Classes are over and Parent Night is Thursday

So all three of my graduate courses for the fall term are officially over and as much as I learned from them and enjoyed them, I am glad they are over. It will be nice to be able to put more of my focus on my internship and also on my new middle school placement and being able to put alot of the practices that we learned in these courses in place.
  Tomorrow night is the first day of parent teacher conferences. The first part is being help Thursday evening from 5-8 p.m. and the second part is Friday, 1-3 p.m. How it works is in order for the parents to get their students report cards early, they must come and physically pick them up at the high school. Once that happens they have the option of visiting any of their student's teachers to talk about their students progress. Teachers can also put a comment on the report card, that they request a parent conference to hopefully encourage those parents to attend a meeting with the teacher. The only problem is if the parent or guardian is unable to make it to pick up the report cards, then there is not an opportunity to meet and help the student. So I am hoping I have the opportunity to meet many of my students parent or guardians, to talk about their child's progress and enlist their help where applicable. To encourage my students as well as my mentors students, we decided that if our students attend the parent-teacher conferences, we will give them 3 points extra credit on their 2nd quarter average, which is quite an incentive for some of these students. To have these students come, will allow for a more productive conversation and to make sure everyone is on the same page for what is being done well and for any actions that need to take place. As you can see by the time I am spending writing this section, meeting with the families and my students about their classroom performance is really important to me.
  I forgot to mention, yesterday I met with the Middle School teacher I will be working with starting next week. He seems really nice and has selected two classes for me to observe and then we can decide which class will be the right fit for me to observe and eventually teach a bit. It was a little bit of an adventure to get to the middle school which is attached by a walkway to the high school. I had only been there twice which was the very beginning of the school year. So suffice to say, I walked the way I thought I needed to, took a little detour but eventually got there. The building is uniquely designed where the even number classrooms are on one side of the building, while the odd are on the other. So luckily the part of the building I walked into was the odd side. We chatted briefly, and discussed that he is currently covering Chemistry in his classes and will be moving to Physics after their holiday break. So I am looking forward to speaking with him more and getting to meet the students and see what the Middle School is all about.