I'm home for the holidays and yet still swamped in coursework for my certification program. I'm balancing holiday-heightened family life, making deadlines and trying to find a job in another state. It's exhausting but mostly fun. Mostly.

I like journals. (I have a blog, don't I?) I like reflecting. I believe in the value of reflective practice. However, my fellow student teachers and I have reflected ad nauseum about our student teaching experience, and it seems ridiculous to ask us to reflect on unit plans and lessons that we already reflected about in our journals and during seminar. It isn't going to do us any good (at this point, it falls neatly in the "tedious work I wish I didn't have to do" category) and it's only going to give our professor at least 3 more pages of work to read per person! I keep hoping I'll get a "new message" alert from my email software that announces our deadline has been extended or the requirements cut.

Okay, enough procrastinating... I'd better get to work so I can play with my cousins tonight! I promise my next post will be more exciting and less whiny. =)

Time Passing

Well, it's official, student teaching is now over. I had hoped to be able to keep up this blog while student teaching, but our daily journaling requirement had to take priority, and I would have had to do some serious editing to those entries in order to make the readily availabe to the public. I kept meaning to at least try; it never happened. I guess that somewhat defeats the purpose for which I created this blog, and I'm sorry it turned out this way. That's the kind of semester this has been.

Overall, student teaching was amazing and the single hardest project I have ever undertaken. Every single day was an adventure. My students suprised me constantly, positively AND negatively, and frustrated me often. Some of my collegues amazed me with their dedication and style, and others disappointed me, mostly by living up to various stereotypes, the worst being the "burnt out, useless teacher."

Okay, there will be more, including job-searching and more reflection as I put together my portfolio for certification over the next month or so. Hopefully then there will be actual teaching to write about here. In the meantime, I'm signing off.