My journey through Graduate School to earn a Masters of Art in Education. I was on track to become a teacher, but now everything has changed, and I'm on the job hunt with a Bachelor's in Liberal Arts and a Master's in Education with no teaching certificate.

 
We heard our first cohort led lession in Literacy. The team was working from a social studies tasks and we looked at media slant in reporting the Isreali-Palenstinian conflict. I offered what I thought was constructive criticism about the order in which they ran the lesson. The instructor stopped me and said "We're keeping this to positive comments." I felt like I was kicked in the teeth. It doesn't help that last week when I was in front of the class and asked about my performance up there I was told "We aren't going to worry about that stuff now." I am worried about it and he couldn't even give me simple feedback about specific questions. It was frustrating.

The frustration continued. Last night I spent an hour or so in Appleworks creating charts for A and R, a pop quiz, and a simple lecture. I e-mailed them from home to my school e-mail account. I could open the e-mail but the files got corrupted in the download. I didn't have time to make up new ones and I didn't have a printout. So much for my reliance on technology.

I did the lecture from memory and while we didn't cover all the topics I think they had fun and I think they got a little more comfortable with numbers. All we did was single variable description using stats and generated some data by rolling pennies across the table and measuring how far they got. We used this data to explore how we organize data. I'll probably spend a few more days on stats but we have to move on to more concrete skills. In fact we left off making a frequency table for the data and tomorrow we will start with a relative frequency table, which means percentages and the kids will not like that. A told me that when she sees percentage signs in a problem she skips it. At least she's aware of the aversion and tomorrow we're going to tackle it head on. Am I mean or what?

In Educational Psychology we reviewd Constructivism. Like all theories of learning and education it has its ups and downs. I think I will end up in the Constructivist camp when teaching the subject matter, but I'll use other methods when dealing with class management. Again, this is something every teacher has to do. Dr. E. ended with the maxim that the best teachers practice "creative, responsible eclecticism." Besides the lexiphilic nature of the phrase I think it sums it all up nicely.
posted by Josh English at 7/02/2003 08:18:00 PM