Career Change: Summer Institute (Week 4)

The entrance to
my school

Week 4 is completed - 1 more to go!  I can't wait for this to end.  Again, not because I don't love my kids and teaching but I cannot repeat often enough how tired I am of dorm life, horrendous dining hall food, and 800 22-year olds.  Plus I really, really miss home.  I know I've done a few mini-posts this week about some aspects of the career change, but here's the entire week summary:

This week was a rough student week. Between having one student dealing with the first anniversary of the death of his brother, another student had a death in his family of an uncle, and a third student being expelled for shoving another student, it's not been my best week in my short lived career.  The student shoving happened on Thursday. These two students had been working together on an assignment.  The student who did the shoving has emotional disturbance issues which, as his teacher, I was not informed of, although I could tell from day one that there was some sort of issue there.  Also, I hadn't been told that he had failed his freshman year at Boys' Latin due to his ED issues and that he was scheduled to repeat his freshman year.  According to the Dean of Students, this student will not be returning for the rest of the summer session (one more week) and probably will not be returning in the fall.  But again, the shoving happened on my watch and I didn't even see it happen.  I had turned my back to deal with another student and bam, it happened.  The boy who was pushed is my best student and is the nicest kid so I'm not certain what happened.  Yeah, it's been a tough week for students.

As usual, most of the TFA sessions have been pretty pointless or annoying, and overall I'm just glad that we're winding down and will soon be heading for home.  There's not much else to report from this week.  Not counting the weekend, 5 days left before heading home!  Woo hoo!

As I mentioned last week, I was scheduled to retake the ESL MTEL last Saturday.  My prediction is again complete failure.  Out of 100 questions on the test, I guessed at 86 questions - educated guesses, but guesses all the same.  I don't have high hopes at all that I did well.  I'm not certain what that means for my fall ESL placement.  I've been attempting to get answers from TFA about this situation but they keep giving me the "let's wait and see what happens" speech, which really ticks me off.