Ms. McCarthy's Blog

Being overwhelmed is not the greatest feeling. This year is my first year teaching. I would not change it for the world, but it can be very stressful, especially lately. I feel as if I wind up doing way more than I can handle. This semester is my first semester of graduate school. In all honesty, the combination of the two- first year teaching and first semester of grad school, have been pretty overwhelming for me.  I have three sections of Social Studies to teach. I teach ELLs , 9th grade General, and 9th grade Honors . At one point, I had 45 students in one class- some of them were sitting on the floor! That issue has now been resolved , thankfully.  I often have trouble deciding how many assessments , and what kind of assessments, to give my students. Sometimes I wonder, should I give them two quizzes? Should I give them a project and a test? Is this assessment differentiated enough? Has it been modified properly ? Are my activities engaging enough? I feel I am constantly seco

I truly love teaching ELL students. I find them to be so interesting and full of experiences. I find them to be full of experiences that a teacher would not often expect someone their age to have. I strongly believe in having an active relationship with the parents of my students, especially because of some of the experiences certain students have had. However, due to the language barrier with many of the parents, it often poses to be difficult task to effectively communicate. As the fall semester is reaching its somewhat end, I will have to begin planning for parent teacher conferences. I am both very excited and very nervous for these conferences. I am excited because I can now meet many of the parents I talk to frequently , but I am nervous because of the language barrier. I am also nervous if the parents disagree with some of the things I will mention about their children.  I have relied on an app called "Talking Points," in which the app does the translating for

The beach means a lot to me. It is my escape, it is my happy place, it is where I go to hangout, it is where memories are made. I love the waves. My friends do not always like to go in the water when we go to the beach. I however, absolutely love it. The rhythmic feeling of the waves splashing on your face, the salty taste, the feeling of peace that washes over you knowing you are one with the sea.  The ocean brings so much beauty to this world. Its water can be murky , green, and rough, calm or crystal clear. Beaches surrounding the ocean can be rocky, smooth, sandy, black or white. They are homes to so many different kinds of wildlife. Wildlife that humans often time have issues respecting, but that is a point for another day. My favorite thing the ocean has to offer is the seaglass . I collect seaglass, I hope to be able to make  table top of it one day. Seaglass is beautiful. Blue, red, green, brown, clear, its color adds to its story.  When I pick up a piece of seaglass from

I have swam my entire life. I swam when I was little, I swam in high school, I swam in  college. I had to work very hard in order to perform well. Swimming did not come naturally to me. I had to put in a lot of extra work.  During high school, we would go to Eisenhower Park Aquatic Center for practice. Our high school did not have our own pool. We would travel there by bus, and we would have to be on the deck ready to swim our first set by 3:05pm. It was always a process to get ready to swim, especially if we were to do a set with flippers . I would have to put on my bathing suit, put on my cap, put on my goggles, and put on my flippers. I would have to go to my lane. I would walk across the bulkhead to lane two. I was always behind Danielle in the lane line-up. She would dive in, I get on the block , I would wait 10 seconds and then dive in myself.  Under the water was my favorite place. The water was deep, so once you dove in, you could swim along the bottom of the pool floor, lo

I haven't really had just one, single, best experience of my life so far. I can narrow it down to one time in my life where I had the best experience. That was when I went on a service trip to Costa Rica my junior year of high school. Now, I also consider passing my edTPA this past May, to be one of my best experiences too. What is ironic  about passing the edTPA is, that leading up to that moment, I had one of the worst experiences of my life. Furthermore, both of these best experiences, did indeed include some of the worst experiences I have endured . Despite these experiences having some trailing moments, in the end, I wouldn't change anything. The service trip to Costa Rica was very fulfilling . My classmates and I traveled to three different parts of Costa Rica. At the time, my Spanish was much better than it is now, so we got to talk to the locals, the local children, and our tour guide in both Spanish and English. We planted trees, we built a school and fixed a playgr

My First Week As A Teacher On Wednesday, September 5th, I started my career as a teacher. It was a bit nerve-racking at first, but by Friday of that week, I found myself sad that the week was already over. With very large class sizes, I found myself to be a small presence in a very diverse, packed classroom. At first, I found this to be overwhelming . However, towards the end of first period, my jitters were calmed and I was ready to take on the challenge of making my presence , present. My classes are composed of 10th grade ELLs and freshmen students. What my students did not realize was that we were " one in the same. " It was my very first day navigating and being a member of the high school as well. Once I relayed this information to my students, the atmosphere in the classroom became much more comfortable as it became clear we were all going to get through this first day together. As day one of my first week came to an end, I found myself eager to get to