pre-institute update

I’ve been procrastinating like a champ, but with one week until I enter my program, it finally seemed like it was time to get down to business. It doesn’t hurt that I’m cooped up in my boyfriend’s apartment (my fault for lagging on the car front) with nowhere to go and not a lot else to do. I’m spending most of my days, in blocks of several hours, reading my program’s curriculum, with intermittent math review sessions. These never last very long, as I’m easily frustrated with myself for taking so long to remember skills I should never have lost in the first place (a problem I’ll have to deal with before I’m expected to set an example for 150-odd learners.) The curriculum, though, is going really well. I’ve got a huge stack of fat, spiral-bound notebooks which, with names like “Teaching as Leadership” and “Classroom Management and Culture,” should be incredibly dry, but are actually surprisingly engaging. They’re written with a sense of infectious urgency, such that you find yourself planning your first day, your classroom rules, the objectives for a big pen-pal project with a friend teaching in another state.

Excitingly, it’s just a little over a week until I find out my teaching assignment. The first thing people want to know when I tell them I’ll be teaching in the fall is, logically enough, what I’ll be teaching. It’s frustrating enough to say “secondary English” and then have to explain that “secondary” could mean anything from seventh to twelfth grade, but the worst of the situation is that I still have no idea what to plan for. I say that I’m mentally planning my classroom procedures; what I mean is that I’m planning everything twice, once for twelve-year-olds and once for borderline adults. They’re very different groups to interact with, let alone teach, and I’ll feel a lot better when I know which to expect. I’m hoping for high school, my past work with older kids being a major part of this whole crazy teaching idea in the first place, but at the moment I’ll be relieved no matter what my assignment – just so long as I have one.