I Got One Of My Student Teaching Placements!

Hi everyone! I got an email with good news today! I got ONE of my student teaching placements! (We do two... one for five weeks and one for ten weeks.) My ten week placement will be in a special ed classroom for second through fifth graders. Interestingly, it is the same elementary school where my dad went to school! 


When I told my dad that I was going to be student teaching at his old school, his first question was whether a certain teacher (we'll call her Mrs. Brown) was still there. It would be pretty unlikely... she'd have to be about 90 years old! Anyway he asked about her because when he was in first grade he had a crush on her. On the last day of school he and a friend wrote her love letters! The next fall, as a second grader, my dad found her in the hall and went up to her to say hi... and she ignored him! My dad says she broke his little heart. Seriously though, there is a lesson in this... someone who is 57 years old remembers how hurt his feelings were when he was ignored by a teacher when he was 7 years old! I guess as teachers we really have to be careful about what we say and do, because you never know what will stick with children for their whole entire lives. 


I've already sent an email to my cooperating teacher, introducing myself and offering to come in to meet with her sometime before my placement there begins in February. In the meantime, I've already started doing some cyberstalking! I went to the school's website and checked out the teacher's classroom website. I was really impressed! It looks like its a very small class (just boys) and they do a lot of experiential learning and using the students' interests and talents as opportunities for lessons. The classroom has a blog. One boy was apparently interested in learning about radios, so the whole class got to learn about how a radio station worked. They learned about disc jockeys, engineers, programmers, etc. The student even made his own radio commercial! I have a feeling I'm going to love being in that class. 


Now all I need to wait for is news about my January student teaching placement!