Day One, Hour One

So, I was literally with Schultz for about 10 minutes before the school day started. Her first class of the day is English 11. When I had imagined shadowing, I thought that I would get to sit at a desk and feel big and important. Instead, Schultz introduced me briefly, put a teacher's copy of the textbook into my hands and told me to go sit down in one of the desks in the back of the classroom.

She needed the desk room because she was interviewing her students about novels they were supposed to have read over Christmas break. When Schultz called a student up to her desk, she opened it up to the back fourth or so, and read a sentence. The students were then supposed to explain the context of the sentence. Meanwhile the class takes notes from 11 pages (note that they have 80 minutes to do this) and I skim the 9th grade text on Romeo & Juliet.

Lots of the students don't have their books, and even though I would probably be one of them, I am surprised by the cavalier attitude that so many throw around as they tell Schultz that they didn't read their books at all. I would have been mortified. Well, a bit embarrassed at least.

From looking through the teacher's textbook, I can see how a person could manage to slide around and be a crappy teacher by just doing everything that the editors put in the margins. I'm pretty sure that one or two of my teachers back at JFK did that, and it will be interesting to see how Schultz compares to this hypothetical crappy teacher.