Monday, November 12, 2007

Week Eleven, Last Observation

Week eleven! Five days this week, two days next week, and then five easy days the week after during which I'll observe other classes. And then this sumbitch is finally well and truly over.

Glad to be moving on (to my job! at Prestigious! thank God!), but I will miss the kids and the first-grade teachers. I should thank the deities of the aleatory for my great fortune, working with a team full of such camaraderie and good humor.

State School Sponsor came for the fourth and final observation today. I led the kids through another of my highly enjoyable PowerPoint presentations, this one on the verb endings -s, -ed, and -ing, as well as the possessive apostrophe-s ending. Then I distributed a worksheet of my own devising based on material covered in the PowerPoint to most of the class before taking the low-achieving readers to guided group reading of short phonics stories that featured the endings.

Sponsor gave me a generic letter of recommendation and told me I'd be getting an A for the class. I'd told her about the five-month contract at Prestigious, and she said I ought to apply for jobs in the fall just in case. She also repeated the old saw that public schools pay more than private; I didn't have the heart to tell her that in this case the pay's better on the other side. Still, though I hope Prestigious will just extend my contract, I'd better hedge bets and apply at public schools for the fall of '08.

Not much learning went on today for two reasons. (1) The Thanksgiving play is coming up, so every first-grader has been spending a lot of time lined up at the cafeteria stage's proscenium and taking turns mumbling or shouting lines and then breaking into song every so often. Busby Berkeley it's not, but it's cute. (2) A local university is doing some kind of experiment on the children while they play with computers. Brown Elementary is, without a doubt, being paid for providing the guinea pigs, given how the principal perseverated at the faculty to get the kids' permission slips in so everyone could participate. Anyway, it's an inconvenience, because the kids miss some learning, but Ms. L did appreciate the forty-five minutes they were out of her hands, in the computer lab, and being subjected to Narada knows what unspeakable Ludovico technique. Just kidding, it's just some dopey psychology test, I'm sure.

No comments: