Huh...ok

Day 17-

Let's jump right into why everything was a bit crazy.  I'm about to start my observation, my first formal one.  I'm already nervous and sweating and just in a general state of disrepair.  I get a call from the Dean of the school, who is more or less in charge of discipline.  He says he needs a student, and I'm trying to catch my DT's attention when he comes in and grabs him.  She looks at me, and I was kind of like "Yeah...was trying to tell you."  Need to find a better and more efficient way to do that.  Anyway, more or less half of the students also were not in class.  We kind of went "Huh.  Odd."  They were doing tardy sweeps, and because our kids are coming from the locker room, and for some reason can't  change clothes very quickly, they had gotten caught in the hall, carted off to write letters to the teachers about why they were late.  Which only made them later. 

I start my scathingly brilliant lesson on triple beam balances, and it's not tanking, but not resonating.  So I flop around for a bit until we strike gold.  I started asking simpler questions, getting the arms into it, getting the kids more into interacting.  It was magical to hear them all chorus together "MORE" and "LESS."  Then we got the rotation established, and somewhere in there the dean returned the boy...and took three more.  Awesome.  We got started and the kids were having a great job measuring my sidekick (photos of him to come later) and we had a blast.  The boys came back, and my DT got them going on their own worksheets.  We moved onto the next activity, and I got to practice some more with the balances.  I was sweating like crazy.  Super cute.

The bell rang for lunch and the little darlings filed on out of the room.  The next part was I had the debrief with my supervisor, and the subject of my interview/case comes in.  The meeting was put on pause, I conducted my interview and then a couple students from the next class came in to wait until class started.  Did you see anywhere in there that I got a bite to eat?  Yeah, that's because I didn't until my supervisor came back to continue the debrief.  Which is when the bell rang for the class.  So I pounded my sandwich and we went and finished talking and I came back to the classroom.

This class has fairly good language skills so they breezed through everything and moved right onto doing their homework. At the end of class, one student started about how school is torture.  So I told him my schedule.  He determined that I'm basically in hell.  I told him everything is easier once you find something you love.  I told him it takes time, but you have to work hard to get there.  Fast forward to the world's longest day.  This was the ultimate hump day.  Awesome.