My official assignment!

I finally got my assignment! I'll be with a 9th grade English teacher named Mrs. Law-Yone. She has a couple honors classes and a couple regular classes...all ninth graders though, which is going to be an adventure! :) 9th grade is supposed to be a little more difficult here, because it's the students' first year at the school, so they haven't really mastered some of the social/maturity skills. The ones I met yesterday seemed pretty cool though.

Oh, which reminds me, Mrs. Law-Yone is backpacking through Burma, so she doesn't even know that I am assigned to to her or that I'll be taking over some of her classes and she won't be back until after this week. She's the head of the English department and apparently pretty strict. One of the other teachers warned me that she'll probably complain about me, but that it's nothing personal; she just won't want a student teacher. She also warned that her management style is to never crack and smile, so as long as I do the same thing, I'll be fine. That might be a little difficult for me, because that's definitely not my teaching style, but hopefully she'll be open to letting me do things the way I want to. The teacher who was giving me all of the warnings also said, "She'll be waiting for you to break, but don't let her see you crack." haha awesome, right? Well, you never grow unless you're challenged, so this will be a growing experience to say the least!

Also, as a funny little anecdote...Before I got my official assignment, I was observing another teacher and she just started an assignment where they had to make a 2-3 minute movie as a class on anything they wanted, so they started pitching ideas. At first, the suggestions were pretty typical: real world style documentary, an ad for their school, behind the scenes of the upcoming drama production, etc. Then., one girl goes, "I don't want to offend anyone, but what if we did a documentary on sex, students' images of it, opinions of virgins, etc." So, of course everyone voted for that one! Then, in the second class, that same topic got suggested, but thankfully it didn't get voted for...unfortunately, that meant that the second class' topic became: "B*tch" and the different connotations and denotations of the word and why people say it. It was an interesting insight into the world of these high school students to say the least! Don't be scared though, the biggest difference I've noticed with the school is that it's performing arts. It actually seems much safer and the students are more respectful than my old high school.

Well, we're going into DC to explore a bit today, so I'll probably have pictures to post.