Wk 4 - Day 16

it was a good day yesterday. i ended up teaching for 5 periods...mrs. s and ms. b were gone for a day of training. mind you, it was a good day not because they were gone...i really like those ladies...it was just a good day. luckily for me, the subs were much better than the last one. one sub was a former business consultant from appleton and the other a retired phy. ed. teacher. both sub's just stepped back and let me do my own thing...unlike last week. i liked the subject...geology and the law of superposition. i modified the lesson at the last minute...i had found something on the internet (geology site) that had lots of cool pictures of unconformities. so, i decided to move the divider seperating the two rooms and put both classes together to look at pictures of rock layers on the smartboard. i'm sure there are lots of students like me that like to see something, like a picture, instead of just taking notes or listening to a lecture. after viewing the pictures, we went back on our side and worked on the activity. the students were productive...asked lots of questions and were well behaved...i couldn't ask for much more. i threw them for a loop when i did mrs. s's technique of getting their attention by counting backward from 5 to 1...i counted in chinese and that definitely got their attention. they wanted to learn chinese...so, we had a quick 30 second drill with learning to count to 5.

during study hall, one student came to ask for help on geology and the next thing i knew i had 7 students bringing their desks and surrounding me. i'm not the kind of teacher to give the answer away...what point is that? i'll ask questions in such a way as to get them to think of the answer on their own. the next thing i knew 2 more students from someone else's study hall came to join our little study group...so much for entering grades during my free time. i finished entering grades, changed the schedule in both rooms, got the journal question ready, set up handouts...for both rooms and i went home. warm fuzzy...the retired phy. ed. sub came up and told me that if he's there when my university supervisor visits...to send her right over to see him. he told me that i did an excellent job and that i was great with the students. he's a gruff ole phy. ed. kinda guy and i told him to stop before i got all girlie on him...major warm fuzzies as i call it.