Weekly Review #5

As promised, here is not only the weekly review for week 5, but a summary of my experience thus far. I have to say student teaching is a lot different than I expected. It's a lot more time consuming than I thought, even after the classes I had last semester seemed at times overwhelmingly time consuming. That said, I have grown a lot and learned a lot about teaching in the five weeks. It's been very frustrating at times as it's felt like I'm being expected to know and understand something that I have limited or no experience in, not to mention the confusion that has been so prevalent not only in this semester, but in my entire graduate experience so far. At this point, I wish I had been given actual opportunities to plan units and weekly lesson plans prior to student teaching. I cannot remember doing any type of lesson planning beyond a single lesson plan. While being able to write a lesson plan is, of course, valuable and necessary, most of my experience involved being given a topic and then given a certain amount of time to complete a single lesson plan. So when I was presented with "OK now write weekly lesson plans" it was quite overwhelming. I seem to be getting the hang of it, not only how to think that far ahead, but also to budget my time during the week to make sure I have enough time to actually think it through well enough and still have time to write them and send them off to Mr. Suzelis by Sunday afternoon.

One of the biggest things I have had to adjust to is the schedule. Being in college so long, I have become quite accustomed to having a different schedule every day, so having basically the same schedule every day has taken some getting used to and some adjustments in my home life as well. Really, it's getting to know the protocol of not only teaching but of student teaching itself that has been frustrating at times. While my students have frustrated me at times, I really can't complain about them as they have been great and it's been uplifting when students say hello to me in the hall or just come up to me to talk. True, my 6th grade general music class doesn't know when to be quiet at times, but in the end I have seen some of those "a ha" moments when they get it and even had a student come up to me after a class and tell me he wanted to start piano lessons after we had spent two days learning how to play the C-major scale on the piano. It was a student I never would've guessed had any interest at all in music, but there he was asking me about piano lessons.