Well, that’s it. I’m done with my volunteer work at the high school. I have been watching this day grow closer for weeks, and honestly, what I mostly feel now is sadness. I’m going to miss these students and watching them grow and learn, seeing how they’ve changed in just these few short weeks I’ve… Continue reading In Review…

Today I was helping some of the design students with their final projects, a costume design project for an out of era adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. About midway through the period it kind of hit me that I’m doing the same thing in one of my classes for The Taming of the Shrew. It… Continue reading We’re all Students here

I’m almost done with my time volunteering at this high school, and I wanted to take a moment and reflect on what I think I could improve on. The biggest thing, I’ve noticed, is making sure the students understand fully what I’m trying to teach them before moving on. I think this will improve if… Continue reading I’m having trouble with…

I went to my first staff meeting today, and enjoyed myself much more than I thought I would. They began the meeting by sharing out, where the teachers all shared things that had happened that they had fun doing, or enjoyed, or thought was funny. It was nice to see them bond as a school… Continue reading My First Staff Meeting

Today was my first bad day teaching. The kids were restless, didn’t want to be doing the work, forgot homework, and in the last class of the day my host teacher had to sit them all down and talk about being respectful to each other in class. After the class was over, I spoke with… Continue reading First Bad Day

My favorite Teacher is, similar to my least favorite, a mixture of several teachers I’ve had over the years. This is a teacher with the patience of a saint. A teacher who, when they are teaching, you can tell is excited and interested in the material. There is a light in their eyes, a burning… Continue reading My Favorite Teacher

I don’t think I’ve ever had one worst teacher. I have had many great teachers, a sadly high number of not so great teachers, but I don’t think I have had any single teacher who stood above the rest as exceptionally awful. However, if I took all the not so great teachers and combined them,… Continue reading My Worst Teacher

This week, I finally realized something: I can do this. This of course being teaching. It was the first week that my teacher had me take aside one of the classes and actually act as a teacher for them, and frankly, it was incredible. We were studying Oedipus Rex, (and let me tell you, they… Continue reading First Discovery

This week, I read several articles on different schools of thought when it comes to teaching. The biggest thing I took away was this: The strongest teaching philosophy I can follow has to be one I cobbled together on my own. Taking qualities from existing schools of thought- progressivism, constructivism, inquiry- can help me to… Continue reading Teaching Philosophies

As this is my first blog post, I decided to start off on an idealistic note with my personal teaching metaphor. It is copied directly from the first  page of my blog, because it’s something I’d like to remind myself. Teaching is lighting a candle. You light the fire in your students, and trust that… Continue reading My Teaching Metaphor