Did I Choose the Right Grade Level?

Biggest Question to Discern

Being called to teach is a fabulous calling. When discerning this calling, the most important question I feel is “what grade level should I teach?” Observing the Middle School level, I have come to grabbing terms of the average Elementary, Middle, and High school level class attitude and maturity. Parents may love the cute and innocent little kid age and may dread a high school student’s drive for independence and sassiness; however, the Elementary teachers are chasing kids around to sit in their chair and the High School teachers are appreciating their concentration, intelligence, and presence in a classroom atmosphere.

The Forgotten Grade Level

As a society, we view kids from the age 11-15 as beginning teens—MIDDLE SCHOOLERS! When thinking of kids in middle school, I imagine half the kids looking like kids and the other half just transformed into adult bodies. I think of how their “social” life is everything, and the fine line between mature and immature are laid out. As humans, we miss the understanding or putting on the middle school students shoes. Society in middle school make out the social life and “popularity” to be everything; this then changes their focus to being liked by their peers then finding their potential. Today, I pretend to be in the middle school students shoes—and man do they have it rough! Not only are they being pressured by their own society, but also going through body change and challenged by curriculum in school. Even though the students may get off key or out of harmony they are full of intelligence, creativity, desire, and wholeness. All they want in life is to be valued and be someone—that is where WE as teachers come into play! Teaching is like riding a train that never stops; we get to see each generation with a new “style” be created, development, and defined!

Can We Reverse Roles for a Day?

In a parents mind, the imagination is telling them that the teacher has complete control of their classroom or that having your summers off is living in paradise. WELL, nobody can just give you a book on “controlling” kids; I mean some parents feel it is hard just to control the average number of kids in an American family—2.5 kids. Well, just imagine a classroom of 22 students with half girls and half boys?! Being a teacher you must have grace, love, passion, and PATIENCE! 

My Pursing Degree!

October 24, 201 

Re-evaluation...

Teaching Mission: What makes a driven effective teacher?

The inevitable question asked from the day a person is born to the day they get a career, “What future career makes your heart pulsate while imaging yourself in that career’s shoes?” Well, the other day I sat in on a conference where the speaker was the 2013 teacher of the year for South Dakota, Katie Anderson. Anderson talked a lot about how she became a successful teacher in just ten years. Anderson’s main point to get her audience thinking was by emphasized on asking the audience, “What is driving them to become teachers and effective in their teaching?” I came to the conclusion that I did not just want to be another individual in the world that educated the next generation of brilliant minds. I want to make a difference in other people’s lives. I want to generate sentiment of being accepted, loved, understood, and inspired! 


Being a teacher is not just appealing to hang out with kids all day, having summers off, or breezing through life. In my mind, teaching is a career I can gloat about at free will. However, teaching is making every child feel victorious and excepted. Helping the children to figure out their purpose in life while working on life skills that they will use every day in life. I do not just want to be another teacher. I want students to get something out of my class and role in their life. My goals are to focus on the students emotionally, mentally, and physically. I want to learn as much as I can to have effective teaching strategies to help each and every child that walks through my classroom door to be triumphant and benefit from my teaching. I want each children to be able to say, “Somebody [Ms. Schroeder] believes in me!”   

Average Day

October 17, 2013

Teaching...

One thing I love most about this teacher is that she KNOWS her stuff as an educator! She connects her past lessons with her new lessons very well. She interrupts technology, textbook, and writing well into her lessons. She engages her students and knows how to control her classroom.

Students...

The students can be quite rambunctious and distracted for being in the last class of the school day. However, the students are still invested into their studies. They were quite stressed over their test scores. They engage in ways to improve their grade with the make-up test and note card make-up. The students also are big into volunteer reading; this surprised me quite a bit! Back in the day, when I was in middle school, the teachers had struggled getting us, students, to volunteer for reading. These kids are efficient and willing to do a task, read, that can be dreaded; I am quite pleased and proud of the students in their advancement and love of reading. This just proves that the school has done well emphasizing on reading skills for the students.

Random...

-Read, Talk, Write (30 words minimum)--READ the text, REFLECT with elbow partner, OUTLINE information in notebooks.
-Students are starting to be more mixed in gender--two boys were blended in with the girls in where the children chose to sit for the day.

Evaluating is for Everyone!

October 3, 2013

If you think about it; even as a baby people start evaluating stuff. As a baby, I evaluate how my parents worked. K-12, I was evaluating school. Finally, as an aspiring teacher, I am evaluating how teachers run their classroom. This week's lesson was dedicated to learning how to evaluate sentences in Language Arts class. The students learned what clauses, nouns, verbs, etc. are. This then lead them to dissect each sentence; this helped show them what it takes to make a sentence.

To help make the dissection of evaluating interesting to the kids, the teacher set up some different techniques. The first technique was a competition of boys verse girls; they had the projectors project a sentence onto the white board and dissected a sentence. The second technique is writing in what they call a "writer's notebook", this book gives them the pencil to paper feel; they write their analysis, discussion, etc. in the book. The third technique was experiments. The first experiment was analyzing the difference in chips and wrote three sentences on their criteria and how they analyzed. The second experiment will be comparing a movie, commercial, or video game to another, they will write two paragraphs on this experiment. The third experiment will be researching more in depth on the lesson that is being taught in their social studies class and evaluating, they will write three paragraphs on this experiment.

Ants in the Pants

Have you ever had those days that you just cannot stay still or on track with one thing; you constantly have to keep moving every second of the day? Today was definitely one of those days for this class. I cannot blame them--sitting through a 90 minute class period, learning how to dissect a sentence and evaluating potato chips before being able to eat them. One thing I love about this teacher--she understands that the kids have "ants in their pants" and cannot stay focused. She gives them a variety of different activities in different techniques to keep them involved and entertained.

Are you a Trouble Maker or Twaddle Tale?

The middle school age is the "in between age" of being a kid and being an adult. In middle school, the kids are transitioning from one thing to the other. There are some kids that are still in the kid stage and some that are maturing. While sitting on my chair, listening to the teachers lesson  a kid raised his hand to tell the teacher that another one of the students was on his tablet instead of listening. To be honest, I kind of giggled a little. I have been in the setting for so long of if you do not listen and mess around instead of listening to the teacher, it is your own fault and your bad grade. Another incident I witnessed was a group struggling to focus and work together, the teacher came over and before she could say anything the whole group had a triangle of pointing fingers on who started the issue.

I believe watching teachers deal with such issues in a classroom is more educational to an inspiring teacher to learn how to handle situations then to read it from the book. I have been more invested and am able to remember the incidents and how the teacher dealt with the struggles then reading it in my education books for college.