Weekly Review #6

All in all I felt really good about this week. My post about my 6th grade lesson was definitely a highlight for me finally taking that next step in dealing with a problem. I'm a very sensitive person and so discipline is not something that comes all that naturally, plus I remember being on the receiving end of discipline and how it felt. I feel like I have a teacher presence, but at least in 6th grade music, the students were pretty surprised that I had it in me to do more than just tell them over and over to stop talking out of turn. I'm a little anxious looking ahead to the new nine weeks as I saw my class lists and Mr. Suzelis identified several potential trouble spots in each class, the 7th grade general music class in particular. While that has me a little worried, being able to start with the class will be something I can hopefully use to my advantage in classroom management. Even though I've been with the 6th grade music class for all of my student teaching, I wasn't there the first week, so I wasn't able to establish myself as well as I wanted, not to mention the fact that I was brand new! I definitely don't feel like any of the classes I'm teaching get out of control and I do have a higher tolerance for noise than Mr. Suzelis (we discussed that) in the end, especially for this nine weeks, he's going to be taking back over, so I'd like to hand it over the way he's more comfortable.

The choirs are all going well, though I'm definitely nervous about doing more with the 7th and 8th grade choirs mostly because of my piano playing. I've been doing warm-ups and sightreading mostly since I started, so I know their personalities pretty well, but with my piano playing not where I want it, I feel like it's a major hindrance in teaching the songs I need to as effectively as I want to. We had our concert this week (on my birthday no less!) and I felt like it went well. Definitely could've been better, but godd enough for that concert. On Wednesday Mr. Suzelis had me lead all the choirs in completing a written evaluation of the concert, where each choir listened to their part of the concert and had to write at least one positive comment and one thing they needed to work on in their own part. It was interesting to read the responses and see the thought process but also how well some could and couldn't follow the directions.