Several New Developments

Hello, all.

Since I have begun full-time teaching, I've had a wealth of reflection-worthy experiences. I'd like to focus on a pair of them for this entry, though, as they've thus far had the largest influence on my teaching style and led to some of my most significant revelations to date.

First, my Acting I class. Establishing an environment where all students can feel free to act and try new things is an absolute necessity in a class like this, especially when I've got 40 students. This has been a major goal of the first few weeks. I was a bit worried midway through week 1 when a group of young men were continually being disruptive and disrespectful to their fellow students. My response to this was to give a very pointed presentation on audience etiquette to the class and mention that we had the option of making the class completely textbook-based if for some reason everyone didn't want to get on board and be respectful to their peers. That same day, several of the former troublemakers were engaging in an exercise that they truly enjoyed. It was almost as if a light had gone on in their heads, and now they're among my most staunch enforcers of audience etiquette in the class. Simply realizing that they enjoyed acting played a part in a complete turn around for them. This is extremely significant to me, as my personal pedagogical philosophy is based on creating engaging lessons. I believe that engaging lessons lead to more engaged, better behaved students, and I think I had a chance here to see that in action. Special thanks to both of my mentor teachers for their advice and feedback through the process. Now my class runs much more smoothly and I'm really enjoying myself in the theater.

My Freshman English classes, however, have not been as smooth. I've had some trouble getting them to get their journals out and start writing on the assigned topic at the beginning of class each day. I've also had one specific student who has been a lot of trouble, to the point where I've had to pull him out of class on two separate occasions and was forced to write him a referral when he blatantly defied my request to speak with him after class. I'm currently working with my mentor teacher to brainstorm ways to reach this particular student. I don't want to be the teacher who just sends the troublesome individual out of the classroom instead of finding ways to engage him, and this particular students is proving an interesting challenge to my personal philosophy. I'll keep trying things until I find something that works, and hopefully I'll find something relatively soon. It takes a lot of energy to deal with him, and that is energy I could be spending on educating the other 29 students in the room.

I've had every intention of getting my exit cards going, but I keep running out of time on Fridays. Maybe Monday would be a better time to do them or maybe I should do them multiple times a week, so I'm covered in case something comes up.