This is the last day of my first week of student teaching at my middle school placement. It has been a long week, although not in a negative sense. Today I taught two out of the five periods that Bella has (Bella is my cooperating teacher), periods 8 and 9. Period 8 is the “advanced” physical science class, and period 9 is the “tough” class (although it is not the class with the most classified students). For today’s lesson, we reviewed types of heat transfer and quickly went through reflection and absorption. For this we used the review book (UPCO’s Intermediate Level Science Review). Then we had them hand in their science starter sheets. Science starters are essentially do nows, but Bella has sheets where they fill in their answers on this sheet (the answers are usually very short). Then we worked out of the packet we have been using all week to go over phase changes, which the students saw when they were learning Chemistry this year. We had a simple matching game where we had different types of phase changes and the students came up to the board and matched either a definition or a description to the vocabulary words (there were about six vocabulary words). By that point, it was the end of the period and I checked the review books (they had chapter 10 due) and they were done.
Period 8 was pretty chatty, and I threatened to send one of the students to one of the other team member’s rooms. It didn’t totally help, but it helped a little. This was also the first day I was teaching this class. Period 9 is the tough class, although they are usually not too bad for me. Or maybe it’s just that I have a different definition of bad. When I think of bad kids, I think of mouthy, attitudy kids. These kids are sometimes attitudy, but mostly they are talkative.
I like how in these classes, Bella has something other than problems to work on and lecture. In every class that I have seen her teach, she has a demo, a lab, or some game to play. And since I have been following her lead on what to teach at this point (I see her teach a lesson about 3 times before I teach it, and I essentially do what she does for a lesson), I have been seeing what she does, and it helps me see other ways of teaching besides just lecturing and giving problems.i
