The First Day

The alarm went off at 5:53AM this morning, which is the earliest I have woken up in quite a while. Drew Adams is also student teaching at Lux, but his car is being fixed this week, and I volunteered to go pick him up in the mornings and take him back home in the afternoons. Unfortunately, he lives on the opposite end of town (NW 16th and Hwy 77), which makes the morning commute last nearly an hour. I can certainly sympathize with the broken car situation, but I'm definitely looking forward to next week when I can sleep in a few extra minutes.

My day went quite well! My first two periods are plan periods, which allows my cooperating teacher and I to get our ducks in a row. Every Monday, my team meets to discuss any problems they are having in their classrooms and to talk about possible solutions. Today, we discussed a few students who are in the at-level classrooms who they think need to be re-tested to see if they could qualify for placement in the gifted class. Conversely, there are also some students in the diff. classes that they think may need to be bumped back down to the at-level class. This was a very interesting discussion to sit in on! Also during this time, I was trained on the very high-tech copy machine (referred to as the MFD), which I have already become very familiar with!

After the two planning periods, I had the differentiated Language Arts block, which lasts for two hours. They are a great group of kids! My cooperating teacher is able to do some really cool projects with them because we are able to go through the concepts very quickly.

Next, I had the two-hour block of at-level Language Arts, which is broken up by lunch. I ate lunch with the teachers on my team, which was also very fun! One teacher brought us peanut butter cupcakes and another teacher brought us chocolate chip cookies! Both were delicious! This class was somewhat rowdy this afternoon. My hunch is that they were eager to get outside to play in the snow. That was all they seemed to be able to talk about!

After school, I stayed until 4:00 (an extra 45 minutes) to get things ready for tomorrow. I will be teaching everything for the entire day, which makes me feel nervous and excited at the same time! My cooperating teacher said that she had planned to throw me right in, and she certainly wasn't kidding! It will be interesting to see how tomorrow goes...at the end of the day, I get to sit in on my first all-staff meeting, which I'm also very excited to see!