Internship Update

As you all know a huge issue facing our country and the world right now is the COVID-19 outbreak, and because of this global health crisis, all schools in Kansas have been closed for the remainder of the semester and have moved all classes and learning online.  Sadly this means my internship in my middle school social studies classroom has come to an end much sooner than I ever expected or planned.

Because of the nature and setup of my internship and their classroom, there is no way for me to continue observing and working with my internship students and teacher virtually online. I am of course sad that our time together came to an end so suddenly, and without a chance for me to say a proper goodbye to them all, but I am still immensely grateful for the time we did have together this semester and for the lessons I did learn from them!

But although my internship has come to an end for this semester, my learning about the education field and teacher education has not! I will continue my teacher education by doing research and assignments online, watching videos, and speaking virtually with guest speakers on Zoom meetings. I will also continue to blog about my findings and learning journey, so do not fear for this blog will still be active for the rest of this semester!

To close out this blog I just wanted to document and tell you about a few of the fun and small details I haven't mentioned about my internship that made the experience so fun for me...

Trading a Shoe for Supplies

If a student wanted to borrow a pencil or any other supplies from the teacher they would have to leave her one of their shoes as a trade-in. This ensured that the student wouldn't forget to leave the classroom with the teacher's supplies, because they would have to get their shoe back before they left! The one exception to this rule is if the student's foot smelled bad when they removed their shoes. ☺️

Blasting Scooby-Doo music

One particularly memory that happened right before my last day was when during silent work time the students all silently (and secretly) coordinated with each other and started playing the Scooby-Doo theme song from their computers really loud. It was a funny joke that the teacher was amused by and we all had a good laugh about it before instructing the students to turn it off and go back to their work.

Tik Tok

If you didn't know the social media app "Tik Tok" is very popular with middle schoolers (and high school students too) right now. I don't have Tik Tok and I don't know anything about it because I am not very into social media, but the students do know a lot about it and every chance they get they tried to convince me to get Tik Tok, to talk about Tik Tok, or show me Tik Toks in between classes. Their persistence and passion for this app was hilarious (although I was pretty adamant about making sure it did not disrupt their learning and work time).

Excitement

And lastly, one of my favorite experiences while working with these students occurred almost every day. I loved their excitement! Every day when they saw me in the halls they would get so excited to see me (even though they saw me almost every day for many weeks), and that touched my heart. I also loved their excitement and eagerness to start a new class and to learn each day, its something that inspired me and that I will greatly miss about these students and this internship.