I almost had my first breakdown today. Something in the range of three hours of sleep last night because I just couldn't fall asleep, and then three classes to teach in a row today, from 8:30 to 12:55, without so much as a free 30 seconds to pee. That's a bloody long time to have to perform, non-stop and super publically. There's no one more watched and on display than student teachers, I swear. My new socials 10 classes make me feel like I'm teaching to a brick wall. They won't exhibit any form of thought, engagement, or life even if you beg. I actually felt like I was biting my lip to keep from crying for most of the afternoon after my classes, though I'm pretty sure it was just a culmination of stress and exhaustion. It's going to be a rough run. Thanks gods, tomorrow I'm on just my lovely humanities 8 class again, who will reap the benefits of being my preferred class this week, for sure.

Nap time now, and then back to the ENDLESS amount of work. I have never met a harder working species of humans than teachers. They end up so busy and stretched so thin, sometimes I think it even endangers the intergrity of the profession.

while there is, of course, always something (and usually several things) I'm doing wrong, I'll still take the little moments where you can tell something has gone right, like when the miserable kid who hates school starts smiling in class, or when the kid who was going to get suspended for skipping shows up to every class for three weeks. The moments when you walk around the classroom and see that all the students are producing fantastic work. The few seconds spent debating life expectancy in the Middle Ages of their own accord. Moments.

But next week I'm adding two more classes, and they could always hate me and crush me like a bug. I'm hoping not. Two more weeks to spring break and the mid-point of my practicum!

I've caught the latest meme. Follow the links and play along.

Start here by telling me how wonderful I am....
Then go here and recover by telling me everything that's wrong with me.

I won't take it personally, I promise.

In some way, it's probably actually a good thing that I don't have time to socialize pretty much at all lately, because I've got nothing to talk about except lessons and the kids in my class - topics that I'm well aware are dull as piss to anyone not currently jumping through the same set of hoops as me. When I lay down to sleep at night, the personalities of all my students start flowing through my mind, and I start trying to dream up the perfect startegies for getting through to the kids who are stuggling and the perfect groups for my students to work in. A room full of 25 kids ages 13 to 14 is a pretty dynamic place - hormones, emotions, and social pressures all run high. The girls compete for better marks, and generally speaking, the boys compete for the title of most apathetic. Not that I can really criticize all that much, given my own experiences in high school...

This whole site meter thing is pretty bizzare. I decided to sign up when I saw the facinating results Milan gets from his page, and I have to admit, they're a bit transfixing. I hadn't relaized before that this page actually come up when you google my name now. It's not that I mind people finding and reading this, it just makes me curious! So, to the people in Ottawa and Calgary, I think you're the only readers I really can't identify at the moment, and I'd love to hear who you are (and most likely, hear from you in general!).

It's back to the lesson planning grind for me. I find myself thinking while I teach sometimes, gee, these kids really have no idea how much time I spend thinking about them, or planning and preparing everything we do in class. Today, for example, they did a "found poetry" Shakespeare activity. Some of the kids, I could tell, had a lot fo fun with it, but not a chance any of them considered the fact that I spent almost three hours hunched over the paper cutter yesterday creating all the pieces for their activity, and as a result, how bloody sore my back is today.

They sure do facinate me though. I'm so dead set on trying to find ways that they can all showcase their talents in class.

Well, I can't belive I'm almost 1/6th done this practicum already, and so far, so good. I've had so many interruptions in my lessons with the humanities 8 class, that in some sense this week was like last week - we had to "settle back in" - but at least I had the added advantages of knowing all of the kids names and having slightly more of a clue what I'm doing. In getting to actually teach lessons three days in a row (without presentations from their counsellor taking up the block, or gr.8 planning, or whatever) I finally established some sense of normalcy in the room. We ended the week with two lessons that ran flawlessly. The kids were pretty much perfectly behaved, they were actively participating, one activity flowed to the next, and they produced soem really great work. As the icing on the cake, my advisor from UBC came down to do his first formal observation of my teaching on Friday, aka perfect class #2, and wrote me a glowing evaluation.

Plus, sunny! Ahhhh. Makes everything better.

I know I'm only going to get busier from here on in, but I'm trying to stay focused on what's gotten me through the first bumps - I actually adore the kids. They're lovely and it's great to see them learning and trying out new ideas. By tomorrow I have to be cracking on a feudalism unit for my grade 8s to start once we finish poetry and on my socials 10 BC history unit, since before the end of the month, two blocks of social studies 10 will be added to my teaching load. Currently, the prospect makes me want to flee to mexico, but I'm beginning to get the sense that maybe this whole teachign thing just becomes like a natural skill eventually, and I might actually find it gets easier as time goes by.

This might be the dullest post ever, but a few people had expressed interest in hearing how the practicum was manhandling me so far, so for them, everyone else suffers too, just like at school.

A Haiku is:
a) a tasty Japanese appetizer

b) a five line poem that imitates a Japanese style but is designed to suit the English language

c) a traditional Japanese form of poem that is three lines long

d) a traditional Japanese form of poem that is five lines long

So far so good on the practicum front, but this is just the beginning, and teaching once a day is a lot different than teaching three times a day, which is where I'm headed. I have to admit, I think there's some irony in the fact that while teenagers think they know pretty much everything, and we gradually realize as we get older how little we really know, it's right around the time you're old enough to realize you actually KNOW bloody nothing that you're the right age to get tossed into a classroom of teenagers who think they know everything. More than anything, I tend to feel a bit sorry for them. It's a rough age.

As usual, Cam left for work not long before I got home, and he'll be at work long after I go to bed. I have the TV on for background noise - I think it must be something about growing up in a big family that makes me so prone to lonliness when I'm home alone.

Back to lesson planning now.