Day 1!

Well, my first day is officially over....
I got a little confused driving to the school since it's in the middle of nowhere! You would think that after 8 years in Illinois I would be used to driving through corn fields, but I don't think it will ever happen.
The real shock, however, was how truly tiny the school was. I shouldn't have been surprised. I was expecting it after all, but my cooperating teacher, Beth, had told me to park in the paved lot, because the high schoolers park in the gravel lot. Well, when I got there the gravel lot looked like it could fit maybe 10 cars and then there was the paved lot right in the front of the school. I saw another paved lot around the back and was convinced that was where I had to park. The paved lot in front was the same size as the paved lot in front of the high school I graduated from, and only principals and important people parked there. Well, come to find out, that paved lot is where all the teachers and faculty park. Wow...
Despite the school being tiny, I got lost on my way to the office. In my defense, it's not right in front of your face when you walk in like it is in normal schools.
Anyway, basically as soon as I got there another teacher came over and started checking out my butt...
Yea, she thought I had a rip in my pants, but it turned out just to be my scarf lying on a strange spot.... scared the crap out of me though. As I walked away, a group of about 5 teachers stayed behind to laugh about what a field day the students would have had with that one.... I didn't find it so funny, but I was very relieved.
In Beth's classroom she only has 4 students in the morning and 2 in the afternoon at a time. The students were adorable. They are in 4th and 3rd grades. Mostly they have LD.
I did find out that Beth went to NIU and was in Alpha Phi Omega, which was cool. We had a lot to talk about and even knew some common people. That was nice and helped me to feel more comfortable.
I got a lot done in my first day. I did my writing and math assessments to start my projects for a few classes, I identified the students that I'll be working with for all of my projects, and I figured out which student and what problem behavior to use for my class management project.
Beth also let me do some of the assessments she does every day with her students so that I could get some practice.
The best part: I made a huge construction paper turkey! haha Apparently, Beth is not artsy, but I love doing crafts so she asked me to make her thanksgiving bulletin board. It was cute!
Seriously, the best part was that she gave me her lesson plan for math on Wednesday and told me to look over it because I'm going to be teaching it! I'm really excited and I'm sure Ahren is too! He's always my pretend student when I need one....what a good boyfriend!
The only thing that didn't go so well today was that I'm afraid one of the students hates me.
She's the girl I'm doing my math assessment with and I don't think she likes math very much. I did some addition flash cards with her. She just had to answer the problem within 3 seconds. It was supposed to be a way of assessing her math memorization. Well, she doesn't have her math memorized at all. She was counting on her fingers for the simplest problems and when they were small numbers she could count fast enough but for the bigger numbers she would just give up because counting would take too long and she didn't have any of them memorized. She got really frustrated and then had to go straight into other math work without much of a break so she was just upset, slouching, and putting her head down the rest of the period and I felt so bad. I just hated that my first day in the classroom I couldn't get to know them better and I had to go straight to assessing them.
Other than that my day was fantastic! Although, I did forget my lunch box in her fridge....