Student Teaching

I finally found out my placement for student teaching! I'll be teaching third graders in a small rural community some forty-five minutes away. I'm excited! And terrified. For those of you not familiar with how education works, even though I've had classroom experience teaching and observing each semester here at Purdue, student teaching is a time in which you gradually get control of the entire classroom all day, every day--you essentially become the teacher for a few weeks or months, and then you gradually hand the reins back to your mentor teacher as the year draws to an end. This means that I get to navigate the students through their first-ever ISTEP testing experience, as well as try to help all the students learn enough to meet the Annual Yearly Progress for the Title I school. I get to do the whole parent-teacher conferences thing, and I get to plan lessons day in and day out for a fourteen-week roller coaster ride. Pressure! But I'm still elated. I want to teach third or fourth grade, and I feel blessed to learn from a teacher who has taught at a few different levels. So I say--bring it on!