Oh yeah. Prac finished on Friday!! I am on holidays now!! Yay!

“Holidays” in this case means that I’m going to uni tomorrow and working 9-5 for the rest of this week, and I also have to do the ten assignments that I have due throughout October.

But it doesn’t matter, cos I’m not on prac!! A retrospective? These five weeks were hard, but they also went pretty fast. I didn’t learn as much as I did on last prac, but my goal going into it was “get it over with”. Not particularly idealistic, but realistic and achievable. And achieved! I will miss some of the kids. As I did with last prac. It’s never the kids that stress me out during prac, it’s always just that I’m getting watched and marked. Even when the kids are naughty… they’re kind of okay. So I guess that’s hopeful.

Apparently I pissed people off last night by not following through on my promises to hit the town and get drunk as a celebration :( SORRY? Team Josh/Claire had some arse to kick at Trivial Persuit!! This Sat is possible?

I like Neutral Milk Hotel very much atm.

Okay school tomorrow will suck. Both my classes in the morning have to be particularly good because my supervisor is coming to observe my Intensive English class, and I still have some criteria to knock out on my report for my 9 ESL class. The problem with the former is that I have no idea if they will have done their assignments… and if they haven’t, how much time they will need to work on them. I have a feeling I need to plan three different lessons – one for if they have them all completed (hah) and I can teach new material all double, one for if they need 45 minutes out of the double lesson to work on them, and one for working on the assignments all double. And. The 9 ESL class is too much pressure :(

OH AND MARKING. Marking is okay because it is systematic and it’s hard to really get it wrong like you can with lesson planning. BUT SO MUCH MARKING. I am going to be sat at that school for so long after everyone else has left.

It is weird how last prac was lame all the way through but I felt okay by the end. This prac hasn’t been all that lame, but I feel terrible this week!!

Edit: Damn, my mantra for this month was STAY SANE and I nearly had it!!

Edit2: 12:30am. Printing lesson plans/worksheets on dad’s PC. Omgggg how can it take 15 minutes to turn on a computer.

Edit3: 1:15am. Printing takes forever :(

Two days left! I should be in a good mood by now but I am not :( I am not coping with prac any more at all! ONE of my classes finished today so that’s good. But I have a feeling the teachers for my two remaining classes haven’t been very impressed lately. And fair enough, because I haven’t been very good? I have been trying, but I am exhausted and anxious and over it. Five weeks of getting assessed on your every move is too many weeks!!!

I only have three more lessons to plan (two singles, one double). I know this should be manageable? And YET.

I wonder if I can quickly get sick for the next two days and then get better at 3:10 on Friday?

Three more daaaaaaaaaays.

I went on an excursion with year 8s to the zoo yesterday, oh god. They weren’t naughty at all, but still… four hours of COME ON GUYS. HURRY UP GUYS. GROUP THREE? IF YOU’RE IN GROUP THREE WE’RE GOING TO THE TIGERS NOW. LET’S GO. COME ON GIRLS CATCH UP. ARE YOU FILLING IN YOUR WORKSHEETS? IT’S LE TIGRI. COME ON! ARE YOU FINISHED? COME ON WE NEED TO GET TO THE HIPPOS is exhausting! With seven more teaching days, I am just hanging out for prac to be over now. There has been no sneaking off to cry in my office/my car/the toilets this time around so no one can say it’s not been an improvement but I’ve still managed to work myself up into a bit of a persistent stressed state. Too much of getting assessed on my every move :( Right now, partly as an anxiety response and partly from tiredness, I have no idea what I’m doing half the time. I keep drifting right out of conversations. And like. I know I have some powers of analytical thought but cannot actually access them right now? I want my brain back!!

Seven more double lessons and four more singles. And then I get to just work admin and do assignments :) I MISS IT.

Josh, check it out!

Hum I wish I was in Friday again.

This weekend was good. There was… weather and markets, and fairly rocky beaches. It was good.

Two more weeks of prac! I got a pleasantly surprising interim report from the Italian teacher on Thursday. Last prac stuffed up my confidence a bit; I ended up getting a Credit-equivalent but there was a lot of angst to get me to that point. So this was a nice thing.

BUT LESSON PLANNING IS STILL HARD. Losing Sundays to work is lame!!

I love me a shortened week. Countdown to weekend: 1 day.

Countdown to end of Prac: 11 (school) days \o/

I am getting a haircut on Friday morning. Suggestions??

To do next week:

- Have Friday off school!
- Book haircut (ideally for Friday?)
- Not be sick
- GET MUCH MORE ORGANISED THAN I HAVE BEEN FOR THE PREVIOUS 25 YEARS

I like weekends. They are too short but that’s the worst thing to be said about most of them. That, and that homework sucks. I kind of refuse to do any uni/school work on Friday nights or Saturdays. It’s nice at the time but then on Sunday by the time I get warmed up, my ability to work calmly in the knowledge that I’m going to get it all done is severely compromised. Like, it’s nearly 7pm and all I’ve done so far is think. But on the upside I got plenty of sleep this morning? And I went to the Show yesterday! There were ponies!

I’m looking forward to getting through my first couple of years of teaching and getting to a point where the teaching/prep/marking that I do is coloured more by an actual concern for pedagogy than by a constant anxiety about my ability to do it right. My granda, who was a principal, told me a few weeks ago that in his opinion a person needs four years of experience before you can tell if they’re going to be a good teacher or not.

I wish I had four years of experience!!!

Left school early again today. I haven’t missed teaching any of my actual lessons but I suspect it still doesn’t look great that I keep running off… but gosh I’m a mess. I keep taking the Codral and it keeps not fixing me :( I FEEL SO DISILLUSIONED. Although today it moved from “no effect” to “Claire gets kind of high”. One of my fellow student teachers says she hallucinated a heap of cats the one time she took Codral, haha. I did not hallucinate, but I did keep spacing out in the middle of sentences while I was teaching.

This cold is totally not running to schedule. I am meant to have been in the Asthma Phase since noon :( HURRY UP!!