McKenzie’s Blog

I am actually beginning my student teaching experience tomorrow, and to be completely honest, I am very nervous (as I am sure many of us are). I think that if I were teaching math I might be feeling a bit more confident, however, this fall I am teaching business classes (Personal Finance and Computer Applications) and am a little bit out of my comfort zone. This is mainly because I have been given so much freedom by my mentor teacher. On one hand it is awesome because he is allowing me to do whatever I want, in whatever order I want, as long as I cover a certain few topics. This sounds very cool and I was extremely excited at first.  When I started planning, however, I realized that I wished I had a little bit more structure to work within so I could make sure to cover all the appropriate material in the appropriate time frame. I think I am most nervous about not being able to predict how much material I will be able to cover with the students in a 70 minute class period. After a week, I should get a good idea of how things can go for the rest of the trimester, so my goal is to try and be as over prepared as possible to make sure that I have more than enough material.

Hopefully my next post will have more content when I finally have experiences with the students to reflect on. I have been a high school dance team coach for 12 years now, so I have plenty of experience working with high school age students. Coaching, however, is very different in that the students I work with generally want to be at practice and make an effort to work as a team toward a common goal. I know that students in school do not always want to be in class and I will have to make more of an effort to get them involved with the material. Luckily, the classes I am teaching have direct real world relevance, so it shouldn’t be difficult to help them understand why they need to know the information. I hope to make things fun and interesting so that the students enjoy the class and don’t feel like it is a chore.