Week 2: Weekly blog

This past week I spent a lot of time helping out in second grade and fourth grade classrooms. My mentor decided that those are the places that I am most needed as well as the most helpful. I learned a lot this week, especially in the second grade classroom. I had no idea children could be so difficult, and how hard it is especially when kids have all sorts of different kinds of learning styles. I worked separately with some of the kids in the second grade class who were dyslexic, or one boy who I wrote about in my past blog who was color-blind. The kids are so high energy and they are so interested in what they are currently studying that the classroom was a wild place this week, and we needed to constantly remind the kids to calm down, or to use their inside voices, etc. This week during some of the time I spent helping out in the art classrooms, the teacher asked me if I want to become a teacher, I told her that I was thinking about it but was still unsure. She had a super real conversation with me then, she told me that she loves what she does, but she doesn’t recommend it. I asked her why, and she said that it is one of the most time consuming, exhausting jobs, and the pay does not reflect the amount of work put in. This conversation really made me think, and it was not something I expected to hear, but the more I thought about it, the more accurate it seemed to be.

This past week I spent a lot of time doing writing workshops in the fourth grade, and working one on one with the second graders, but I also spent a lot of time organizing. Because it is the end of the year, teachers have a ton of ungraded work, or graded work that needs to be handed back or sorted through. So, I spent a good few hours over the week going through and sorting math papers, writing assignments, and science labs. Although this is not really part of what I have been doing, the teachers needed help and after all that is what I am there to do, help out where help is needed. I think that going into this next week I have a very clear idea of what I am going to be doing, and how I plan to do it.