Student Teaching Begins

I finished my first week of student teaching on Friday. I'm completely exhausted and drill this weekend didn't help the matter, but yet I'm ready to get back in there tomorrow. It was extremely overwhelming at first, but as the week progressed a lot became clearer and I started to catch on to the routine and the way things worked. I am doing my special education placement first, and then after 8 weeks, I will do my last 8 weeks in a 3rd grade classroom. So I'm in a resource room for 3rd & 4th graders. The first week was just observing, but I was also busy making up lessons for next week, because I'll be taking over 4th grade math and language arts and then the following week I'll be taking over the 3rd grade as well. You will quickly find out how little time there is with the students and how much you have to try and accomplish. There's never enough time in the day. Not enough time to teach, not enough time to prep, just not enough time. It's hard work but it finally feels like my hard work has a purpose. This is so much better than traditional classwork that once done, gets filed away. My work will come to life now in my lessons that I teach. So far, so good. My classroom teacher is really helpful, the kids are wonderful and funny (kids really do say the funniest things), and I'm really excited to continue this semester and learn all that I can learn. My days are longer now and I'm so tired by the end of the day so I'm sure I won't be on here updating as much as normally do. I'm still finding the balance between school and home duties!