Week 7 Post

Well this past week was a tough one for lots of reasons. First off, Mrs. McLaughlin was sick four of the five days making me the leader of the class outright (even if I wasn't completely ready). Secondly, I had not been feeling all that great as well the whole week. The third and probably worst of the reasons was the fact that it was the week building up to Halloween. After experiencing my first Halloween week at school, I now have a new appreciation for teachers working to maintain their classroom weekly, especially weeks that have a holiday somewhere stuck in it.
Now I had planned to begin teaching full-time this past week. I felt that I was up for the challenge and thought it would be tough but I'd be just fine. These feelings were before I found out that I would be without my teacher for the greater part of the week. It was unbelievable to me to see how crazy they were without her being there. The week before when I said "I thought they were too quiet" had definitely passed. The students were completely different. Talking all the time, not getting focused when they needed to, disrupting others, etc. Funny for me my AR is all about classroom management and trying to find what type of prompting elicits the best response. I didn't think I'd be thrown into the fire so early on in my study.
The first three days, Monday through Wednesday, were just flat out tough. I had a lot of trouble with maintaining the classroom rules. Throughout the day, they'd show me periods of time of constraint and responsibility, but for the most part they just liked to talk talk talk. It wasn't just a couple of the students, either, but instead was most of the class. I was really struggling to keep my composure while trying to discover ways that would pull out better classroom behavior from them.
On Tuesday I started taking minutes away from recess for the entire class. That didn't go over well and I understand why. On Wednesday when we were in for our time before they went out we had a class discussion as to what we could change or how we can become more responsible and respectful in our class and around the school. It was a good time because it allowed the students what they wanted to say; upset about missing recess, talking about ways to prevent all the talking, ways to being more respectful, and so on. We also came up with disciplining only the students who were causing the inconvienences. So on Thursday instead of having a class recess time, we had a student recess time. If the student had their name on the board it was warning, their name and a check took away 5 minutes of their recess, and their name with 2 checks took their full recess away.
I'm not sure if this is educationally sound but I saw much better results from the students on Thursday than I had the previous three days. I think I will continue it but get the opinion Mrs. McLaughlin before making any big decisions.