Oh goodness, I haven’t changed one bit.

Every couple of months, I post here and say I’m oh so sorry and I wanna post more often and I will, I swear!

I’m not going to bother with that this time around.  You’ve (meaning me in the future, I think, no one really reads this anymore) heard it all plenty of times, and I’m not convincing anybody.

My life has been hectic, but I think I’ll live.  It’s my Curriculum/Unit/Lesson Planning Activity (CULPA) semester, which means my 40%-of-my-grade-in-two-different-classes project is making an entire year’s worth of curriculum, units, and lesson plans, and while I understand how intensely useful it is to have this to build off of in my first couple of years of teaching when I’ll have nothing stocked up, I also know it’s intensely difficult to do while working and attempting to do readings for other classes.

Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is, no matter how hard this is, student teaching next semester will be harder.  And my first year of teaching will be even harder than that.  I hate thinking about that, because it makes me terrified that a) I’m never going to see my boyfriend that I LIVE WITH again, and b) I’m actually not going to be able to do it.  But I’m not giving up.  I can’t give up.  I want this too much.

Work is kind of interesting.  I do the opening shift sometimes now, which means being there at 5.30 in the morning, but they only need me to do it on days where I already have practicum hours to do, so I’m only there till 8.  It makes for interesting days – I’m at work from 5.30 to 8, I leave for my practicum by 9 (that hour in between is spent finishing up at work and changing for practicum), I’m driving or at the school till noon, I have choir 1-2, and I have class from 3 or 4 to 6.30.  So, between 5.30 am and 6.30 pm I have 2 or 3 hours to do anything.  It’s a little hard, but I gotta remind myself that I signed up for this.

My practicum has been fun, but I don’t think I’m getting as much out of it as I should be.  Everyone else in my classes talks about all the things they’re doing with their students, and for the most part I haven’t done much of anything yet.  The one class-long lesson I did kind of failed miserably.  So I’m trying to be more active in the classroom, but my cooperating teacher, while great, isn’t exactly helping me out with it – I’m not sure what she’s planning on doing next in any of the classes, and I’m not really sure what I can take over, if anything.  But we’ll see about that too, I suppose.

I’m super pumped about a video I’m showing my students tomorrow morning.  I saw John Green a couple of weeks ago in Waupaca, and I had him answer a question about what he would say to students who just finished Catcher in the Rye, and he DID 😀  Most of the excitement in telling them this is going to be geeking out to them about how awesome it was to meet him, since I know they enjoyed his book when they read it last year.

I can do this.  It’ll be fun, even if it won’t be easy.