rakkauden ja epätoivon laulu

I think that my practicum this time around is off to a good start. It was a tiny bit shaky at first, but once it quickly came to a point where I was prompted and was able to reveal my sob story fears and pressures to my mentor teacher and my facilitator (both of whom are new to these roles), things became a lot easier because I don't need to hide anything anymore. (Not that I ever really wanted to, but I was worried that the seeming conflict of interest would mess up people's expectations of me in a "why the hell are you here anyway, no wonder you fail at this" kind of way. I guess they would have, anyway.)

They know that I'm just trying to get through this and so we're keeping this simple, and I'm not about to try anything super-creative and take on any more work than I'm required to because I stress out enough about it as it is.

It's nice that the textbooks are set up in discrete lessons, each with its own explanations, examples, and then exercises, and my teacher has mostly been just putting up the examples onto interactive slides, working through them with the class, then assigning homework from the exercises. I've been following that format because it makes planning super-easy, and the kids are used to it anyway.

My teacher is doing everything she can to help make this work out for me. She obviously knows the kids better than I do, so she's been stepping in to discipline the more insinuatingly disruptive students whom she knows I'm not yet confident in dealing with (and trust me, there seems to be a lot of troublemakers. Maybe it's because it's a school of jocks?).

Yesterday the facilitator came in to watch while I was doing a lesson using my teacher's slides. This is the really really terrible group of kids (I think there's like five troublemakers in the class so you can't ever totally separate all of them) and I was a bit nervous because I knew that the facilitator was coming in, so I messed up my sequence of things. But although I was nervous, I was also kind of excited.

The day before my teacher said that I'd actually done a really good job (given that she'd just heard my story and was a little bit worried about my capabilities), and I just really didn't know how much stock to put in those comments. So I was looking forward to getting a second opinion. He said that I erased all his doubts also, and that, yeah, that's a difficult group of kids, but you've got fantastic teaching skills developing over there; newbies tend to speak too timidly or not explain stuff well.

Well, I have normally had little doubt in my presentation skills. I sometimes stumble over my words when my brain's spinning faster than my lips can move, but I have a strong voice with good inflection (all my emoting and dramatics haven't been for nothing!).

I just don't get it, you know? Everyone tells me to give myself more credit for things, and I can kind of agree, but with this teaching stuff, I have no standard to judge myself against except for myself (my mentor teacher is obviously too pro for me to compare myself to for a sense of how I'm doing as a student teacher).

As far as I can tell, I have the feeling that I'm not taking this as seriously as my classmates are, which I know also lowers my self-assessment.

They've got their fancy plan-book binders (I have a binder for my own copies of the schedule and the seating plans and my reflection notes, but I write the plan notes in my teacher's planning binder at the front of the room, and since we're not doing fancy lessons, this is all the planning that is reasonable to do, don't need printouts of step-by-step instructions for each lesson and stuff). I also haven't strictly been doing 'professional' reflections, I've been doing my usual type of existential reflection with some 'professional' comments tossed in, in the form of a pretend letter to a friend (complete with non-school digressions). I just need that "Dear ______" prompt to get myself started. I'm sure that if someone wanted to see some of them I can excerpt out appropriate parts for that purpose.

Anyway, I feel my anxiety levels slowly rising every evening starting from when I come home from work. Then sometimes I'll randomly wake up at 3:00, only to fall asleep again until my alarm at 6:00. But just before I leave my apartment the next morning, it's worst.

Like today, I really had no reason to be worried about the lesson I was to be teaching, but as I got on the bus, my heart totally felt like it was in my throat.* But once I get to the school, and the day starts, and I watch my teacher getting her stuff done before classes start, I start to feel a little better. I knead my stress ball. (One of the students wanted to play with it today. "No," I said. "It's mine!")

I kind of wish my facilitator was here to watch me today. I put together my own slides for this lesson instead of using my teacher's, and it was a better-behaved group of kids, so I felt pretty good about it. I didn't run out of time or anything, I did stuff in the right order... I put the seating plan on my desk so I could call on kids by name. When my teacher asked how I felt the lesson went, it was a little bit hard to say at first, but yeah, I'm pretty happy about it.

I marked a pile of math tests too. That was actually kind of fun. (The high school kids in the room for my teacher's computers class, not so much. They were rude and disrespectful and stuff.)
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^*Ken Follett uses the phrase "his heart was in his throat" twice within, I think, 20 pages, not too far into The Pillars of the Earth. It's a good phrase, but hey editors!

I just got my admissions email for my transfer from engineering into general science, but a look at the transfer credit page on Beartracks only shows the following:



What on earth does it mean? By my calculations I have exactly 90 credits toward a general science degree based on courses that I have already taken, but how come they are not listed? Why does it only list those three? What's going on?

Or maybe the faculty doesn't go through transfer details until later? Beartracks correctly gives me 4th-year status on the registration pages.


(x-posted to ualberta)

Edit: I hope it just means that I have 90 credits, but they haven't gotten around to figuring out exactly what they are. Beartracks recommends something to the effect of "keep checking throughout the summer":

Check Bear Tracks periodically to review any updates to your transfer credit. The Transfer Credit Report is not available on Bear Tracks after the registration add/drop deadline for the Term of the application. You may wish to save or print a copy of the report for your future reference.

[Most of the dialogue has been paraphrased/rephrased. I don't have a perfect memory, you know.]

( Part 1. The Dean's Office )

( Part 2. The Second Signature )

( Part 3. Statements )