"Duty" Assignments 2/3 - Back Again!

SECOND SEMESTER HAS OFFICIALLY BEGUN! 

Last week started my first full week back out in classrooms observing and teaching for my 2^nd semester of Teacher Ed! And it felt so good to be back!

To start off my week on Monday I returned to the same 1st-grade Elementary class I was in last semester for “duty” assignments.

Basically, if you don’t remember, my “duty” assignment is for a grade level I don’t plan on teaching (an elementary class), but in the education world, it is important to have experience with different grade levels and different ages of students. Last semester for my “duty” assignment my elementary school placed me in a 1st-grade classroom and this semester they decided to keep me there! It was SO wonderful seeing all the same kids again! I didn’t realize how much I had missed them over winter break!

This Monday in first grade was easier than most days because the students were EXTREMELY sleepy and exhausted because they had all stayed up the night before WAY past their bedtimes to watch the Super Bowl, but what I quickly learned was that the 1^st grade teachers had planned ahead for this. The 1st-grade teachers knew that because the Chiefs were playing in the Super Bowl on Sunday night that their students would stay up late and be exhausted on Monday. So, last Friday they had told their students that Monday would be PJ day! And if they all brought in bedsheets they could also cash in their “class party points” (that they had earned by being on good behavior) to have a fort building party and build a fort in their classroom! You can probably imagine my surprise when I walked into their classroom to find that the entire room was covered by a giant fort! And that everyone was in PJs! But it turned out to be very beneficial for the students and the teacher, as the teacher didn’t have to waste two days of learning (one for the Super Bowl and one for a class party, so they combined the days), and the students weren’t being pushed past their mental capacity and being forced to learn new material. Instead, it was a review day in all their subjects and class party day!

What I learned from this experience, and from the 1st-grade teachers, was to plan ahead and to know your students! They knew that usually days when they have class parties not much gets done, and they also knew that if all their 7-year-old students were staying up hours past their bedtimes on a school night for the Super Bowl they would be too tired to pay attention and learn much in class the next day. So, their teacher smartly decided to merge the two days so that they could have their class party on the day the students wouldn’t be able to do much anyway! This not only taught me to plan ahead, but to also know the mental and learning capacities of my students. Sometimes students aren’t physically or mentally able to learn or absorb information, and if you push them it just makes everything worse. A teacher needs to know their students, know when to push them, and know when to let them rest and recover. It certainly was a fun and interesting day! Definitely, a fun day to start my semester off with!