World's best student teaching

This week was my first one student teaching. If I do say so myself, I am pretty much the best student teacher there's ever been. I mean, I go waaay above and beyond the call of duty. More on that later.

I'm working with Jennifer Holmes at the middle school here, and she is an amazing teacher! I take these education courses about what an ideal teacher, and she is it. She is incredibly positive with these 7th graders, even when she is conferencing with them after class about their general slacker-ness. I've gotten to observe this week, and I wrote down a lot of things that I can be sure to do.

The first week was only for observation, but being the awesome go-getter I am, I actually passed out some papers and made some copies too. I'm sure I'll get a gold star or something!

It's pretty neat being back in my old school. Just about every corner of that building brings back some memory. I remember exactly where my locker was in 7th grade and even my combination. One time we were out in the halls cleaning out our lockers, and somewhere in the depth of papers heaped on the bottom was a nasty old apple starting to mold over. Ew! I just shut my locker and decided not to use it anymore. Fast forward several weeks later, and that entire section of the hallway smelled to high heaven! I think I eventually braved the stench and threw away the apple-- along with a good barrier of papers to protect my hands.

Then there's the time in shop class while we were drafting, I reached across the table to grab an eraser, and another girl stabbed my hand with a compass. It was HER eraser.

In 8th grade, all my friends had 6th lunch, but I had 5th. They had so much fun while I was stuck in stupid French class, so I just stopped going to French! Then after several weeks, I met Madame Gillebaud in the hallway. She asked me what was going on and where I'd been, and I felt so bad that I just started crying right then and there. Then I resumed going to French.

There's the time Lydia and I had been absent for a test, and we had to go sit in the hall while the class reviewed it the next day. Mr. Farley came by and asked us what was up, and we made up a story about how we got in a fight and in all our pushing and shoving, we broke our science teacher's fish tank. He believed us, and we knew we were cool.

It's funny to see some of my old teachers (only like 5 or so). They have no idea who I am, now that I introduce myself with my married name. Mrs. Smith-Ecke, the orchestra teacher, recognized me after a double-take, but it was because I was friends with her daughter, not because I'd had her as a teacher.

It's fun to see my old daycamp kiddos all grown up. There are probably 10 or so that I've recognized so far. I last had them in camp when they were 7-year-olds, so they don't remember me at all. But it's amazing to see the little 2nd-graders peeking out of these sassy, 7th-grade bodies.

This next week we're going to conference about what exactly I'll be teaching. I'm happy to be getting more involved. It's hard to observe the same class 5 times in a row, especially on days where Penny wakes me up earlier than my already-early 6:00 alarm.