What did I learn?
Over the course of this class there were a lot of different times that I had to question myself. It was tough being in a classroom that much when we are coming into the middle of a semester. The students were curious about us, and seemingly willing to learn what we wanted to present to them. But this wasn't always the case. We had to feel our way through the teaching process to get to know these students. We were told about some of the issues that the students have in the classroom; mainly some learning issues such as not reading up to the level, and some pyschological issues. This was an eye opener to me, in that I was brought up in a privileged environment where I always knew how to read and wanted to fully complete my assignments. This school was not the case. It helped us to know how to better adapt to each situation and gave us insight on adapting our lesson plans. On a normal day, we would have at least three different students missing due to a varying array of reasons. This class has taught me how to better adapt to situations when they happen and be flexible in changing environments. It has enabled me to deal better with students and how to manage them. I now try to direct them back to the task they need to complete without getting into a power struggle with the students. It helped me manage the classroom better and use my time where it needed to be instead of where I wanted it to be.
A problem that appeared when we started the project was keeping the students on task. They were easily distracted and would start doing other activities such as playing games on their iPad. When we confronted them on this, they would always use the same excuse, "I don't know what I'm supposed to do." This was easily rectified when we would redirect them back to the schoology app, where all of our instructions were found.
Something I learned about myself was that I need to remain flexible when teaching. We had to modify our lessons due to students not completing their activities when we wanted them to. They needed to learn the standards to do well, and we were able to accomplish this in the end, but it just took more time than we were expecting it to. We really needed to walk them through the terms and what we wanted them to accomplish.