Here is my room. Well, my half of the room. Since I only came out here with a small suit case and a backpack, I didn't have enough room for some items; namely a towel and blanket. What? I had other priorities. Things I actually NEEDED like Chaco sandals, my giant headphones, and a frisbee. Megan was kind enough to mail those other items out to me (you can probably see the awesome snowman blanket I use), but the first couple days were humorous without them. I used a t-shirt as my towel and wrapped up in my top sheet like it was a sleeping bag.
Institute has been crazy so far, so I am going to attempt to give you an accurate portrayal of what I do on an average weekday.
5:30 - Alarm goes off
5:45 - Dressed and eating breakfast. Attempting to wake up still.
6:20 - Bus pulls away from IIT and heads to the school
6:45ish - Arrive at school, sign in, drop off my bag, grab supplies for the day, roll out to first session
7:15 - 3:45 - Classes on investing students, classroom management, lesson planning, literacy, and other assorted topics. One 75-minute block of teaching. One 25-minute lunch break. Work time to lesson plan.
4:00 - Arrive back at IIt
4:15 - Shower
4:30 - 5:00 - Relax
5:00 - 5:30ish - Dinner
5:45 - [anywhere from 9:00 - 12:00] - Planning.
Sometime between 9:00 and 12:00 - Go to bed and repeat.
We have been placed in 4-5 person groups called "Collaboratives" or Co-labs for short. Each Co-lab shares the responsibility of teaching one summer school class. Each person teaches one 75-minute block each day. While one person teaches, the other 4 are either planning or in a class. The school I am at doesn't have classes on Friday, so instead of teaching, we are just in classes from 7:00 - 3:30. For all of the classes we take, TFA was kind enough to provide us with an 800-page publication known affectionately as a "Bounder" or "Big Nasty"
The weekends are a lot more laid back. I normally don't do any work on Friday evenings and just take it easy. Taking it easy includes listening to great music (I actually don't listen to any other kind, so I don't know why I specified), reading, frisbee, and partaking in the occasional adult beverage. I do a fair amount of work on Saturdays and I work most of the day on Sundays. I feel that I would likely have less work to do if I wasn't teaching Biology.
Yes you read that correctly, Biology. Let me explain. When I first arrived at Institute, I was assigned to teach World and/or U.S. History. Being the history nerd that I am, I was ecstatic. However, on the first day of summer school, only one student showed up. The school district has to have at least 10 kids to justify having the class open, so the History class was canceled for the summer. :-( The best alternative was to take everyone in my group and split us off into other Co-labs and I was placed in Biology. It turns out that I know a lot more about Biology than I thought, however it is still a struggle to plan because I do lack a lot of the background knowledge that I think is necessary to plan an effective lesson. As a result, I am reteaching myself some things and asking all of my Co-lab members an inordinate amount of questions. I team taught for the first two weeks of summer school and tomorrow is my first solo day as a Biology teacher. I get to teach about food webs. Naturally, I went online and found a video of the opening credits of the Lion King to start my lesson off tomorrow. I feel that the Circle of Life is an excellent way to get the kids interested in talking about a food web. I mean who doesn't love that song? It moves us all. Seriously.
This past week I also found out two notable things. #1: Next year I will be teaching 5 sections of World History and 1 sections of American Government and Politics. This is super cool because I will get to teach every student in the freshman class and I get to actually teach history for the first time! In all of my student teaching, practicums, and now TFA, the only Social Science I have never had the chance to teach is the on I went to school and got a degree for. #2: I start teacher training in STL on the 25th of July. This means that my next day off is Labor Day. I was hoping for a week between leaving Institute on the 22nd and moving to STL on the 30th that I could just hang out in Colorado. Now that will no longer be the case. I fly back to Denver at 7:00 on Friday the 22nd and I fly leave Denver for St. Louis on Sunday the 24th. I will at least get to see most of my family and Megan's family before I officially leave the great state of Colorado. Megan and Gizzy-Moe will be hanging around that whole week and then driving out, with her parents, to join me on Friday the 29th.
In a final note, I am going to attend one big festival while I am here in Chicago. It involves bicycles, costumes, and Belgium-style beers. I think you can figure the rest out ;-).
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