Today I got an email from the teacher I will subbing for tomorrow. I have always wondered if teachers are able to access the subs email addresses because I have never gotten an email about what is going on in class. It was so helpful to have the lessons before the morning of a sub job. I will have to try to do this in the future when I am a teacher and will have a sub.
Today I am subbing for an English class at the high school. When I got to the teacher’s desk I could tell that she is always trying to better herself as a teacher. There was a professional development magazine on her desk as well as a book, Adolescent Literacy:Turning Promise into Practice. The book had flags with notes on them, and flags to remind her to copy certain pages. As I looked around the room I saw posters and pictures all over the walls. There were pictures of animals and landscapes, posters of books they read in the class, inspirational quotes from famous people, and some student work. In ways it was really neat, but in other ways it was really busy. There was no organization to it. Also there were no windows in the classroom. This might be why there are so many images of nature, to supplement the lack of natural light. What I did like about the class set up is the fact that the teacher’s desk was in the back of the room, and the teacher had a student desk she used during class. I also liked how she had her seating charts set up. She had a folder for each class, then inside the folder were post it notes with each student's name in the formation of the desks. She also put any allergies or special circumstances for the students, like unrestricted pass to the nurse’s, on the post-it note. This is great because many times subs do not have access to this information.
Today CAIII was reading Robert Frost. Before they started reading they had a journal to answer, Does a stoic demeanor indicate a lack of feelings. Most of the students didn’t know what “Stoic” meant. It took a while for the students to settle down and work on the question. Some were done, while others hadn’t even started. I wasn’t told to give a time limit, but as some students weren’t working on it, I decided to give them five minutes to finish. I warned them again at three minutes that they had a limited amount of time left, it was at this point that the class was completely quiet. I didn’t even have to comment about their talking, I just gave them a deadline. Next we started on Robert Frost, as I was not familiar with the poems we were reading I was not able to connect the journal with what they would be working on. Very few of the students had ever heard of Robert Frost, which scared me. I read an “About the Author” and “About the Selections” section, then the students were to read the poem. There were 12 questions for the students to answer about each poem that they were instructed to read before the read the poems to give them a purpose, or something to look for as they read the poem. The students were really confused about the poems. The first poem was “Mending Wall,” some students were confused because they didn’t understand what was being said, while others were confused because they didn’t realize there was an actual wall. I wasn’t told to go over the answers with the class, but they were so confused that I went over the answers for the first 10 questions for the first poem, then they were to work on their own on the second poem. The students seemed to be more confident for the second poem, and very few of them had questions.
Hi
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