School has been out for over a week now. Since dismissal, I have gone to the beach, played golf, and sincerely tried to sleep in past eight o’clock. Though I will surely carry parts of the past ten months with me, I fully intend to make the most of my summer off as well. As a “second year” (because I’m in my second year of teaching), I will living in beautiful Oxford, MS during the majority of the month of June and be helping out with summer school. If you remember some of my earliest posts, you’ll remember that Teacher Corps has a summer school that they administer in a town about 25 or 30 miles north of Oxford. The summer school essentially serves as a training ground for first year teachers. It is also an opportunity for second year teachers to hone their skills and develop better practices of their own.
One of our blog assignments asked us to think and write about teaching skills we are hoping to practice and improve on this summer. As I think back to the past year, I know that I still have a long way to go to be an effective instructor. I can’t possibly be good at this with only one year of experience. What I would like to improve, though, is developing activities that will push the students to learn and comprehend the subjects while also having fun. I had a couple of instances last year where a student said “why don’t we do more stuff like this?”, as they were both learning and having fun. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a good answer for them. The risk of “fun” activities, is the management of your classroom could go to shambles. Because of the relatively uncontrolled environment, one kid says something to another, and before I can intervene we’ve got arguments and no one is learning. This is honestly why planning fun activities is such a risk. Summer school is a pretty safe venue for experimenting with ideas like this though. Also, because I’m only going to be teaching a couple of times a week, I should have more time to think and brainstorm ideas that I could implement.
As said before, I realize I have a long way to go to be an effective teacher. This summer should be a great opportunity for developing many other skills as well: an effective set in beach volleyball, my driver and #4 iron, the moorhead swag...
