Wow, so I'm a teacher now??

This week has been one of the most interesting, stressful, intense, high learning curve experiences of my life. This week I have woken up at 4:30 AM every day, and been in bed around 10:30-11:30, I haven't done that in a very long time, and honestly, I don't mind it all that much. This week was spent teaching things to some 400 incoming corps members that people who got an education degree learned in 2-4 years. We learned how to set classroom norms, how to make a lesson plan, how to make a lesson plan vision, how to find activities, how to make activities, how to be culturally responsive, how to work with IEPs and students that need modified coursework, how to give assessments, make assessments, find assessments, and so much more. 

In a week.

I am coming into this next week with a week's worth of lesson plans that I am going to be teaching to 20 students for an hour a day, on how to read and reading strategies. One thing that I find pretty cool about what I'm doing is that I did cover a little bit of it in my second language teaching class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. We learned about lesson plans, SLOs (student learning objectives), and how to find and create activities; the best part about that is that I was one of the less stressed corps members this week. I get to go through this week and teach incoming sophomores strategies on picking an independent reading book that is on their level, how to preread and make predictions, how to monitor comprehension, and how to make questions that clarify information and lead to successful discussions. I'm starting to feel like a teacher. I haven't had much one on one time yet with my students but oh man will I have that tomorrow. 65 minutes with students, the third block in their 4 hour long class, will be interesting. 

Although I am only with these students for four weeks, and although I will probably never see them again, and although this experiences is just as much of a learning process for me as it is for them, I already think that they are amazing students and I am really excited to see them accomplish their growth goals. I'll fill you in on how my activities have gone and what I've been doing later once I figure out what I've done myself!

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