Music in Special Education stuff

Our Music in Special Education class has to do five observations/teaching of small groups at West Windsor-Plainsboro North High School. There are about 20-25 students in the classroom at any given time. The teacher and the aides are there, as well as our own teacher and most of the students in our class. The students' disabilities range from very mild and almost undetectable to severe mental retardation, Down's Syndrome, and speech impediments.

I'm not sure if many other students feel this way, but I feel like being required to teach these students in small groups, sometimes with only one Westminster student to a group of five students, is sort of like baptism by fire. Last Monday was the first of these observations, and even then, we were expected to be able to help these students with the activity they were doing. I just feel really unprepared to teach students with such severe disabilities when we have barely finished learning about the classifications of disabilities.

Today, one of the groups had a problem with a student pushing another student off her chair. I felt really bad for the Westminster students in that group, because they had no idea what to do when these students were becoming violent. As students, we have no access to these special needs students' IEP's and don't know if any of these students have a tendency toward violent behaviors or if a particular action or word will trigger a negative reaction from the student.

It really puts a damper on what we can take away from this class. I want to talk to my teacher about it, but I'm not sure how to bring it up. It's not an issue, for me at least, of being comfortable with a few special needs learners, but being thrust into a classroom of 20 students who are, for the most part, severely disabled is scary. And on top of that, there was no period of observation where we could just watch and become acclimated to the students and their behaviors.

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to complain, but I'm really frustrated about this. What would you do? Should I try to explain my trepidation with the teacher, or just suck it up and deal for three more weeks?