Acting like a teacher

Today I acted like a teacher. Only two-thirds of the school attended today (6th and 7th grade; 8th grade, my class, attends tomorrow along with the other two grades). The principal asked us 8th grade teachers to walk around the school and visit with the 6th and 7th graders, help them open their lockers, and make sure they were able to find their classes. So, during my off time, I roamed the halls looking for lost children. I also helped serve lunch to the 6th and 7th grade classes (free lunch for me!) and after school helped kids find their buses home. Easy peasy, but the day was long. The days we had our meetings at school went much quicker than today, but I’ll assume tomorrow, when I have my own classes, will fly by.

Every day of my student teaching flew by without my being able to keep up.

What was nice is that we had several students from the 8th grade class show up to help out today. This was very nice of them, and they were definitely a benefit to us. It would probably be nice for a new student to have his/her peers help out with locker combinations, class routes, etc. Plus, I got to meet a few of my students.

What I noticed most today was that our student body is very diverse–even more so than the classes I worked with during my student teaching. I come from a small town of little diversity, and what I see now is a welcome change. (See my previous posts about registration and non-English-speaking families registering their children for school.)

No work to share today, because it’s all on the school computer, but tomorrow I’ll use my “Getting to know you” pamphlet for the first time, and I’ll share any difficulties (and any changes the students suggest for the pamphlet) later this week. The second day will be spent on going over the class rules and creating a Class Constitution: I’ll ask the students to come up with rules for the classroom (aside from the normal school rules) that will be written in their own words. Hopefully the students will come up with some rules about grading, contacting parents, classroom behavior, and participation (ha! right!). I’ll have the first class work in groups of four in order to generate four rules that should be applied to the classroom. They will then vote on the best rule per team, pass it on to the next group for amendation and ratification, and we’ll vote on the selected rules for the most popular rule for that class. The next class has it a little tougher–they’ll have to come up with a new set of rules which cannot include the prior instated rules. By the end of the day, we should have five important class rules.

I’ll let you know how that goes, and will post my list of instructions (along with a downloadable handout for students).

Until tomorrow….