Student Teaching Journal

I’m doing the second eight weeks of my student teaching assignment at Westwood High School and Aspen Ridge Middle School with Tony Beacco. I’ve been hoping I could student teach under his supervision since my freshman year at NMU, so I’m pretty excited. I’ve observed him teaching a lot over the past four years, but I spent my first full day with him about a week ago. The high school concert was a week away and the middle school concert was that evening, so I got to see a lot of concert preparation and even help out with set-up and program copying and folding. I got to know some of the kids. One of the seniors is actually a friend of mine, so it’s probably a good thing that he’s graduating so I can be on a strictly professional level with the students starting off.

Tony says that my student teaching experience will be a lot of team teaching. Since high school chorus (at least the way he runs it) is a rehearsal-based program, we’ll probably do a lot of sectionals where I work with half of the class while he works with the other half. It sounds like he’s going to let me start off the year on my own with one of the smaller middle school classes that meets three times a week. That should be a good way to get my feet wet.

I’m also very excited that I’ll get to help out with the musical, Fiddler on the Roof. I was in Fiddler once and I’ve seen it on Broadway two (maybe three?) times, so I know the show very well. The only not fun thing about that is a lot of their rehearsals are in the evening, so I’ll either have to hang out in Ishpeming for a few hours between school and rehearsals or drive back and forth twice in a day.

I’m pretty excited, but more nervous of the unknown. Tony and I will keep in touch over the summer, but I have a feeling that a lot of what will happen will be a giant question mark until September 3rd, the first Professional Development Day. That one day spent with him answered about 217 questions that I had, though. I’m glad I went. I don’t know how some people can not even meet their supervising teacher until the day they begin!!

I’m spending a day with my supervising teacher for the first eight weeks tomorrow. Hopefully that will get me more excited for that part of it, because I’ve spent so much time with Tony now that every once in a while it slips my mind that I’ll be spending my first eight weeks somewhere else before I go to him.

Filed by emstrazz at 4:40 pm under Uncategorized
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