Education — Having the classroom to yourself changes the dynamics of teaching

By: Laurent Bonczijk, The Newberg Graphic
Published: 10/6/2010 2:38:22 PM

(Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a year-long series on how three brand-new teachers are coping with the demands of the profession).

One of the highlights of teaching programs is the time spent by candidates under the supervision of an experienced teacher. This exercise is supposed to give teachers-in-training a feel for what they’ll encounter after graduation and their examiners an idea of whether students will be able to apply the skills they’ve learned.
Once in the classroom by yourself, it’s a completely different ballgame, said David Masenhimer, who teaches sixth-grade core and eighth-grade reading at Mountain View Middle School. The student teacher has to adjust to whatever rules and teaching style his mentor has. Once in their own classroom it’s all on them. “As a student teacher you’re responsible for someone else’s kids. This is proving to be so much better,” he said.
Masenhimer, Alison Hudson — who teaches sixth-grade math and seventh-grade science at Chehalem Valley Middle School — and Monica Barry, who teaches second-grade at Edwards Elementary School, all had one common experience during their first month in front of a classroom: the kids have been well-behaved overall, but they’re little chatter boxes.
For Masenhimer it’s par for the course that students won’t behave exactly as he wants, because as much as he needs to learn about them they have to learn about him, and what his expectations of classroom behavior is. “You revisit it from time to time,” he said of classroom discipline.
“It’s been really good. I’m loving it,” Barry said. “The hardest part is being thrown right into it.” She did so much talking the first day that she went home with a sore throat. “They’re all really sweet and really well-behaved.”
As far as discipline, she said she thinks it’s important to make it clear that “you’re not just there to be their best friend.” With the proper prompting, “they want to please you, they’re excited about school, they’re excited about learning.”
“I’m doing well, I’m still alive,” Hudson said, “I’ve learned that teaching is the easy part for me.” The hard part is prepping for classes and the different age groups she has. Her mentors have been providing her with activities to illustrate her teachings, a godsend as otherwise she expects she wouldn’t sleep if she had to research everything.
She said she was worried she’d be too soft on her young charges, but apparently this hasn’t been a problem so far as she has clearly stated her expectations and the consequences of failing to meet them. While she has the additional difficulty of teaching at two different locations and two different age groups, she said that sixth- and ninth-grade students do have a lot in common as both are at the bottom of the pecking order at their respective schools and are trying to find ways to fit in. Freshmen do hide their insecurities better, she noted.
Hudson has been using brainteasers to engage her students and has been surprised at the solutions they come up with, sometimes completely different than her own, yet correct. With the addition of coaching soccer, Hudson is away from home 12 to 13 hours a day and is looking forward to November. “I’m excited because when soccer ends I’ll actually have a lot of time,” she said.
Masenhimer has worried he’d be done with his material and there would be time left before the bell and a classroom full of students looking to him for direction. For those occasions he searches Youtube for videos relevant to the day’s teaching and ends with one if time permits. For a recent geography lesson he finished by showing students images of Earth from space, smoothly tying it all together as if it had been part of a master plan.
“You can’t always anticipate how it’s going to go,” Barry said of lesson plans. If for some reason students just tear through the material “that’s when read aloud comes in handy,” she said as she pulls out a copy of “James and the Giant Peach.”
Retrospectively, Hudson said he thinks that she spent too much time decorating her middle school classroom and ensuring that it was organized just so. “I probably could have made better use of that time,” she said.
The closest Barry has come to disaster was painting. A former daycare teacher, she thought that painting with second-grade students would be easier. She discovered that it’s just as challenging: “If you want to paint, be ready to take that on.”

Taking the long view on teaching

By: Laurent Bonczijk
Published: 10/6/2010 2:37:18 PM

For high school chemistry and marine biology teacher Scott Klug, one of new Chehalem Valley Middle School teacher Alison Hudson’s mentors, planning is the biggest issue for rookie teachers and he doesn’t think it gets much easier as time goes by.
“I try to change up every year what I teach, otherwise I get bored,” he said. “I do pretty well off the cuff, (but) I have always over-planned.”
Planning and organization are the two skills teachers need to get a handle on quickly if they want to survive in the classroom. Planning doesn’t get much easier because teachers still have to put in the time to get it done.
If he runs out of ingredients for a particular experiment, Klug needs to come up with a different one to fulfill the same learning requirement and to keep his teaching fresh — he’s always looking for new activities.