Paraprofessional/Practicum

Well I survived week one of my practicum...barely. And by that, I mean I only survived barely a week. A nice little snow day on Friday helped finish it out. So far, I cannot believe how incredibly exhausted I am. People I've mentioned this to just tell me, "Ha, just wait until you do your student teaching!"Might I point out that this is not necessarily something I am looking forward to? I don't think I've gone to bed past 10:30 all week. Its also killing my ability to sleep in because I keep waking up before 9. Boo! It'll certainly be different when I'm back at USF.

Teaching at an elementary school has definitely been interesting. I figured out before I even came to college that I wanted to teach music in high school. I had a great choir director myself and could easily see myself doing the same thing. However, I was not able to find a high school to do my paraprofessional at. (I'll admit, I wasn't putting too much effort into it either.) Well, the first week of my break, I went to a church game night. Some of the adults in our church were talking to me about how finals were, how long I'd be back, etc. One of them was Mr. Doug Robbins. He was particularly interested in that I was going to be doing my paraprofessional during January. He asked if I had picked a school yet, and I told him where I wanted to do it but had been unable to contact the principal. (I had completely forgotten about the fact that Doug was a principal.) He told me to let him know if it didn't work out because I was welcome to do it at his school. I called him the next day to let him know that I wanted to do it at his school. Even now, I still think I only did that because I was too lazy to contact the other principal.

Over break though, I started to wonder if I'd like teaching elementary kids. I had always been set on high school, there had to be a reason for that, right? Well, thinking back, I realized it was probably because I had a HORRIBLE elementary music teacher who still scares me to this day. So I thought that maybe it wouldn't be so bad. After all, I am a pretty good babysitter. Its gotta be close to that right?