  Day two is over—and I am already feeling quite comfortable in my placement. I met two new classes of students and was delighted by both. The morning started off on a humorous note when a student asked me “are you a new student”, when I replied, “No, I am your new student teacher.” She said “Yeah, I thought you were a new student. You look really young”. It was bound to happen. So anyway I give the class an introduction to myself and at the end inform them that if they have any questions of me they can feel free to ask, and if throughout the semester they have any critic or advice for me as a teacher I would gladly welcome it.
A girl raised her hand and asked, “Do you like kids, I mean teenagers? Because the last student teacher we had didn’t.” I confirmed that I did like students and that I wouldn’t be in the field if I didn’t. I think the answer appeased her—but I suspect her to be suspicious of me for a while. My mentor and I then administered the exam. It went much smoother today, now that we have a system for passing it out. There are four parts we had to pass out.
The first two were the scan-tron type answer sheets. One for her to grade, and the other for the district (they are now starting to accumulate data on exam test scores to help them determine how to raise scores because of NCLB). So in essence the students have to mark their answers on two score sheets—which was a bit confusing to them. The second two parts where the actual test. The test was so thick that we couldn’t staple it into one piece—so we had to do two. As you can guess this got a bad reaction from students—the test is how long?!?
My mentor teacher is really understanding of students as they take exams. For instance one boy (who was sitting at the high lab tables) was more comfortable standing in is place than sitting. It was really quite interesting watching him alternate between the two. Other students need additional time, more than the allotted two hours—and she freely gave it. We had a nice lunch today given by the parent organization. The brownies were to good---yum.
It was good to have that highlight of the day before the big sadness. The sadness came when reading one students free response answer. The question was to compare and contrast an animal and plant cell---and in the response the student compared animals and plants---and in really poor grammar to add it that. According to my mentor this student should not have been placed in the Pre-AP class, and next semester she will be moved to the regular class. Hopefully she will be able to be more successful there. After school the kid who stood during his exam came to work on his science fair project.
This kid absolutely cracks me up with his lab technique. He needed to clean out some beakers and this was his method. He began by spraying some All Purpose Cleaner in the beaker, then filled it with water. Now for the best part---he placed his hand over the top of the beaker and shook it up and down. I believe this will produce a really clean and sterile beaker which he needs for his bacterial growth experiment. Anyway he is one of those intelligent kids who has his head in the clouds, his is definitely going to be entertaining this semester.
Talked more with my mentor today about the plan for this semester. We are going to really lay it all out on Friday, but we pretty much determined that we are going to team teach for the next two weeks—then I will take over the class. This is much sooner than I thought, but I imagine I will be fine. She explained her teaching methods to me, and basically every day consists of a lab or activity—she rarely lectures. This is great because that is just the way that I want to teach—I am very hopefully that I can learn a lot from her. Also my university supervisor came by for his introductory visit—my mentor then realized she knew him from science fairs of the past—so hopefully that connection will make their communication go smoothly.
Alright—that is all for today. 
