Campfire in the Classroom

This past week seemed to last forever; by Friday, I was completely exhausted and felt like the week was twice as long as it actually was. I'm still working on building my "teacher stamina." Teaching all of the classes all day really wears you out and my body is not adjusted to it yet. Plus, my voice tends to hurt at the end of the day because I do not normally talk this much, especially not using my "teacher voice." On Tuesday, I read a story aloud to my students during the afternoon class and my throat was killing me by the end of it.

Overall, it was another pretty solid week. It was a little more difficult than last week, but I would still call it successful. We have been working on writing scary stories and my students got really into them. Friday afternoon, I found a Youtube video of a campfire and figured out a way to make it loop. I projected this and then we read our scary stories by the campfire. Plus, my best class during the week got to eat marshmallows. It was really fun and it was great to hear their stories read aloud. I was pretty impressed with a few of them. One of my students, who tends to be a little shy, read his aloud and it was definitely the scariest of all the ones read aloud. It was great seeing him be so successful when I normally do not hear much from him.

If I were at Cornell student teaching, then this would be the end of my lead teaching all of the classes; pretty much everyone else just does two weeks of the full teacher load. However, since I cannot ever seem to do things the easy way,  I still have three and a half weeks (aka one Cornell block) left of lead teaching. It actually only amounts to about 15 days because we get out of school for Veteran's day, have a field trip one day, and my last day we are doing Diggory day.  Here are my thoughts and feelings in a stream of consciousness fashion about having only 15 days left to teach:

It will be really nice not feeling responsible for a group of 70 thirteen year olds, but I will still think about them all the time and wonder if they are being successful without me. I am looking forward to being a student myself and spending time on campus and in the library and with my friends, but I will miss the lolz my students bring to me on a daily basis. Thank God I won't have to make lesson plans anymore or write field notes or be required to blog weekly or wake up at 6 am or dress professionally. But it has been kind of fun feeling like a "real grownup" and what if I think of a really fun lesson that I know my students will love and won't get to put into the classroom right away. It is going to be truly miserable being in Iowa in the middle winter when the weather will be absolutely beautiful in Arizona. I am going to miss the trip to Disneyland and their graduation; I will miss them walking across the stage and seeing them with great, big, proud smiles across their faces on the day they have been looking forward to all year. The moral of the story is that I am looking forward to the end, but I also am going to miss my students and will think of them often. I intend to get the most out of these last fifteen days.