Well, here it is, Wednesday night and I've just about reached the halfway point on this nutso train to teachertown. I know that both of the sponsor teachers I'm working with think that I am doing well, which is nice, and means barring some horrible and unimaginable circumstance, I will pass and get my teaching certification. $10,000 well spent? That remains to be seen.

I adore my class of grade 8s, but they are so cute and impressionable at that age, and I know sometimes I seem awfully old and "teachery" to them, but we have a good raport I think, and they have done some really awsome work for me. Out of the 25 kids in that class, I have fully 7 with learning "exeptionalities" or who have been identified as at-risk. It makes for quite the range of personalities and characteristics, but seeing those kids be succesful and feel renewed confidence in their abilities has been the most rewarding part of this whole thing for me. I had never imagined how much of my time and attention would need to be devoted to students like this, but for some of these kids, you begin to see that at school may be the only place that they have actual positive and supportive relationships with adults, so anything that I can contribute to that feels very worthwhile.

One of my sponsors came up to me the other day while I was watching my social studies 10 class work away and said "I can just tell that you're going to be great at this." Since it was pretty much the first feedback I've gotten from har that gave any real indication of what she thought of me, I was pretty damned happy. The ss10 has been a bit of a challenge - I've got one block that is really sweet, small, and quite easy to work with, very receptive, etc. and another that is much more of a mixed bag - much bigger, and with some really high end kids, but also soem really low end, with the most severe special needs I've encountered so far. The biggest part, I think, of what makes the class tough is how transient the kids are. There are only a dozen or so out of a class of almost 30 who actually attend regularly, so there are constantly kids showing up with no idea what is going on, and who shows up can have a huge influence on the whole class dynamic. Almost 2/3 of that class failed last term, and I'm not quite sure how to handle the whole thing. I know it has to be up to the students, but it is pretty unnerving even thinking about the fact that there are still about a half dozen of them that I have ever even met, and I've been teaching them for two weeks. A great many of them I've only met once.

Today, my main sponsor teacher bought lunch for all us student teachers and we had a nice chat. The best part of all of this has been getting to work with my peers - the other student teachers - and bounce around strategies and ideas. There are three of us all teaching humanities 8, and the collaboration between us has been awsome.

Oh the stories I have to tell! But they wil have to wait, since I still have to battle through my exhaustion and hammer out the details of my ss10 lesson for tomorrow morning. My faculty advisor from UBC is coming in to observe my class before my formal midpoint meeting with him and both my sponsors, and I'm all nervous even though he's coming to see my nice class and I'm sure it will all go fine. I still feel like I'm battling against getting sick too... No rest for the wicked though, and back to planning I go.