TateFieldExperienceJournal1

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Field Experience Journal 1

I’ve never been to Danville High School before so I did a drive up there on Thursday (I was scheduled to go there Friday) to see exactly where I’d be going. The school is VERY different from the high school I went to. It’s very old-fashioned, the buzzer to change classes scared the living daylights out of me, and it’s very tiny, but it was a nice place! I mostly wrote down a list of questions to ask my mentoring teacher since we were meeting for the first time. I learned that eventually I’ll be teaching 10th grade genre study, and they mostly read short stories and focus on character development within those stories. Many of the students in the classroom have IEPs and need to have accommodations for how they learn and accomplish tasks in the classroom. The class is also co-taught, so when I go back there next Friday, I’m just going to observe to see how things run in the classroom. If I got up there right away, it might be a little overwhelming for the students, having three teachers there. Each student has an interactive reader, and I thought that was some kind of technological device that they use, but actually it’s just a copy of the text that the student owns and can feel free to mark up as they see fit. My mentor says this allows students to be more engaged with the text and pick out important information rather than try to memorize it with a borrowed copy of the book. She says she wants me to start getting involved in the classroom as soon as possible, starting with little things like helping with materials and working my way up. My goal, she says, is to interact with the students as much as possible and get to know them as people, which I’m really excited to do – that’s what I’m most looking forward to for student teaching! I can’t wait to work with them next week, they sound like a good bunch.