First Day of School.

I'm glad that I'm here for the experience, but honestly the Ireland education system is not the best. In my opinion they have no concept of how to obtain goals in a time efficient manner. There is a lot of wasted time (aka morning break, teachers just leting the students free on computers when they are suppose to be working on math or english concepts. There is little to no structure in the system. There are no lesson plans or things to accomplish.
The last year of a students educational career is called leaving-cert. This is kind of like the graduation tests we have in the states except these leaving cert scores are also looked at by universities, so the amount of stress the children are under is quite a lot. So much in fact that this country has one of the highest young adult suicide rates. Im sure the lack of sunlight also contributes, but most of the town blames it on the leaving cert. Getting back to the story I think that most teachers just stress about the test instead of cracking down and preparing their students.
For the most part the school is pretty open to new techniques ideas, and structure (meaning they are going to let me teach and do grades the way that I would in the states, as long as I can justify my reasoning of course) so tonight I came home with about 10 books to put some lesson plans, and individualized student plans together to be prepared and on task for what tommorow brings.
I received my work schedule and I am only in school for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours each day (except for Fridays, which I have off) when I was expecting to be there for at least 7 hours, so tommorow I teach for 40min have a 2 hour break teach for 2 hours, have a 2 hour break and then finish off the day teaching for 35 minutes. Each day is all over the place, but hey it's all good. As I was saying tommorow I am going to try to find something to occupy my time (downtown, the beach, a dance studio, park, a book, etc.).
The program that I am participating in is call student teaching. This is where the I (the student) slowly take over the classroom, and after a couple of weeks, teaching 4 subjects a day. In this case I have 4 classes per week. Michelle and I are at the same school (Presentation Secondary School) and the administration has placed us in resourse rooms and lower level students with disabilitiese. Not sure how well this experience will relate to our degree, which is general education, but I'm sure this experience will help benefit my to be a better teacher in at least a couple ways... I hope.