Well, middleweb.com will be an awesome resource for me. There are so many resources to sift through. It will be a perfect place to go before I set off into the world of real teaching-when I will have a first week of school with my students. Going through the lists of resources on the site makes one of my recent realizations even more striking to me. Teaching successfully in middle school has a solid foundation in the early formation of relationships with your students. I guess my realization might not be recent, but it has truly played out before my eyes.
So much about middle school is your relationship with your students—a relationship that clearly starts and is outlined on the first day or days of school. By jumping into the school year after it has already started, I am a foreign element of my middle schoolers’ classroom. I cannot be trusted and I need to be checked out before they will truly be themselves around me and, most frustratingly, give me their full attention and respect in the classroom. I am only with them for six weeks—why on earth would they allow me into their lives? Because I am a motivational teacher, role model and all around sweet lady, that’s why! The hard part is showing them that.
They do their best to challenge and test me and while I can be myself with them and joke and I understand parts of their lives other adults might not, I am still struggling to engage them and motivate them to learn. This fact frustrates me and makes it harder for me to let loose and be myself-I just want them to take in the content…but I am learning and experimenting. I already supplemented the text with a PowerPoint complete with music and old time Western video clips on Monday. One student was laying his head in his arms before “Home on the Range” started playing. When it came on, I heard him say; “Are you trying to put us to sleep?” Halfway through the song, he was sitting straight up in his chair singing along-I pointed out to him that he was far from sleeping-he liked it. Funny how those tiny things can be the shining moment of your day.
I almost completely threw out my plan for Thursday and I am doing a kind of center activity about the Transcontinental Railroad. Even more so than 4th graders, I think (I know) these middle schoolers need active, engaged and hands-on lessons. No matter how awesome the textbook may be, I need to go beyond it. It is more work, but I knew from the start teaching isn’t easy and that the best teachers don’t teach by the book-no pun intended. My cooperating teacher isn’t stopping me (among the many other things she doesn’t really do…) so I am going to go for it. Even if they never remember where the golden spike was nailed in Utah in 1869 joining the east and the west railroads-I will still be working on building relationships with them.
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Teaching middle schoolers is this funny mix of understanding that "they don't care what you know until they know that you care" and building credibility through meaningful and memorable curriculum development. Your post helps me see that you understand this tension and that you're working to approach from both sides. Smart.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad we had a chance to talk more about your 'stations' for the transcontinental railroad discussion. I looked up information about the book Coolies, too, and I'm adding it to my collection. Teaching social studies was always one of my favorite parts of fifth grade, particularly because there were so many interesting ways to get kids immersed in the subject at hand. Have you ever seen simulation curriculum? It's like The Oregon Trail on paper. I'll look around and see if it still exists. My students loved those activities and I could tell they learned a lot through the level of engagement the work required.
Hang in there, Joanna. You're handling this situation with a professional attitude and your characteristic hard work and creativity. I imagine that a teacher with less of all those qualities might feel threatened by you and that her feelings of inadequacy would manifest themselves in obvious and unsupportive ways. Trust me when I say you're doing a tremendous job.
S.
I agree that middle school students need active learning. If you read my other post, I wrote about how I had changed my plans for this Monday. I felt like the students would sit too long with my original plans. I have also adapted the habit of not making printouts too far ahead of time because things change as you teach. How receptive was your Transcontinental Railroad lesson?
ReplyDeleteWe have a textbook for language arts, but I am not planning to use it much. Is that a mistake? I am teaching grammar (adjectives). I learned grammar though diagramming sentences, and I know the different elements of a sentence. If I don't have the students diagram sentences, will they really understand all the different parts of speech? I know this is more of a language arts question, but I am sure you come across the same concerns with how much to use the textbook.