Week 2 of student teaching high school physical education is complete. Everything in life has fallen to the wayside as I am laser focused on this experience and improving my teaching. I’m taking a break from choreographing a dance, learning the rules of broom ball, and writing lessons on substance abuse to give an update of how it’s going; the Good, the Bad, and the Interesting.

Because I don’t take photos while teaching, I will add Bitmoji visuals to this post. Ha ha!

The Good

 

Logging 12,000- 14,000 steps every day and without a workout!

Gotta love my TomTom step tracking because I am moving all day long. Sometimes I jump in and play or workout with my kids too.

I feel better about playing basketball.

Oh basketball! I’ve always been to uncoordinated to execute so many skills at once and I had to teach it in my first week! But by the end of the week I was feeling more comfortable and I even scored a basket in a game during class!

Wearing workout clothes every day.

Most comfortable job ever.

Coaching track this year.

This spring, I’ll be coaching track and I’ve been recruiting kids from my PE classes. It’s helped me form a few good teacher-student relationships with kids who want to compete and knowing I’m going to be the coach gives us something outside of class to talk about.

 

The Bad

I have to adjust my classroom management style.

My plan going in was to make everyone love P.E. with a positive and peppy attitude. But I’ve learned that every class dynamic is different and I have one class that was starting to ignore me completely because they didn’t respect peppy Rachel. So this week I had to give them a lecture and implement rules about running laps and I had to be much stricter, but then things ran better. But I do have another class that does well with peppy Rachel!

I’m so tired!

My alarm goes off at 5:30 am now so I can be at the school by 7:00 am to have an hour to prepare for my days lessons. I then stay at the school until 4:30 p.m. working on lessons because there are so many to write. Funny thing is, I’m only teaching two classes right now. Next week it gets bumped up to three and in my last week I’ll be teaching four- a full schedule.  I’m also sitting on the coach with Ryan after dinner either working or lesson planning until 9pm where I pass completely out.

I’m not eating enough during the day.

The day goes by so fast and I’m so hyper focused on the task at hand that I’ve noticed it’s hard for me to eat. Lunch time is when I sit down and go over my marks for the days classes and start reviewing the next days lessons and I just don’t feel like eating. On Sundays, I’ve been prepping these amazing healthy lunches that are tasty and everything but I’m just not hungry during the day. I do go home starving though and eat these enormous dinners which I know aren’t good for me!

The Interesting

High school students are an interesting group, and not at all what I expected. I guess because I was such an involved high schooler, I only saw high school through the lens of someone focused on good grades, clubs, and sports.

They skip A LOT!

There is one kid I have seen once in two weeks and none of his absences are excused so he’s failing the class. I have others who skip 2-3 times a week.  Once, a student went out to get a drink of water in one class and didn’t come back! I never skipped classes in high school. Probably because I had nowhere else to go, but also I wanted good grades. I always made friends in my classes so it was nice to go and talk with them.

They need to be treated like 5th graders.

I came in expecting high schoolers to have longer attention spans and reasoning skills than my 5th graders from last semester, but they don’t. This means demonstrating every rule or exercises visually because if I verbally tell them, they say they get it but they don’t. They can only do one thing for about 3-4 minutes before they lose interest and stop participating. I’m really interested to know if that’s how it’s always been or if kids today are different.

They throw around the word ‘anxiety’ a lot.

Many students are saying their anxiety is high but they don’t realize that it’s really just regular stress, ie. assignments, sports, exams. We have to teach these kids the difference between stress and anxiety and that stress is a part of life. We’re preparing them for life and in the workplace they’ll experience stress all the time.

It’s not coming as easy as elementary.

When I taught 5th grade, I had a few hiccups during the first week or so and then *boom* had it down and flew through my lessons easily. I scored very high very early on. But this time around it’s much more of a learning curve. I learn from my mistakes and keep improving, but it’s definitely more work.

So that’s what’s going on with me. I’m trying to work on blogs in between everything else, but I’ve definitely ghosted from social media. It’s okay though, the more I teach, the easier it will come.

Now I’m off to wash some pinnys!