Day 159- October 6th: how to get over your doubts

Every once and awhile as I sit in my classroom or work with students, or most commonly when I'm put in charge of the students, I think to myself, "Oh my god, I cannot do this, I'm going to be the worst teacher ever." Today was one of those days. I was put in charge of the students for a mere 15 minutes, so I could complete one of my assignment. Unfortunately, among all the chaos of writing papers last night I forgot to prepare how to give the directions. This is something that takes a lot longer to learn that you would thing, especially when you have English Learners in your classroom. Chaos insued: I forgot I was suppose to take one of the groups on the side to read the questions aloud to them, and forgot to ask my cooperating teacher what she would like them to do when they were done. After discussing this with my teacher we decided that it would be best if for my assignment tomorrow I write out directions beforehand. Additionally she is giving me the last hour of the day to be completely in charge of the students while she has a sub. Exciting! and nerve racking! But how to get I over my doubts? By trying more and more to prove to myself that I can do this. This is what I want to do, and I'm not a quitter. So I turn up my music, then I force myself to take time to run. I only ran for 10 minutes, but it helped. Then I look up inspirational quotes. This is the one I found today.

"Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you."
-Aldous Huxley

So that's my plan. I'm going to take what happens to me and use it to grow and learn.

Day 158-October 5th: group discussion

Today I got to start my assignments in school. My goal was to write two 5 page papers tonight, i wrote 4 pages of one and 2 pages of the other. I did an interview with students today about social studies. They didn't know hardly anything, and it made me very sad, because our school doesn't teach social studies. They don't know the difference between cities, states, and countries. When I asked them about famous people from other countries one girls response was "I think Katy Perry is from California." I also got the response of Michael Jackson and Hannah Montana. The fact that they could only list pop stars makes me very sad. They also did not know how someone became the president, or about any other government figures. When I asked about taxes they said they were used to pay rent.

All in all it was a long day. The children all were misbehaving and I had a migraine for the majority of the day. Here is to hoping that tomorrow will be better :)

Day 157-October 4th: I know what it means!

Today during Readers Workshop I was asked to pull 4 students of my choosing to read to me for 7-10 minutes and then to do a short reading conference with them to tell them about their strengths and what one reading goal (or strategy) to work on. The last student I pulled happens to be one of our lowest readers and he was reading a Dr. Seuss book. I find these books wonderful examples for rhyming patterns, but hard to follow. During our session I taught him to look for rhyming words for hints and to always think about if, when he got to the end of the page he understood what the page meant. During our math class he volunteered to read our story problem, and at the end of finishing it exclaimed "I know what it means!" I love my job. I also had to do way to much discipling of students today, so i hope they are better tomorrow since I'm starting all my assignments :S Hello chaos and reflection/analysis papers.

Day 156-October 3rd: Back to School

Today was my first day back at my elementary school. It was amazing to see how much the kids have grown in the last 2 weeks (at least most of them.) As I was looking at some of the kids today I was thinking about where they might be in 10 year. Some of my thoughts were utterly scary. But I decided I'm going to push all the bad thoughts out of my mind and pretend like every single student will grow up to be a doctor or lawyer, or engineer, because who is to say that they won't? certainly not me....

Day 155-October 2nd: done for....

So today was originally the day I was supposed to run 10 miles, then it was the day I was supposed to attend the Packer game at Lambeau. I did neither. I just ended up tracking a few of my friends updates online about running the twin cities marathon, and I watched the packer game. at this point in my evening (7:30) I'm ready for bed. I had a bloody mary and 1 beer and I'm done for. That's all.

Day 154-October 1st: Diploma!

This finally came in the mail today :)

Day 153-September 30th: Love is Gray

So today I was finally able to spend some time running (did i mention i twisted my ankle last week?) I was able to do a glorious 2 miles. This song came on while I was running and these lyrics seriously hit me:

"There is so much more in love than black and white...."

If there is anything I've been learning A LOT about since I've come to college it's love, and how many different kinds of it there are. There is no such thing as "one true love." I love a lot of people, and most of them in many many different ways. There is no one explanation, and no one definition. In fact, I decided to look up the definition in the dictionary. There are so many versions, 9 for the noun, and one for the verb to be exact. And none of these even begin to describe what I personally think love is.