One week down already!

I have learned two things today: one, living in Cleveland, Mississippi is in fact worse than living in Loretto. Cleveland makes Ebensburg look like a wealth of resources (and for those that I went to school with, yes, it really is that bad). I went to Wal-Mart with my roommate today looking for a few specific items: make-up, make-up sponges, a black blazer, and a wide black belt. I came out of the store with a 6-pack of blue moon and the make-up sponges. My roommate bought two bags of trail mix so we wouldn’t look so pathetic. I don’t know where people work here in the summer, but it’s obviously not in a professional environment because even when we tried the random clothing stores we came across, no blazers suitable for teaching children were to be found. We also decided to “explore” Cleveland after our unsuccessful shopping excursion. Well if you go past the Wal-Mart, there’s a pizza place… No, really, that’s it. Oh, and the super sketch-looking roller skating rink. At least in Loretto, the landscape made up for the lack of anything but my university, but here it’s just nothingness for miles. I guess I don’t feel so bad anymore that I won’t really have much of a chance of spending time in the town this summer.

Second thing I learned today, no matter how short of a distance I am walking outside, wear bug spray! OK, I don’t know how many times the 2010 SLA CMs told us this, but for some reason the mosquitoes were put on standby the first week, allowing us to think previous CMs had simply overreacted to the severity of mosquitoes here, and when we finally decided it was safe to stop wearing copious amounts of bug spray, BAM, they strike. All I know is that when I left for dinner this evening, my feet did not resemble a small mountain range, and now they do.

As for the rest of my first week – well I’m hoping it’s downhill from here. Which, actually I think it will be, or at least I keep telling myself it will for the sake of my sanity. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s just I’m so busy. And not like college-ah-I’m-so-busy-but-I-really-could-make-time-if-I-cut-out-Facebook busy, but legit, I come back from school and have about 3-4 hours of work time, all of which I desperately need, before I crawl into bed at 10 p.m., because once again, I have to wake up at 4:30. The middle of the week, we started to learn about lesson planning, and consequently started cranking out lessons like little TFA-driven lesson planning machines. I’m actually pretty excited to teach elementary math (who knew – but I am still desperately praying I get a job teaching English) – it’s pretty easy to break down and I actually know how to do these problems.

On Friday, we got to meet our students! It was such an exciting day. It felt like we had been working up to this moment for so long, yet it had only been four days. We only administered a Diagnostic Reading Assessment to the students’ on Friday, so we weren’t actually teaching a lesson, but it was pretty cool to get to interact with my students before I have to go into “super teacher mode.” All my students that I tested are on at least a 3^rd grade reading level, and they will be entering 4^th grade in the fall (I don’t think any of my students have been retained – they are in summer school because they either just barely passed and need more instruction time to catch up, or they’re just want learning enrichment). One of our students even tested on a 5^th grade reading level! My class overall seems like a great group of kids and I’m so excited to teach them (check back in with me at the end of next week, and I’ll let you know if I’m still feeling the same).

While everyone else was busy celebrating their livers out Friday night, I was closed up in my room studying for my last two praxis exams (did I mention I had to take 4!?) that were yesterday morning. They were for high school English, so I was very familiar with most of the content. I was able to take some time out Friday night to go to a catfish fry Delta State held for us. I was surprised at how many people were just so unsure of how to perceive the eating of catfish and hush puppies. I guess I shouldn’t have assumed that all families in the country just grew up eating fried catfish and hush puppies like I did. It was certainly strange to see the culture shock some people were going through. I am extremely exhausted tonight and most of me just wants to crawl into bed and curl up with non-TFA reading material. As Ian put it, “welcome to the life of a teacher.” Hey, if that’s what teachers get to do on Saturday nights, I have a feeling I’m going to love this teacher thing.