At last at last, I teach at last!

Monday and Tuesday of this week mark the first days that I have had a chance to put my last four years of higher education to use! If you had told me last semester that I would have gotten through it, I would've thought you were a liar. And if you asked me prior to 10:15 on Monday if I thought I could do it, I wouldn't have been able to give you an answer without going into a full-blown panic. It has been an incredibly long academic year and there have been many moments where I have questioned why I ever thought I would be able to to teach ELA. After this week though, I finally feel as confident as I did where I first chose the major. My lessons were not by any means perfect. On Monday, we got to our exit slip twenty minutes before the class period was up. Up till that point, things had been going really well. The kids had jigsawed a chapter of the novel they're reading, we'd figured out the definitions of two new words, and we questioned whether or not someone can survive without society. As it turns out, I was pronouncing one of the vocab words wrong, but that was an easy fix. And in the end, the kids shared some of their writing and did some silent reading on the section of the book we were going to discuss the next day. I was elated that nothing major had gone wrong, not to mention the teacher told me that she could tell the kids liked me- one of the girls even wrote "you were awesome!" on her exit slip, much to my joy. I was more nervous yesterday- things could only be better or worse this time around. There were a few kids who showed up who hadn't been there the day before and as a whole, the class was much rowdier. But rowdy didn't really hurt me, in the end. We read the chapter out loud, stopping when we found "Thoreau-isms" and I couldn't help grinning every time one of the students said "Miss, stop! That was one!" Not everyone read aloud (I wasn't expecting they all would) but so many kids did, much to my surprise. And when afterwards I had the kids pass notes pretending to be HDT and Chris McCandless, they were near impossible to keep quiet, but the conversations they read out loud afterwards were priceless and showed how much they had been absorbing from their previous lessons. Afterwards when they did their constructed responses, they all wrote something, but I was sad that one girl in particular wouldn't write more than two sentences. The class was nearly over and she handed in her writing, so I didn't say anything. If I had the students for longer than two days, I might've tried to get more writing out of her but I didn't. This was my only disappointment. I know I probably shouldn't be as proud of myself as I am, but I am quite pleased. My mini-lessons in 406 were awful and my lesson plans in our special ed component were not things I was proud of, despite the effort I put in. I was beginning to believe that I had no right to be pursuing this field and I'm glad that despite the end of semester stress that I'm feeling, I don't feel like it's all for nothing.