Week 1 of student teaching

This has been an interesting and exciting week starting my student teaching experience. While getting to know all of the new faces and learning about the procedures of Andrew High School has been fast and fun, is has been a slow week as far as classes go. Within physical education, the first week of a semester is usually slow paced. This week we have introduces ourselves and talked about the overview of the class on day one. On day two, the students found their gym lockers, bought uniforms, as well as locks. During the third day, we walked through the syllabus and talked about expectations of the students for the class. Finally on Friday, the students dressed out for the first time and we had an active day where the students just had to stay active for the whole period either playing basketball, walking, or anything else athletic based. It was unique to see that now it is required to have a CPR unit (which we will have as our third unit) as one of IPTS within physical education (15-6). This was something that was not active during my high school career
One class that I am part of is an adaptive physical education class where we are working with special education students from Andrews, as well as other schools. I can already tell that this is going to be the class I enjoy the most. Working with these students just puts a smile on your face and it is hard to have a bad day after leaving that class. They enjoy the smallest things and appreciate anything you do for them. Watching and helping the students in the adaptive class while they were working with their tutors seeing how many hits they could get in a badminton unit was amazing. No matter if they hit is once, or twenty times, the students were all smiles and excited to try again.
Outside of the classes, I can already tell that I am going to have a bit of an issue with navigating the P.E. teachers. There are many of the male teachers that are against more instruction and evaluations through tests or quizzes, while there is another female P.E. teacher that goes to the other spectrum with this. Talking with one of the male P.E. teachers, I have found out that the department chairperson wants more of diving into why we are doing the activities and not as much of relying on sole physical activity. Seems like this would fit into the IPTS physical education standard 20.A.4a where it talking about interpreting the effects of physical activity on the students' health and fitness related levels.  I am going to have to find a nice middle ground to appeal to the department chair so I hopefully gain a job here after I complete my student teaching.
Regardless of everything, these next 15 weeks are going to be exciting, interesting, and enlightening. For this next week, my main goal is to establish a good report with the students as I will be taking the classes over starting Monday. I want to make sure they view me as the teacher and make sure that I execute the lessons as close to the letter of the Andrew unit plans as possible. Overall, while I am here I plan to meet as many new people as I can, pick as many brains that I can, and make sure that I am coming out a much better and more prepared teacher than I was going in.