A or B? A...... or B?

So, this is exciting. I have two options for student teaching... I'll call them Wallie and Birdie (both middle school).

I don't know anything about Wallie except that her school is organized into "houses," and 6-7-8 graders are in multi-age classrooms with the same set of teachers for all three years. It's supposed to be really great for the students b/c it's a stronger sense of community. Drawback: Wallie doesn't always teach social studies, and I'm not sure that, when she does, I'd be able to have my own class (if she only has one social studies class, for example...). I'll have to think about whether it's important to have my own class or whether I had enough experience with that last year.

Birdie came highly recommended. Her school has a reputation for really being committed to full inclusion (that means that students are not segregated by "ability level," i.e. according to what teachers have decided they should be when they grow up), which is something I really wanted (plus, I understand it makes me extra-marketable). There are some superficial bonuses to Birdie's school--it's much closer to home (not saying much--it's ~50 minutes while Wallie's is ~65-70 minutes from home--not that this should be a huge priority but I can't help thinking about it). It's also across from a lovely park with a body of water.

Both schools are relatively small. In terms of the students, I know very little. My vague impression is that Wallie's school is in a "tougher" neighborhood (the high school from that neighborhood has a "reputation," and one of my favorite students last year came from there, a white white working class girl, at times a real hell-raiser, but also a sweetheart). When I went by Birdie's school, the students seemed pretty diverse (for this town), at least racially, which is all you can really tell from driving past the playground. I would like to get more practice working in multicultural classrooms (and I'm not just using that as a euphemism for "nonwhite"--a classroom that is "monocultural" along one major axis (whether it's Latino, Black, rich/white, poor/white, or whatever) has different challenges than a multicultural classroom with few points of reference in common, like my classes at Shabazz)(......and while I was writing that parenthetical comment, I revised it about ten times and started re-evaluating my assumptions about several things...but that's another post for another day). But I think I should focus on working with the best teacher I can find, almost regardless of the students. Almost. Because the school I've been observing in is pretty monocultural (in one sense anyway) and the teacher I think has a distorted perception of how much she actually teaches them--they get a lot from sharing the same culture as the teacher, that she woudl have to teach if they were from another culture. Everything from the unwritten rules of "how to behave" to the technical stuff like "what is an essay?" The teacher talks a good game about teachiing multicultural students but it's hard to guess whether that's based on actual experience.

ANYWAY! I'll be spending the day at Wallie's school on Tuesday and Birdie's school on Wednesday. I can hardly wait!!!

Well, I'll keep you (whoever you are!) posted.

I'm going to start a teaching blog too. Both so I can make that more public, and so that my friends who are more interested in my opinion of Shrek 2 than my teaching experiences don't have to slog through lengthy teaching-related posts.
~V