Student teaching

So I'm in the midst of my student teaching- 16 weeks of unpaid classroom observations, note taking, lesson planning, grading, disciplining, and of course teaching. It is assuming full responsibility as a teacher. It is required in most states for teachers. You have to work for 16-30 weeks depending on the college and program FOR FREE. For many it is quite a hardship as many, except young students fresh out of college, can maybe really afford to student teach. I know many who have had to find evening and weekend jobs, or like an instructional aide at the school can't think about getting her credential because she can't afford to even if she were to find a part time job as she is the sole income provider for her family. How many professions do you have unpaid training like this for such a long period of time?

Some have great student teaching experiences, while others have not so great ones:
- One girl in my class took responsibility of everything from day 1 and the teacher is nowhere to be seen
- One girl is focusing on just taking over 2 of the classes and doing everything for those classes
- My mom had an awful experience and the teacher was manipulative that she worked with placing my mom against the students.
- Linda also had a bad teaching experience.
- With Linda I have been taking over 2-3 classes a day, done a lot of the grading, but it has been more of a team type thing. I really have nothing to complain about. She treats me well. She brings me lunch.

Well, except for Linda's OCD. These are annoying little events that have taken place over the course of the past few weeks. These are small little things, but in the moment, during the day, when this happens, these events are trying/annoying:

So without further ado here are the Lindaisms I hinted about in my previous post. Enjoy.

Lindaisms
- We walk down the hall around the gum. We have to walk around the biggest gum spots. Gum spots are germy. The ground is germy too, so I don't understand the problem.

- We have to walk down the hall also looking up to make sure nothing falls on our head. She was walking down the hall a few weeks ago when something white fell in her hair. It was nearly the end of the world.

- She prides herself on the cleanest trash cans in the school, and the custodians love that she claims. Only paper goes in the cans. Tissues go outside in the big trash can outside of the room as does gum. There are procedures in place as to how to exit the room with your tissue and gum to avoid getting germs on the door.

- Her trash cans can only stay near the door because who needs germs near their desk or work space? She doesn't have a trash can next to her desk which drives me crazy.

- All who enter her classroom have to scrape their feet on the mat at the door so they aren't bringing dirt and contaminants into the room.

- She makes 36 photocopies and separates them into groups of 6 to make them easy to pass out. One time I didn't, and the lecture went like this, "Michael, you photocopied, but you didn't separate them into groups of 6." No, I didn't. "I always like to photocopy and separate the copies into groups of 6 to make sure that the photocopier made 36 copies." I made the comment I usually just trust the photocopier, but the issue with that is that it is wasting paper. Oh, and can you imagine how much extra time this takes to do it Linda's way? I am more a fan of just cutting the papers down the middle and one half of the room gets half, then having the student grab 1 as they're passed around.

- Linda found a vocab game and directions online that she liked. She wanted to print it. She didn't. Why? We must have argued for 15 minutes. The laser printer is too loud, it would waste too much ink (to print out 2-3 pages), and we are conserving electricity. What was the only option? To have me handwrite everything...

- I needed a sharpened pencil. I plugged the electric sharpener on her desk in, and started to sharpen my pencil.
Linda: " Why are you doing that?"
Me: "I need a sharpened pencil."
Linda: "We have hand pencil sharpeners in the student boxes on the table."
Me: "Yes."
Linda: "Well, why aren't you using it?"
Me: "I figured I would use this one rather than to have to hunt one of the student sharpeners up."
Linda: "But the electric one makes so much noise. It also uses a lot of electricity."
Me: "How much electricity? In comparison to what?"
Linda: "Well, the taxpayers are paying for the electricity, and we want to save them money where we can."
Me: "And the pencil sharpener probably costs mere pennies to run a day."

- Linda constantly asks, "you're not going to share my ideas, are you?" I always say no. Why would I? I don't have any other fellow teachers I want to share with. And why would I share Linda's ideas on taking attendance? She counts how many kids are there every period, circles the number when she enters the attendance into the computer, and what good is that going to do me? Why do I need to know 27 kids were there today? Wouldn't it make more sense to know John and Juan were absent? And as long as it is archived somewhere like the computer I really don't care.