student teaching weekly log - 1

Student Teaching Weekly Log

Name: Talbot Hook Week: 1-2 (August 24 – September 4)

1. How did you spend your time this week? What responsibilities did you have?

Being the first two weeks of student teaching, the majority of my time was spent soaking in unfamiliar surroundings, new stimuli, and information, and upon observation, both informal and formal. I participated in unit planning during a PLC with the entire Social Studies department, toured the facilities and met, it seemed, nearly everyone of importance, looked at many classrooms with their designs and decorations, and began forging a good working relationship with my mentor teacher and the other teachers of this department. There are four student teachers this semester working in the Social Studies department, and some of my time was spent with them, exchanging plans and ideas, and sharing our experiences. I have taken on more responsibilities than most of my peers, in that I am already full-time teaching one of my mentor teacher’s courses. My mentor teacher created his History of the 60s, 70s, and 80s course upon his hiring here over a decade ago, and was given one section of introductory American History this year. As this is a class he has not yet taught, it has fallen to me to design how it will progress (which is beautiful and terrifying). The department hammered out a foundational curriculum for it, and I am planning, teaching, assessing, and differentiating all on my own in this class, receiving little-to-no help from my mentor teacher (which isn’t as bad as it sounds). My planning periods (and our combined school-service period, which is In-School Suspension) were therefore consumed by planning for this class, examining curriculum and supplementary resources, grading student journals, and gathering necessary materials. That said, I enjoy all of these things greatly, and the class is, so far, a joy to teach, even though student motivation is something I will perhaps never understand. In reality, I am the teacher for this class, and I quite like it. The other class, colloquially referred to as Hippie History, exists not in any syllabus, but in the head of my mentor teacher. It is primarily exposition, with little student involvement, and it revolves around music to a great degree. With these facts in mind, I am nervous about assuming the role of teacher in this class, because my specialization is not in American History, and certainly not in American History of this era, or its music. But, as this is my placement, I will of course apply myself to the best of my abilities, and work with what has been given to me. At present, my teacher and I have yet to hammer out our plans for my transitioning to lead teacher of this class, and I am therefore in the dark. In total, however, it has been a very enjoyable two weeks, and I am learning a great deal, and hopefully effectively teaching a commensurate amount.

2. What were your most satisfying experiences? What were your most challenging experiences?

My most satisfying experiences have both taken place in the classroom. I have taught two lessons that I thought were quite good; my mentor teacher corroborated this (he was quite ecstatic), and I even received several compliments from students. (As a side note, this means that when I have lessons that are less good, I feel like I have subsequently “failed”, even though I know that not every lesson can be spectacular, and that it is likely only in relation to adequate classes that good classes stand out. But, I digress.) I have also been able to effectively shape my lesson plans around the curriculum, yet still cover things that I find truly important. For instance, in our unit on Progressivism in the early 20th century, I have been trying my hardest to tie together historical events and movements with

concepts and happenings in modern social justice, in order to better show the importance of studying this period of history. And it is in this that my lessons have truly connected to students. Yet, here is where my most challenging moments come into existence. My mentor teacher and I have different ideas, shall we say, on what things count as being important politically, and I can tell that sometimes he and I are not in perfect agreeance with one another on topics of equality, discrimination, or justice. So, while I am happy with my freedom to introduce these concepts into my lessons, and students seem to be most engaged with these connections, I sometimes worry that I should just be towing the line, and not upsetting the rapport I have created with my mentor teacher. Effectively, the atmosphere is one of social conservatism (especially in the teachers’ lounge), and teaching (with my personality and my need to push for reform) seems a delicate dance, at times. Yet, my mentor teacher is a highly pleasant man, and the relationship seems stable and amiable. As with all things, I will just have to wait and see how things develop.

3. What are the plans for the upcoming week?

My plans for the upcoming week are two-fold. Firstly, I will continue planning units and lesson plans, as well as teaching and assessing the class I am solely responsible for managing. I aim to be more creative in my planning, and implement more unique and different instructional strategies that I have yet to utilize; after all, I need to keep in mind that not everything is meant to go perfectly during student teaching (especially not at the beginning), and that student teaching is a time of both learning and experimentation (and perhaps even failure). So, as I grow more comfortable in my role as teacher, I will explore different methods of instruction, and I hope to increase my capability to manage the classroom effectively. Secondly, I will begin to discuss taking on more responsibilities in Hippie History with my mentor teacher; this first unit is centered on storytelling and an extensive video, and so my interactions with these classes (except when I teach them for my mentor teacher, which has happened three times to date) is somewhat limited. I need to ask him for some semblance of a curriculum, or plans for the class, and then I need to acquaint myself with his resources and materials, and begin to develop lesson plans that I can teach within the next few weeks. In short, I will continue to develop in both of these classes, even though my interactions within each of them are incredibly different to date. In even more brevity, I want to become more comfortable, capable, competent, and creative.


Name: Talbot Hook Week: 3 (September 7 - 11)


This week saw increasing responsibility on my part, which is the natural course of student teaching. While I have been full-time teaching American History since the third day of school, two days this week the teacher was gone due to the birth of his grandson (his reaction when first he saw him was truly touching), and so I took over full responsibility of the classroom. Granted, the lessons he left were not complicated, but still, it was up to me to manage the classroom, and implement the teaching. It was a nice amount of responsibility, I felt, even if I had not designed the activities for those two days. Monday, of course, we had no school, due to Labor Day, and the rest of the week seemed flavored by that; the students, when Tuesday rolled around, were uniformly tired and unwilling to become engaged in anything, it seemed—a fact which was

corroborated by every teacher I talked to that day. So, for what it is worth, I learned something about the first day back from holidays.

There were long periods of observation, still, and a lot of lessons were planned by me, up to the point where I found out I would likely not be continuing in this school, for reasons of licensure previously unknown to both myself and my mentor teacher. But, once that was resolved (more-or-less), things were once again underway, and school continued. I made good progress in gaining rapport with several classes, though I sometimes think my age and youthful appearance (some students thought I was 20 years old, which was flattering, but quite untrue), as well as my general demeanor, make some students see me as more of a peer they can wrestle with than the teacher they feel they should listen to. But, I can do little about my appearance in this manner, so my classroom management will need to stem from some other source, provided I can find that source. Overall, I felt my responsibilities grow, though the growth was not huge. Yet, even modest growth is still growth, and so I consider it a week well-spent.


My most satisfying experience, by far, was assessing the learning of the students in my American History class. I was incredibly interested, with commensurate anxiety, in how my students would do on a thirteen-question quiz I produced for Friday (which blended curricular items from their unit test, as well as things that I simply found more important); after all, to an extent, student performance is somewhat based upon the success of an educator’s teaching. That said, more responsibility is upon the student to take charge of his/her own learning, and if they are given opportunity, they should succeed, provided they strive for it. Of course, the results of any given assessment are more optimistic the higher the grades, but grades generally fall upon a standard bell curve, with some students doing poorly, most students doing decently, and a few students exceeding. And, this is how it ended up playing out. The class average was 73.3% (after some quick calculations) on the test, with a few failures, and a few perfect scores. While I, as a teacher-in-training (I’m always hesitant to call myself a teacher, as I am not one, yet), was hoping for above-average scores (reflecting well upon both my teaching and student learning habits), the results were typical. When I reflected upon the test, I realized that, even when I simplified language, I could still make it yet simpler. And, then I realized that, to an extent, students should also be challenged on the content of their English abilities (English Language Learners present a more nuanced case, of course); if every content teacher is also a reading teacher, as we are taught, then it is my job to not only teach reading, but to push the limits of student English. So, while my English was simplified, I am not yet sure where I should have fallen on the scale of linguistic complexity. As with all things in life, I fall upon the Middle Path, in that I do not want to make things impossibly hard, but I also do not want to coddle students, because where there is no challenge, there can be little growth. As you can see, I have not found a definitive answer on this point; nor do I know whether one exists.

The most frustrating thing I’ve yet experienced is the classroom management of freshmen. The upper-classmen are already jaded, tired, and laid-back, so the problem that results is one of motivation. On the far end of that scale are freshmen, who, while they do not lack for the energy lost as one ages, are the squirreliest organisms imaginable. And while I can get them to quiet down eventually (though my methods are pushed, occasionally, to their limits), it does lose class time, which is rather bothersome to me. They, quite literally, talk at every given opportunity, and transitions are protracted sieges of conversation which are never as efficient as I would like. I have been doing some readings on this point, however, and I am getting new ideas. That said, the biggest frustration of this week has been that of classroom management. Is this normal? Probably. Does that make it any less frustrating? Heavens no.


My plans for the upcoming week are simple, and yet complicated. As I will be forced to transition into my second placement for reasons of licensure and accreditation (though I do not harbor ill will toward anyone, as that is not in my character), I will spend the last two days handing all reins back to my mentor teacher, patching up any final holes in my experience at Southeast Polk, and gaining some amount of closure with the students, my fellow student teachers, and those with whom I work. I will also extend gratitude to the faculty that have helped me, and reassure them that this is out of all of our hands. From there, I will transfer to East, and assumedly observe, ask more questions than I ever have (for I am intensely aware of my ignorance of what being a teacher of English Language Learners actually entails), and fill out all the paperwork that takes place at the start of a new placement. I will hopefully become familiar with East, and quickly transition into a comfortable role as student teacher there. Here’s to hoping everything goes well.


Name: Talbot Hook Week: 4 (September 14 - 18)


The first two days this week went by far too quickly, as I attempted closure at my Southeast Polk placement. During these two days, I released any responsibility I had in the History of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and only taught half periods for the American History course which I had been teaching on my own since the beginning. It was strange in a way, to have only half a period where before I had the whole thing. With my days cut short, I knew I had a limited time to ease the students back into the norms of their main teacher. On Monday, I invited students to review my performance after nearly four weeks, and printed out a review form asking them what I did well, what I needed to improve upon, how their learning went, and other general comments. I gave them optional anonymity, but I told them that regardless I wished for them to take it seriously, as it is one of the primary ways I can grow as an educator. On my last day there, I co-taught with my mentor teacher, reviewed the student quizzes from last Friday, and then took a class selfie before the bell rang. All in all, it was quite touching; the students wrote me a sweet message, and I had my first student cry, which was immeasurably humbling.

My transfer to East High School for the beginning of my ESL placement was even more humbling. The evidence of the economic, ethnic, and linguistic diversity between the two schools is unmissable. While I knew my experience would be different, I wasn’t quite ready for such a sudden and prodigious shift in student backgrounds. That said, even after three days, I already have huge appreciation and respect for the students in Mr. Hawkins’s classroom; they all seem delightful, and appear more focused than most mainstream classrooms. Largely, I observed for the past three days, though I also worked with small groups, read to the class, helped with classroom management (keeping students aligned with their classroom expectations), participated in two PLCs, met at least twenty people, toured the school, and began looking at curriculum. The tone, pacing, and atmosphere of Mr. Hawkins’s room as compared with Mr. Knipp’s are all incredibly different, and Mr. Hawkins definitely leads a more hurried lifestyle, and is more involved in student lives. I can already tell that this four weeks will be incredibly different than my first four, and for that I am quite excited.


My most satisfying experience was reading the reviews my students handed in concerning my teaching. The consensus was, overall, humbling due to its positivity. I received more praise than I looked for (even if not all students took it as seriously as their more assiduous classmates), and the criticisms were more than valid, as they are the same critiques I have pointed out myself—especially concerning assertiveness and “putting my foot down”. These are both things I need to work on. But, I got a great deal out of my students’ thoughts and comments, and it was an excellent way to finish out my time there.

The most trying experience of my week happened after school on Friday when two teachers in the ESL department got into a “passionate discussion” with one another over an incredibly trivial matter. There is some, shall we say, Drama, in East’s ESL department, and things can become rather heated without much warning. I have not been privy to the disagreements of the past years, of course, so my background in this area is negligible. Yet, I have picked up on a few things in my short time there, and internecine conflict seems par for the course. I have witnessed way too much gossip, too many idle words, and more disrespect than I am used to, or that I permit, and it is particularly trying for me to function in such an atmosphere. Speaking factually, I am a very happy person, and I do not allow myself to put others down, so I will either need to rectify things at East, ignore them, or internalize negativity—none of which seems possible or probable. Humans are silly.


As my four weeks at East will go by quickly, I need to begin throwing myself into the curriculum, continue helping my mentor teacher implement his lessons, familiarize myself with his methods, units, and the larger planning scene, and eventually begin to co-plan and co-teach. As you know, my observations will be back-to-back, and I need to have a good foundation upon which to begin my teaching. While I am excited to take more initiative in the classroom, I am also nervous, as my theoretical knowledge of teaching ELLs far surpasses my practical knowledge. I have already asked for the patience of my mentor teacher, so I hope my teaching goes smoothly.

student teaching weekly log - 1

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