I have a class!

This day was LONG! We woke up at 6:30 this morning to get ready, eat breakfast, and leave our hotel by 8:15 so that we could bus down to where we had our orientation with the San Francisco Education Fund, the nonprofit that set up our placements for us. Luckily we left way before we actually had to be at the meeting, because we had the wrong address and ended up being 10 blocks off of where we were supposed to be. AKA we got to speed walk across the industrial district of San Francisco at 9 in the morning. Luckily I forgot to change shoes in the morning so I was in TOMS all day (blessing in disguise), but there were a lot of hurting feet by the end of the day. After a totally thrilling orientation and really awful photo shoot for our ID badges, we got our placements and were on our way to the schools! I am working in a fourth and fifth grade classroom with only 12 students in it! Everything about it is totally different from my wonderful student teaching room... The class is small, the kids are much older (I walked in during a social studies lesson and it was a little bit of a shock to remember that this is what older grades looks like), and I am the only white person in the room besides the aide that sat in the back and was silent the whole time. But my teacher is wonderful and last year she had one of my old Whitworth teammates, Morgan Veleke, so I was excited that she knew what we were about and what our role in the classroom was supposed to look like. It sounds like she's really excited for me to work with her fourth graders because there's only 3 and they have kind of gotten the short end of the stick. So bring it, fourth graders :) It's going to be an adventure, that's for sure!

After we got home from school in the afternoon (our school ends at 1:50 every day... SCORE!), our whole group (13 + prof) went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lesson for the day: we don't get modern art. But it was cultural and an experience and, best of all, it was free! Thanks, AT&T, for sponsoring the first Tuesday of every month :)

Also, happy birthday to my fabulous father! His birthday always seems to be either the day I leave or the day after... it's really unfortunate. Sending you sunshine and palm trees from California dad :)