student teaching week one

I'm at Central High School for the first third of the semester, and I am having a blast so far! It's exhausting, though. I'm well accustomed to school schedules, but it keeps surprising me how late it is when I get home after staying to keep the library open till 4:30! That's get tough next week when my evening class starts up...

I didn't start till wednesday of this week, because I wasn't totally sure about being able to count days before UT's semester started, but I've ended up with a ton of projects in just three days and will almost certainly have more on the way. So far, besides all the good stuff I'm getting to watch and help with, these are the projects I have in the works:
--Prepared selection of biographies, with booktalks this monday morning for a film studies class
--Lesson on how to use two career information sites for a research activity this tuesday with an english class
--Review of the catalog and using TEL, plus preparing reference materials, for an honors english class this wednesday
--More intensive review of catalog searching and basic library use for an english fundamentals class in two weeks
--Preparing a bibliography of web resources for a teacher with geography and world history classes for mid-february
--Two inservices for teachers on making use of the electronic resources they may not know they have available through the school
--Designing an alternative layout for the library shelves to fix some accessibility problems

That last is kind of an interesting problem. Central has two striking points in its library situation: 1) It's got the biggest space I've ever seen in a school library, really ginormous, way too physically big for the size collection that they can afford to maintain, and so they're able to play with their layout and where they put their books, but the shape of the library and the various non-library uses it gets force some constraints on how they can use all that space. The library is laid out with a long open central space and two wings to the right and left in the back, kind of like a cathedral sanctuary in the shape of a cross. The fiction currently lines the front part of the library, half on each side of the central space before you get back into the wings. 2) Central is badly overcrowded with its student population. They have a lot of traveling teachers, who push carts around and use other people's classrooms during their planning periods; since there are only one or two teachers in the whole school who DON'T have a traveling teacher in their room at some point, they all need somewhere else to go during their planning periods while their rooms are being used. Many of them go to the library, and there is a row of desks and computers for teacher use down one side of the front central space before you get back to the wings. Now, these are both good problems for the library to have, but they are coinciding poorly; as you may have noticed, the teacher desks are in front of half the fiction section, with very little clearance between, and the students won't go behind the teachers to get books from that part of the library! They've got some other layout issues too, even though they did some moving in the fall and improved it from where it was before, so I'm going to try to propose something new.