At first I was afraid; I was petrified.

Dear Jennifer,

Today was your second day (ha) of student teaching, and you have certainly survived so far.

Things that are giving me anxiety:

• I start teaching on Wednesday and I don't have any lessons yet.
• Russ says that I can teach anything I want, when all I really want is for him to tell me what to teach.
• There is only one SmartBoard.
  
• Being alone with 15 high school students and having no idea what I'm doing.
• Fully understanding the grading system.

I like watching how the Franklin teachers interact with each other. Their personalities are all REALLY different. There's a certain amount of tension when they're discussing things together.

I'm going to be teaching with Kathy in technology class. I like Kathy, but sometimes it seems like she's blowing me off. Or blowing everyone off. If she's talking to 2 or 3 people. she'll only make eye contact with one person. If I asked a question, she would say the answer to the one person she's talking to. It's odd. One-on-one though, shes very nice, and she doesn't seem to have a problem making eye contact.

Everyone there has a good sense of humor but jokes tend to be hit or miss depending on the situation and time. Sometime you'll get a really good laugh out of them and other times you get the cold shoulder.

I met the downstairs middle grades teachers today. They laugh a lot. They seem different, as a whole, than the high school teachers. Mr. Barlow says that the middle school students are outrageous. He said I could definitely go and observe Melissa's classroom. I met Melissa this morning, she is the only teacher in the building that is certified to teach English. In one respect, it's nice that there can be so many English classes to meet the requirements of the students, but on the other hand, I wonder about the effectiveness of lessons made/taught by non-English teachers.

Russ (Mr. Russel), has some weirdly large amount of confidence in my ability to teach and manage these students. Either there is something inside of me that I'm not aware of or all of these people are going to be hugely disappointed.

One more day of conferences and then your first day of teaching! Woot! Ha...this could be so bad.