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.

Old vs. Upgrade

September 26, 2013

 I feel the "Internship" stage of a person persuading to be a teacher is the most vicious and important time in their education. The intern is in a sense in the "Middle School Stage"--they are the student yet they are the teacher. The intern can be in the students shoes or in the teachers shoes and relate. This role is important to take notes for future reference when they eventually are only in the teachers shoes. The intern will be able to look back and remember what it was like being the student and not the teacher to help engage and educate the students to the fullest.

Asylum vs. Classroom

Walking through a 10 foot wooden door, every square inch of the walls beaming white, and the minimal amount of items in the 25 by 32 feet room--this is how most "students" feel while being bond to class--or in their mind a school asylum. I remember how back in the day, when I was in their shoes as a student, I felt school was another version of an asylum--forced education. Although, in the teachers shoes, their classroom is a home away from home. Teacher's do everything they can do in their power to have their classroom active and creative. Whether that is putting educational stuff up or involving their students art work. In room 133, every wall has some sort of educational item to make the room feel more active and cozy! There are the Language Art students creative posters hanging up and bulletin boards with educational items from the teacher. The room gives off a welcoming, colorful, active, and cozy environment, to keep the kids engaged in their education.

Do you have cooties?

That first crush--taking extra time in the morning to primp your hair or to smell good. Middle school is the end of the "cooties" stage and the beginning of the "dating" stage. Middle school is the age level that the girls stick with other girls and boys stick with other boys; however, there is a minimal amount of flirtation between opposite sex induced in the air. In room 133, the students do not have assigned seats; therefore, the students themselves divide the room into opposite sex like the other has cooties. The twisted part in this situation is that even though they sit separate sex, by choice; they choose during "free time" or "messing around" to express their flirting skills. This being said, Middle School is the beginning and practice of dealing with the opposite sex.

How old is to old?

I remember always making fun of how my parents childhood and education ways; while I observe room 133, I feel as if my Middle School years would be considered "old times." Back in the day--everything was through textbooks and paper and pencil. If the teacher needed to have the class use computers, the teacher would have to schedule a block of time in the computer lab in advance. Now today--the teachers have a kart with mini laptops on them. They assign each student with a laptop to use when the teacher wants to incorporate technology into their lesson. Today, the kids used their laptops to read a story and then do an activity. While the kids were logging onto the computers, I noticed that after the kids logged on the desktop was personalized to what they wanted--such as a background picture. The 21st century has a lot of benefits through technology; however, getting all the laptops up and running and keeping the kids on track is quite the time consumer. Technology is a blessing and a negative aspect to the education of the 21st century. And to think, all of the technology will just keep getting upgraded as life goes on. I feel as teacher's, we should use this advantage; knowing that technology will just keep upgrading and become a bigger part in every child's life down the road. However, I feel it is necessary to involve the students in face-to-face interaction, so there still is humanity in the kid's lives.

A Family Operation

Structure and acceptance are key elements to build a family. A classroom is another form of a family for students. The teacher and maybe if there is an assistant or aid teacher in the room would be the parents and then the students are the kids. Today the average number of kids a family has is 2.5 kids. But as a teacher, they parent approximately 15-30 kids at a time. Not a lot of people would find that appealing or fun. How do these teachers exhibit a structured classroom family and stay sane? Some techniques that have been around for a while are raising of the hand, using tools around the classroom to educate and stay entertained, and asking questions to the students. There are a few techniques I have observed in room 133 that was not inner-twined during my Middle School years--allowing the kids to chew gum, they do not have to sit in their chair all primp and proper, and they focus on teamwork. The teacher's have established a system that they they call "elbow partners"--this is where you work and help the person that sits next to you. I feel these added techniques have made a great difference in helping the students to stay focused when they need to. Not only are the kids engaged in teamwork, but also the teacher is engaged in teamwork with the students. For instance, when the kids read aloud from their textbooks they incorporated the technique "popcorn"--somebody reads a section of the text then says, "popcorn and a classmates name" that will read the next section of the reading--this gives each child the opportunity to read and be engaged. When the students came across a word they did not know the teacher would sound out the word with the student, instead of just telling the kids what the word was. Along with this, the teacher would take any given opportunity she/he had to give a vocabulary lesson on words the kids may not know. Lastly, the teacher stays after school as much as she needs to, so she can correct their notebooks--this way the students will always know where their notebook is and that the notebook will not be misplaced.

The Beginning of a New Start!

Sept. 19, 2013

Have you ever encountered a situation with one or more children that have ADHD? Well, walking into the classroom 133 at Madison Middle School was like walking into a room full of ADHD kids.  In reality, I walked into a room with 15 normal Middle School kids. Middle School kids have quite a bit of energy! There were seven girls and nine boys that gathered in this room to be educated on Language Arts for 90 minutes. As you can imagine keeping Middle School kids entertained and focused for 90 minutes on a subject, most of them do not want to do, can be quite challenging. Madison Middle School hired quite a talented teacher to teach Language Arts to all these students! As a observing student teacher, I learned one of the biggest challenges in the classroom is to "control" the environment; therefore, I am quite pleased I get to observe this talented teacher on how to control a classroom!

The kids were put into groups of two and had to make a poster on either a noun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, pronoun, and conjunction; the kids had to give a two minute presentation on defining what their subject does for a sentence and give an example. I went around to each group to see how it was going and if they new how they were going to present their presentation. I have to admit, I have never been in the presence of such a creative group of children! The kids found ways to involve their audience into their presentations such as finding objects, doing actions, or asking the audience questions.

This amazing teacher has set up her classroom to be more "entertaining" then "parallel straight." She has medium long plastic tables that look wooden. The tables were set up in an "S" shape form in the room. I felt the setting of the tables give the kids more of a "free expression" setting then a "strict, primp, and proper" setting. At that young age, it is important to get the kids involved and comfortable; instead of having a setting such as a college classroom--sitting, staring, and lecturing.

As for the teaching techniques I saw, they were quite understandable. This marvelous teacher focuses on "peer help" to learn and educate. She let the kids interact and help each other along with her teaching/lecturing the children herself. Her purpose for the poster presentations was to have the kids educate and learn from each other. To keep up with the kids "ants in their pants" behavior she gave a leeway of allowing the kids to stand up by their chair while listening to her lecture. Also, she brighten the kids day by informing them that her goal this year was not to focus on lectures and worksheets, but by physically practicing and group projects to educate the kids on grammar!