The End

My long and illustrious career as an educator has finally come to an end.  After one whole week on my own I have decided that this profession is just not for me.  Grad school here I come.

Good luck to the rest of you.  You have my utmost respect and admiration.  May this school year bring you much happiness and joy.

Student Intereset Survey + Goal Setting Lesson Plan

So, Monday (tomorrow) marks the first day of the 2007-2008 school year in most counties that I’ve heard of in Georgia.  Monday is also the official start of my first year as a teacher.  I’ve been told horror stories, but I’ve also been given lots of reassurances.  I’m hopeful that if I remain consistent and fair in my discipline plan, I will be able to gain student’s respect.  I’m already looking forward to the days when I have students that will spread the word and allow me to have a reputation that precedes their coming into my class.

I’ve been trying to do a lot of preparation, but it has been difficult.  So far, I can confidently say that I am as prepared as I can be for the first day of school.  I have my syllabi all printed out and I have my Student Information Sheet and Interest Survey ready to go.  My number one goal is to establish myself as a strict authority figure, immediately.  My number two goal is to get to know my students as well as I can, on an individual level, as early as possible.  I created this fairly open-ended interest survey in order to do that.

In addition to going over the syllabus/code of conduct/expectations and all that good stuff, on the first day.  I have my digital camera ready to take pictures of each and every student (although, I will be taking them in groups of 3-4).  I want to be able to have pictures to fill up the bulletin boards.  I figure that it will help me remember their names and make them feel more comfortable in my classroom.  I hope to create a really close-knit community in my classroom, so I’ve been brainstorming ways of doing that.  I think the best way that I have come up with is trying to make students feel, as much as possible, that this classroom is theirs, just as much as it is mine, and to ask for their opinions as much as possible.

On Day 2 I plan on using a Goal Setting Lesson that will enable students to better understand how I formulate goals for their class and help them set goals for themselves, both short and long term.  A lot of the students that I will be teaching are considered at-risk.  Meaning, I suppose, that they are at-risk of not graduating from high school and continuing in the cycle of generational poverty, which is a big problem in this city.  Many of them have no models for goal setting and many of their parents don’t talk about what what they will do five years from now.  So, I am going to try to make this a big part of my classroom and find ways for students to continue to monitor their progress and set new goals.

In Carol Ann Tomlinson’s How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, she offers an activity that is perfect for extending the ideas taught in the Goal Setting Lesson.  One of her ideas for differentiating is allowing students a day within a unit to set their own goals and come up with a plan, or set of activities, that they are going to engage in to meet their goals for the day.  She calls it Design-A-Day, and many members from my college cohort have had many good things to say about it. 

I’m trying not to bring textbooks in until the second or third week of the school year, so what I start students out with is a diagnostic test so that I know where they stand in terms of ability in all the criteria that they will be tested on.  On that same day, I plan on guiding them again through Georgia’s college preparation website GeorgiaCollege411 and the CollegeBoard website.  We’ll probably have discussions about learning interests, scholarships, tuition, college majors, and post-college opportunities, as well as a short Q&A session about what to expect in and from college life.

On Thursday and Friday I’m going to do a mini-unit based on names.  We will read a vignette from House on Mango Street called “My Name,” in which the main character, Esperanza, gives a very lyrical explanation and description of her name.  Students will discuss the vignette and names and general.  They will end the week by writing their own short vignettes about their name.

Now down to “real” planning . . . . 

I don’t know about all of you teachers out there, but I’m ALREADY exhausted . . .

So I didn’t look hard enough … Lesson Plans for British Literature

I couldn’t leave out the Brit Lit people.  Like I said in the previous post, these lesson plans are based on a set of standards called the Quality Core Curriculum (QCC), which the state of Georgia has already abandoned in the subject area of English Language Arts.  I, however, think that there are still some valuable resources in these pages.  So, if you are teaching British Literature and are looking for some ideas, I would AT LEAST browse here.