phonics failure

Yesterday, my supervising teacher (the DePaul teacher who gives my grade) came to my class for the first of four observations of my abilities. This was basically to get a baseline of where I am, so that he can look for improvement.

I taught a phonics lesson, which was gruesome. Do you remember the dream where you go to school and you have to take a final in a class you haven't gone to all semester and you panic? That feeling is the same feeling you get when you're trying to teach a group of 6 year olds how to change the first sound in a word to make a new word, and half of them are looking at you blankly, and you realize you have no other strategy for getting the point across. Phonics is tough, because its really about skill-building. Each new skill depends on the ones learned previously. So it's important to make sure everyone is getting what you're teaching. And if someone didn't get something previously, what you're trying to teach now goes down like a lead balloon.

I have a terrible confession to make. I am what is now termed "addicted to success." Through much of my schooling, I was always "the best." I usually succeeded right away at everything. And if it wasn't immediately easy for me, I usually gave up on it pretty quickly (I still do this. I'm an instant gratification-seeker). This "addiction to success" is something that teachers are now supposed to prevent by making sure that accelerated learners are properly challenged. Anyway, because of this, it was so uncomfortable and paralyzing to be up there, and realize I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. Intellectually, I know that I'm not immediately going to be the best teacher. But emotionally, I felt like a failure because I couldn't immediately come up with a way to help these kids figure out on their own how to replace the /k/ sound in "cat" with a /b/ sound to make "bat."

Oh, and since today was April Fool's Day, my students kept trying to fool me with things like "hey, there's a unicorn over there!" or "There's a spider on you!" - but they'd repeat the same "joke" every 5 minutes, and I'd keep pretending to be fooled, and they'd laugh and laugh.