Hello World,
So here I am almost done with my first week of teaching four classes, one section of Animal Science and three sections of Agriscience and I can already see my methods adapting to what I have learned from the past few weeks. For those of you that know me you know that I am a very "let's stick to the plan" or "we have to stay with the timeline" type of individual. I have already found that in teaching that is not going to work. I have found that if I think an activity or project will take two days it will most likely take three. This delay in completion does not come from lack of time management or higher degree of difficulty in the project; I believe that for students to do a project correctly and to absorb the information properly they cannot be rushed through a project or an activity. Let’s take the project I am having my Agriscience class do this week, they are to explore the water cycle by creating a "storyboard" of the various steps in the water cycle, then write a fictional story of how a water droplet travels through the cycle. Fairly easy, right? Well what I have discovered is that if you do an activity to get them involved with the information, in this case a step-by-step storyboard, it will take longer for them to process the information than you originally thought. If you rush forward and several of them do not understand the process or the material, they will not gain the understanding or mastery of the topic you have set as a classroom goal. This mastery/understanding "should" ultimately be your classroom goal and if you are not adapting to the students in your classroom so they can learn the material, then there is something wrong there. I have been working on this adapting to student learning and process time this week and I think overall my students understand the content fairly well.
Ok, enough about the classroom methods for a moment and let’s talk about something most schools have frequent discussions about, budgets!!! What I have learned this week about budgets is, always order your materials early in the year and order heavy!!! This is a part of teaching I had never even thought of and have been exposed to during this process and have seen in action. The reason as an educator you order early and you order heavy is to make sure you use your budget when you have it. Towards the end of the year school budgets start getting tight and they may pull the remaining funds from department budgets to cover expenses or deficits. If you use it early when there is plenty of money around you have the supplies you need all year round.
I am learning and developing my strategies every day and so far I think it’s gone well. Have I made mistakes? O YEAH! Have I learned from them? Yes I have. That’s what this experience is all about trying new methods and strategies so when you take over your own classroom you do not fall flat on your face. The more I learn the more I feel I don't know and the more roadblocks that surface in my path. And that my friends is the nature of this beast we call education. So I leave you with this, continue to develop your methods and strategies as a teacher and spend your budgets early.
"A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it."- George MacDonald
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