student teaching week ten

Yikes, y'all: week ten is getting on through the semester! I am not sure how two thirds of the semester manage to come prior to spring break, but whatever. :) So, after the break I have one week left at Gresham, and then it's on to lovely elementary school. I really like Gresham in general and have learned an awful lot from Carole, but I won't be too sorry to make the move. I like the kids (who are an absolute hoot in general) a lot better than I thought I would, but I'm growing weary of having them old enough to push your buttons in an adult way and not old enough to start figuring out when it's time to back off. This week I've had to kick kids out of the library for skipping class under the guise of helping us with circulation (we have a couple of those), confiscate a pile of Nazi symbols printed from the lab without permission, and deal with kids who are uncomfortable with the lesson material almost to the point of tears but who choose to cover it by lashing out at me and telling their teammates they suck. That's only a few of the kids, of course, and many of them are splendid, but I'm a little down about it, especially after getting a little flack for not suiting a teacher who asked me for help evaluating student work without telling me anything about what was expected of them. Note to self: never do that to anybody.

This week we had our relay race, which I won't repeat from an earlier post. Most of the kids had a lot of fun, most were able to find their books on their own or with just a little help, and only a few had trouble with good sportsmanship. There were a couple of cases where kids couldn't find books because they'd been misshelved by somebody, which prompted me to be very assiduous about shelving everything myself after each class. This was not a good exercise in letting go of control for me, which is a problem I'd need to struggle and come to terms with before I tried to repeat the lesson in my own library, because I couldn't be an effective teacher and librarian if I was busy being the head shelver all the time. Meh.

Other than that, I've been weeding the 300s, cataloging some new books from the bookfair and an amazon order, taking a ton of fine money (must've been payday for parents somewhere, or something), and working with some AR scores.