Markert-Noticing Blog 14

Today my MT was not able to be in school so I knew that I would be “subbing” for the day. This is always a great experience because it shows me what it will be like to teach all day. It also gave me a real eye opening experience to some of things in the classroom when there is no one else to assist me. The actual sub for the class was called to be in another classroom so as a last minute resort the primary RTI teacher came to sit in on the class. Since this was a last minute change she sat in the back and had things to work on. This was great for me because it meant I was in charge of everything. The afternoon was the most difficult because the students tend to become restless and a little wild by the end of the day. The end of the day is also our scheduled time for math. What was challenging for me that I noticed today was the difficulty of having five special education students in the classroom. During math today my five special education students were not taken to go to their special education class. This did not worry me because I have worked with them in class before. However, today was especially different because I noticed how hard it is to have such a range of abilities in a classroom. I know that this is the reality of teaching but it is a challenge. One of my students in particular, Alex, was a challenge for me. Alex has asperger along with being autistic. This causes him to not sit still on the carpet, running around the classroom and shouting out. One of the challenges for me was when something is bothering Alex he will continue to shout out until something is done. For example today during my math discussion he kept saying “my head.” Alex is also selectively mute so he does not respond often to my MT or myself. When I tried to ask him what happened he just said “my head.” At this point I need to move on because I have another 31 students to worry about. But throughout the following 2 minutes he just kept shouting out “my head.” This is distracting to the other students and disrupts the lesson so it was increasingly hard to maintain everyone’s attention with such frequent outbursts.

This experience showed me that teaching has a lot of obstacles and a lot of times you need to think on your feet about how you should handle situations. For me, I had to explicitly tell Alex that I would look at this head after the lesson. This seemed to calm him down and limit the outbursts. However, I have seen that this doesn’t work with him at times. I just didn’t realize how hard it was to balance the range of learners along with different behavioral needs in the class. Today allowed me to see that sometimes a lesson may need to be stopped to address a need before you can move on. There are times where it is not feasible to stop a lesson but you need to be ready to make those accommodations as you see fit. It also showed me the importance of knowing your students and how as individuals they deal with situations and also how to best redirect behaviors.