Reflection 2

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

REFLECTION #2 August WEEK 25-29

I’m reporting this document to say, I made it through the second week…Alive! It was an absolute rough week for me since a lot of unexpected things happened. This week I had to give in my first assignment as a practice teacher, my nucleus study. It was a little tough because I needed to know my surroundings, the faculty, and all the other workers in one week. I haven’t met the entire school yet, but at least I became acquainted with many of the personnel and got to know the school I work in more. On Thursday, Gina let me go in front of the class and I did basically what she did in the class before. I read the story with them out loud, well actually I read first and then they repeated. This activity went good but the next one which was underlining the vocabulary words in the story did not. Getting all of their attention is really hard. Talking to them made me see I have a group that is not proficient in English. There were others who seemed like they didn’t care about anything and a few tried.

On Friday 29, me and my practice teaching peers received a surprise visit by the Practice Teaching Supervisor Dr. Nilsa. I was a little nervous but then felt more at ease because I was reminded it was just an exploratory visit. My ease left again when I didn’t have my reflection printed out and in my professional notebook, but then again, thankfully I wasn’t being evaluated… yet. For next time, I need to have everything more organized and every job required in it so I can be more at peace.

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

I also had the chance to experience a glimpse of the real educational world. In Kindergarten, there was a new little girl that arrived from another school. This day the students were cutting and pasting into their notebooks. About 5-8 minutes into the class, this little girl started running around the classroom screaming “picadillos”. She would bend down and take all the tiny little pieces that would fall down and put it in her mouth and chew it. I had never seen that before. The teachers tried to stop her and sit her down, but she kept being disruptive and repeating her strange behavior. What was kind of funny is that the other students were complaining about this and the homeroom teacher said something and mentioned “huyanle” and for some reason all the students started chanting that word altogether. Lesson learned? Be careful what you tell kids, they might get the wrong message.

That same day on the afternoon, I closed my car door on my pinky finger and it turned black and got swollen and I couldn’t move it. Then to close the night, out of nowhere at night, a bee came in through my house’s windows, got stuck in my hair and stung my ear! I’m not going to lie, I cried so much. I didn’t even know what happened to me and the pain was very intense.

This was the first time this happened to me, so I took some Benadryl which makes it almost impossible for me to wake up afterwards. The next day, Saturday I woke up and my mom felt very sick so I took her to the hospital and they said she needed surgery as soon as possible. She had her gallbladder in an acute condition. Being so, the next day, Sunday, I woke up got dressed early, took my practice teaching stuff to the hospital to do them while I waited outside until my mom came out of surgery but I couldn’t. I was too nervous and worried to do anything. I tried passing the names of my students to the roll book but I just ended up messing up around more

University of Puerto Rico in Humacao English Department Shirlenne Peralta 842-07-6270 Practice Teaching Practice Supervisor- Dr. Nilsa Lugo

than 5 pages, no exaggerations. Thank God, the surgery was a success and here I am, writing my reflection on a Sunday.

As I said before this week was tough for me but I’ve been through worst times and made it through. Plus, if I made it through a bee sting, I can make it through the semester. Reflecting upon this week, there are still things I need to improve, like my organization skills. I also need to find something that helps me in classroom management; probably a reward chart, even if it seems a little behavioristic. Pinterest will become my new best friend for practice teaching.