First and Last Day of Teaching

    This week was the first official week of fieldwork. It was a great time! It was also one of the most stressful weeks in my college career. The classroom that we were in was Ms. P.'s second grade class at Bishop Dunn. Bishop Dunn is a catholic school on the Mount Saint Mary campus. My group was obviously group 1 and some of the challenges we faced were difficult to overcome. Being that the time restraint on these lessons was very short, we felt a lot of the pressure on us. 
     The first day of fieldwork was on Tuesday. Tuesday was a little nerve racking because it was our first fifty minute period that we would be teaching the students. Our first lesson plan was the direct lesson plan. I found that putting together this type of lesson was long and strenuous. It was really hard to make sure that everything in that lesson plan was teacher-centered. When I go through other methods classes it is nowhere similar to this type of methods class. They are also not really teaching teacher-directed lessons or direct lesson plans. They tend to move towards cooperative and inquiry lesson plans. So, I had no background in writing a teacher directed lesson plan and their were only three of my group members working on it. I think to me that was one of the hardest parts, because when we would meet up our other group members were on their phones or they weren't really helping out. It was a lot of work that paid off though. Our first day with the children went extremely well. I thought that we did very well, and the SMARTBoard went out in the middle of our lesson. We were able to recover from the SmartBoard outage and keep going, we finished strong. Everyone in the class also believed that we did well, even Dr. Smirnova! That had to be one of the best feelings, when Dr. S. said that for our first lesson we did well. I have heard so many stories about Dr. S. ripping everyone a new butt because they did not do well, and I was nervous for that, but it never came. The kids also seemed to retain a lot of the information and I really enjoyed that group of kids. They are bright in so many ways! 
     Thursday was my second, and last day of teaching the class. Now Thursday, although my second time, seemed ten times the amount of stressful. I felt like we were not prepared at all for Thursday and it was frustrating. On Wednesday night, we gathered to finalize the lesson plans, which were the Inquiry and Cooperative Learning lessons. It was a mess from the beginning. Being that my group couldn't decide on what they wanted to do for the lessons, we decided on doing that Artifact Bags. However, we did the Artifact Bags wrong. All of the parts of the lesson that we did not clearly plan out a week ago seemed to be falling and crumbling on top of us. Next, we attempted to make examples of the Native American shelters because that was our CL project. The materials that I had picked up for the group seemed that they weren't good enough. As the group complained I looked over the other lesson plan only to find out that no one, and I mean NO ONE had revised them. This was the last straw in my bucket, because only three out of five group members worked on the first lesson plan and out of the five only two revised the lesson plan. So to me, I was tired being that I was just getting over a stomach bug and I, with two other people, did the entire twenty page lesson plan. But I guess it was how the cards fall, that I ended up revising the last two lesson plans as well. Anyways, Wednesday night was just a mess, and we all went home aggravated and feeling stressed. As I revised the lesson plans until midnight, I just felt happy that it was almost done. On Thursday morning, four out of the five group members met up an hour early to finish putting everything together. When we were done we went over to Bishop Dunn to start setting up for our lesson. I felt the beginning of this lesson was strong, and I feel that it started out strong, but as we emerged into the different parts the lesson crumbled much like the night before. Our lesson was not organized enough and it showed to the all of the teachers and teacher candidates. By the end of the sixty minute lesson, I was exhausted, hot, and ready to have our lesson handed to us. The teacher candidates felt that we had good ideas but that we were not able to execute them correctly and with the correct time management. Dr. Smirnova agreed and I couldn't say that I didn't disagree with them. I felt that the lesson had good ideas but it was poorly executed. 
     Overall, this week was a great one but definitely a learning lesson. I feel that there are areas that we all need to improve on and there are areas that we did fabulous in. I am excited to see what the groups after us are able to scarp together. I feel that this week was a learning lesson for all of us. Now  here's to a stress-free weekend!