I Wanna Teach Alone

For years, I've hated working in groups. It probably has to do with the perfectionism in me, but throughout high school and college I tried to overcome this weakness. Still though, when dealing with less than ideal groupmates, I get frustrated at the decisions they make that I now have to deal with.

Needless to say, team-teaching has played out like most of my group experiences have; normally I'd be worried, but apparently this has been the common scene for all groups at Institute. You end the experience taking your team relationships to the extreme: love or hate.

I think I've said it before, but as a team we rotate among the concepts we teach. And in math, the whole idea is that the concepts completely build off each other, so once something is taught one way, you're pretty much committed to teaching and reteaching it that way for the rest of the lessons.

One of my groupmates tries way too hard to be the cool teacher and in doing so, decided that he would teach factoring of polynomials using the "factor booty" method. I can't describe it in words, but I will say that one of the steps involves drawing a "butt" on your paper, and now I feel like an idiot in class every time we have to factor something on the board. Let's just say our styles of teaching don't quite mesh...

But I can deal with that. What I'm having trouble dealing with is the style of our faculty advisor. Each teacher trainee must have a registered teacher in the room at all times for the scenario to be legal, so our faculty advisor is him. The thing is: even though we do all the teaching, he does all the grading. When the students got their progress reports for summer school, he even added in comments that he had not told us about prior, so now we have students asking us why there are certain comments on their reports, and in some cases all we can say is "...I don't know- I'll have to ask Mr. Sanchez for you..." And I am just waiting for the phone call from Ms. Valladares wondering why her daughter got 30 points taken from her for texting in class (and as a result going from a C to an F-... That's right! An F-! Now I have Jackie thinking that there's nothing she can do to pass the class, so why try...) The sad thing is that when TFA leaves this school in a week, the faculty advisors teach for another two weeks, so they have the final say in grades.

Now don't get me wrong, I definitely wouldn't have students pass that obviously have not learned the material, but I would still do many things differently if I had the class to my own. I'm sure I'll look back at this and laugh at how good I had it with all the support people around me, but in the meantime, I wanna teach alone!

On my way back from lunch I saw someone's dorm window with a "5 days left" poster. I'm sure they'll turn it into an "hours left" poster by the end of the week. I have a feeling this last week will be rough. After all, it's crunch time for our students: they have to take another assessment on Thursday so TFA has their student achievement data!

In the meantime, soccer...