My New Happy Place

During the Fall I took an online class about culture in the classroom. I hated this class because all I had to interact with was my text book, and I felt like every chapter my text book told me, "Tressa, you are a conservative middle class white girl who has no life experience and cannot relate to your culturally diverse students which will limit your effectiveness as a teacher." Then on particularly rough weeks of the month my book might also add, "Oh and because you are an ignorant middle class white girl you will be solely responsible for completely destroying any love of learning, more skilled teachers might foster. Also, there is nothing you can do about it."

It was a really mean text book.

Anyway as I came back to school I was a little depressed and doubted my abilities to be an effective teacher. I was just praying for a way to feel confident again, and my prayers were answered. This semester I have my early field class where I go to a 3rd grade class every Wednesday and Friday. It is like a really tiny student teaching. I absolutely love this class.

Every week there is another new adventure, and I get to push myself to think of new and different lesson plans every week. Occasionally I wondered if I would ever get bored as a teacher, but I know now that as long as I am mentally engaged I will never be bored. Every day is a new adventure, or brings a new challenge.

For example, what do you say to a class when you are in the middle of a lesson about the Supreme Court and a kid raises his hand and announces his older brother had to go to court for drunk driving? I ignored it....

The Wednesday after I went down to Utah to visit Liz, I had all of the girls in the class surround me. They were stunned by my choice of deep purple nail polish, and they all took turn feeling how smooth my nails were. When I was asked why my nails were so long, and I responded that I just never got around to cutting them, one of the girls told me that just biting them off was a great way to solve the long nail problem. I love those girls!

Anyway, I got really excited tonight when I started to fall asleep and slide into my happy place and I realize that my happy place was in the classroom. I was so excited I just had to get up and blog about it.