Day 5

Made it! I think the students and I are both ready for a break.

Day 4

Fairly uneventful day, although we did start our elective classes. The elective classes are actually a pretty cool idea: students get to pick a "for fun" class that they will go to once a week for 8 weeks. I volunteered to co-lead a class with a mom from fourth grade. Did I pick a subject that I'm already very good at teaching, just to make my life easier? Of course not. I'm teaching singing. I think we're going to have the kids compose a school anthem, but our ultimate goal is still a little nebulous. I've never taught singing before, so I'm getting the feeling that this class will become an adventure in and of itself. Of course, we did get off to a little bit of a rocky start today when our room got switched at the last minute (the coordinator had apparently not talked to the right people about the facilities) and we had an unannounced drop-and-cover drill. Oh well--chalk it up to one more "experience" in this already weird week.

Believe me when I say I'm looking forward to this weekend!

Day 3

One of the weird things going on this week is that we have standardized testing. Except today, of course. We ended up having to cancel our testing period at the last minute (literally one or two minutes after school started) because so many buses arrived late today. I was a little stressed about having to teach during a period I had not prepared for, but it turned out to be a good thing. I had the students write about Cinderella from the point of the shoe. They loved it! As you can imagine, many of their stories involved sweaty feet and general smelliness. Some of the more creative also involved shoes that wanted to learn how to cook, a shoe/feet war, and one shoe getting married to another. I'm seriously thinking about not giving this assignment back to the students and bringing it home with me, just for laughs.

I also got to teach about empowerment today. After reading "Cinder Edna" (a story about a Cinderella-type girl who takes the initiative in living happily ever after), the whole class got into a great discussion about choosing to be happy and helping ourselves instead of waitng for someone to rescue us. The funny part is, most of them have already given this some thought and have very strong opinions about it. Empowered third-grade girls are pretty darn fantastic.

Day 2

Today a kid brought a pocket knife to school and took it out to recess with him. Three teachers, a counselor, and a vice principal later, we got the whole thing worked out. Another exciting day in third grade!

Takeover 1

Day 1: already behind schedule. Shoot!

Just so this post (hopefully series of posts) doesn't sound too confrontational or seem to be harkening back to colonialism, here's a quick bit of background on a teaching "takeover." Over the course of the semester, I have to do four weeks of total instruction in the classroom. Of course, my master teacher is still hovering in the back of the room while I'm up front all day. I guess a "takeover" could be defined as when I get to pretend that I'm the real teacher. Or maybe I could describe this takeover period as teaching-with-training-wheels. Either way, there's going to be a lot on my plate this week.