"I have been told to expect quite a lot of bureaucracy, and politics when I start teaching, so I have learned to keep my awareness of it, but I don't even know what form it will take. I'm guessing I'll find out more about that kind of stuff when I start taking education classes."

Actually no, unless you take education courses about education adminstration, and even then it is highly unlikely, the bureaucracy and politics of teaching aren't covered in the classroom. My best suggestion is to read both "How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carniggie (sp) and "The prince" by Machiavelli (which does not diserve the bad rap it gets).

I don't know how much statistics (not probability theory, statistics) you know so my next comments may not make much sense. Be very wary of educational research, even when it pretains to teaching science. A lot of educational research is conducted on small groups, often less than 20, and for short periods of time. Because of that it is only suggestively qualitative. Twenty people sounds like a lot but in reality is tiny once one starts to think about all the variables each person represents. For multivariate statistics the general rule is that one needs at least three examples of each degree of freedom (variable) to get a reliable result. Let's consider some of the factors that could effect an educational study: student gender, student age or grade level, student ethnicity, student economic background, educational background of the student's parents. I just listed 5 degrees of freedom but let's only consider one grade level (which means the study's results may not apply to different grade levels), so we effectly have 4 degrees of freedom. That means we need 3 boy and 3 girls (6) of each ethnicity (say black, white, hispanic and east asian = 4) and of each economic background (say poor, middle class and rich = 3) and of each parent's educational level (say high school or less, BA and grduate school = 3) for a total of 6*4*3*3 = 216 students. There are some methods that can reduce that number a bit but one can't get it down to the typical numbers used in educational research. What is worse is that we still aren't considering the effect of the teachers and teaching methods on the studies. I hope I have given you a feeling of one of the issues that effects the usefulness of educational research.

" But I do get a little wary of the furture when I think about grading practices, discipline, homework, testing, and all those other aspects of teaching which is more than just getting across to one kid, To one young adult." The sane don't teach but then again the sane are boring.

"When I have paperwork to deal with as well. I get a little scared. " The paperwork is demanding, good TA's help alot but you'll just have to find a strategy that works for you. Eventually I had a policy of not giving a grade to anything that I didn't correct myself, meaning I only graded reports and tests but not homework. That was tricky because I told the students what I was doing, to make that work I had to convience the students that the homework was the practice for the tests much like pro-sports players are paid to practice for the game (be honest with yourself, you know the pro-players would play games even if they weren't paid but going to practice is a different story) - I made it work but I don't suggest that a new teacher try it.

"Can I prep for them? " You are doing just fine.