National Convention/ Teaching On My Own Week!

During National FFA Convention, I stayed back at school for more teaching days! Actually, staying back was a super hard decision for me to make. It would have been an awesome opportunity and great time with students but I just was not ready to leave my baby for that long yet. I hope some day as an ag teacher or as a (hopefully) FFA mom, I will have the opportunity to visit this awesome convention. 

While Mrs. B was away though, it gave me the entire week of extra teaching days! I definitely needed these days. This opportunity gave me the chance to play the role again of substitute and also teacher. I really enjoy that the students are starting to feel most comfortable with me but this is also scary! They definitely try to push boundaries when Mrs. B is not here but they also know that I will not let them bend rules so they get pretty creative! 

This week was also Halloween week, I truly believe this made the students crazy! It seemed like this week the students were a little extra sassy and drama filled. It is very hard shut out student drama from a classroom. I do try to shut it down as soon as I hear anything but how kids are acting in other places definitely follows them into a classroom. Some of this can just be ignored but I think it is also important to address some and use it for learning if possible. 

I did try some new activities in a few of my classes this week. They both were actually in my most difficult, classroom management classes. In natural resources, we did a soil layers food lab. We used cookies and pudding to create the different soil layers. I was super excited for this lab but then regretted it. This class is pretty rude and rowdy and they did not appreciate or take this lab seriously at all. The lab itself overall went decent but their participation was lacking. After the lab, I did give them a lecture on respect and that we will not be attempting fun things if they cannot handle it. In my animal science 1 class, we attempted group projects. I gave the students two class days to work on these and then the third day they were expected to present. The majority of kids did well but I was decently shocked the groups that chose to spend two days doing absolutely nothing! They did not finish their projects even after I constantly hounded them for two days straight, had conversations with them about their topics and showed them what to do! This was pretty disappointing and frustrating. 

The mindsets of students still blow my mind some days. I definitely give the benefit of the doubt with kids having way to many other life things to deal with and that all people just have bad days. But, when students come to me asking to improve their grades just to play sports or just choose not to get help on an assignment, it is definitely one of the hardest parts of being a teacher!