Reflect on your rapport with the students.

To put it mildly, my students love me. I think this comes from a combination of things. First off, I am a naturally sarcastic and witty person which is not something that usually describes teachers so I think they enjoy that. When I was in high school I had a young biology teacher who utilized humor to make bio and anatomy more interesting and when I was trying to figure out what type of teacher I wanted to be I knew that with my personality I could do the same thing, and it's worked beautifully. Because kids never know what I'm going to say they pay attention more, because I can tell stories that may not seem entertaining in everyday context or to anyone who may read this, which I doubt anyone will (a quick, generalized example, Ben Franklin called up his brother on his cell phone and said "Yo I invented electricity) but when that's coming from a teacher kids find it funny and it keeps them interested. Also they know I care about them and want to succeed and understand the material. Whether they sense this consciously or subconsciously I don't know. And probably most influential on my students is that I am a young teacher. They can identify with me more, half the girls in my classes have crushes on me and they are in general more interested to spend time with someone they identify more as a peer and less as one of their parents.

Reflect on any team teaching you have participated in.

I try to keep my host teacher as involved as possible. Often we will co-teach in some manner almost every period. I try to always let him take role so that he can match names with faces. I also will ask him questions while I am lecturing to hopefully reinforce students recognize him as an instructor as well. Sometimes he will instruct for an extended period of time especially if we are discussing something that he was alive for (for example JFK assassination). I think this helps students realize these events from a historical perspective and a personal perspective.

Reflect on a lesson that you wish had gone in a different direction. What would you change and why?

I wish my students' presentations had gone better. I expected the students to look up the material and become experts on their subject ( the goal of any assignment where each student has a single, unique topic) and then educate their classmates. This was not the case for most of the students. For the most part, they just copy and pasted off the first three Google results and handed it in regardless of its content. The material they handed in was sometimes copy and pasted. It was mildly depressing but next time I will be sure to discuss plagiarism and its repercussions more in depth beforehand. Also, it is difficult to revert from case studies and intensely focusing and covering as much material as possible on one subject (i.e. college) to a brief overview of a topic (high school)