My Winter Term Teaching Reflection

For the last ten weeks I have been student teaching in four periods of physical education in a high school. When I first started the MAT program I really felt that I was more of a health teacher but I that I would enjoy teaching a class period or two of P.E. Now that I have experienced what it is like to be a P.E. teacher I love it. I am rather anxious about what I am going to do with myself in a health classroom.
At the term change, which was two weeks into my winter placement, I started my solo teaching. I was assigned three straight periods of Introduction to Physical Education, which is just a fancy way of saying freshmen P.E. I started the term off as their lead teacher with my cooperating teacher as more of an assistant than a teacher. I introduced the P.E. class expectations, I told them about the new cardiovascular fitness emphasis, and I answered their questions. I was the TEACHER! We started off in a badminton unit which I used as my worksample. It was a little rocky but I learned so much about my students and how to keep them participating.
It is some much more obvious in a P.E. classroom when students are not actively engaged compared to a regular classroom. In a regular classroom the students sit at their desks and are hopefully attentive, but at least they are quiet enough for the teacher to talk. In a P.E. class if the students aren’t actively engaged then nothing is happening. You see students sitting around or climbing on the walls, either way anyone that enters the classroom can tell that students are not learning. I found that my students were particularly into competition and choosing who their opponents were. If I tried to make anything a cooperative game then the students just didn’t care to try or if I chose their opponents/teammates they were less likely to try and more likely to argue. So I provided opportunities for my students to compete and to choose their teammates and opponents.
During my winter placement I was also responsible for disciplining students according to the non-dress policy, contacting parents, going to IEP meetings, posting progress report grades, and notifying counselors about issues with particular students. Since I have quite a few students that don’t particularly care for P.E. and thus would not dress down for P.E., I had to contact a few parents. Often at the beginning of the conversations with parents, especially when they contacted me first, the parents would have a rather harsh attitude towards me. Once I listened to what the parents had to say and started to offer a compromise I found most parents agreeing with me and how I run my classroom. Every conversation I had with a parent ended successfully and left me feeling more confident when I entered the classroom.
One of the most fulfilling experiences I had was when I had to choose two students of the month. I decided to choose a girl from that my class that is not athletic but had been trying really hard in my class. She is also considered a high risk student and comes from a rather difficult home life. I really liked her attitude in class and how she encouraged other students to participate in class. After I chose her for student of the month I let her know while we were running together during a cardio day. She seemed happy about the nomination but not overly excited. I later found out from my cooperating teacher that she was overjoyed at being chosen for student of the month and couldn’t stop talking about it to her next period teacher. The reason my cooperating teacher found out was because the other teacher stopped her in Staples to let her know how happy this student was and how impressed he was with me. From then on my student continued to put in excellent effort in class. It made me feel so good to not only make a student feel good about herself but to give her a reason to continue participating in class.
On my last day of class I gave my students a choice day. We were at the end of a basketball unit so one of the options was to play basketball shooting games in the gym. The other option was to play scatterball in the mat room. Scatterball is a version of dodgeball that only has one ball and no teams. I played. The students loved it. I heard more than once that it was the “most fun I have ever had in a P.E. class.” Most of my students had been begging me to play dodgeball from the first day of class. Letting my students play scatterball was a great way to end my time with them.
Now that my time is over in P.E., I am rather sad. I have so thoroughly enjoyed myself. I will miss my students and hope that they will come see me in my new room. I now know that if I got a job as a physical education teacher not only could I do and be successful but I would receive a great deal of fulfillment. I could show up everyday to school happy, excited, and ready to teach.

Technology in Future Schools

I agree and I disagree with this article. I find the article out dated. I think that if the author could have gone into the future at the time he wrote the article to find what schools are doing today he would be shocked. Schools are moving toward a technological school. More and more teachers are using computers not only to learn about computers but also to learn within subject area. Schools are moving toward charter school models and small school models which relate closer to his idea of the technological school. Many schools across America have a laptop for every student to use in every subject and I think that model is spreading. He viewed schools as only have the historical ways of teaching from a text with questions and practice and then a test as a rock that will be hard to roll away. Yet we are doing that already. I have been out of high school for seven years and yet I was graded on my ability to make powerpoint presentations and videos. In the schools right now students are being graded on their ability to make websites and animations that relate to the topic they are studying. Also many schools are moving to a block scheduling, where students are in the classroom for about 90 min with a teacher for one subject and have about four classes a day. Personally I think this is the model we need to be reaching for in our public high schools. This gives the teachers time to be more in-depth, to get out into the community and do something. The fifty minute classes are soon to be in the past and I think we are advancing a lot quicker than the author ever anticipated.

Computers as a Catalyst for Change in the Classroom

This article just enforced my belief that in order to change you must look at yourself and see the need for change. It took self reflection for all of the teachers to make a change in their classroom. I found it interesting that most of the teachers that were using computers in their classrooms the most also are teachers of learning and not teachers of facts and figures. Schools today need to be focusing on teaching students to think and for learn instead of rote memorization. This type of knowledge is what is going to help them get and keep jobs in this technological world. Using computers in the classroom is way to teach them how to learn. Computers are one of the best tools to seek out knowledge now. We can communicate with people across the world, we can look into libraries all over the world, and share our experiences. Computers give even the worst artist a change to make a beautiful piece of art. Computers are amazing tools. If we are teaching our students to be life-long learners then we must teach them to use computers.
I also found it very interesting that one major catalyst for change in the classroom was school environment. In schools where the use of technology is expected, the teachers would change their teaching style to fit in with the school expectations/goals. It makes me worry about the schools that are lead by those who are “scared” of technology. Will the students’ interest be able to make a change in the classroom? We, as new teachers, are being taught to pay attention to our students and what they need to learn and are interested in learning. But none of the teachers said that their catalyst for change was student interest in computer use. Why is that? I hope that as a future teacher I will be able to take into account my students’ interests for change in my classroom.

Digital Divide?

I started reading this article and found it very interesting. What I had always thought of as just a case of luxury has become an argument of inequality. Computers and other technology is expensive and so I found having it in your home was just a luxury and of higher priority to the family. I went to a rather poor high school and we had a very good computer lab. Our school bought the computers with grant money. But according to the powers that be not having a computer in your home becomes a case of inequity. When the article continued with its ways to eliminate the intangible inequities, I was really disappointed. Having the teacher go over software before student use to be sure all students were represented seemed a little over kill. It is important to try and make all lessons culturally open but if a software program is really effective at teaching it should be used. And having women and people with disabilities come into the classroom to show how they use technology well would not encourage but discourage many adolescents from learning to use technology. To those students, these outside adults just aren’t cool, and they don’t want their peers thinking that they want to be like the presenters. As teachers, to avoid the digital divide, we need to have technology use during school hours to be expected. Part of participating in our classroom is using information gathering software and digital photography/videography. As long as the computer lab time is given in class and students aren’t expected to work on it out of class, just expecting technology use could help close the gap.