.  It was good because the students were willing to laugh at themselves over the situation and so I was really pleased with the way they took it.

POW:  This week was my first week of being full-time.  It was a lot of fun, especially starting with the new classes.  My students in fourth period kept trying to make me nervous on the first day that I taught them, and it was really great because it didn’t work.  I wasn’t nervous at all.  I could tease them right back because I was so much more excited to teach them than nervous to teach them.  However it was a full week and being full-time is a lot of work.  I also gave all the College Algebra classes (I teach three of them) a test on Monday, so I had to find time to grade them early in the week.  I didn’t want to feel as though I had to grade all seventy of them on Monday night (which would have taken me five or six hours), but I also knew it would be hard to get any more graded on Tuesday night because we had an extra long seminar this week.  I ended up finishing them by Thursday, which was not as early as I would have liked, but I still had to do some planning every night, too, so it was not like I was slacking.  It was a really long week, and I put a lot into it, but it was also rewarding.  I am very grateful for a weekend to recuperate and hopefully get some good planning time in for the upcoming week.

The Rest of the Week

Teaching full time is a lot of work, so I don’t really have too much exciting from the rest of the week, although one of my roommates also had a crazy week.  Her internship is with an organization (SCUPE) that held a conference this week for people throughout the US.  She stayed at the hotel where they were holding the conference all week, working from about 7am until midnight most days.  She had to do so much because she was helping run this huge conference—what a great experience!  On Thursday all the general students when to the conference for the entire day, and then student teachers went in the evening to hear Shane Claiborne speak.  It was pretty good, although I have heard Shane Claiborne several times before.  I really enjoyed being able to see a little bit more inside what my roommate has been working on so far this semester.  

Peacemaking in a Culture of Violence

2011 Congress on Urban Ministry

Student Teaching - Week #5

by Kathryn Williams - Taft High School

POW:  Several times this week students got taken out of my class for misbehaving somewhere else.  It is really frustrating because it happens to students who are well behaved, but unmotivated in my class; students who need to be there to be learning the material.  I had students taken out for in-school suspension without any prior warning twice this week.  I would have liked to have been able to prepare work for the course that they could have worked on while they were there, but without any notice I did not have materials ready for the students.  Another time this week a student was pulled out of my classroom to talk to the dean about an incident from the day before when he was caught texting in another teacher’s classroom.

This makes me so angry.  I cannot believe how common it is to take students out of a classroom that they should be in and are not misbehaving in, to punish them for something they have done in another setting.  Apparently things like this are very common at the school.  I was talking to some of the other mathematics teachers who said that they are hardly ever notified when students are going to be at in-school suspension, which is unbelievable to me.  I cannot believe that they would hold them in a separate room in the school for an entire day without attempting to have something for them to work on that will allow them to be caught up in the classes that they are missing when they return.  Students are so much more likely to misbehave when they are confused by what is going on and feeling stupid than when they are caught up with the rest of the class.

WOW:  This week we were supposed to be doing a lot of research for our neighborhood research project in which we investigate the way that the neighborhood and community work together.  We were supposed to interview one administrator and someone else from the neighborhood.  We were having a little bit of trouble with our administrator interview because the assistant principal we were going to interview was always busy when we were both available, so we sought out one of the other two.  We ended up getting our interview with one of the others, and it was a really great experience.  Neither Monica or I had met him before, but he was very kind and helpful and knew a lot about the history of the school and the neighborhood.  At the end of the interview he told us that if we needed anything else throughout our time at Taft to be sure let him know and he would be willing to help us.  It was really nice to get another contact within the school.  I have added some pictures from our neighborhood project.  The first is the front of our school, and the second is of the park close-by.  

Student Teaching - Week #4

by Kathryn Williams - Taft High School

The Teaching Week

WOW: This week my teacher began giving me a little bit more responsibility and independence.  She keeps busy preparing for the classes I am not teaching and allows me to prepare mostly on my own for the lessons I am teaching.  It was a lot of work to be mostly in charge of three periods, but it was very rewarding.  I enjoy being in front of the classroom, and I especially enjoy it when she steps out of the classroom for a little bit.  One time when she did this the students freaked out and were asking me where she was going and when she would be back.  However, in general it did not faze them to have her leave and have me be the only one in the classroom.  I like that they trust me in from of the room!

POW: This week was my first observation by my Chicago Semester supervisor, Carole.  Don’t worry, things went really well, but I was really surprised by how nervous my CT got in anticipation of the visit.  I showed up to school on Thursday and my CT was asking me a million questions about the lesson I had planned, even though we had gone over everything the afternoon before.  We had made all necessary copies and gone over how we would organize the lesson prior to Thursday morning, yet she kept asking me what to expect with Carole’s visit, if I had everything I needed for the lesson, and if I was nervous.  This was totally unexpected for me, so it almost made me a little bit nervous about the visit, but I reminded myself that there really was no reason for me to be nervous.  I thought this might be important for all of you future student teachers to know, because it was something most of us experienced, but none of us expected. 

The Rest of the Week

This week we went to see the musical “Working” at the Broadway Playhouse.  It is created from interviews Studs Terkel did with regular working people about their work.  It was beautifully done and I loved seeing an inside perspective of how people view their own work and justify to themselves what they do for a living.  It has been adapted from the original to be more up-to-date with today’s workers, but I believe the lines they used in the play are all quotes from the interviews.  I love the sociological perspective it gave on working.  Plus the music was great!

Welcome to the new CS Blogspot - February 2011

I'm Kathryn Williams and I'm student teaching with Chicago Semester.  I go to Central College (in Pella, IA), but I went to high school in Bemidji, MN.  I love being in Chicago!  I am living with three other girls from different colleges.  Here is a picture of us in our apartment:

I am teaching pre-calculus and college algebra at Taft High School.  To be considerate of my cooperating teacher's privacy, I'm going to call her CT on this blog.  She has been really great to me so far and I have really enjoyed working with her.  I have begun teaching some lessons and she has been really supportive of what I have been doing.  I also have gotten to know a lot of the rest of the mathematics department at Taft, and they all seem really good.

Each week I plan on posting a "wow" and a "pow" from my "teaching" week.  "Wows" are good things that happened, and "Pows" are not so good things. I will try to write a little bit about what is going on outside of teaching too.

The Teaching Week

Wow:  One thing that was really cool that happened this week was that one of the students who failed last semester aced the quiz.  I had noticed that she had been doing all of her homework correctly and paying attention in class instead of sleeping.  When I graded the quizzes I was surprised by how well she did.  I told my CT, and she almost did not believe me.  She asked me who the student was sitting next to after the new seating chart.  When I told her, she said, “Yup that was definitely all her.”  I was so proud of her, that I told her she had done really well the next day (even though I did not pass back the tests), and told her to keep up the good work.  I think she is going to take advantage of the new start that this semester brings.

Pow:  This week was really busy.  I was teaching first and fifth period, and doing all of the planning for them, so I had a lot to do.  It was also the first full week that the students have had since I've been here, so it seemed pretty long to me.  It was hard to keep up with planning, but it's not like I can fall behind because otherwise I won't have anything to do with the students.  Also the content I am teaching is pretty advanced for high school, so it takes some work for me to remember all of the details.  Right now we are graphing trigonometric functions, something I haven't done since tenth grade!

The Rest of the Week

Last Sunday was the Chinese New Year parade, and Rachel, Jennifer, and I decided to jump on the red line to Chinatown to get the experience.  This is something I have always looked forward to doing, so I am so excited to have gotten to do it.  It was snowing through the whole parade, but nobody seemed to care (and of course I didn't--I'm from Minnesota).  Here are some pictures from parade: