Reflections 2018
This semester was difficult. I bit off more than I could chew and it affected what I was doing in the classroom. I was finishing up coursework for my masters. Though I still have a portfolio and some presentations to put together I don’t have anymore classes to take. The two classes I took this semester were tough. One was very time consuming, and the other was time consuming and mentally a challenge. But, I ended the semester with 4.0, and a cumulative 3.94 so there’s that.
I also decided to do two productions as drama club director this year. This past fall we did “Clue: On Stage High School Edition. It was such a great production, of course there are always things that I want to do better but this was the first time that I built a set, I’m always a bit of a minimalist with my sets, but I designed what, in theory, was a great set. We had secret passages, six different rooms that looked like the gameboard, I was so happy with it. Of course the night of the first production things didn’t stay where they needed to but hey, that’s live theatre! I was so proud of the students too. They all did such a great job with their characterization, I know they are harder on themselves than I am when it comes to the performances but I think we had a show that everyone could be proud of.
In the last weeks of the semester I decided it was a good idea for me to be in the Christmas play at the community theatre. I had a blast, but my grad school finals definitely took a hit.
And of course we had the incident at one of the intermediate schools. I’m not going to write much about that because I think we are all still kind of processing it a little bit. It was an awful situation, and our community had protocols in place and we stuck with them. My students are safe, my friends are safe and for that I am thankful.
As far as teaching this past semester goes… it was rough. I had some of the chattiest classes I’ve ever had. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, individually all of my students are great people but sometimes you get them with their friends and they just don’t stop talking and that can affect how the rest of the class goes. I do think I’m getting better at classroom management, but I think I tried to jump all in with what I learned over the summer rather than implement things little by little. I’ve been reading Teach Like a Champion 2.0 and Tools for Teaching although not everything in those books relates to the Second Language Acquisition classroom, there are a LOT of great ideas that I’m trying to take into the classroom next semester. I’ll be writing about all of those ideas later.
The time off between semesters is great, and I need a little more time to get ready to go back, and a little more time to reflect on how I can be the best that I can be for my students.