and so it begins...

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday have mostly been spent in my teacher's classroom. The teacher who I will be student teaching for, that is. We have been putting together bulletin boards, name tags, mail boxes, calendars, making copies, moving files, and tons of other stuff.

She's a really nice lady, my cooperating teacher. She's been teaching in Spearfish for 30 years, and really knows her stuff. She teaches science, while her students will go to another teacher's room for Social Studies. I'm glad that she teaches science, because that will hopefully allow me to use the science kits that the college has for a week-long unit that is required of all student teachers.

I'm getting really nervous now, however. On Monday, we all meet at the college campus with our supervising professors, go over our portfolios (which I still have a couple things I need to tweak on it), and I'm sure we'll learn some more valuable information that we can use during student teaching. There is one professor in particular that I pray to the gods isn't my supervising professor because I don't like her due to her crappy attitude towards me last semester. Grr. Anyway...

So on Wednesday I will go in to the first day of school. I will get to meet all of the children, learn about them, and learn what is going on for the school year. I honestly have no idea what my cooperating teacher has planned for the curriculum of the school year, and that makes me a little nervous, but oh well...I'll learn as I go.

Also something that could be problematic: We are required by law to stay at the school until 3:35pm or something like that. Well, I've already requested from my boss at work to show up an hour later than usual on Mondays and Tuesdays, the nights I work. That would have me showing up at 4pm instead of 3pm. Well, with this newfound information about having to stay until 3:35pm, that's not going to happen (going in at 4pm, that is), as it takes about half an hour to get to Deadwood and get clocked in and ready for shift change on time. My cooperating teacher said that there's a very good chance my supervising professor will say that I have to stay until 3:35pm, just like all the other teachers do, and that I should talk to my boss again about the schedule.

I just hate doing that because we've already changed it once. I go into work tomorrow morning, but I'm not sure when my boss works, so if he's not there, I'll have to leave him a note of some sort, explaining to him that I wasn't aware I had to stay in the school that long, and could we please push back shift change AGAIN. *sigh*

Hopefully that's the only problem I run into with this whole working while student teaching thing. My cooperating teacher said that most professors want you to only work on the weekends, but to not work during the school week while you're student teaching. Obviously they don't have to do that themselves, or they would not recommend it, because they couldn't afford to pay rent, electricity, and other random bills that are slightly necessary in this world. Grr again.

Wish me luck!