Elementary Internship: Day 6

(48 hours down 72 hours to go)

Today was the most normal day I've had in about two weeks. . . which makes me realize I need to reassess what "normal" means. 

The day started out fine, I got to work just in time to make it to our specialist team meeting. It is nice to make the time to connect, and talk about some of the issues that are unique to prep-providers. We've been working on using rubrics to make students aware of how their graded and make it easier for us to grade, too. Just recently we sent out a specialist letter to inform parents about the general grading rubric (we grade on a 0-4 point scale, which still confuses a lot of people. . . "but did I get an A?")

I had my post-observation meeting this morning, too, which went fine. I need to work on pacing. Which I knew (the lesson I taught was new to me, so I wasn't sure of how it was going to go). A sub had to cover my first hour (2nd & 3rd graders) for the first 10 minutes because of the post-observation meeting and when I got there, the kids were bonkers! I caught one kid crawling across the media center, several were skipping around, so we all went back to the beginning and practiced walking into the media center, sitting down quietly in the lab for directions, and listening quietly. I am pretty sure I never got them fully back, though. 

With no time between classes it can be hard to not let the "mood" of one class affect the incoming class. My ENVoY training was put to good use today, I was really working on breathing deeply and watching my tone as the kindergarteners came in. 

There was nothing remarkable about the rest of the day. All my classes were good, although I was incredibly tired by the end of the day today, which made it hard to keep my tone even. I had some frustrating behavior issues to deal with, so I really struggled to stay patient. I have to really commend one of my 4th grade colleagues, though. He always wants to know names of students who were disruptive, and then he will often not let them go to their specialist the next day. I was not 100% sure I agreed with this at first (a couple of days he held his whole class back) but they have shown tremendous improvements in behavior and their specialist time becomes more of a privilege than just a prep time. 

Which is nice.