Friday July 13th 2012

Day five at Mountain Creek State High School

I taught two lessons today!! I went to the dance studio for session 1 with a class of about 25 students. It was a bit intimidating considering my class yesterday was only 12 students. It was so great. When the music starts they all start to laugh and it takes a minute for them to actually take it seriously. But once we got moving, everyone hearts were pumping strong and I felt great energy from them. This is not my original class, Melissa and I switched because her teacher wanted me to take over the aerobics. I feel so prepared inside knowing they trust in me to do all these classes already. For the term, the students must create their own routine including specific criteria, and then they perform it in front of the teachers and the other classes of aerobics. It is a pretty big assessment so I am trying my best to prepare them well. I thought I would have trouble getting the students to respect me, because of our closeness in age. But really, I think the opposite now. Because they are so close in my age, I have no problem telling them to be quiet and listen up. I am not nervous to be firm, and I like the fact that they see that in me. My second class went great as well. We were in the larger gym, and this is the smaller class. It was our second aerobics lesson together and today we did some strength training. In their routines they must have crunches and push ups, so we worked on those. It was really funny to me how much they were complaining. Here I was thinking I went easy on them, and they were all sweating and moaning throughout the exercise. It was awesome to see them work so hard and push themselves. I have been very surprised to see the effort the boys have been giving. My teachers are equally as shocked. Overall, I am starting to get the hang of this. I even found my way around a bit better today. The school is massive, hopefully by week 9 I will know where I am!!