Week Two of Chicago Institute

This week was rough, challenging and so rewarding all at the same time. On Monday, we started teaching in our classrooms for half of the day and sitting in educational sessions for the other half. I work with a collaborative group of three other people to teach four different subjects for 45 minutes each day. We met our faculty advisor (a veteran teacher who supervises us in the classroom) and she said that we have a few students in our class that will give us constant trouble because of his behavioral problems. My group and I decided that we would walk into the classroom with a new set of eyes and treat each student as if it were the first day of the rest of their lives.

Each week, our objectives are written for us by an Institute Curriculum Specialist. We are given the objectives and we need to design a lesson plan that will allow students to master that objective. Well, Monday did not go so well. I felt as though they were not fully understanding the concept of inferences, which was my objective for the day. Tuesday did not go as planned and my reading lesson got pushed back to the last thirty minutes of the day. On Wednesday, I went in fully prepared and motivated with all of the materials to help my students master the concept of inferences and character traits. Well, my four hours of lesson planning paid off! My students were on fire! They were understanding the content, engaging in the material, and they all did amazingly well on their end-of-lesson assessments! It was so rewarding to finally succeed in teaching someone something!

Thursday was a completely different story... Ten minutes before my lesson was scheduled to begin, my faculty advisor pulled me out into the hall to meet with the schools curriculum specialist. I was told that I needed to change my lesson for that day in order to teach to a script so my students could pass the assessment to be given at the end of that same day. I was so caught off guard, all I did was smile and nod. Thankfully, my entire collaborative group was willing to change our schedule so I ended up having an hour to prepare. As I quickly learned, an hour is not nearly enough to understand phonetic sounds and plan how to teach phonetic sounds. To top everything off, we also found out that the school was being audited that day and auditors would be sitting in on our lesson to make sure that we are following the National Geographic text that the school is supposed to use. There must have been some major miscommunication between Chicago Public Schools and Teach For America, and unfortunately, I was caught in the middle of it.

This weeks success story:

This boy, I will call him Tyrone, is seriously the highlight of my day. He went from being semi-disruptive in class to being the first to raise his hand, turning in his homework on time, and asking for more challenging work in class. I honestly think he has made this transition in just four days because we made sure to start off with a clean slate. Now, don't get me wrong, he has moved down a few stair steps on our behavior chart, but he is more than willing to do whatever he needs to do to get back up to an A+ with the rest of the class. Working with kids like Tyrone make it so much easier to get out of bed in the morning, because I am waking up with a purpose. I might not be changing the world, but for that day, I am changing a life.

I have a lot of work to do this weekend, but I am heading to my roommates parents house for a Fourth of July barbeque. It will be nice to get out of the residence halls for a few days and relax. Our students don't have school on Monday, but we still have sessions planned all day... but the good news is...

We are 2/5 of the way done with Institute!

Bottom Line: I am still surviving, learning how to live without sleep, working the hardest I've ever worked in my entire life, learning valuable lessons and loving almost every minute of it!

Good night:)