Due to spring break and good Friday, I was only able to visit my field experience once since the last blog post. I showed up hoping to sit and observe, paying close attention to the way that the students react to the teacher's teaching and their dialogue. However, the day was cut short when my clinical teacher's daughter came in the class crying because she did not feel well. Being a newly divorced single mother, there was no other option for Ms. Smith than to leave to take care of her sick daughter. In what seemed like one second, she started throwing lesson plans at me and telling me what the students needed to take home for homework. Ms. Smith knew that the substitute would most likely not be the best and she was trusting me to take over the class and teach them what she had planned to teach them for the day.
As usual, I took the students to lunch and sat with them. Then the craziness started. The sub could not speak enough English to even communicate with me. After speaking broken Spanglish, she was able to understand that I am a student training to become a teacher, and she kindly let me take over the class. I was able to teach the students 2 math lessons, a poetry worksheet and then we went over the homework and the students made their own rhyming poems and I let a few students share with the class before they were let out for the day. I know that it sounds like it was super easy, but I was completely overwhelmed. I constantly had to call student's names, confiscate paper airplanes, and each question took over five minutes for everyone to understand it.
I noticed that I had to constantly remind myself that I needed to be walking around the room after each question so I could see if students needed help, reminded students to get on task, and further explained the question. I'm writing about this so late because I thought that I would be able to go in last Friday, but they did not have school. So I was unable to observe the things that I wanted to, but I basically had a dry run of teaching a class on my own.
It was a hectic and unexpected day, but I really enjoyed having the opportunity to practice teaching just for half a day.
Pretty cool that you got the chance to "take over" the class. There's always a first time for everything! It must of been hard not knowing all the students names but it looks like you managed the situation well enough if you were able to teach two math lessons. I know it was overwhelming but I'm sure you did great!
ReplyDelete