Workfolio Complete!

I finished my workfolio today, the big collection of stuff we can use in our classrooms next year. I think my parent letter is good, so I am very psyched about that. All of my stuff needs some more tweaking so hopefully I can get that all squared away in another week and I can really get down to business on my unit plans and all the lesson plans for September. I guess my goal for the rest of the summer is to finish both grades' unit plans and plan about six lesson plans for September, which includes the stuff I do on rules and all that. I think that introductory stuff will be about two days. I love September holidays by the way. Thank you September gods for giving me a few days extra to rearrange if things go horribly.

These last few days of summer student teaching are really tough. One of the kids told me today that he's going to curse me out on the last day. I didn't do anything about it because I think that's really ridiculous, but I realize now that I totally should have kicked him out of the room. That's like a threat right? The hardest part about teaching is you have to make snap judgments all day long, which I don't think I am very good at yet. And it's not like being a doctor where you can say ok here's what's happening right now, what can I do for that. Because kids are absolutely unpredictable and irrational. And insane and rude. I am coming down hard next year with my rules, I am not wasting my time being annoyed and flustered.

Also today we watched a video called F.A.T. City, which was about the way Special Education students feel in general ed classrooms. It stands for frustration, anxiety, tension. It was really interesting. If anyone has an opportunity to see it, they should most definitely do so. It sort of put people in situations that many learning disabled students find themselves in and it brings up a lot of stuff I never even thought about. One thing that was really interesting was how some students can't distinguish letters that are spatial rotations of the same shape, such as b, p, q, d. Actually, that's a perfect order for that because you can see a p is a flipped down b, is a mirrored q is a flipped up d. So I can totally see how that can be challenging. And then the people in the video were given paragraphs to read where they not only had to decide which of those four letters was "correct" in words, but the words started and ended in weird pieces and were all over the page. It was really hard for the people in the video to read like that and they sounded just like some students do when they are struggling to read. Amazing. I thought a really good thing to do if students had that spatial processing issue would be to let them write in Caps lock, since the letters all look different. That sounds like a really good example of differentiation, no?

Bleck, I am supposed to teach something tomorrow and we are all finished with teaching stuff. Every day this week is supposed to be about the students finishing their letters, so there's no reason for me to teach anything new. The field visitor crap is a waste of time. I don't know what I'm going to teach. I'm going to decide on the train tomorrow. My cooperating teacher doesn't want me to teach more than like five minutes anyway, since the kids get such little work done in a period, they need as much time as possible. Boo for field visitors. So sleepy now.