The Student Teacher Chronicles: Week Three.

Hurricane Ike is coming my way, so everything is shutting down, and everybody is evacuating and whatnot. As such, the rest of the school week was canceled, making for quite the short week. Anyway, here we are.

---------------

And now, another short week.

Monday wasn’t too special. I just did the usual vocab for the regular English 3 students. For creative writing, I started out having them think of who their favorite fictional character was and why before I randomly called on them to divulge the information. I handed back the vocab review to some shocked students, though I think it helped for later (see Tuesday). After that, everybody finished up their “I Am” presentations (including me, since they asked me to do one, as well. My mentor teacher also did part of her own). And that was about it.

Tuesday was interesting, because I basically took over for every period except first and second. I don’t do too much in first period yet, as it’s AP, and she’s setting a lot of things up with them. And she often uses second period as an example of how to do things in case she hands it over to me later. And that’s exactly what she did. I went over capitalization and (the beginning of) punctuation with most of the classes. It went very well (though I could tell I was starting to lose my voice by the end of the day). However, 5^th period was a bit strange. The one guy who seems to really tie the class together was absent, so it really felt like something was missing. As such, the class didn’t come off nearly as interesting and was actually quite awkward. Everybody was dead silent. So I’m standing up there reading off these rules and stuff from this packet, and it feels like I’m just doing this straight lecture to people who I can’t tell if they’re paying attention or not because they’re refusing to respond to anything. I was seriously very close to saying “Bueller… Bueller…” None of my jokes or anything was working like they had with the other class. They were just dead completely, and it was very awkward. I know you’d think it would be a teacher’s dream to have a silent class, but it was very unsettling.

Anyway, for creative writing, they had a vocab test… and in the last 10 minutes, I began reading the short story I wrote for them based on the character they had come up with. They were so into it (at least according to my mentor teacher, who was watching their reactions and stuff), but the bell rang when I was just a few paragraphs away from finishing. But they were all like “I’m totally gonna finish it tonight! Don’t worry!” So that made me feel good that my writing was enthralling enough to make them want to read at home. After that, I graded all of their tests, and almost all of them did very well. Only two people failed… one of which was a new guy who had only been there half the days he’d been on the roll, and the other was an ESL student who doesn’t really seem to care too much. And most of the grades were A’s and high B’s. So that made me realize that they took it more seriously after that review grading the previous day.

Wednesday, we didn’t have student teaching because of our student teacher seminar. And Thursday and Friday are canceled due to Hurricane Ike, as well.

And that, as they say, is that.