Completely terrfied

I've been trying to bargain with time over the past two weeks, trying to get it to stop, but no such luck, tomorrow is almost here. This is so much more terrifying than the night before student teaching. At that point, I knew that I'd be spending my first week observing, but in about 9 hours, I'm going to be center stage, on the tightrope without a pole to help me balance.

My syllabi are all ready, as are my seating charts, class rules and expectations. I plan on spending tomorrow's class period handing out and going over those, handing out vocab books. The rest of the period I'm going to spend on community building stuff. First, I'm going to have students fill out inf0-cards for me with their contact information, etc. I'm also going to ask them to briefly answer two questions on their card: What do you like to read? (anything... from cereal boxes, to comic books, to newspapers, to Stephen King) and What kind of music do you like to listen to? I thought those two questions would help me to understand each student just a little bit, so that I can get a feel for what types of material each may respond to. Then after I collect the cards, I'm going to introduce our real community building activity which will be bag-presentations. Dr. Richards had us do them at the beginning of our Classroom Management semester, and I thought they were a really great way for us to get to know each other. So I am taking in 5 items in a bag that will allow me to introduce myself as a person to the students (favorite book, a souvenir from a vacation, my RENT poster, lol). This will model the process for them, and they will be asked to bring in 3-5 things for their bag presentations the following day (I anticipate it will take us two days to get through everyone, with about 2 minutes for each student). I hope this goes over well. I have doubts about their enthusiasm, but it should get the students up and speaking and listening to each other (standards based, you know!).

I'm mostly scared that I won't have enough to get us through 44 minutes and I'll have like 10 left and not know what to do. I think if that happens, I will just have them write a first journal entry. Or we can do some other name-game kind of thing. I don't know. I hope it all works without me looking too much like an idiot, or too outwardly nervous.

One thing that happened last week that I forgot to write about. On Thursday, I received notice of my students with IEP's. Instead of giving us the full length document (which we can access electronically), each learning support teacher gave each regular teacher an abbreviated sheet for each student. It lists their strengths, their weaknesses and their necessary adaptations. It's a of information when you have 10-12 students with special needs, I feel like I'm never going to remember everything I need to do for these kids. I did notice right away, however, that many of the adaptations (just like our profs told us) are simply just "good teaching" practices, things we should be in the habit of doing to help all students, not just those with adaptations. For example, one of those was, for a hearing impaired student, make sure you always repeat any questions or answers given by other students in the class so he can hear them: something easy that I really just need to get into the habit of in general. I'm still scared though that I'm not going to remember to do all these things, with so much else going on and stressing me out. Many of them had "preferential seating" as a requirement, so I had to go back and re-do all of my seating charts to make sure these kids were in the front. Just something I encountered last week that sort of threw me for a loop. Not that I wasn't expecting to have IEP's and such, but it sort of hit me amongst all the other prep-stuff that was overwhelming and it just added to the pile of panic and things to worry about.

Well, I'm off to bed for an attempted few hours of sleep. I will report back from the other end of the battlefield when it's all over...