I’m batting 2/10 in my ratio of teaching days to snow days.
After a retreat this weekend with my lovely housemates at a beautiful cottage on the edge of frozen Lake Michigan, I was setting my alarm for 5:10 am not to get up and read books but to grab my clothes, my lunch box, and my courage and catch the bus to my new middle school.
I was so on top of things that I was able to catch an earlier bus than I was expecting and ended up getting to school before 7 am when it opened. I also ended up with soaked shoes as all the snow was melting from the last week, and the route I take involves ten minutes of walking on both ends of the route. Once some person—I think it was the building guy—let me in, I waltzed over to my mentor’s room and picked out a space for my desk to live.
Even though I was only able to teach Monday and Tuesday, and teach is a strong word for stand-up-in-front-of-students-and-tell-them-fun-(and-not-so-fun)-facts-about-you, I’ve already felt more invested in this placement than my sophomore student aiding. I’m starting to memorize students’ names, recommending books with a 33% success rate (shoutout to M. T. Anderson’s Symphony for City of the Dead), and getting questions about my C++ use. After 3-hour teacher seminar on Tuesday, I was getting excited to see a real class happen rather than just going to the library to pick out nonfiction books. Then Grand Rapids turned the cold shoulder on me and glazed the roads.
I feel like my mentor teacher and I are getting along well. He’s tolerant of my sometimes fool-hardy decisions, like me walking 30 minutes to school (and then him picking me up) in 0-degree windchill to get the work I left there on Tuesday, and is willing to let me shake things up. He clearly cares about his students, and his colleagues respect him. He even played a random indie playlist when we were both chilling at school late. I think we’ll get along fabulously for the most part.
Maybe I feel so in my element because this school reminds me a lot of LCA—caring students, the general atmosphere of goodwill, willingness to step out of the box. Maybe it’s because it feels like one of the easier assignments: we are on a block schedule, so I’ll only be teaching a one hour religion class and two 80-minute English classes a day, which will have the same material on Monday & Tuesday and Wednesday & Thursday. Maybe it’s because I’ve finally owned who I am (a 3 on the Enneagram, surprising no one) and where I want to get going.
After a retreat this weekend with my lovely housemates at a beautiful cottage on the edge of frozen Lake Michigan, I was setting my alarm for 5:10 am not to get up and read books but to grab my clothes, my lunch box, and my courage and catch the bus to my new middle school.
I was so on top of things that I was able to catch an earlier bus than I was expecting and ended up getting to school before 7 am when it opened. I also ended up with soaked shoes as all the snow was melting from the last week, and the route I take involves ten minutes of walking on both ends of the route. Once some person—I think it was the building guy—let me in, I waltzed over to my mentor’s room and picked out a space for my desk to live.
Even though I was only able to teach Monday and Tuesday, and teach is a strong word for stand-up-in-front-of-students-and-tell-them-fun-(and-not-so-fun)-facts-about-you, I’ve already felt more invested in this placement than my sophomore student aiding. I’m starting to memorize students’ names, recommending books with a 33% success rate (shoutout to M. T. Anderson’s Symphony for City of the Dead), and getting questions about my C++ use. After 3-hour teacher seminar on Tuesday, I was getting excited to see a real class happen rather than just going to the library to pick out nonfiction books. Then Grand Rapids turned the cold shoulder on me and glazed the roads.
I feel like my mentor teacher and I are getting along well. He’s tolerant of my sometimes fool-hardy decisions, like me walking 30 minutes to school (and then him picking me up) in 0-degree windchill to get the work I left there on Tuesday, and is willing to let me shake things up. He clearly cares about his students, and his colleagues respect him. He even played a random indie playlist when we were both chilling at school late. I think we’ll get along fabulously for the most part.
Maybe I feel so in my element because this school reminds me a lot of LCA—caring students, the general atmosphere of goodwill, willingness to step out of the box. Maybe it’s because it feels like one of the easier assignments: we are on a block schedule, so I’ll only be teaching a one hour religion class and two 80-minute English classes a day, which will have the same material on Monday & Tuesday and Wednesday & Thursday. Maybe it’s because I’ve finally owned who I am (a 3 on the Enneagram, surprising no one) and where I want to get going.
I wish I could live on this whole introductory and observation cloud for the rest of the semester rather than having to get down and dirty in lesson planning and teaching activities that flop, but I guess I’ll capitalize on my excitement while I feel it. Before all these snow days sap it out of me.
Recs:
Quiz: I stumbled across this quiz that tells you what shade of rainbow you are. It’s a good ol’ time.
Music: I’ll rec you “Weight” by Crywolf because I do really like it, but the reason I added this section was because the Kingdom Hearts theme written by Skrillex is just so dang good.
Quiz: I stumbled across this quiz that tells you what shade of rainbow you are. It’s a good ol’ time.
Music: I’ll rec you “Weight” by Crywolf because I do really like it, but the reason I added this section was because the Kingdom Hearts theme written by Skrillex is just so dang good.
Post a Comment