"Teacher Bladder"

This week I started picking up classes and by Friday I had 3 out of 4 classes picked up. I am starting to feel that "teacher tired," but more importantly I have discovered what it means to have a "teacher bladder." According to Urban Dictionary, teacher bladder is "the ability to prevent oneself from requiring the need to urinate less often than every 12 hours." If you haven't yet experienced this, I would start to prepare because the time will come.

I would rate my experience this week as a 4. Everything went smoothly and according to plan, or rather the "new plan" because of the snow days last week. I started picking up classes, which went great. I am just exhausted and ready for the weekend! Plus, I really need to empty this teacher bladder. I was surprised this week at how "not nervous" I was about picking up classes. Last semester I would have driven to school terrified while having an intense conversation with Jesus. However, this week I was calm and ready for the experience. I believe this shows growth! One of the biggest lessons I learned this week was to always over plan. It's better to over plan than to under plan and have students sitting with nothing to do. With this in mind, I made sure to pack my lessons full for next week. On Monday, I am starting my first week as the teacher in the classroom. In anticipation of this, I planned my lessons early this week to give my CE plenty of time to look over my lessons and allow me to make appropriate changes. Before leaving school at the end of the day on Friday, I made sure everything I needed for next week was prepared and set aside. With this done and my lesson plans in place, I feel confident that I am ready to officially start my 10 weeks of student teaching.

For standard 1 (NCPTS) this week, I had the opportunity to sit in on a parent-teacher conference for a student who was failing almost all of his classes. This student is smart and capable, he just doesn't seem to want to do his work. A meeting was called with all of his teachers, the principal, his mother, and himself to discuss the upcoming semester and how/what changes can be made. I did not actively participate in this meeting, I just observed, but I feel it provided me with a great opportunity to see how a teacher leads in a meeting like this.

For standard 2, I really focused on getting to know the students and who they are as individual people. With this only being my third week with them and with all of the snow/ice days, I really have not had much of an opportunity to get to know them as people and as learners. Next week, I plan to take time to have the students fill out an interest survey to further help me in achieving this goal.

For standard 3, I took an in-depth look at the standards I will be teaching next week. I spent some time unpacking these standards and looking back at the 6th grade standards to see what they should already know. Once I felt confident that I knew what the standards were saying, I started to look for resources (some on my own and some from my CE's stash) that I felt would be good for the lessons.

For standard 4, I took those resources and started to plan my lessons. I look at the different classes I had and the diversity in each and planned the best way to present the content next week. One of my classes, I know will pick up the content really quick, so I had to plan extra activities and assignments for them. Another class, will move really slow. They are my lowest class. They will need a slower pace and plenty of practice time. The other two classes should move at about a normal pace.

For standard 5,  I took the notes that my CE made on my teaching this week and reflected on them. I was very pleased with myself to discover more positives than negatives in those notes. However, I did take those negatives and spent some time reflecting on how I can turn them into positives next week.

I hope everyone has a restful weekend and a great week next week!