Week 9 Student Teaching

This is my last week here at Humphrey. My cooperating teacher has slowly been taking over the lessons. One thing I notice is the kids really aren't responsive to him. Whenever he asks questions. They ask me. Even when he comes to them with their hand raised they say "No I need to talk to Mr. Young..." It's actually funny because he's like "Really?! You don't want my help!"(kidding of course). I know that they are just not used to the new teaching style of my teacher and they have had me for the past nine weeks. The last 2 days have been actually sort of emotional. When students say goodbye, they are so sad and they are so bummed out when they find out I'm leaving. I'm not gonna lie I almost cried. We seriously had a lot of fun during the class. They would love to see me in the hallways. They say hi even when the are with a group of friends. It's funny when I first came to the school I ws a little terrified. And honestly, I thought, man these kids are kind of disrespectful. But I went on to realize just how awesome each and every student is. The last day students brought me a signed card by all the students and a box of cookies. One of the students walked to Meijer before school and bought with her own money a box of cookies. It was the most thoughtful thing. On the last day, my cooperating teacher said I should choose the daily listening but to make it mean something important. He happened to bring his trumpet on that day. I said, "Let's perform!" We looked up the chords and melody for the jazz song "Autumn Leaves" I learned the chords and before class, we rehearsed it for 10 minutes, then we performed it for each class. Students then analyzed musical elements within our performance. Students clapped. It was amazing. The energy was amazing. We really were having fun. I'm going to miss that place. At the end of the day I went out in the hall with my djembe drum and another teacher met me out there to jam as students were leaving. (we've done it on Fridays before). The image I'm going to remember forever was this student walking away down the hall and the teacher singing "Good-bye Britt-ney!" and she just walked down the long hallway, waving.

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