1 post tagged “summer”

Our training this summer started with a few days of orientation (mostly intros and paperwork).  That was the easy part.  It quickly progressed to grad school education classes and actual teaching.  June consisted of teaching summer school from 8am to 1pm, then taking class from 3pm to 5pm, followed by lesson planning pretty much all night.  July was a little better.  More teaching, but less class.  Instead of class after summer school, we had classroom management role playing workshops to prepare us for classroom chaos, verbal confrontations, physical confrontations, and other special situations.

The most beneficial aspects of the summer were the time spent with second and third year teachers.  During time just hanging out, I asked a lot of questions about what things would be like, what's good, what's bad, what to expect, etc.  I think I learned the most when I asked questions about negative things, like, "When did you want to quit?" or "Why did you want to quit?" or things like whats the worst part of the job.  I feel like if I know the ugliest parts of the job, I'll be able to recognize them when they happen and know that they've happened to others, and that, like others, I'll get through them.  The second and third years are a great asset and being around them so much was very helpful all around, from time relaxing to evaluations and role playing.

The thing that I think could improve the summer training for future first years is to allow them to observe more teachers during summer school.  As it stands now, we could only see the teachers in our classroom (or, more accurately, HAD to watch the teachers in our classroom) unless we wanted to sacrifice a planning period.  Early on, planning periods are absolutely critical for our time management.  Besides just needing a break for mental health, I know that I needed the planning period to PLAN.  Lesson planning took me so incredibly long for the first few weeks and I did not want to sacrifice this time.  However, I would have really enjoyed and benefited from being able to leave my classroom while not teaching or planning to observe my fellow first years and the second year teachers.  Especially when I'm searching for an appropriate teaching style to adopt, I feel it would be incredibly beneficial to expose myself to a myriad of styles.  Being chained to my classroom made my development as a teacher progress more slowly than it otherwise would have.  It also exposed me to fewer types of students.  My class was five well-behaved kids.  Realistically, I have zero classroom management experience.  Considering this is widely considered the most important part of teaching here (or at least the most difficult thing for MTCers to excel in), it would have been very helpful to observe in classes that were larger and had more problems and student misbehavior.  If nothing else changes, I hope that MTC's policy on peer observation is changed for the future.