It was a slow start to the week with Monday being a vacation day for the Martin Luther King Holiday and Tuesday being an inservice day for teachers to prepare for the new semester. Tuesday was filled with paperwork and getting situated for my first day of teaching on Wednesday. This included a crash course on google classroom as well as Nearpod.
Wednesday, my first real day as a student teacher. It was a rather eventful day, I spent my prep period doing teacher things such as making copies, verifying lesson plans, and getting ready for the next day and then the announcement came….
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| Fire in Ag Mech |
In just 60 minutes I discovered the joys and struggles of using technology in the classroom, and all of the questions I wish I would have and should have asked prior to day one came flooding over me, and I just had to roll with it. These were questions I didn't even think of asking, I was so concerned with my content that the little things escaped me. But overall the first class session went well, the main item highlighted in my review was that I need to be more confident in my content knowledge!
Thursday was my first full day of teaching Intro to Ag Mechanics which I have discovered so far that I really enjoy teaching the safety content. In addition, my
students are a lot more responsive to the material than I thought they would be. The class went well with the exception of some confusion about google classroom and a bad habit that I am working to squash already.
My students have the habit of packing up in about the last 4 minutes of the block and then they begin chatting. I have gone over the expectation for these last minutes of class but this is something that I will have to continue to reinforce until it resonates with them daily.
To end the day we finally got to see our block 4 class, which is the Introduction to Ag Sciences course. My cooperating teacher and I are planning to co-teach this course and are feeling out the waters for what this will look like. After school I did some planning and then it was off to my first Ag Teacher Meeting! An interesting meeting filled with news, updates, opinions of change and record books!
Finally I made it to Friday and I have come to my first real classroom management challenge. I have a student that questions everything and quite frankly wants to do nothing. So far I have tried encoring the student to do work, I have tried to provide a constructive group for him to work in, and I have tried proximity control, with no success. My next actions will be to to make sure to provide a concrete and real life explanation to why we are doing everything. We will see how next week goes and make adjustments as needed.
To conclude week 2 I co-taught my first AFNR course and it went fairly well. Once I began the activity I immediately wished I would have read the entire activity instead of glancing over the procedure and conclusion questions. However, the students were very responsive to the curriculum and seem to be enjoying it so far.
Well thats all for this week, read back next Friday to see what shenanigans I have gotten myself into then.
Very interesting. Shenanigans??? Well, anyone who knows me well knows that I get into them all the time. What you are learning is the reality of teaching agriculture. Yes, you have to read the entire lesson and then try to anticipate how the students will react to it. yes, you can have everything planned and then the unexpected happens - early dismissal, the school computer system goes down, you have no power, etc, etc, etc. Never a dull moment. Continue to learn and have fun. be sure to spend lots of time talking through lessons with Neil and the other teachers.
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