Week 6 Reflection (September 27- October 1)

O, how I love short weeks; it was a four day week with students plus a IS day today, Friday. Today, I got to see how an IS day functions. It is definitely a lot of meeting, listening, and sitting. Despite sitting in a hard chair for around two hours, it was interesting to see how a faculty senate meeting functions. …..it gave me some knowledge for later. Also, we went into our PLC groups. Since I am in social studies, I went in the social studies group where we had to complete a focus journal on something we had to analyze and figure out how to improve it; we chose WV Writes.

Teaching is going good. I have my days where I have to scrap things but so far so good. I had a little trouble with my 5th period class being too loud and rowdy. However, everything is better due to some help from my host teacher. I am still struggling with gaining respect and control of this class period. As time will go on, I know I will but it’s frustrating.

Testing is going good, as well. On Thursday we had the chapter 3 exam. All of the classes I am teaching got very high scores. It made me feel good because I must be doing something right. Additionally, I attempted an incentive system for a few of my classes to get high scores. How I did this was I offered the students a free day if everyone in the class got a 92.5% or above on the exam. Now, no class got the required scores but I am still going to reward them for how well they did. As of now, I am trying to develop an incentive system that rewards good behavior. I plan to have a point system in which the class with the most points at the end of every nine weeks gets a fun day. However, I have not decided what I can do for this fun day.

This week was also interesting because I got to play around with EdLine a lot more, as well as WV Writes. Both programs are fairly simple to use. To me, it seems like WV Writes is a good program. Hopefully, it is better than Writer’s Roadmap, which was last year’s writing program. It had a horrible grading system and just liked big words. After talking to another teacher about it, he said that it’s harder on grading but still has its mess-ups. I guess we will see. As of today, ten more weeks until my internship teaching is done…….I can’t believe it.