My Role as a Teacher-to-be

Now that we are bringing together everything we have learned so far for our group teach, it is beginning to feel more like the real thing (I'm guessing!). As part of Group 3, the Dystopia Group, we do not yet have specifics planned out but we have an outline of what we want to do with the class and we are all pretty excited! I can't give too much away, but I believe it will turn out well. As far as the group itself goes, I think it is neat that we are all at different phases in our teaching, and I, being the youngest, definitely could learn a lot from these girls. We balance each other out because we all have something different to contribute at each meeting. We assigned tasks at the last meeting, so tomorrow we will go over what we have and try to plan everything out to more detail. I picked this group because I really like pieces of the sci-fi and dystopia genres. I am glad I went with this because I ended up picking a group based on my interests, not on who I thought would be in the group. It has worked out really well because we are focused on our work while I ended up making some new friends in the process.

On the other hand, we have some teachers that are coming in Wednesday for us to listen to, ask questions and get advice from. I really liked the teacher panel that Shannon organized last Spring semester, where each teacher talked about their different classroom experiences and included a segment entitled "10 Things I Wish I Knew About Teaching 10 Years Ago." I especially liked when the one teacher talked about how, on the first day of school, he would bring powertools into his classroom (this was usually for ninth graders I think). He would pick out one of the burly boys in the class and give him a hammer to try to get a screw into a two by four. When the boy couldn't do it, he would find the smallest girl in the class and give her a powerdrill so she could complete the task with no trouble. The message from this exercise?: Teachers have to give students the right tools to succeed, but then it is up to the student to use those tools. There was also a teacher who talked about her move from the high school to the middle school, and how refreshing it was because she felt liek she had fallen in a rut. She said not to be afraid to branch out if you ever feel like this. One teacher I observed with at Greencastle told me after she got her degree, she worked in another field for about 16 years before going back to teaching! So that was another good piece of advice to think about. Even though I wasn't able to stay for the whole presentation, it was reassuring to hear from experienced teachers about real problems and solutions that they dealt with. I took a lot away from that, so I'm hoping to do the same this time. I would like to hear about everything from cool activities in the classroom to their student teaching experiences to their opinions on censorship since that was a really hot topic we talked about. My list of questions will include ones like these:

What is one cool activity that you use in your classroom?

Do you teach classes that are diverse, or a part of a more specific population?

Do you ever teach controversial or banned books? How about books you don't enjoy to read?

How much instruction time do you devote to grammar and other writing skills?

If you could give one piece of advice to a future teacher, what would it be?

Etcetera, etcetera. These are adopted from our classroom discussions, my reader profile project and just my own uncertainties and misgivings about my future as a teacher. But I must admit I think that sometimes no matter how much advice you get, eventually we're all just going to have to take the plunge and go on the journey, which is the only way I can describe how I think teaching will be! I realize that it is a process of trial and error, and that it will become easier once I get some experience under my belt. Is there anything you guys are unsure about when you think of yourself as a teacher? What questions do you have for our visitors?