Reflect on any after-school activity you attended.

I went to the east/west game a few weeks ago and it was a lot of fun. East lost and that was depressing, but the band was great (as always). It was so much different from participant year when I went to the east/west game. Almost no one recognized me last year but this year all of my students were talking to me, other teachers were talking to me. I didn't have any parents talk to me thankfully, usually parents only talk when they need to complain it seems. One depressing thing about the game was the some parents in the stands who are setting bad examples for their kids. The fact that every parent is a coach comes with the territory but some of the parents were yelling obscenities towards the coaches and the refs. Cursing is whatever, who am I to tell them what words they can or cannot say. The fact that they were choosing to do so where there were children though was a little uncalled for though.

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)

Without using last names, which child do you think you influenced most this week? In what way (academic, social, emotional)?

A student in my 7th period influenced me the most this week. At first I thought the student was going to be a problem child and was going to be an interruption all class every class. But he is very intelligent, applies himself to all of his work and really puts forth an effort that I did not expect the first few weeks of school. He has impressed me academically, however I still feel he needs to work on his social and emotional skills. Sometimes he can be...immature in class and if he can master that (which he will) then he will do just fine.

Think about one of your recent presentations. Was there a student who was inattentive? How could you involve that student and draw him/her into the le

There are always students who are inattentive and I always wonder how I can keep them paying attention. At the same time it is hard for me to say anything to them because I always used to sleep in class too. Partially because I was tired but mostly because I wasn't interested in the material being taught (and that's kind of common sense, if something is exciting it will keep my interest and I won't be going to sleep) so to me that is saying that I need to make my classes more interesting so that I don't have sleepers. Often I try to use humor and wit to keep kids interested, I feel like this is fairly successful. They say they enjoy my class a lot more then their other classes so hopefully they are more attentive to what I say then in their other classes.

Classroom interruptions unfortunately occur. Do these affect your instruction? How do you get students back on track?

I feel like it does not affect my teaching that badly. I am sure that I have room for growth and will get better as time goes on, but I feel like it is not a tough issue for me...That being said EFHS has an incredible amount of interruptions. There are multiple interruptions a period. But maybe it will get better as the semester continues.