Student Teaching - Week One (8/19-8/23)

     Describing my first week as a learning curve would be an understatement. While I overall feel pretty good with how things went, I definitely can sense some very noticeable growing pains happening. 

    This week was much heavier on the classroom preparation side of things rather than actual teaching. Since school didn't start until Friday, the first several days were spent with my CT and helping her get her classroom ready by setting up displays, organizing shelves, and other management. There was also a lot of meetings between all of the staff (such as the first few hours of Wednesday where they went over literacy expectations and SEL guidelines). 

    I will admit that the first days were pretty draining mentally just because of how little to do I actually had. I did enjoy the experience I gained, and especially enjoyed organizing the classroom in our freetime, but that was a process I overall didn't enjoy all that much. This leads us into the first day of school on Friday. 

    The night before I did not sleep well at all due to a combination of anxiety and excitement, which for sure did not help my energy the next day. The first day was mostly spent on establishing/going over expectations with the students with some curriculum, mainly math and literacy thrown in throughout. The first part of the day went by pretty fast. I enjoyed introducing myself to the students, and helping manage the classroom. It was in the afternoon when the lack of sleep and the energy of the students began to clash. When they came back from lunch, they became much more restless and antsy, making them harder to keep on track. At the same time, I felt myself crashing to the point where I spaced out a couple of times. It was harder for me to keep up and remain engaged, which led to me feeling frustrated and restless myself. Despite this, I pulled through and had a second wind kick in during the final hour which made me feel so much more involved. 

    While the first week felt like a lot mentally, I have a very good feeling that once I get used to the routine of things as well as develop better management habits, things should realistically fall into place. Since this was the first week of several, I am not letting myself get too disheartened over the negative aspects and will rather use them as learning experiences to help me to improved as I continue my student teaching.