Thursday was: Very Good

Again, a really good week. I'll tell you what, this Student Teaching experience has been WAY different from the one that I did in Indiana 10 years ago. When I did Student Teaching the first time around, there were a couple of days here and there that I thought were really good, and the rest of the days I STRUGGLED to get out of bed in the morning - even calling in sick from time to time when I REALLY didn't want to go. Yeah, that was pretty much a day-to-day [even, some days, HOUR-TO-HOUR] rollercoaster, one day I would think, "This feels good. I'm doing the right thing with my life." The next day would be, "I HATE THIS. I JUST WANT TO QUIT. WHY AM I HERE?" Even now, this time around, I'm not SPRINGING out of bed each day thinking, "WOW! The sun is shining! The birds are singing songs just for me!" - and, yes, there are days where I would rather not get out of bed. But, I have a WAY better attitude about it all, it feels "right" 95% of the time, and, as I've mentioned before, the bad days are really all THAT bad.

A kid [strangely enough, the son of the witch... heehee, that sounds like I'm cursing, eh?] from our class BIT a kid from anothor class out on the playground Thursday afternoon. This is the boy who has the [technically undiagnosed] condition whereby he rocks when we are sitting on the rug, he blows on other kids, he contorts his face with his hands, and, when he gets angry he gets REALLY angry. Apparently this other kid kept pushing our kid [the only Anglo kid in our class] and our little guy hauled off and dug his teeth [FIRMLY] into the shoulder of the other boy. I looked, and it was bad. Skin was cut, and there was major bruising. The kid who got bit came up to me and told me all about it and I, prompty, went to Miles and said, "Um, this seems to be under your jurisdiction." Well, I can handle kids calling each other names and lightly kicking each other, but when there is bloodshed... well, that's what Miles gets paid to deal with.

As a whole class, we did a lesson on the difference between FICTION and NONFICTION books - or, as we also referred to them, INFORMATIONAL and MAKE BELIEVE books. One of Miles' books that we sorted was about sunflowers, and the second he showed the book to the class I thought, "GIRL WITH AUTISM." [Well, ok, in my head I didn't say "girl with autism" but actually referred to her by name...] She LOVES flowers, she draws flowers all the time, and spends a lot of her afternoon recess time looking at the flowers [including sunflowers] that are growing in the school garden off to the side of the playground. When it came time for the students to have free-reading time, I picked up the sunflower book, walked over to the girl with autism's table [knowing that she probably wouldn't have followed directions and gotten out a book of her own], and asked her if she wanted to look at the book with me. She nodded. So, we sat there for the entire time, looking at the pictures and figuring out the lifecycle of a sunflower. At recess that afternoon, she poked at me and then pointed to the sunflowers on the playground. I walked over to them with her and said, "Yeah, those are just like the sunflowers that we saw in the book, huh?" We were over there looking at the flowers for a good 5 minutes when this other girl in class [who hangs on me all the time] ran over and tugged at my shirt saying, "Will you play tag with me?" Without missing a beat, the girl with autism pushed the the other girl away as if to say [because, she still has yet to utter a single word at school], "Um, he's hanging out with ME right now!"

Math went very well on Thursday. Actually, after school that day he said, "Math went much better today than yesterday..." To which I, naturally, exclaimed, "What was wrong with Math yesterday!?!" Ah, my insecurities. So, for Thursday's Math lesson I had the kids sit in a circle and I started a pattern in the middle of the circle using little, plastic, colored bears [red, yellow, green, blue] and I had each person, in turn, come to the middle of the circle and place a bear to continue the pattern. It was fantastic - they totally got it. Next, they went to their seats and, using the same bears, planned out a pattern of their own which they would then stamp onto a paper article of clothing [I guess I described this on Wednesday, huh?]. Again, I thought we had a class of HAMS, but, it was like pulling teeth trying to get kids to stand up and "walk the runway", showing off their pattern-adorned headband, tie, or bracelet. All in all, yes, I suppose that it did go a bit better than Wednesday's Math lesson.

I went in to school on Friday afternoon for the class Halloween party. Thursday night I got home from seminar and looked in our wardrobe to see if there was ANYTHING that I could crudely fashion into a costume of sorts. A couple of shirts immediately jumped out at me: Brian's "racecar driver" looking shirt, and both my Nabisco and US Postal Service shirts. In the end, I thought that it would be easiest to pull off the "mailman" look. Friday morning I put on some grey pants, the mailman shirt, and stuffed a shoulder bag full of junkmail - tada, I was a mailman. Sure enough, though, when I walked into the classroom a bunch of kids kept asking, "Where is your costume?" Um, I'm wearing it! A USPS shirt and a bag full of junkmail! A mailman! Who am I kidding? I still don't like Halloween, and I DREAD having to put together a Halloween party for my students next next year [and EVERY YEAR AFTER]. The kids in their costumes were awfully cute, though. And, they were SO excited [although probably just from all of the sugar...].