Going out of my mind (But in a good way!)

So after having it mentioned to me by both of my cooperating teachers, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how, well, I've been spending a lot of time thinking. Whether it's putting together lesson plans of trying to talk to students, right now almost all of my free time is being spent in the act of thinking about teaching. The idea of thinking about thinking about teaching also strikes me as fairly ironic.

My nature is fairly thoughtful - I do tend to spend a lot of time just thinking. Not just about education, but about life and wider topics in general. So as far as thinking not only about my education, but about how I am trying to teach others, well, it is kind of exhausting.

So this weekend was spent recharging and in many ways getting out of the groove of teaching. I tried to avoid thinking too much about education all weekend and instead spent my time with friends and with my girlfriend. Friday feels like a century ago, although I did have something interesting to report from then.

Friday afternoon during my freshman class, Mrs. C stepped outside with a few students and left the rest of the class to do an assignment. As more and more students finished and grew restless (last block of the day, after all) things got rowdier and crazier. I had never been in a situation where I didn't have a plan or a cooperating teacher in the room. I tried to regain order and momentum by having students share journal entries, but it did little to stem the quell of leaping up, jumping around and general misbehaving from rowdy students.

I felt like, if it had been completely my classroom, like I would have thought of what to do. Because Mrs. C's meeting with the students ran for much longer than she anticipated (15 minutes instead of 5) I was really on my own. In this regard, I don't feel like I was very successful yet. This will be something to work on - having a few backup assignments on hand if things are winding down at the end of the day. In retrospect, I could also easily have just said it was time for silent reading until the end of the class - not only do students have silent reading books, but they also have a novel they're working on now and I can use having less homework as leverage against in-class misbehavior now.

Food for thought.