Overall, I really loved working in this classroom and couldn't have asked for a better teacher to observe.  Mrs. M and I are very similar in our personalities and she gave me a glimpse into the future.  I thought some of her ideas in the classroom were really interesting and would like to use some of her assignments in the future.  Since the school had block scheduling, she had the students for almost two hours.  This schedule allowed her to do more activities in class; she would typically start the day with a review of the last class, move into today's lecture, then conclude with an activity or time to work on projects/assignments.  I thought it was really well organized and really enhanced student learning, the students seamed to really like it as well.
        I also learned from watching Mrs. M that some days nothing goes as plan.  Sometimes she would be trying to deal with an issue before class during her planing period and not get to what she wanted to and then have to make up something on the spot in the classroom.  She would assign some group work thing for the students to work on and then tell me she had to make that up on the spot which is something i'm sure every teacher has to do every now and then when something doesn't go as planned.
        I learned from the students as well.  Some students don't want to be there, some crave attention, some are perfectly behaved, some are too self absorbed to really care whats going on around them....how do you deal with all these attitudes in one classroom?  Being a teacher is going to take patience and understanding.  Mrs. M got all of the students involved by just acting like she cared about their lives and what they were doing.  She made an effort to work around their schedules when planning presentation dates and showed empathy when they were worried about something.  In turn, even the students who don't really care about homework and studying at least made some effort and were respectful towards her.  If you treat your students like intelligent, worthy people, they'll be more likely to put forth effort.
        I was so nervous to teach a lesson to the students since it was the first one I was doing on my own AND someone was observing me.  However, since I had spent the last few weeks getting to know the students and talking to them, they were helpful and respectful while I taught and I was so grateful for that.
        I had a really fun time in this class and it was nice to see that even though some things don'g go as planned, it'll be ok.  I just need to learn to go with the flow and show my students that I care about their education.  I hope to be able to create a comfortable, open classroom environment like Mrs. M did!

       To help out at CHS I sat in and observed the students IB testing.  IB is the International Baccalaureate program at CHS and gives the students opportunity to earn college credits.  To do this though, as seniors they have to take oral exams which include them sitting in a room with one of the teachers and analyzing two of the works they have worked with over the summer.  The first 10 minutes of the exam they get to talk about a work that they have had a few minutes to prepare for and for the other portion of the exam they draw a work at random and have to analyze it.  These exams are recorded and sent to an international grading committee. 
    Some of the students were very impressive and it was interesting to see with how much information they could come up with on the spot.  Other students were clearly unprepared or just nervous and didn't do as well as they needed to.  It was hard to watch students do poorly because I knew that they probably knew the information and were just nervous.  I know that as a high school student I would have found this oral examination incredibly nerve wracking and wouldn't have done very well at it.  Although some students clearly performed better than others, I'm happy to say that very few didn't pass!

     I have completed my first week of my observations in Ms. M's classroom at CHS and I have been really enjoying it.  The class is a junior level IB class and they just began a unit on Truman Copote's In Cold Blood.
     Ms. M started off the unit by giving the students a lot of background on Capote and the murder case that the book covers.  She wanted the students to always keep in mind that these murders really did happen but at the same time take everything Capote says with a grain of salt.  I think it was important for her to explain to them that even though something is based off of true events, that doesn't make everything in the book factual.  The book is colored with biases and conversations/thoughts between characters that Capote imagined rather than observed. 
        CHS works on a block schedule so the classes are longer than I am used to and Ms. M does a good job of filling the time with a mixture of individual work, group work, and lecture.  Of the three classes I have observed so far she has worked each of those elements into class and I think it works well.  Although students are in there for a long time they don't have much time to get bored and they are constantly involved in doing something