Student Teaching Reflection 16

This week was very similar to last week. My mentor teacher is still out until Christmas break, so I am acting as teacher for all of her classes. This week went slightly smoother than last week, though, and the classes worked well when they were supposed to work. I think that this has a lot to do with the sub that is there on my days off of student teaching. Last week, the sub was not on top of the students to get their work done, and as a result, they did not do any work when I wasn't there. This week, my mentor teacher requested the building sub for the days I am not at school. He interacts with all of the high schoolers on a daily basis, gets to know all of them, and cares enough to push them to do their work. This helped me out a lot because the students were prepared when I came the next day. The one thing that stood out this week happened on Thursday. The early classes went smoothly, but the conceptual biology students struggled to stay on task and focused. While I was walking around helping the students with their work, I stopped at one student's desk and started asking him questions to guide him through his worksheet. He was not trying to answer any questions, and when I pushed, he told me that he didn't care about working on the questions and he would get the answers when we went over them as a group. I was at a loss and felt like it wasn't worth an argument, so I moved to help another student. I asked both my mentor teacher and her co-teacher (who was there at the time) how they would have handled it, and they both answered similarly. They both said that this was a time when they would have chosen their battles. Since these students are old enough to be responsible for themselves, sometimes a teacher needs to let them make their own decisions, even if that decision will negatively impact their learning. My mentor teacher said that she would have tried again the next day to get the student to engage and possibly remind the student that they are not helping themselves by waiting to get the answers when the teacher goes over it. I think that this apathetic mentality is something that affects a lot of the students in conceptual biology, and this will be my biggest challenge when teaching this class.