4th post!!!

"Now that you are nearing the end of your first quarter of your internship, what has been your biggest surprise about being in the classroom and working with students?"

This may be just because it was so recent, but I was surprised by Parent Teacher Conferences. I was lucky enough to see a whole afternoon and night of conferences. It was a valuable experience to see a veteran teacher go through conferences with parents. It was interesting how some parents asked lots of specific questions, "How can I help him in his reading?" and some parents ask little or no questions at all.


It also was interesting to see how long the ELL program takes to pull out students! We had a student who only speaks Spanish and yet it took upwards of 4 weeks before he was pulled out at all. That was just interesting, the politics involved. Because of this there was a student in our room for a month who we could not fully communicate with - it was good to see what we could do and what we couldn't do for this student.

I've been surprised at how small Bellingham is for it's schools in numbers. Vancouver has so many schools and districts that small things surprise me. Like nurses at a school one day a week.

Bellingham School District
Elementary 14
Middle 4
High 4
Total: 22

Evergreen School District (my old district)
Elementary 21
Middle 6
High 5
Alternative 4
Total: 36

Vancouver School District
Elementary 21
Middle 6
High 6
Total: 33



http://www.bham.wednet.edu/schools/schools.htm
http://portalsso.vansd.org/portal/page?_pageid=153,178877&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL
http://www.egreen.wednet.edu/Schools/Pages/Default.aspx