Part of the joy of teaching is the delight of hearing the students call your name and say “Hey Ms. Stanley, how you doing....what’s new...Good Morning Ms. Stanley.” So a typical day begins with a lot of students acknowledging you and the chance for you to acknowledge a lot of students. I go up into class, and if I’m clever, I will have put my objectives and my agenda on the board the night before. Often times a typical day begins where I am writing my agenda and my objectives on the board. I will review to make sure that I’ve got my notes ready, that I’ve got my handouts ready. Often times there is at least one or two students who have a ‘crisis’ or a concern, so before my day has even begun I will have one or two students in my classroom where we’ve talked about a problem or discussed a situation. They may have a senior project that’s due or they may have a paper that’s due that they want some help with, so this is before I’ve even started teaching. As the students come in, they all take their seats and then we begin with an opener. The opener is some sort of a ‘get ready’ project. It’s fast and furious for the first 15 minutes because then I have to take roll. So I quickly take roll and get that taken care of. Once roll is taken, then I jump into the lesson and, depending on what it is, [there are] lots of different possibilities for the lessons, I begin teaching. After I finish teaching, then there’s usually some sort of a guided practice that the students do with me and I get to monitor as I walk around the room. Once that’s over, usually that’s the end of that period. The bell rings and we do it again. When the bell rings and it’s done, then I prepare for the next group of students coming in and what’s fascinating is because of teaching both Freshman and Juniors, I have to quickly change gears and be ready to teach another level and then go back to teaching a different level and so there’s a lot of planning that goes into this.