Goodbye Southwick!

This is it.

My final week of internship.

I can't wait to be in the class for a whole week straight!    

Fuck, I shouldn't have jinxed it.

That's right, this last week was fully online for me. I feel robbed. I did my best with what was handed to me, all things considered. But I didn't really get a fair send off. Seems kind of anticlimactic.

To rectify this, I'll be going an extra day next week to have my official last day. A real chance to say goodbye to the kiddos. But for now, I'll talk a little bit about my final week at Southwick via Zoom!

This being the final week, I ended up taking over a large chunk of most of the classes. They all went off without a hitch... mostly. Overall however, Mr. Ready and I were able to get around some online difficulties in very creative ways as co-teachers. The week had up’s and down’s.

The first period of everyday was math. A warm up, a difficult problem to discuss with the class, and then a lesson or quiz is par for the course. After the second day, I was in charge of the whole thing. It made me realize that something I really need to work on is my timing and pacing. For example, one day I gave them seven minuets to complete the warm up, and it was hard to tell if that was too much/not enough time because I couldn’t see their screens. In the classroom, you can always cut an activity short or expand it depending on how well the kids are engaging the concept. That day, I just had to wing it.

Then we moved on to the dare problem. I walked them through how to “cubes” the problem as to focus on what we need to solve the word problem. Then I had them come up with an answer statement. Afterwards, I sent them off to breakout rooms to discuss with a partner how to solve the problem before calling back and having a class discussion. The discussion was where I hit a big road block.

I was so distracted working and listening to the students that I neglected to actually solve the problem myself. So, when students were coming up with problems, I realized that I didn’t know which was right. As a matter of fact, I had to actually calculate one of the students answers with him to double check his work. His reasoning was sound, but when I checked his work I came up with a different answer and called him on it.

This ended up being a big mistake.

            The student I questioned was “Karate”. He is possibly one of the best math minds Southwick school has to offer. So, when I got a different answer than him, I should have known to double check my work. I said he was wrong, he said no, students started talking all over one another, I double checked my math, I was wrong, I muted everyone and apologized for making the mistake. It was a hectic few minuets, and we spent a lot of time on the dare problem.

Maybe too much time, as we weren’t able to get to the quiz. Mr. Ready talked to me afterwards and said it was okay that we weren’t able to get to everything. What mattered was that the students had a great conversation about the problem. He also made note of how I messed up the calculations and thought it was a good learning opportunity for the kids to see the teacher isn’t always right and to vocalize their thoughts on the matter.

Another big noteworthy thing came at the end of day three in social studies. We started researching NH state symbols (state bird, state dog, etc.) when Mr. Ready started to experience technical difficulties. He couldn’t see the Zoom and his wifi kept cutting out. So instead of switching back and forth between writing the presentation for the kids to see and reading the information form NH.gov, he would dictate and I would write the info down and find pictures. 

This worked as a minilesson to show kids how they can spice up a power point to make it more interesting for their reader. We showed them formatting tricks, themes, and how to write a presentation. I don’t know how much experience the kids have had with a slide deck presentation before, but it’s a skill they’ll need to know. When I was a kid, there was a weekly class we went to to learn about that stuff, but with these technology natives it’s easier to just include it where you can in the general curriculum.

I also got to teach a minilesson all my own on Earth day about my favorite topic: The National Park Service of the United States :)

    It was short. Not much to it. If I wanted to begin a unit on the NPS, I would’ve absolutely expanded every aspect of it. But this plan had just come together earlier that day when I was reminded it was earth day, so I worked with what I had. I started with a Kahoot quiz about earth day, and then, as a class, went through a Google Arts and Culture tour of Bryce Canyon National Park and took notes.

This was super cool. I had never known Google used it’s street view tech for stuff like this. It looks like they have art museum tours, natural history tours, the National Parks, and more! I don’t know if this is a recent result of COVID or not but it was really cool to find this resource.

  So I modeled using the tool and going through the tour and assigned them to go through their own tour of one of the parks on their own. They would take notes of interesting facts they learned and will share them the next day. However, I neglected to realize the next day was a half day, so I never got to figure out if the kids completed that homework.

This blog post is turning into a book, so I'll wrap it up. This week showed me new ways and new experiences to teach. I added more resources to my teacher tool box that I wouldn't have had otherwise. While I wish it had been in person instead, there was definitely some kind of charm to being fully remote. A fitting end to a chaotic year and semester.