Since the beginning of J-term last Thursday, I've been anticipating my first day in the classroom as a teacher's observer. My J-term class is an education class where four days a week we observe and help out in an area school classroom. I was placed in a Decorah High School science class since I am interested in possibly teaching biology at that level.
This morning was full of excitement and anticipation, especially after we found out that there was a 2-hour delay due to weather. I received a call from my car pool driver at 6:10 AM telling me about the delay, and I was a little relieved. (I stayed up a little too late to watch the national BCS title game last night, and it wasn't even that close!) So after sleeping a bit more I was refreshed and ready to go. I felt so professional as I donned my black dress pants, heels, and nice top before heading out; not my usual type of attire.
Other Luther students are also placed at Decorah H.S. in other classrooms, so we all had a meeting this morning with the principal before school started. Then in we went, to meet our teacher and the students with whom we'll be working for the month. As I walked into the classroom I could tell it would be a great fit for me. The teacher is super enthusiastic and the kids were all participating and talking, and not just talking to their friends, but actually talking about the current classroom topic. This teacher really encourages discussions, interactions, and activities that help apply lessons from the book to real life. I'm really looking forward to seeing what all goes in to being a great teacher-the lesson plans, the relations with the students, relations with the other faculty, etc. It will be a great experience to see if teaching is what I'm really interested in, and it gives me an opportunity to step away from my role as a student, and try out being a teacher. It also gives me something to do during the days while all of my friends are taking their 2 hour classes and then doing homework. Last Thursday and Friday I was getting a little bored because we don't have much work to do outside of our observation.
Speaking of down time and boredom, during J-term not too much is going on at Luther other than movies on the weekends, varsity basketball, wrestling, and swimming, and INTRAMURALS! Intramurals are huge during J-term. Dodgeball, card games, basketball, indoor soccer, and much more are all offered to students. I'm playing in a 5-on-5 basketball league on a team made up of all cross country girls (we all played basketball in high school, though). Last night was our first game and it was awesome! We played a team of guys and we rocked. Despite the fact that we only had 1 substitute and non of us had shot a ball in quite some time, we did really well and won by 7. The 3's were dropping and I was amazed at how physical we were. It was so fun to play again and to see this 'baller' aspect of my teammates that wasn't apparent during XC. We have a total of 11 games in the next 3 weeks, so our conditioning will pay off.
So after a slow start, J-term is shaping up to be a fun month full of new opportunities. Not a bad way to start off a new year.
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