Clouds: The new form of classroom management

I know I haven't written a post about my school yet, and it's coming, I promise!  But I want to get past the "I'm a visitor" stage so I can really let you know what the school is like from the teacher's perspective!

I will tell you that my mentor teacher has been really nice so far, and I can tell I'm going to be extremely busy.  I'm going to (eventually) be teaching four different levels of Spanish: Spanish 1, 3, Spanish Speakers 2, and AP Spanish for 6 straight periods except for a lunch break, since my planning period is the last one of the day.  Out of the 6 classes I will be teaching, 3 of them are made up entirely of native Spanish speakers.  I haven't quite decided if this is one of those situations that will start intimidating and get easier, or stay intimidating but be one of those experiences that's beneficial in the long run.  I guess we'll have to wait and see!

But that has nothing to do with what I wanted to share about today, so here goes...

Obviously, the weather has been great in Florida so far.  Yesterday was cloudy, but other than that it's been sunny, clear, hot, the whole enchilada.  So my classroom, even though it only has 2 fairly small windows, gets a lot of natural light.  So much that we ended up partially closing the blinds today because students were complaining about the sun in their eyes.

So later this morning we were in the middle of Spanish 1, and my mentor teacher had to keep shushing the students, bringing their attention back in, etc because they were talking over each other, getting distracted, not listening, basically doing everything they shouldn't have.  But then, a huge cloud must have rolled in because suddenly it was as if we had closed blackout shades over the windows; the room went from bright to almost completely dark, save for the one classroom light we still had on, in an instant.  Every single voice stopped and their heads turned toward the windows so in sync that you'd have thought we choreographed it.

I couldn't help but laugh to myself, since apparently Mother Nature knows how to silence a class better than the rest of us.  But of course, even Mother Nature only managed to keep them quiet for a few moments...