This is not a post.

So, I have decided to do a bit of reflecting upon the last few weeks of school, and also talk briefly of the madness to come.

Teacher's College has been fantastic thus far. We're in our first week of October, and I am facing about the same amount of workload that I expected to be facing when I applied to Teacher's College in the first place. If you look in my planner, you'll see that each Tuesday (and to a lesser extent, each Thursday and Friday) of each week in October has a little sticker on it. A sticker means that I have to do something or hand something in. That's right, I basically have between 2-3 things to hand in or to do each week this month.

Our narrator calmly sips from her tall cafe mocha from Starbucks. Mmmm...consumerism.

It hasn't fazed me so far. Yeah, there's a lot to do. But I keep reminding myself that I just got finished writing a paper that was about the size of a small apartment before I started Teacher's College. I changed the topic of said paper after already doing a whole semester of research, causing me to start an entire Master's-level thesis paper from scratch...twice. In doing so, I developed stupidly amazing time management skills since this time last year, I was balancing 6 hours of class with about 3-4 hours of related reading per course each week, PLUS TAing for a demanding survey course in the Classics department, spending between 5-6 hours per week attending the aforementioned class or assisting students or grading or creating exam questions or preparing my guest lecture, PLUS RESEARCHING FOR THE PAPER I NEEDED TO WRITE BEFORE APRIL TO GRADUATE IN EVERY EXTRA HOUR OF EVERY DAY. Let's also not forget the nights I stayed up late, terrified to go to sleep, since I'd have to wake up the next day and complete another 16-17 hour day of class/TAing/researching/beginning outlines and drafts.

Our intrepid narrator continues calmly sipping coffee.

So, you see...while there's a lot to do, I'm not exactly worried. I am in a much better mental state than this time last year.

Oh yes, I wanted to talk more about Teacher's College. We are asked, as teacher candidates (I love that saying - teacher candidates...reminds me of MA candidate, which I was just last year) to put in 10-15 hours of volunteer work at a high school in our area. We are assigned to a teacher, much like our practicum, but we won't be responsible for lessons...simply hanging out in the classroom, observing how the teacher does things, helping students as necessary, and maybe leading an activity with a class, if there is time/space to do so. The teacher I get to hang out with for this volunteer project, I feel, is basically me 10 years into the future.

Seriously, she even looks like me.

We have the same attitude about teaching, she maintains her classes in about the same way I would like to maintain mine...it's like my TES instructor paired me off with someone who not only matched my teachable, but my personality. The students are fantastic, and do revere her with more respect than I tend to see given to FSL instructors. I kinda half-assedly hope one of my practicums ends up in that school, no joke.

Speaking of practicum, could I be more excited for that or what? I find out in only nine days where my first practicum will be held, and whether it will be for my first teachable (French) or my second teachable (History). I understand that when I actually get to my practicum, the difficulty level will shoot through the roof. We basically get thrown into the deep end, and we'll have to stay on top of our collective games by creating coherent and interesting lesson plans which we will test drive on our students, and we will have to practise whatever skills we have developed in classroom management. (Thank goodness I attended a workshop about classroom management earlier last month instead of going home to sleep like I so desperately wanted to do.) We will also get to help with extracurricular activities, one of the aspects of practicum for which I am almost the most excited.

I attended a workshop last night on integrating web pages into our instruction, and it just got me so excited to carve out my niche as a teacher. It seems like a random tangent, but honestly...I hope to develop a classroom website when I get started, so that my students can do things like collect handouts they missed from being absent, or check out neat content-related links I post up there. I'm excited about developing a rapport with students, and about using technology to help them develop their own intrinsic motivation. It's all just awesome.

So that's where I'm at right now. Teacher's College is awesome. There's a lot to do, but I'm managing, and I get more and more excited each day to see what I will do in a classroom setting.