I See a Story

As I sit at the counter typing up a few lesson plans for the week, I can’t help but be excited to get back to my sixth graders tomorrow. As much as I have loved every second of my (unexpected) long weekend, it’s time for me to get back in the classroom again.

In creating my lessons, looking up standards, and writing objectives, I keep thinking about the individual uniqueness of each of my students. Due to the current culture of education, many times teachers are pressured to look at their students and see a test score floating above their heads. Or perhaps, we are supposed to look out and see which students are proficient, which ones need an intervention, or which ones are quickly falling farther and farther behind and need immediate help.

However, when I look out at each individual student, I see a story that cannot be summed up in any type of label, number, letter, or score. I see stories of students who are trying desperately to find their place in their communities, their school, and the world. I see stories of students are trying to navigate the treacherous waters of growing up, making and keeping friends, and deciding who they want to be. I see stories of students trying to turn their lives around despite everything that is holding them back and stories of students who want to succeed but don’t know where to start. I see stories that contain more challenges and uphill battles than I have experienced in my own 22 years. I see stories of courage, faith, and resiliency.  While some stories have common threads and themes, they are all incredibly different, heart warming, and inspiring in their own ways.

As a teacher, I am constantly wondering how I can help shape these individual stories. I know that I cannot change what has already been written, but what can I, as an educator, write in these stories that’s more than a test score, an assignment, or a grade? Maybe I can be the one who says just the right thing to help a student see the value of an education. Maybe I can be that role model someone has been desperately looking for everywhere. Maybe I can be the one that writes, “I believe in you.”

Got Grit?

In the first four weeks of student teaching, I am now sitting in my room during what is now my FIFTH snow day. You know you’ve had too many snow days when you’re wishing you were in school and starting to think that five day weeks are a conspiracy. So as I take shelter from the dangerous wind chill, I bring you a new blog post.

Over the past week and a half, my cooperating teacher and I have been waging a war against laziness. On Wednesday, we had multiple conversations with our class about how laziness would no longer be tolerated since we know that they are more than capable of completing “top quality work.” However, I was not satisfied with leaving things on a negative note, which led to the commencement of operation grit.

In brainstorming lesson ideas, I remembered one of my TED talk videos and pulled it up for inspiration. (Watch it below for an extra boost of motivation!)

After that, idea after idea started to pop into my head. I decided that for morning work, students would respond to the following prompt in their Reading Response Journals:

What qualities are needed to become a successful person?
How do successful people reach success?

Explain your answers.

As students finished, I invited them each to come up to write one of the qualities they wrote about on the board around the prompt. It was actually quite inspiring to read 32 different qualities of successful people on the board. We had everything from pride and try, to athletic and courage, and to innovative and organized.

Then we watched the TED talk above and discussed what grit is and why it is important to be gritty. Finally, after I knew that they understood the meaning of grit, we brainstormed about what grit looks like in the classroom. As they offered their responses, I recorded them on the board. Many of them astounded me with their willingness to continue to offer response after response and actively participate in the conversation. They were then each given a piece of computer paper, and I instructed them to make an acrostic poem using the word grit. Below are a few of my favorite examples.

                                              

I’m hoping to make a bulletin board of all of their acrostic poems, and I will definitely share a picture once it’s up!

I am very excited that my teacher gave me the opportunity to teach this lesson because while we weren’t spending time mastering Common Core Standards or preparing for the state’s standardized test, the students were learning valuable life lessons. After discussing grit, they know that they are all capable of achieving great things both in school and in life with hard work and effort. If this lesson made just a few of them believe in themselves a little bit more, I think it was a success.

The Buzz from Miss B.

Welcome to the Buzz from Miss B.!

My name is Meghan Barnauskas, and I am currently in the beginning phases of my senior student teaching at Saint Mary's College. I'm hoping to use this blog to share my student teaching experience with family, friends, and other teachers.

I have always said that I was born to be a teacher because even when I was a baby, I would sit in my mom's classroom in a portable crib while she set up her classroom in the summer. As I got a little bit older, I transformed our basement into a school where I would teach my younger sisters on the weekends and over the summer. Now that I am quickly approaching the time when I will have a real classroom of my own, I am becoming increasingly excited (and a little bit nervous).

At Saint Mary's, we are able to spend our entire senior year in the same classroom for student teaching. I chose to spend my year with the sixth grade teacher that I worked with for my formal classroom observations during the fall of my junior year because I deeply admire many of her teaching qualities, and we also get along extremely well. Throughout the fall of this school year, I worked in the classroom during three mornings per week. I would observe, assist with instruction, and occasionally teach my own lessons. Now that I am officially a student teacher, I am slowly taking on more and more instructional responsibilities and couldn't be more excited!

Stay tuned for more buzz from Miss B.!