Day 28

Today was a pretty good day overall and I am happy with my results. Today was the last day that I will be acting as the primary teacher in the classroom. Today was also the day my cooperating teacher decided to take her “free day” which she is awarded for having a Student Teacher. She was allowed to take the day off while I taught the class without a substitute in the room. It was only me in the room, but I felt comfortable and confident.

Today, my Art I students took the Printmaking quiz that I worked on last week. There were three versions, one for EA Special Needs students, one for integrated Special Needs students, and one for the rest of the students. My cooperating teacher advised that I give the Special Needs version to students who were also just struggling in the class, but may not necessarily be identified as Special Needs. I found it difficult to remember who to give each quiz, especially since I was supposed to do so in a way that no one knew there were different quizzes. I ended up making one mistake, giving a student who is struggling in the class a “normal” quiz. After grading his quiz, though, he actually did well on it and would have only gotten one more question right on the Special Needs quiz. It’s difficult to keep track of all of the students with their individual needs and try to meet their needs in a private manner. This is something I will need to continue working on.

After grading all of the quizzes, I was pretty happy with the results. Most of the students did really well and there weren’t any questions that most of the class missed, meaning that my quiz seemed fair. I was especially worried about the diagram of a print I had put on the quiz that asked students to read some information such as, “This is Lindsey Brown’s fourth print. She plans on making ten prints in total. She wants to title it “Fox Eyes,” and then label the print using the information. Almost every single student succeeded with that part, which made me very proud. Many of the students did not label their prints correctly, so I’m glad to see that they can at least do so on a quiz.

Other than taking the quizzes, the rest of the class periods were work days in which students were continuing their clay creatures. Several of the clay creatures dried over the weekend, but we did have a few casualties. An elephant lost its head, a fox lost its horn, and several creatures had cracks or breaks. I worked with the students to repair their pieces and hope that they will dry without breaking this time. I’ve still been working with students to try to make their pieces strong in the first place so that their pieces won’t break when they dry.

I still found it difficult to manage the Art I classes when they were working on their clay creatures, but I’ve been told that it’s just always going to be that way. Thankfully, today was a lot better than Friday. Students were still out of their seats, needing hall passes, refusing to work, on their phones, messing with friends, needing my help, and all of the other activities that generally go on every day. I feel that I am learning how to generally manage these classes. I’m just worried about another serious event coming up, but hopefully I’ll be better able to handle it now.

There’s really not much else to report as it was a pretty chill day. I administered my quiz and found it to be fair and successful. I graded the quizzes along with other artworks that I’ve been struggling to find the time to grade and started handing back work. I made lists of the students who were missing work or were absent for the quiz and will be checking in with these students tomorrow. I entered all of the grades and feel caught up on everything. I am proud of my work today and look forward to tomorrow.

| Student Teaching Reflections |