Pics!

(In a whiny, devastated, needy voice)...I don't how to post pics!

About Teaching...

Being at Williams Middle School (pseudo name given), I have the opportunity to take part in a school improvement plan called Turing Points. This program focuses on five specific steps that defines problems that hold the school back, the causes of problems, indentifies solutions, and then action plans that can be implemented, and finally the fifth step involves evaluating and reassessing. This is the second year Williams Middle School has been a part of Turning Points. We are currently at the end of analyzing the data that identifies the problem areas in the school, and we are now working on indeitifying solutions and creating action plans to be carries out.

Part of Turning Points includes staff professional development. Each teacher and staff member is in a group of his or her choice and while working with other staff and faculty members of the same interest, learn and teach together to develop their own professionalism, essencially what will make them a better teacher or staff member.

I have chosen to be in the technology group. Gathering for at least an hour ever week, my team members and I have the opportunity to collaborate ideas and encourage one another while we each make our own website and learn how to use FrontPage. Also included is the opportunity to make a WebQuest.

Although my knowledge and experience leaves me limited in how to incorporate FrontPage with the classroom experience, I am anxious to use my collaboration time each week to come closer to making it a possibility. Right now I am working on a WebQuest for an extensive art history unit. Each week is changes and morphs, and perhaps in the end it will be a database for all art history I may wish to include in the classroom. Until then, I will keep working...

New Additions to the Family...

Again, I am behind on my blogging...

On Sunday, the 17th, my brother and his wife had a beautiful baby boy. The fifth in a line of handsome Goodsell nephews, (the fourth for this one brother). If only I knew how to post pics! Hint, hint, hint...

Also, the day before Bill and I adopted a kitten. We found him at the Humane Society in Boise. An orange striped tabby, Charlie is fifteen weeks old and a ball of cuddly, yet sometimes fierce, fun. We love him.

About Teaching...

Teaching is always full of surprises. Students get upset when they are disciplined, and the next thing you know you have to meet with belligerent parents who are too upset and emotional to actually have a talk, so they make up stories and try to press charges, and their children are removed from your classes.

Sometimes, the resources for your lessons don't pull through, so you have to figure out a way to keep the interest of 30 eleven and twelve year olds for an hour when you have to introduce a lesson about Incan art history while tying it into their Social Studies unit when you have no visual art to show them. Descriptive stories and gross details will have to make do.

You start to get a good giggle at puppy love, and you finally realize how ridiculous it is to see a short scrawny boy whose feet and ears are still too big for him holding hands with a girl with wildly curly hair who is about a foot and a half taller, and they are clumsy and bump into one another when they walk. They see you as a teacher and a friend, and are always willing to ask if you know so and so, and then they tell you that the person they are always holding hands with is really, really cool.

Every once in a while, you have a miserable day, and by the headache you have at 3:00pm you decide to swear off raising your voice, no matter the cause. The next day you go in all smiles, and find that those you confronted the day before about their behavior really won't hold a grudge against you, or hate you forever.

Finally, in teaching there are always those surprising hugs from the students you would least expect it. One minute they are trying to be cute and enjoying the attention you are giving them, however not quite sure how to go about doing it, and then the next minute they are hugging you, and you are hugging them back. When you pull away after that brief, 2 second hug, you look at the student and realize for the first time (again and again) that you are a special teacher.

Long Time No Blog

I apologize for the huge length of time that has passed since I last blogged. A lot has happened to keep me busy, however I will be sure to make an extra effort to let the slacker side of me kick in again.

Mostly, I have been concentrating on my teaching. My lead teacher has been named "Art Teacher of the Year" in Idaho, so I am working under a celebrity, which means that I have an awful lot to live up to.

Work on my thesis is coming along, however I am dragging my feet when it comes to actually writing the sucker.

This last weekend Bill and I went rock climbing with some friends, and then out to some of the best sushi I have ever had. Ever had green tea ice cream? It was wonderful. A very complete and special weekend.

About Teaching...

Today I am taking a different approach with my students. Instead of simply looking at art history slides on a PowerPoint, I am showing them slides of masks, and then breaking them into groups and having them brainstorm ideas about where the masks are from, what they were made out of, and how they may have been used. Then we collaborate as a class and discuss it as a group. Thus far, three periods have passed and things are working out nicely, and I think the students are enjoying the lesson model.

It has been interesting and challenging for me to learn classroom management. Chatting students are the biggest problem, and I have had several quick discussions intermittently throughout various lessons about being respectful of those who are talking. Being in close proximity of chatty students helps, but in some classes that means that I have to constantly be moving around the room. To get the students' attention at the beginning of class (there is no tardy bell) I have started to ask students to raise their hands if they can hear my voice. It works very well, but I think it is kinda' funny that I have to use a technique you would usually use for elementary students...(although some of my education professors use it too)!!!

I have grown a lot in only the month that I have been doing my student teaching, but I continue loving every bit of it. It's nice to go to "school" or "work" and have so much fun that it doesn't seem like either.