1st week student teaching

Well the first week is done and I survived! Anyway there was not much to write about on a day to day basis so I thought that I would just write about the week in general. One thing I do like about CCMS is that they are very rule orientated and they stick with them. I like this because you know what is expected of you, what you need to do in a situation, and also that you are going to be supported just as long as you are following the guidelines set up. The principle at CCMS is Stacy Smith this is his first year in this role, he had been the V.P. until Rocky Miner went to the high school. My co-op teacher Jennifer O'Gorman is in her 12th year of teaching, but I am her first student teacher she has worked with. She is really wonderful to work with. She has shown me books, and websites, and many other things to get ideas from for teaching lessons. One lesson she did was called "We didn't start the fire" the song by Billy Joel, and we are in the process of discussing this song and how it relates to history, the present, and possibly the future.
Jennifer has a focus group first, then followed by 4 periods of 8th grade social studies, and then prep, and last period is call menotoring/buddy reading. And eventually we will go to the grade school and read to 2 of the first grade classes there.
One thing to note, on the very first day of school that all of the kids were there, one was taken away in handcuffs for assulting a teacher. Scary deal.

After 3 periods of the same thing over and over I decided to take a break on thursday and I kinda did sit in on another teachers class informally (I wanted to know what they were doing to make all of the noises they were making) it was nice to get another perspective on the first week activities of getting to know one another. Mr. Waite played a game of moving the desks to the outside of the room in a big circle then one had to be in the middle and asked if you knew your neighbors names, (not sure what happened if you didn't I am thinking that they had to go to the middle then) if everyone knew the names then you had to ask a generic quesiton and then everyone who said yes to this question had to move to a different seat. It was fun to watch them.

I am looking forward to the upcoming year and working with Jennifer, I think I am going to learn a lot from here and the other teachers at the middle school. This about sums up my week.