Two Amazing Weeks

           Lucky for me, I have been blessed with a great cooperating teacher. From day one he has said he was open to trying anything I wanted to try and he wanted to hear my ideas. He admits that after for teaching for 20 years he knows he gets stuck in ruts on how to do things and so he welcomes change.
           The only thing that I can say really bothered me in his class was how many worksheet exercises they did. I am not a huge fan of worksheets everyday type learning. Despite this, I think he is a great teacher. He has a great personality and the all the kids absolutely love him. He is humorous and so he is able to make learning fun despite the numerous worksheets. The other thing I disagree with is that often all the language arts teachers pass out the same unit tests. So my cooperating teacher may not have had any part in making a test depending on if he had time to meet up with the group or not. I think each teacher needs to have their own tests if that is the way they choose to assess. Not every teacher taught the unit the same way or with the same information. He also doesn't plan his units using backward design. He said that the language arts teachers were going to start doing that, but that it got put on the back burner as they were focusing more on making sure they were hitting the Common Core standards. He is against the standards, but unfortunately he has to incorporate them into his teaching as we all know.
          To introduce me into the classroom he had me write a bio to the students and then they wrote a bio of themselves back to me. On the back of their bios they wrote questions they had about my bio. I answered all the questions they asked and passed back a worksheet with the answers on it. My cooperating teacher asked me to come up with a rubric for a poem they could write based off of my answers to their questions. They asked a wide variety of questions and so they had a wide variety of topics they could write about. I gave them the creative freedom to write a poem about any topic I talked about in the answers to their questions. This is when I realized just how creative these 7th graders were. I absolutely loved their poems and the variety of creativity I saw.
           When I finally got to go in for a whole week the first thing I was put in charge of was freewrites. My cooperating teacher had actually never heard of the freewrites we did in teaching writing where you write for 5 minutes without stopping. He also had never heard of mentor texts. He really loved my idea and so I am in charge of the freewrites we do almost everyday. The kids are loving it and I think their favorite prompt has been 'What would your last meal be'. Anything that has to do with food gets them sharing and talking.
          The next thing I did was introduce their persuasive writing unit. For this I had them start by sharing a time they wanted something from their parents or asked their parents to let them do something. Then they wrote a letter to their parents persuading them to let them do/have something. As a class, we then shared our letters and discussed the different ways we tried to persuade our parents. The next day I passed out envelopes full of different persuasive techniques and their definitions. Before giving any explanation of the techniques I had the students work in pairs to try and match up the techniques with their definitions. They really are smart and did pretty well with it. We went over the answers as a class and then talked about how the different techniques matched up with the techniques they used in their letters. On the third day, I had them individually go through a Prezi I had created with different examples of the persuasive techniques used in advertisements. They were then put into groups and given two techniques. They had to either draw or act out the two techniques in their own advertisements for the class. My goal (which I explained to them) was for them to make very creative advertisements that would help all of them remember all the different techniques because some of the techniques were hard (and there were 16 of them!). They really loved the project. They were excited to create the advertisements and told me so. Some choose to draw the advertisement and some acted them out for the class. When they presented whether they drew the advertisement or acted it out they had to tell us how they used the technique. All of them were very creative and some had us laughing a lot. It was a great experience and another English teacher even stole the project from me to use! It made me feel really great!
           I am so glad that my field placement is going so well for me. I honestly was questioning whether or not I wanted to still be a teacher. After working with the students these past two weeks I now know without a doubt that this is what I was meant to do. After talking with a student about school he made the comment, "I know we have to learn, but why can't school be fun?". I told him it was my goal to make school more fun and after the project he told me I was doing a great job! I am so happy that I finally feel like I know for sure that this is my calling.
           My cooperating teacher is now reading the book "Live Assessments" (that I gave him to borrow after reading it) and considering doing a debate as the final test for students. He also is considering using my idea of revising the letter to their parents as they move through the unit and having that be their final paper for the unit. I am really happy that he is so open to my ideas and that he has loved all of the ideas I have brought to the table so far.