1/3 of the way done!

This is amazing, but I realized on Friday, the last day of the marking period, that I'm 1/3 of the way done with this insanity called student teaching--where you work your ass off to just survive and not make a complete fool of yourself while hopefully teaching your kids something or other, take classes (most of which are a complete, excruciating waste of time--Nelson's C&I being the obvious exception, and, perhaps less obviously, I'm not just saying that), try to figure out how to plan lessons and units, create assessments, grade those assessments, not lose any papers or your mind for that matter, make sense of all the feedback you get from all over the place, deal with being observed and hear about all the things you could have done better, and do it all without getting a penny.

Meanwhile, despite all the insanity of this semester, I really have had a great time.

There have been some amazing developments with my master teacher that I have been neglectful about addressing here, but I will soon. (Grades are due tomorrow! Ahhh!) The short version is that we're friends now and that I'm invited to her St. Patrick's Day party on Sunday! This is in part a tribute to my university supervisor and to my nice master teacher, the department head, and another teacher who overheard the inappropriate way my master teacher spoke to me. I have to say that I am proud to take a considerable amount of the credit myself, though, if I really think about it. I feel like I controlled my emotions really well and behaved really professionally and appropriately at times when not doing so might have been the more likely response. I worked really hard and finally just told her straight up how I felt but did it in a way that was really respectful and non-aggressive. (All those nonviolent communication classes may have taught me something.) Anyway, I feel good to have stuck it out.

More updates once grades are done!