1st Week: Lessons Learned

As I document my semester of student teaching at Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colorado, I am reminded how difficult teaching high school is compared to teaching at the adult education level. I'm convinced that planning is key. You have to fill each moment that they are in class, so I can't just let them go after I'm finished talking and they've completed all their work. There's the bell system that keeps them in my classroom for approximately 82 minutes for each period. I've run short in each meeting of my 6th hour Entrepreneurship class. While the same class, I seem to be doing better in the 5th hour Entrepreneurship class.

I've gone a little different route with the Entrepreneurship classes than my mentor teacher did. He provided some fun activities for the first couple of days of class, while I jumped into the lessons anxious to get started. The benefit of the fun lessons was to build those all-important relationships and give the students a sense of creativity and openness in the class. They enjoyed the artwork that they created and talked openly to their peers and even displayed their work on the wall proudly.

Because I thought that introducing the topic of Entrepreneurship was fun, I started in with the lessons. They worked out okay because the first lesson is really about what it takes to be an entrepreneur and putting names and faces to some successful entrepreneurs. However, let's call a dog a dog and be done with it. It was still an assignment, and while the students didn't squawk and carry on about having to do it, they did it, but I didn't get the opportunity to get to know the students better except by walking around and making them nervous by looking over their shoulders. Lesson learned.

Finally, the cell phone debate. It seems that I lost a student yesterday because I asked her to put her cell phone away during a pre-assessment test. My mentor teacher isn't convinced that it was because of me (maybe I'm being a little narcissistic here); however, as soon as the pre-assessment was over, she asked to go to her counselor and switched out of the class. Her reason was that the class would be too much work. So, with no official school policy on cell phones, and my own dismal outlook on them, how do we navigate these touchy waters with attendance waning and interest lacking? My approach for now will be with expectations and confidence. I have to stand behind my classroom policies and expect that students will put away their cell phones while I am talking and be confident moving forward.

It's been an exhausting first week, but overall, I think that it is going well. Every day is a new day when you're teaching.