Welcome Back to my Blog!

     I can't believe it's been a month since my last post. After I'd finally nailed down a name for this blog, I thought that having a framework for my ideas would make it a lot easier to sit down and write. And it does! I just haven't had the chance to be alone with my thoughts in quite awhile now.
     For the past 6 weeks, I've been spending all my time with other prospective teachers to get a taste of teaching and to prepare for the upcoming school year. I just wanted to write about it to process it better. I analogize it to watching a movie or reading a book again - your brain will probably focus on some other details that seem new just because you didn't pay them proper attention for the first time. This way, you really get the most out of the material as you can. Similarly, I'm hoping to get the most out of life by programming in occasional periods of review. It's like watching film of yourself to learn from events that just recently happened. That being said, let's move on to what's been happening since I moved away from California!
     For the first week, I spent time to get to know the 15 other people placed in the same region as me; we traveled around the community and met people/explored places. This included some community service (a major clean up of a park), meeting and talking to parents and other community members to get to know the area and our work in it, and a lot of team building and reflection activities to share out about ourselves and get to know each other better - after all, we will be spending the next 2 years together.
     For 5 weeks after that, we joined with 400+ others from the surrounding regions to participate in a variety of things during our summer training (referred to as "Institute"): teaching summer school classes, engaging in discussions on culture and teaching, and planning our daily lessons. It was the definition of routine, at least from Monday through Friday. Specifically, my days went like this:

• Wake up at 5:15, get dressed & head out the door at 5:30. 
• Go grab a bagged lunch and have breakfast 'til 5:55
• Walk over to the bus, which leaves at 6:10.
• Get to school at 7, head over to the classroom and prep for the day (clear the board, sharpen pencils, etc.)
• From 7:30, spend time with students in the gym until classes start at 8
• 8-9:40: Fine-tune my lesson for the day or work on tomorrow's lesson 
• 9:40-10:40: Small-group instruction (practicing math with 3-4 students, it's pretty self-explanatory)
• 10:40-11:05: Sit and spend time with the students during lunch
• 11:05-12: More lesson-related work, meeting to discuss lessons and the classroom, observing others teach. Come to class during my co-teacher's block so that students get more individual attention.
• 12-1: My 1-hour block to teach Algebra.
• 1-2:30: Getting back to campus
• 3-6: Classes on teaching, culture, management, etc. etc.
• 6-10 or 11, sometimes 12: Cramming in dinner, lesson planning/printing, exercise, and socializing.
• Rinse & repeat

Phew! We got weekends to ourselves, which consisted of hanging out/going out to get to know the surrounding area (I went to Memphis for 4th of July weekend, which was awesome).

     It's weird to write out that list and see just how planned out my existence has been during Institute. People are creatures of habit anyways - it just so happens that this routine was largely given to me as opposed to being set by me from the start. 

     As far as the bigger picture goes, that's what I've been doing for the past month. The last day of Institute was yesterday, and afterwards I drove back down to our regional base at Tallulah. Everyone but myself and 2 others headed home until we start back up on July 22 with a week of professional development. Until then, I'll just be hanging out in the general area (hopefully sliding down to southern MS for a few days and then around New Orleans for a few more). I hope to get some more writing in during this time.

     Even though I've given you a snapshot of my life for the past month, there's still so much I haven't gone over yet - ideas coming from the discussions during our class sessions, visiting the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, my experiences in class as a teacher, and so much more that I'm pretty sure I won't even get to it all (for instance, I haven't even touched on moving from California to Louisiana [or more accurately, Mississippi]). Stay tuned for updates in the next ~11 days!