It's Only Tuesday But It Feels Like Forever

So it's only just Tuesday, meaning we've been here a whopping total of 3 full days. Yet, it feels like we've already been here for much longer. After getting my first taste of Swanson School and Amanda's classroom yesterday, today was a little bit more than just sitting by and observing. The entire Totara Team had their first Tech session of the week. This entails both Amanda and Hayley's (the other Totara Team teacher) classes taking a twenty minute bus ride to the Bruce McLaren school for some applied arts classes. These classes include activities along the lines of sewing, woodworking, art, metalworking, and other specializations. It seems as though the students really look forward to getting a chance at working on something that isn't strictly reading, I actually got the chance to get a peek into the metal working class with Neil Parker and a group of several of the students. Working on creating personalized key tags, it was really apparent that the students took a great deal of pride in seeing the completion of something they had made with their own hands.

With a shortened afternoon of maths, interval, shared reading, and work time on character sketches, I feel like I was able to become more familiarized with Amanda's style of classroom management. It's a really interesting combination as she has very clear classroom expectations set with her class, in a fairly regimented way, but she's still so warm with her students and they absolutely seem to love her. It's definitely interesting being able to experience this classroom as it's so different from what I was exposed to at my other high school placement. The age, for one thing, is different as the students are younger and clearly at a different phase in their lives than the high school teenagers. The mix of learning levels/abilities also makes it rather interesting, as the class is divided up into groups based on this during each of the subject sessions. This kind of threw me off initially, as I'd never really personally experienced a classroom quite like it before. Each group is responsible for a different task during each subject's allotted time period, which they actually do a fairly decent job of staying on task with. It will definitely be quite interesting working out lessons to fit along with this class environment. It definitely seems to work for the students though, as there really are several distinct levels of capabilities/talents.

The next couple days and moving into next week ought to be rather fun and busy as Amanda and I work out how to start integrating me into the lessons and as I begin my planning for future weeks. I can tell that this term will definitely be a busy and fast-paced, yet oddly relaxed, period of practice. I honestly feel that my placement with a cooperating teacher could not have worked out better, as Amanda is definitely an amazing model to learn from and a great person to work with.