First Week At School (with students)

Wow so what a week! I feel: excited, intrigued, vulnerable, questioning, friendly, hopeful, exhausted, challenged and relieved.

The first day we had a council meeting (a democratic all-school meeting). I was a little dismayed at how disrespectful the students were during the meeting. I had heard that these were magical meetings where the students were able to voice concerns, address problems and formulate school policy, but that totally wasn't possible with people talking over each other and being generally distracting...but also it was the first meeting. Everyone was real excited to see each other again and the first graders were really excited because it was their first time being in a council meeting.

I spent quite a bit of time bonding with a new student. There are 5 middle school boys and they are trying to get more of a gender (sex?) balance by having more girls. So there were two girls visiting. One of them fell in real easy with the boys and the other one is who I spent time with. She was really shy and nervous to be around those rambunctious middle schoolers. I feel proud in being a part of her deciding to stay.

Tuesday I went to the high school free school at 11:00 to help teach a math class. It was the first meeting of the class. My co-teacher is an older man who was a math teacher "in a past life". Since everyone was different ages and different experiences we went around and found out about what people wanted to learn, why they were there and what their past experiences were like. I think it will be really hard for the two of us to cater to 10 high school students needs...they are kind of intimidating for me. The students at the elementary school are excited to meet me but the high schoolers are like, "what are you gonna do for me?" and if they don't like your answer they don't seem to care about you. So that will definitely be a challenging experience. My coteacher will be there twice a week, but for now I am only committing to once a week so I can have lots of time at the elementary school. We decided to divide it up so that he is meeting with the students interested in preparing for the regents exam, I will do a "transition math"/"algebra"/applied mathematics/whatever hour long math activity once a week for those who are interested. Lesson plans! aaah!

My best times so far this week were when I was with a small group of students doing an activity. Sometimes there will be a group being rowdy and fighting and yelling and that just isn't what I'm into. I taught one student one-on-one how to draw people and horses. I played kickball. I taught letters and numbers to kindergartners. I played circle games. I went bowling. I went swimming.

I have been involved in and stood in on several conflict resolution sessions so far, but there haven't been any council meetings to resolve conflicts. The free school doesn't always break up fight, sometimes they let students duke it out which I think is interesting. Kinda makes me nervous though.

Next week I am going to offer a skateboarding class. I have to work on planning my math class.