It's great to be back at Memorial, because Memorial really is like one big family. The teachers are all friends and they all remembered me, so it was fun to catch up a little. When I enter class, the kids get excited because they like having a high school student in the room. It only took a day to get comfortable with the students and for them to get comfortable with me, so things are running smoothly. The kids spent the week preparing for a test Friday, so no full lessons were taught, just small review and free work time, and I helped with individual questions. The kids are a lot more naive than I remember being in middle school, I'll attribute that to my middle school overconfidence. I was probably just like that in middle school and just didn't realize. Anyway, they're a lot more like high schoolers in that they have cliques and friends and people they don't like, so it's almost comical to see them all interact. There are a couple troublemakers in one class, but for the most part, the students are how I would have expected: more intelligent than first graders, but still innocent and fragile. My teacher has to travel all day between multiple classrooms, so he just makes do with what he can. His method of control is just allowing the students to sit wherever they like. This way, when he asks them to settle down or be quiet so he can speak, they don't complain. The class respects him, and he's firm with them but still a fun teacher. There was a student who didn't have a pencil;/Mr. Koob just told him to figure it out as opposed to wasting time to find the kid a pencil, which would have just reinforced the behavior anyway. I think that was pretty effective. Overall, they goof around a bit and still get a lot of work done. I also got some experience with the printer room policies at Memorial; each department has their own printing code so they can track paper use. Other than that, I just met with old teachers and had a good time revisiting my old middle school.
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