Sub Pay

Substitute teacher pay is horrendous. Many new teacher try to rely on substitute teaching to makes ends meet while job searching immediately after graduating. But $55/day is barley minimum wage and doesn't pay the bill, let alone the college loans!

Family trees

Today my US History classes turned in their family trees and I thought it would be great if as they came up with them to show the class their posters and tell them one interesting fact the they found out while researching for the project. It was interesting to hear how surprised some of the students were by what they had discovered. I feel good that if it were not for the project they might never had found some of this information out.

Maps

I think I would really enjoy teaching a geography class once I get my Social Studies certification. I did a lesson in my US History class where the student mapped out conservation efforts that Teddy Roosevelt's administration put into effect. The students seemed to really enjoy it and so did I. I remember back to when I was in middle and high school that doing map projects and exercises ion geography class was one of my favorite things to do because you didn't have to be very creative to do it. Anybody should be able to follow simple instructions and place items correctly on a map.

Attendance

The attendance at this high school is awful! There are no repercussions for students missing school, no matter how much, as long as their parents excuse them. I feel there should be a limit to the amount of school a student is allowed to miss. I had one student at the beginning of the school year miss over two weeks because she went to Disney Land! Where I went to high school, if a student misses more than seven days of any class they lose credit for that class. The only way they can then get credit is if they make up the hours missed in Saturday School. I really keeps the absences down and students actually beg their parents not to make them miss any more school.

Deer Season!!!

As a hunter I enjoy deer season. As a teacher it is the worst thing on earth!!! I have a half dozens students missing today and there is a major 4 chapter unit test. I am certain I will need to track every one of them down to get them to take the exam upon their return. It is also the students that can not afford to miss school that are taking a week or more off to "go to camp." One student, that I know of, is not coming back until after Thanksgiving break! He is barely passing the class as it is and will now miss several assignments and probably a couple quizzes.

AP History

I have recently taken over teaching AP History for the next couple weeks and it is almost overwhelming with the amount of work involved prepping for it. Now I am teaching three classes; economics, general US History, and APO History. The workload for AP is about three times as much as the workloads for the other two classes combined. The experience is amazing but I do not think I will be ready to teach an AP class full time as a new teacher. I think no matter what a teachers level of area content is, at least five years should be dedicated to teaching general education classes before diving into teaching AP. This class is more intensive than the HS126/127 US History classes at NMU were!

Sleep

Not getting enough sleep!!! Student teaching is definitely the hardest thing I have ever done in my entire life. I took over all classes last week and since then I've been getting about 4.5 hours of sleep a night. My normal week day looks like this:

4:00 wake up and write lesson plans (I work really well at that time for some reason)
6:45 leave for school, make copies
7:30-12:30 teach 2 US History classes, AP History, and 2 Econ classes, and lunch
12:30-5:30 grade papers, write lesson plans,
5:30-7:00 cook and eat dinner
7:30-11:30- write more lesson plans and read material

I hope that with time I become much more efficient. This is only week two but it is definitely taking its toll

This is NOT a complaint only an observation

Money Matters

Today in my Econ class we were learning about money so thought it would be nice to bring in my bag of foreign money I had collected during my travels in the Navy. The students were very intrigues by the look of the foreign money and some said that our money sucked compared to theirs. I had access to the internet so I asked them to each hold onto a few coins and bills of differing currencies. I then ask what they thought they were worth in USD. One good example was the 10,000,000 Turkish Lira which was worth about $9 when I got it but is now worthless because Turkey's economy collapsed and their currency was revalued and renewed.

Poetry Writing

Yesterday I had my US History students write short poems about being an immigrant coming to or being in America in the 1880's. The day before I had handed out some short primary soruce poems written by Chinese immigrants during the same time. I was very hesitant asking 10th grade general history students to write poetry.

Afterwards I was completely blown away! As I read some of the poetry I was amazed at some of the names on the papers. If we had not done these during class and hand them in before they left I would have thought some had been plagiarized. Some of my most struggling students wrote the most amazing poetry.

My only mistake was reading one of my best pieces from 1st hour to my 5th hour. Afterwards about half of my 5th hour copied the very original format of the poem which was disappointing. I tried to remedy it by requiring any student that used that format to also write a haiku.

Great day in Econ

Today in econ I decide to try something a little differetn to keep the students' attentions.

First post

This is the post post to my newly created education blog. Within this blog I will highlight experiences and thoughts that I have come across. I will enter my previous journal entrees soon with the original dates of entry.

More on Constitution Day

I have found out that most teachers feel that Constitution Day is a ridiculous law that Senator Byrd from West Virginia created for his own personal agenda. The fact is Civics/Government is a required class which all students must take to graduate form High School. Teachers I have talked to feel this is a waste of their precious, already reduced, and overloaded reduced class time.I had created a "stay awake" worksheet or quiz that I had emailed to all teacher in the building and have come to find out that not one used it during or after the quiz. I have heard through the grapevine that a few teachers shut their televisions off after announcements and began class. I am not offended by either of these however because I tend to agree that this law only gets in the way of normal instruction. The biggest issue is that there are no guidelines for the law, only stating that all educational institutions that receive federal funding are required to educate their students on the U.S. Constitution on that day every year. Why is there no required instruction on any other special topics each year like morality and ethics, environmentalism, or nutrition?

Monday was Constitution Day and I was put in charge of creating the activity for the entire school. It went off without a hitch . I was really nervous since this is only the second week I've been in the school. I showed a 15 minute video I had found on the Discovery United Streaming website throughout the school networked television system. It was on the First Constitutional Convention and I thought it was pretty good. It worked out well because I played it at the beginning of third hour witch is the school normal daily RIT (Reading is Thinking) time when the entire school reads for 15 minutes at the beginning of an extended 3rd hour. This way I did not interrupt teacher's normal instructional time.