My shoes is party dance!

I have now finished teaching my unit on inventions. I made a display of the kids' work in the window at the library, mostly so I can show it to my professor when she comes to do her site visit. It's pretty cool though, the kids who bought into it and actually came to class did a good job. I wrote down some of their more humorous writing to share with you, which I will get around to eventually. I think. :)

Today I weeded old books out of the high school's collection. I pulled a bunch of books on the Middle East that were written in the 1980s or earlier, and some AIDS/HIV books from the 80s too. I also found some gems like "What About VD?", "The Rise of Red China" and "The Indian and the White Man in Connecticut", which are also sitting happily on the discard cart. Oh, there was also a book on what teenagers could do to help avoid nuclear war (huh?) and books on nuclear proliferation from 30 years ago. And books from the 1960s and 70s about American politics/political parties that hadn't circulated since the 60s and 70s due to their HEY-WE'RE-FROM-THE-60S-AND-70s looking covers. I love weeding. It's fun finding all these freakishly old, unloved, and sometimes just downright horrifying books and freeing the shelves of them. I hate to think of any kids who learned about safe sex from a book entitled "What About VD", after all! Plus, now I bet I can select some replacements for these books, which is also fun. See, up until this point, the library had a very small budget, so they couldn't really replace old stuff, which is why all this was still on the shelf. But it looks like they're going to be getting more money this year, so there is hope for the collection now.

My BPAL order and the crazy lip stuff came today, so it's time for a sniffing session now. :)

So, my first day!

It was fine, and pretty relaxed. The weather was crappy, so school was delayed by one hour and got out an hour early. So it was like a warmup day, or something. :)

I mostly shadowed today. I observed a couple of classes. One was a class on the American legal system that my LMS was covering for a teacher who was out sick - basically, they watched videos of "Cops" for 1/2 an hour, and boy was that a good time! And the other class was one that was actually in the library. They were doing research for a health class project, so I helped some kids with that a little bit. I talked to the teacher whose class I'll be teaching in the library next week - she teaches lower-literacy kids, and I'll be doing the researchy unit on inventions with them that I wrote with my class partner from last semester. Tomorrow I'm bringing in the unit so we can go over it and figure out how to make it work for them. I also spent some time today planning my bulletin board - they're letting me to do the library bulletin board for while I'm there so I can take pictures to put in my portfolio. :) And then I had lunch, and when I was coming back, the announcement came over the loudspeaker that school would be closing at 12:50. Since I was in the hall, I could hear a roar of students cheering about this. :)

So, there we are. Tomorrow I get to get started on my planning a little more, and probably observe some more instruction. I'll also have a desk by then, methinks, and my very OWN key to the bathroom so I can go by myself like a big girl!

I have a headache that just won't quit, but I think that's related to the change in my sleep schedule and stuff. Other than that, I feel much better about life already - we're over the hump, people!