Day 17

This week there won’t be as much to reflect on as the Talent Show is this Friday. Because the Talent Show is this Friday, the music teacher is pulling all of the students this week from all of their Specials classes (Music, Gym, Library, and Art,) and practicing for the Talent Show with them. All of the student who do not get pulled are being sent to the gym for a “Fitness Friday” type of gym day. This means that my cooperating teacher and I are not teaching any art classes this week!

I was surprised to find that we’re simply doing a “Fitness Friday” schedule every single day this week for every single class. Every single class is running laps around the track and then having free time with the gym stations. It’s really rather annoying, and my cooperating teacher’s a little annoyed too. I don’t understand why the Talent Show students couldn’t have just been pulled from the regular Specials classes. Why did all the students who didn’t get pulled have to go to the gym?

Like I said, there really isn’t much to report. I watched students run laps. I watched students play with basketballs, scooterboards, hula hoops, and jump ropes. Rinse and repeat. I’m not looking forward to doing this 24 times this week.

There was one moment of significance, though.

While I was monitoring the students while they were running their laps and marking dots on their hands for every time they ran a lap to keep track of how many laps they ran, a kindergarten student came running up to me, “There’s a bird over there! There’s a baby bird over there!” he yelled. I looked behind me and found a large group of kindergarten students gathered around the building’s wall.

“Oh no! Don’t touch it! Tell everyone not to touch it; I’ll be there when I can!” I responded.

I didn’t know what to do at that very moment since I still needed to mark students’ hands with dots and I didn’t want to leave my post and cause a panic. I searched around for my cooperating teacher, but she had gone into the gym to monitor students inside, and I didn’t know where the gym teacher was either.

Moments later, another kindergarten student ran up to me and dropped a baby bird in my hands. The bird was quite young and hadn’t even grown all of his feathers in yet. His beak was intensely bright yellow and what feathers he did have were striped. I’m not exactly sure what kind of bird he was, but since there’s a lot of house sparrows nesting around the building, I figured he was a house sparrow. (I just did a quick Google Image search and yes, that’s exactly what it was.)

“Oh no!” I yelled out. ” I told you not to touch him. We have to put him back! We have to put him back!” I tried to reason with the kindergarten students that had gathered around me now, but they were pleading about how they needed to help him, keep him, save him. “No, we have to put him back exactly where you found him!” I gave him back to the student who was originally holding the bird and told her to put him back.

Moments later my cooperating teacher came outside from the gym and I called her over and told her what had happened. She went over to the group of kindergarten students and shouted, “Everyone get away from the bird! No bird! Get away from the bird! She cleared the area and stood watch for a moment to shoo away student who tried to return. For the rest of the class, we had to keep watch and keep students away. They were so interested and invested that they kept trying to return.

After the class ended, I Google searched on my phone what to do with a found baby bird. According to what I read, the best thing to do was really just to leave the bird there. I read that bird’s do not have a good sense of smell, so they won’t actually smell if the bird’s been touched by a human and that their parenting instincts are so strong, that they’ll continue to raise the bird on the ground. I read that the bird has high chances of living if there are no cats or dogs in the area. This gave me hope and made me feel a lot better as I really didn’t know what to do and I just wanted to help the poor animal. He was sitting on the ground shivering ferociously.