The First Final Haul

The past few weeks of this semester have been rather hectic, but I feel at last as though I am beginning to see the end of the craziness and can at last take a moment to enjoy everything. Within a rather short time frame, at the end of October, I had to complete both my video reflection, as well as my formal observation. Both assignments added a bit more pressure to those days, as would be expected when you have somebody watching over your shoulder and jotting down notes over every move you make for an hour and a half. 

On top of this, I also had the class all to myself multiple times over the course of my unit lesson. While these solitary (well, mostly solitary as the subs in the classroom were instructed to let me have the class to myself) moments did not seem like much to fret about for my teacher, for me I had the added stress of making sure I didn't set our class back to summer. Sometimes students just don't behave as well and don't get things accomplished quite as smoothly without the head honcho in the room. On one hand I'm lucky that I have a teacher with such solid management skills that I can learn from, on the other hand, because of this my less than perfect management skills are only exacerbated. 

But the light is there. Having received several items of feed back from both my supervisor as well as my CT, I am finally feeling more comfortable in the classroom. Nothing has gotten too out of hand with my students, and they are still, as far as I can tell, moving forward. As long as I continue to build relationships with the students and continue to work on my management skills, I think that the future in this classroom looks quite bright. Fortunately for me, both of these items go hand in hand. 

As this semester begins to settle down, next semester rolls ever closer. Oddly enough, though, I am less concerned with how things will go next semester than I was at the start of this semester. Sometimes I surprise myself with a tool I have picked up within the last three months. I will also begin spending some time wherever possible these final few weeks with some of the other classes that I will be student teaching next semester. The more familiar all of the students are with my face, the more quickly I feels we will be able to adjust to one another.

While I am admittedly excited for this semester to come to and end and to enjoy a little bit of a break away from everything, I am also excited to get things going for the final haul next January. While the next year certainly holds a lot of questions for my future, I have no doubt that the experiences I gain over the course of the next seven months will be vital for the rest of my career, wherever it leads me.