Introduction
In the Fall of 1997, I was a student teacher at the Lake Linden - Hubbell High School with the cooperation of teacher Maureen Schick. The classes I taught were all math (Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry) and were populated primarily by younger students. I had wanted to teach something closer to my degree (Computer Science) but I took what I could get. Actually, I never really expected to teach computer science locally. There were only a handful of CS classes offered in local high schools and the chances of one of the few CS teachers wanting a student teacher was slim, at best.
Regardless of the class content, the student teaching experience sure was... well, an experience! I've worked a lot of hard jobs already, ranging from warehouse to maintenance to janitorial to grunt labor to the intellectually challenging software engineering. But none of those jobs compare to student teaching in the "they aren't paying me enough to do this" catagory. Plainly put, the amount of aggravation, after hours work, and frustration puts teaching in a class by itself.
This begs the question "why, then, did you do it?" Well, at the time, I wasn't entirely sure which way I wanted to go with my career. A huge part of me really wants to teach. Another huge part of me wants to be a computer geek. When the opportunity came to try out teaching at a secondary level, I jumped at the chance. I had already had experience with the computer side, this was my chance at the teaching side.
I am currently employed at Motorola. This should give you an indication what I finally decided. And if you read into these daily journal entries, I think it'll become pretty obvious after a while why I chose the path I did!

Navigation
There is the navigation bar on the left of most pages in this site. The underlined "Week"s (e.g., Third Week) are links to my weekly lesson plan overview. This shows what my plans are for that particular week. As I didn't start doing this on the web until my third week, you will not find any journal entries or plans before that.
Underneath each weekly plan link is a list of dates. Each of these dates are links to my daily journal entries.
There is one entry that didn't find its way into the normal flow of the site. It was the very first entry I did at the end of the first week. It was an eye-opener. Without further ado, here is the First Week.

Comments
If you have any comments on either this site or my experience itself, drop me a note. My email address is kurt_granroth@pobox.com.