My first day in the classroom! I spent most of this day introducing myself, both to classes, individual students, and other teachers. Natalie is great - she'd been talking me up before I got to the school, so most of the classes already knew I was coming.
The classroom environment is really great here. With the freshman English classes, we played a warm-up game, and then went on to vocabulary practices. The senior classes had finals essays to write, and I got to see the rubrics for their final. I made note of Natalie's changes in demeanor between classes - one freshman class, which was a little more crazy, was treated with slightly more authority than the other.
The experiences that were really unique were the ones outside of the classroom. Mountain Valley High School is currently going through an accreditation process, and I got to sit in on a meeting after school in which the staff discussed a paper on the indicators they were preparing for the accreditation team.
I was interested in the line-by-line analysis they were doing. Most of the teaching staff seemed stressed at their obligation to be there, and wanted to get out of it as quickly as possible - perfectly understandable, as the snow was picking up and nobody wants to drive home in a snowstorm.
The day was a little crazy due to the Wednesday schedule (late-start), but I really liked it. Natalie told me that the days usually aren't like that, but if things are usually easier than this, then a lot of my fears about teaching were way overblown.
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