Fitzpatrick Student Teaching Blog #11

Week two of High School PE is in the books. The transition from Elementary to High School has not been as difficult as I had expected it to be. The biggest surprise for me has been how open the students have been to me as the lead teacher in the classroom. Students listen to direction better than I had anticipated, which has truly helped me in running my lessons.

I am currently running 5 classes and 3 different units – Freshman Basketball, Sophomore Conditioning, and Junior Badminton. This week I began taking control of the warm-up and game portions of Badminton. This class is a six week unit, and they are completing the 4^th week of the unit. Currently, students are participating in a 15 round, round robin tournament with the 16^th rd being a “championship” round. I have been placed in charge of recording the winning teams of each round and up-keeping the record board. This Friday, 3/21 in the championship game. Being Juniors, this class pretty much runs itself. It is my main objective to observe the class and make sure all students are participating and following the rules of the game. In this class I have one individual lady who always seems to have an emotional issue. I try to reach out to her but every time I do she either stays silent or gets more aggressive and agitated toward me. On Wednesday she came into class crying. Seeing her in distress, I could not ignore the signs and pretend that nothing was happening in my classroom, even if I knew that might be what she wanted. Surprisingly she began to open up, but by this point I had to begin class. When I tried to deviate from the situation she exploded and attempted to leave the field house and enter the locker room. I have to start class, but I cannot let this emotional student go into the locker room or hallways of the school unattended. I do not know her or her background, and I have no idea what she is capable of. I do not have a phone to reach out and let the deans know she was attempting to leave, so my cooperating teacher took over the class while I attempted to get her back in class. I eventually calmed her down enough to where she was willing to at least walk the tack instead of participate in class. I told her I wish there was more I could do, but I insisted if something was bothering her that much, to please get in contact with a dean or a friend or somebody she could talk to because it is not worth being so upset that it interrupts her daily routine. This was definitely an experience I never had to deal with in the elementary setting.

In Basketball I have been alternating between teaching the instruction portion and game portions of the units. For each portion, I have been able to incorporate my own lesson ideas. I incorporated a team concept of “around the world” for my basketball game, and partner passing, shooting, and rebounding skill combinations during my instruction portion. As much as I love working with the little ones in elementary, it is a breath of fresh air to be able to work with students that are much more relate-able, and can grasp the concept of the learning objectives near immediately. I do not have to set out cones and poly-spots and repeat directions five times only to have multiple pairs mess the drill up anyway. There are some squirrely kids in the classes, but even when they are fooling around they do not put themselves in any sort of harmful situations like the elementary students would. Surprisingly, I have realized that still, some things never change. In my 3^rd period class I gave students the opportunity to pick their own teams for three vs. three basketball games as a reward for working hard throughout the course of the week. Of course, what I believed would be an easy situation ended up lasting about two minutes longer than expected because certain students did not want to separate from other students. Although I specifically said groups of three, I still had four groups of 4 because one could not leave another. Unfortunately I had to separate them to make the teams even. Instead of being authoritative and demanding students move, I gave the teams the ultimatum of one choosing to go to another court or I will move somebody. Fortunately for me, each group had a student that was willing to move.

Conditioning has been the hardest unit because the students do not want to participate. No matter the age, I realize all students want to play games. This week I have been placed in charge of creating the activities for the conditioning unit, a feat that is making a lot of students talk under their breath. I am introducing the students to step aerobics and Tabata. Tabata was by far the toughest unit I have had to teach to date, in both High School and the Elementary level. Between engaging students who do not care about  the program, instructing a concept unknown to every student, and motivating students to move when not choreographed to, the idea flew right over most of their heads.  My 7^th hour is by far my most diverse class in terms of physical, emotional, personality, work ethic and everything in between. It is a wellness class aimed toward students who have failed over half their subjects from the previous semester. I wish it were possible to find that way to peek every student’s interest, but I know that is impossible, however it hurts to watch some of these students wasting so much potential for nothing.

I am still struggling to find that assertive “teacher voice,” just as I did at the beginning of my time in the elementary level. Just when I feel like I was making some improvement, the students seem to want to test me a little further. One idea my cooperating teacher told me was to take the points. For some of these students, once they see points being taken away they will realize that what they think they can get away with, they can’t, and they will figure out how to act. I began taking points away today because the sophomore classes are beginning to get a little out of hand. However, every teacher around here has said being so close to spring break does not help.

A goal of mine over Spring Break is to create lesson plans for each unit a week ahead of time so that I have time to ween out the kinks before applying them. I also want to research ideas on how to introduce conditioning in game-like activities to possibly intrigue my sophomore classes a bit more this coming week.  In basketball, I am going to take over both classes all of next week and utilize my own lessons. This excited me because basketball is one of my favorite units and I have some ideas I am looking forward to trying out. In all classes I am going to begin grading students and marking it in powerschool.

Regarding standard 1 – Teaching Diverse Students – I am working in a well-diverse school district where 65% of the students come from low-income housing. Many students are dealing with out of school experiences affecting their lives on a daily basis that I do not and will not ever know about. Knowing this, I have made sure to create that assertive teacher mentality in the beginning, but continue to reach out to students when they look like they are in need. At the beginning of my student teaching, the student in my racquets class was warming up with her arms in her shirt. For safety issues and asked her to take her arms out of her shirt and she confronted me about it. I had to stand my ground, but I made sure to continue giving her equal attention to those in my class. Then this Wednesday, as I mentioned earlier, she came in to my class crying. Knowing she has emotional issues, even though I know she does not know me on a personal level yet, I was the first to reach out to her in an attempt to at least point her in the direction that was looking to go. Since then she has not changed much, however she does not give me the same scolding eye as she had every day since correcting her on her shirt. She also does not complain and does show interest in the activities more than she did ]previously. Knowing she does not get a lot of Adult affection, I wanted to let her know that there was an adult out there that was willing to listen.

Regarding Standard 3 – Planning for differentiated instruction, I introduced a game to my basketball students that I played with my elementary students and they thoroughly enjoyed it. Instead of poly spots I used cones, and I let the students put the cones wherever they wanted to shoot from. The goal of the game is to shoot a basket from each cone, if you make it you pick up the cone, if not you leave it there and pass it to your partner. By allowing the students to put the cones where they wanted to, they were able to make the game as easy or as challenging for themselves as they wanted based on the skill level. I suggested for struggling students to place the cones inward while my more advanced students to put the cones near the outside of the perimeter, making the game more challenging.