merry end of 2009!

Well, the student teaching semester officially ended on December 10, 2009. I graduated from college 2 days later and now I find myself enjoying the life of a lazy bum a little bit too much.

Good thing the holidays are here to help me excuse my behavior for a few more days. There's something about just hanging around the house that I love so much: eating our leftovers, eating our Christmas candy, watching Nat Geo or History Channel specials with my dad, watching movies with my family, basically eating and watching TV in general...it could be pretty embarrassing if everybody knew how much TV is actually watched and how much treats are actually consumed around our home on a daily basis.

Anyway, the thought of going back into a school makes me groan inside. Just a wee bit. I sure do love not having to do anything. I guess I could more adequately say: I love wasting my time. This love of cruising Facebook for the latest gossip is sometimes beneficial - today I was able to call a friend and congratulate her on her engagement and her fetching new diamond, a mere day after the event, because of FB photo updates. But lingering over FB to get all caught up on everybody's doings is slightly lame. Just like zipping around on Etsy and jcrew's sale section to shop for everything I don't really need is kind of silly. Especially when it takes up an hour or two.

I have all this free time because of a December graduation with a degree that doesn't lend itself well to a mid-year-job opening. So, this would really be a great time to write. To read. And write some more. To scrapbook - maybe even finish scrapbooking freshman year of college (which was begun this summer...yick)!

But I do want a job, though. At least there's a few more days of productive leisure to be had before I hit up the school websites again...

week 13: Bueller...Bueller....

Good thing my blog is not like a classroom, or I'd be that incredibly frustrating, constantly absent student who is currently failing. This email is an attempt to sum up the past 3 weeks.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED LATELY, OR, THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

The Good:
1. Some students will like you, not because they think you're a great teacher or you're really cool - they'll just like you. This can mean a lot when you aren't sure how well you're connecting to other students or how good your lessons are.
2. Constant criticism is sometimes given by people who want you to toughen up and meet your potential.
3. Seeing students grow has become the goal and joy of my teaching. The rapport between me and them is also wonderful.

The Bad:
1. There's a lot more to memorize and remember than I thought.
2. Nobody ever tells you in college about handling students' papers and materials, or about getting procedures down. This is something you get to experience firsthand.
3. You WILL have to teach grammar, and they WON'T teach you how in college, so you have to learn on the fly.

The Ugly:
1. It's more important to get less-exciting lessons planned for a month or more than it is to plan on the fly as great ideas come to you. The latter method of planning will kill your spirit with stress!
2. I absolutely hate receiving passive-aggressive disapproval. And I've been getting it a lot with one teacher.

Hard to believe that I am going to be done full-time teaching in 2 1/2 weeks. After that I get to co-teach for a few days, then visit other classrooms to observe other teachers, and then I'll graduate. The graduation stuff came in the mail yesterday, and looking over those Powercat-emblazoned graduation announcements, I could feel that my parents were very proud of me. Another little thing that means a lot.

THE DEATH - OR REFOCUSING - OF IDEALISM

My best friend Katie wrote about a change in her perception of idealism last week. It's a timely post, especially as I've found that I am developing a more realistic way of looking at education.

During this student teaching semester, my romantic notions of teaching have been revealed to be a thin veneer of icing on top of a rock-hard cake of reality.

All the cool lesson ideas I gleaned from the Internet? Impossible or difficult to apply to the classrooms I've had.

My goal of implementing so much cool technology it would rock my students' worlds? Only 1 assignment, to make a Facebook page for a short story character, came close. And that was done on paper, not Facebook itself. (Although I will be learning to utilize some neat software called Beyond Question next week, through which I hope to get more tech in my teaching before I'm no longer the lead teacher.)

My dream of students loving me? HAHA. Most are tolerable of me, which is a bigger deal than I thought it would be, and a few do seem to genuinely like me. But all of a sudden, it's no longer such a need for me to have students think I'm more happening than Bella and Edward put together. Instead, it's more important that they have enough stuff to do and that the stuff is relevant.

To be idealistic is to believe fervently in the hope that people will change. For me, the idealism includes:

• nurturing the next generation of great novelists and newswriters;
• bringing students who can barely sound out words to a point where they can read and comprehend grade-level text on their own;
• directing students' hearts and minds toward the people and situations in their lives who can most benefit from their compassionate attention;
• and, most importantly, shedding light on the Truth that I know is present in the good works of literature that Westerners revisit again and again.

It's not that these things aren't worth believing in and pursuing. It's just that they can't be touched or even glanced at until the mundane practices of procedure, control, and discipline are firmly set in place. Without control and guidance, students become their own bosses, and suddenly, directing their attention to worthwhile things is not unlike an attempt to herd 50+ cats - all with iPods and cell phones firmly attached to their ears.

It's amazing how quickly my sympathies for these kids fizzled to the point that I was having to lay aside their actions and force myself to care about them. I never saw that coming. It's those kids who refuse to do even the simplest assignment; who boldly mouth off to you; who can't quit talking to or harrassing their classmates even for a few minutes; who sit and stare into space while their grade quietly swirls down the drain. I have come to this part of the semester more realistic about loving kids - it's an act of the will sometimes.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned this semester is that the idealistic views I hold about everything must be tempered by reality - particularly with teaching. But I still think once I get into the rhythm of establishing my classroom as a place to learn and grow, learning and growth will happen, and these idealistic hopes and dreams may come true, even if just for one student. In which case, the belief and endurance of idealism will have proved to be so very worth it.

LOOKING AHEAD

This coming week, I will apply for my first year teaching license. It's called an initial/conditional license. The emergency sub license should be on its way next month and then I'll receive the REAL license in January.

I've nearly completed 3 applications for employment in the "big 3" districts. The part I'm waiting on is references, because I am hoping and praying for a positive reference from one of the school principals next week. I have 2 observations by the principal and 1 of the associate principals on the SAME DAY. YIKES!

Looking forward to: applying for my license, finishing these last 2 units so things can wind down, seeing my sister in Springfield this weekend. Joy.

week 9: organization and adaptation

To any education student who may have stumbled across my last post:

Student teaching will NOT ruin your life! (It shouldn't, anyway.) You will probably have at least 1 day like the day I described most recently during your teaching career, but you should know that even the best and brightest teachers have challenging classes sometimes. Besides, you may not be unorganized like me. But to anyone who IS a little less of a type-A, color-coordinated-folder using, list-generating, anal-retentive person...work on being a little more like that. Get organized. Then you will have less to worry about when student teaching. Trust me on this one.

My conclusion on the struggles and difficulties of the past 2 weeks is ORGANIZATION and ADAPTATION. I will now be committing to making handwritten lists of everything until I can create a spreadsheet or some other tool to keep track of missing assignments. I will also be sending both Ms. S and Mrs. B lesson plans in advance. Feedback is a good thing.

This week the schedule is wacko macko because the end of first quarter is Friday. That's so insane. I can't believe I've come to the end of 9 weeks! Halfway through. Goodness. Sakes.

Now on to This Week At School!

9th grade: writing and turning in their Personal Narrative this week. The Personal Narrative is a page length essay, double spaced, about 500 words, about a 5-minute experience that is significant to them. I had a neat moment with one of my students who Just. Won't. Work. last week. By sitting down by his desk and helping him to think about things he enjoys and memories he recalls, we managed to get him to choose to write his narrative about the time he landed a very difficult skateboarding trick. I am looking forward to reading this one. If only kids like him could get some intrinsic motivation...instead of waiting for a teacher or a para to hover around him.

10th grade: finishing Julius Caesar. They will create illustrative projects for this play instead of taking a test. I am definitely looking forward to this!

Web 2.0 question: Would it be worth it to create wikis for my next 2 units, Romeo and Juliet and various short stories? I'm exploring this question and am not sure. If you have thoughts, let me have 'em PLEASE!

just another manic monday. - the bangles

This is slightly unorthodox, but today was wretched so I feel that it deserves its own post.

Well. I thought I lost control of my 9th graders a week or two ago. That little episode cannot even compare with what happened today. Basically, my Chatty Cathy class was chatty to the extreme today. By that I mean: 2 verbal warnings. Then a mark on the board (standing for 1 minute after the lunch bell till they got to go eat lunch). Then another mark.

Then 3. More. Marks.

All this while I was trying to get them to do a group reading of the short story.

Anyway, I found myself working in a group, while the 2 other adults were working with 2 other groups, so that we were all completely engrossed in dragging them through the story when the lunch bell rang.

My students vanished. I was left with just a couple lingering behind. They eventually left too - and then it was just me, staring at my marks on the board and feeling any shred of a sentiment that I am a teacher who follows through on what she says vaporize into the suddenly empty room.

And then the tears came. I tried to hold them back, but I was so upset that I couldn't get them to pay attention today and that they seemed to respect me so little. Good thing my cooperating teacher was there to encourage me and give me a much needed hug and good advice to make sure I let every student know that I would still make good on my promise to give them consequences for being so booger-y earlier (to put it VERY VERY mildly).

I let them know after lunch that they got lucky since I was working with a group and lost track of time. I had them serve 2 1/2 minutes of silence after the bell rang at the end of the hour. They will serve the other 2 1/2 minutes of silence on Wednesday when I see their class again. And I can assure them and myself that I will NOT forget next time they're rowdy before lunch. Few things speak to kids as much as denying lunch for a minute or two.

But I confess that I was most hurt today by recognizing the simple truth that I am such a passive person and this passivity is working against me as a teacher.

It's so easy at times like this to wish I was different. I want to cope with the frustration of failure by curling up inside myself and numbing the pain to the old familiar tune of, "If only I were ___________ instead of _________." If only I were bold instead of meek. If only I were loud instead of quiet. If only I were funny instead of goofy. If only I were confident instead of hesitant. Etc.

Succumbing to berating myself, however, never fixes the problem. "Duh." Here's what will fix my particular problem, or at least aid in the eventual fixing:

A pause.

Regathering of my strength and focus.

Prayer.

New plans.

Moving forward.

Ignoring the desire to whine about my personality.

Reveling in the fact that, as Anne so wisely learned, "tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it."

Basically, today I learned that my 9th graders are just not mature enough to handle any group or pair work. For the next several class periods, until I see improvement, they will have to deal with an ironclad structured classroom. Whatever it takes to establish myself as the boss and the law. I don't like it, but I'm going to do it so that, by the end of my time with them, we can move past this immaturity to something far more interesting and exciting.

In college, education professors like to focus on what I call the "fluff" of education - Web 2.0 tools instead of books, for example, along with sweet stories of reaching difficult kids and not giving zeros as grades. The truth is, those folks have been out of the regular classroom for Way Too Long. They have forgotten, or pushed to the back of their minds, the significance of first establishing control and management over the classroom. If you don't have control, you can have the coolest lesson in the world, and you'll never get to see it happen. First things first - establish authority and procedures for learning. Hopefully it won't take the rest of the semester for these students to straighten up and move past the madness to take some responsibility over their learning in my class.

week 5-6: only 10 minutes left of lunch! QUICK!

I have mere minutes to correct my error of not blogging about last week, here goes! (P.S., how did we ever handle 4 years of 25 minute lunches in high school?!)

Let's see, in week 5, my dreams of becoming a proper lesson planner (i.e. being AT LEAST 2 weeks ahead of the current week) fell apart in a miserable heap. I spent last week (and this week, unfortunately) planning for the next day - the night before. horrendous. One of my teachers has noticed this and cared enough to give me feedback about getting it together. I am proud to report that, although I felt the beginnings of a mini-meltdown gathering in my chest at her words, I quickly shoved the despair aside and instead got to work on catching up. This semester is proving each week to be a catalyst in improving my self-health and coping skills.

In other news, I had not set up a system for TARDIES, ABSENCES or LATE WORK this semester. This is proving to be a beast to deal with - a three-headed beast of a size that almost feels like Biblical proportions. I will have my very first detention next week (awww, precious...?) for tardies/skipping class, and no doubt I will be spending the rest of my free time at school this quarter prepping a late work binder and hounding kids till they give me assignments so I can get rid of their many zeros. Funny how often kids just Won't Turn Something In. Even when I'm standing right there, asking for it. Even when I am gathering everyone's papers. And they think we have NO IDEA if they skip class after lunch (when their stuff is STILL at their desk). Amazing. If I ever doubted the science behind the adolescent brain not being fully connected, I repent wholeheartedly. It's true.

Finally became the lead teacher in 10th grade this week! Julius Caesar is off to a good start. One sour moment today during 6th block...a few students were asking me when Mrs. B will return. When I explained that I'll be their main teacher through December, I got less-than-thrilled looks. Oh well. What can you do? They're stuck with me - and I with them. These lunch block classes can be the most difficult at times. Especially this one. Quite a few sassy kids here.

In 9th grade this week, I had my 1st experience of a total class failure to communicate. They literally Did Not Get what I was trying to teach about a narrator's voice.

More later, bell has rung! Tonight and tomorrow: Parent-teacher conferences and phone calls to parents! yay?

"Men at some times must be masters of their fates; the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Cassius, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

week 4: on the eve of week 5

Whoops! I let the week get away from me! Quick recap:

Week 4 was a week in which I realized that it is trickier to put freshmen into groups than I previously thought. Here's what it sounded like in my classroom on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Me: Okay, now I want you to get into groups of 4. How about, you 4, you 4, you 4 etc.
Students: [silence]
Me: I mean, push your desks together and get into groups.
Students: [blank stares, some lethargic movement that eventually ended in groupings of 4]

They are so funny. Funny haha and funny strange.

Big news: I had my FIRST MAJOR DISCIPLINARY ISSUE this week.

It involved the aforementioned group activity, in which I gave each group posterboard, coloring materials, and relatively simple directions: to draw and color an image from the story, with 2 quotes from the story, that capture the mood of the short story. So simple, a fun end-of-the-week activity.

But for 1 group of 3 boys, who were goofing around the whole class time, the temptation to add a little something extra to their drawing was too much.

When I went over to check on them, I found myself looking at a very bloody rendering of the violent climax of the story, with an extra addition: a thought-bubble from one of the stick figures, with a bed - a stick figure - and a dog. In. That. Order.

I was ticked. I really was upset by this. I was so upset that I got onto them pretty intensely (for me) and told them that unless they came to seminar and redid the assignment individually (free of creepy suggestive images), each boy would get a zero. Two of them came in, two didn't. 1 of the absentees had football, and the other just didn't show. I think I'll give those two 1 more chance before it goes down in history in the gradebook.

Oh, the joys of teaching English to goofy/creepy freshman boys.

In other news: I went to a GIFTED IEP meeting, which is quite the opposite of a regular IEP meeting. These Individualized Education Plan meetings involve the student, their parents, and their teachers. I only stayed for 15 minutes because there was literally nothing I had to worry about for this high-performing student. So different from last week's IEP meeting, in which the student is being encouraged to just make C's so he can pass this 3rd round of English 9.

Plans for this week: Learning about characterization in Langston Hughes' "Thank You, Ma'am" and Judith Ortiz's "American History." We will examine Facebook profiles and how they share DIRECT characterization (name, date of birth, personal info) as well as INDIRECT characterization (profile picture, people they are friends with, things people write on their wall). Then we will make FB profiles (the paper version) for characters in the stories we've read so far. A teensy bit of Web 2.0 making its way into my classroom, finally!


on what makes a book:

"To those who know and love them, books are recognizable, as as forests are, and cities, by their structure (branching and rebranching), their complexity (enormous), and their size (big enough to get lost in). A book is usually something we can carry in one hand, yet if it is a real book it is also larger than we are: a city or forest of words that can feed us and swallow us up and transform us. A book is not a catalogue or list; it has to make more sense than that. It is not a stack of cordwood but a tree: a branching, leafing, flowering structure, unfolding in the mind, where it can find the space it needs." - Unknown (Kyle, who wrote this incredible thing?!)

week 3: flexability...frustration

I wrote such a sunny entry last week, but this week changed things up a bit...

On Monday I learned that 60 more freshman students had enrolled at the school than were anticipated. This meant that some of the freshman English classes were shuffled around and even pulled from some teachers' schedules in order to re-hire a teacher whose position was eliminated last year. What did this mean? It meant that Ms. S was ecstatic to have only 5 classes to plan for, with 2 free hours for planning. It also meant that I lost her 6th hour class, which had some awesome students whom I was sad to let go.

Now I have 2 freshman classes (with 17 kids that have IEPs) and 3 sophomore honors classes. Things are going to shift a little bit to accomidate the very different needs of these kids. But this is part of what teaching - and life - is about, I suppose. Learning to deal with dramatic changes on the fly. Not getting your feathers too ruffled. Rolling up your sleeves and doing the dirty work.

You may be thinking, "Well, duh. How do you not get this is what life means?" But the fact is, I have very rarely set out to accomplish a task by working step by step from A to B to C to D to E to F to G etc. Most of my life I have wasted time trying to find short cuts from A to G - shortcuts that require the least amount of work and the quickest avenue to success. Too bad most of the time, these shortcuts really don't exist. So I end up doing a whole lot of nothing. It is deiniftely possible to fritter your life away wishing to get somewhere when all you need to do is get up, step forward, open the door, and GO.

I think I'm finally in a place in my life where I have no other option but to work my hardest to get from step A to step B. This is a good thing. I have students who need my instruction to be differentiated so they can come away with understanding. I have supportive teachers who can lead me in this and I have the wise advice of countless individuals available through my educational communities online. Not to mention the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self-control that comes from my Lord who led me to this school for such a time as this.

How sweet it is to know that God knows all of our days before one of them comes to be. How delightful to rest in the certainty that He has a calling on each of our lives, and that He will bring His purposes to pass. The key is to keep the communication line with Him wide open.

Anyway, I learned about flexibility this week, and I experienced some frustration with my lessons. I truly felt like the kids were stone-bored and hating me by the end of the week. My CT and I had taken turns reading a 17-page short story aloud, since we don't yet know who can read aloud and who can't. My CYOA activity did not produce the shining eyes and bright smiles that I anticipated. After class I couldn't hide my disappointment.

Good thing God placed me with these wise, experienced teachers. The CT wanted to know why I thought it was a failure when at one point, ALL the students were reading the books and making decisions like I asked them to, completely engaged. She reminded me that high school students will RARELY if EVER give me the facial expressions of joy and/or interest during instructional time.

I am learning that teachers can NOT measure the success of their lessons based on the looks on students' faces.

THis 3 day weekend is oh-so-welcome. On Tuesday I have my first clinical observation, with the 1st freshman class of the day. I need prayer if you can spare it. :)


"Do not follow me! Let's just be fabulously where we are and who we are. You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow. Let the stars keep track of us. Let us ride our own orbits and trust that they will meet. May our reunion be not a finding but a sweet collision of destinies!"

(on reunions, from Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli)

week 2 - no need to reinvent the wheel

A lot happened this week...

- This week was Picture Week. The students took their pictures during English class. I definitely had some deja vu moments when I went with the students to the gym each block and watched as those infamous LifeTouch photographers captured images of my students in all their 9th and 10th grade glory.

- I attended my first school staff meeting on Monday. For the first time I saw how many teachers a large high school like this one actually has - we filled up the cafeteria. I made an appointment to meet with the principal next week, so I'm looking forward to meeting him and learning more about the student community at this school.

- Ms. S got sick on Wednesday and had to leave after 1st block, leaving me as the only teacher out of 4 (the CT, the para, and the sub) who kind of knew what was going on. I found myself teaching a review of transitive/intransitive verbs by myself, for a good 15 minutes. It just kind of happened - the best part was that I felt so confident up there. I could see flashes of understanding in the students' eyes and it encouraged me so much. In fact, I'm thinking it was the natural high that gave me the adrenaline I felt as I kept teaching. But the best encouragement came from the CT and the sub, who both said I did a great job. High praise coming from 2 seasoned educators.

I ate lunch with the sub and was surprised to learn that she was a Christian who is actively involved in volunteering for City Union Mission and a member of multiple prayer groups. One of her prayer groups is the very same one who prayed for my roommate last year as she was undergoing treatment for her rare bone marrow disorder. Absolutely amazing. This woman has worked in a nearby district for many years, so I have written her name down just in case I solicit that district for a job in the future. This precious prayer warrior prayed for me after school that day. It was the sweetest thing. Meeting her was the blessing of the week.

- The title of the post came from my first creative attempt for a lesson plan this semester. Last week I began work on creating a Choose Your Own Adventure story(ies) for my 9th graders to introduce our first short story in the short story unit. The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell is a fascinating suspense/adventure story about a famous hunter who must match wits with another hunter - one who has decided to hunt people instead of animals. I thought that a CYOA game would cultivate discussion about making choices and figuring out how to survive by using what you know. I read those novels as a kid and found them incredibly entertaining. I loved how each story could begin the same way, yet have multiple different endings based on which pages you chose to turn to.

However, when it came to writing my own CYOA, I quickly learned that I had set myself up for an incredibly difficult task. I was actually writing several short stories for this CYOA game, and they were multiplying exponentially as I continued to offer 2 choices for the students on each story card. It was too much work. I was so disappointed, thinking that I had set myself up to fail, but fortunately Ms. S liked my idea. She suggested that we just borrow some of those CYOA novels from other libraries and have the kids work through them in groups next week. So, my idea still works, even though I'm not actually writing the scenarios for them. As Ms. S said, "there is no need to reinvent the wheel."

- Back to School Night ocurred this week. I had been told I would most likely see all the parents of the honors 10th graders and very few of the regular 9th graders. It was true. Mrs. B's room was full of eager parents while Ms. S had just a handful. There were a few parents of struggling students that I would have liked to see who did not show up. However, it was great to see whose parents did come, because it showed that they definitely take an interest in their child's education. Lots of interesting adults came, some who I definitely recognized as being certain students' parents and others who completely surprised me as to whose parents they were.

- More planning for teaching the short story unit to the freshmen and "Julius Caesar" to the sophomores. Dreading "Caesar," it sounds so...boring and dull. But I guess it's not fair to call it that when I haven't even read the play yet. Et tu, Brute?


All in all, a very eventful week. I am so excited about leaving grammar far behind and moving on to short stories with the freshmen! It's going to be awesome. The sophomores start Elie Wiesel's "Night" this Monday, that will also be exciting! Hooray for actual literature! :)

week 1: butterflies and confidence

I added a picture from a springtime view of the gorgeous Kansas Flint Hills to the top of this blog. In the 9th grade Honors class I observed today, the students were learning about symbols. Thus, to show that I was paying attention, I suggest that this photograph is a symbol of education moving the wayward traveler along her path in life. Nice, right? :)

After tomorrow my first week as a student teacher will be over. Although it's only been four days, it really feels like Monday actually happened LAST week - that's how long the days have felt and how much I've seen/learned in the past 4 days. I've been soaking up my observation time each day and leading the 9th classes for a few short lessons (in grammer, no less - blech. let me tell you, the sullen looks of boredom and the torture of these grammar lessons on those students' faces is absolutely WRETCHED. something i want to fight tooth and nail when i take over in a few weeks. ).

I am dissatisfied with the trend I already see in myself: that, much like a pot of boiling water, I start off cold with the students in the 1st block, then only get hot and poppin' around 5th block. Sadly, I bet part of it's the coffee finally kicking in. Still, I am waiting to fall into the rhythm of readiness that comes with being at school each morning, prepared and ready for those first blocks of the day. Each student deserves my best, and the morning blocks shouldn't miss out because the student teacher was still working on her caffeine fix.

The truth is, I am still pretty nervous when I get up to lead a class. My mind gets fuzzy and I forget important details when I'm speaking to them, I speak too quickly, and/or I muddle my words by my classic mumbling skills. In a way, it was interesting to see how my confidence grew and the butterflies in my tummy were quelled after the first few times of going through the routine of the same lesson taught to different students. I'd just like to be that way, to be on and going strong, ALL the time. A work in progress, I guess.

So you can see why it's a good thing I'm not totally alone at the front yet! I have 2 cooperating teachers, Ms. S and Ms. B. Ms. S teaches 9th regular English and Mrs. B teaches 10th Honors English. Their classrooms are side-by-side in the "garden level" of the school (what every other person, including myself, would call the basement). The rooms have no windows but are still bright and the temp doesn't fluctuate nearly as much as you would expect. It's relatively quiet down there because students only come down when they have a purpose, like class. Consequently, the hallway is not filled like the upstairs hallways with the crush of student bodies slowly trickling to classes and winding around pockets of people chatting. The gymnasiums, large and auxiliary, are a few hallways down from my teachers' classrooms. I walk past them to visit the restroom or fill up my water bottle. I plan to take pictures for my own use soon, but I'll have to check to see whether I can actually post them on here.

This week I've learned a few things about the students in my classes and how teachers teach them:

1. It is a lot more difficult than I thought to distinguish which students belong in which social groups. Of course, there are the athletes and the cheerleaders. Then there are a few who stand out because of their apparel. You have the artsy-"scene"-fashionista girls who wear high waisted skirts, brightly colored Keds and those goofy black plastic glasses with no frames. (Seriously, what is that about? Don't get it.) On the flip side, you get the skinniest skinny jeans in all kinds of colors - the best I've seen so far was a zebra striped pink and blue pair. But for the most part, the students are just students. They wear jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, tennis shoes and flipflops, and as I look out at them from the front of the room, I can't always pinpoint who is popular and who's not. I expected that with my sharp memories of the pain of high school cliques that I would instantly catch on to the "who's-who" of this school, but apparently not. That's probably a good thing.
2. Summer reading gets very little time in the classroom - about a week and that's it. The 10th H students took their "Once and Future King" test the 2nd day of school and now they're over it - or rather, Mrs. B is over it. Soon they'll be starting Elie Wiesel's "Night." It's made me realize how precious classroom time really is for teachers as far as the curriculum THEY want to cover rather than covering the summer reading that they didn't necessarily choose.
3. Freshmen students are quite possibly the toughest crowd I've ever encountered. I tried to get them to react by telling a pretty detailed story about my weekend at the Ozarks and how I murdered a poor catfish because I thought I knew how to take out a hook - but instead jammed it down his throat with the pliers. No response. Maybe they were busy dreaming of fried catfish, since it was lunch time?
   
4. Ms. S and I were talking about the difference between regular students and honors students when she caught me off guard with this statement (paraphrased): "I have students in my regular class who are smart enough to be in the honors class. The only difference between honors students and regular students is that the honors students have more drive." I have NEVER thought of that before, ever. Probably because I was an honors student with barely any drive...now I know why most teachers want to teach honors - most of them are the kids who really want to be there.

Well, that's the essence of week 1. Now on to the weekend and week 2!

"The best thing for being sad...is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn." T.H. White (Once and Future King)

one word: anticipation.

student teaching is almost upon me! hooray! and YIKES!

in honor of this thrilling and terrifying occasion, i plan to make this blog a veritable cornucopia of information about teaching, from shout-outs about good articles concerning education, to education news, to Web 2.0 tools and implementation - not to mention some carefully-worded stories about my experiences this fall as a student teacher in 2 high school English classes.

i'm learning about RSS feeds and social bookmarking and all that good stuff, but it'm thinking it would be nice to be able to record my thoughts about the things i see, hear, and read about in a nice blog.

so i made this one.