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.

 

Day Twelve - July 10

Lessons, mid terms, ups and downs

I managed to get to school on time today. I wasn't feeling well and skipped breakfast. The lesson presented today was from a Spanish class but fortunately we didn't have to learn a word of Spanish. We watched an introduction to the value system of the average Mexican compared to the values of the typical American. It was a very good lesson. It was well crafted and well presented. We will have an in-class mid term that will not be a mid term exam in Literacy on Monday. He gave us a few ideas to mull over or prewrite over the weekend (like there isn't enough of that already).

I worked with M.C. to finish off our presentation. I explained some of my frustration with the way our partnership was working out. She began to understand my perspective that while she is an experienced teacher and had set ways to make lesson plans I am still learning the process, and so far my participation has gotten "that won't work" responses from her. We have a script we like and have agreed with. She's still a tad condesending towards me but I won't have to put up with it for long.

I caught up with the students for the second half of tutoring. They had been interviewing people to collect data for their capstone presentation. I haven't been too involved with that part of the process. We decided to turn the tables on them and had 'A' and 'R' create some problems for us to solve, and J, S, and I planned on doing them wrong, forcing the girls to correct us. 'A' caught on right away and thought we were teasing her, so she showed me how to do the problem. She did the problem well and got the right answer. We went on to discuss why her problem, and the problems created by S yesterday had strange answers like "one egg costs 16.5 cents." My problem didn't have those kind of rounding errors. We did a quick review of factoring and I covered the concept of 'evenly divisible by.' Something must have connected for her. She said "Sheesh, you should be a teacher or something." It made my day, since that is what I am trying to become.

In Dimensions of Learning we talked a bit about how the tutoring was going on for the rest of the cohort. There are various struggles and concerns, but in general things are going well. We began a discussion of our next book, John Kozol's Savage Inequalities. I read part of this book before the term and if I had a heart it would be breaking. We talked about the underlying issues in these schools that are doing so poorly that they are not even structurally safe, but must be used. We watched a video on a similar subject and it was even worse. Some of the things that schools in Ohio have to do to survive is crazy. No businessman or CEO would stay in a place like that for half an hour, but apparently will stop short of giving money to make the schools livable.

We got out of class early and I got an email that the Educational Psychology mid term was graded and ready to be picked up. I got a 96%, which is better than I'd hoped, and if I really wanted to get legalistic about things I could get it up to a 98%, but I think Dr. E likes me and I don't want to jeoparize that by being picky.

The weekend will not slow down either. I have a study group tomorrow for a couple of hours and on Sunday I am helping a friend pack up her small apartment so she can prepare to move to be with her fiancee. It's great that they're engaged, I'm sad to see her go. All this, six pages of mid term to type, another midterm to prepare for, apparently I'll have part of the house to myself while Steph babysits her sister, and Monday is our 2nd wedding anniversary. I can't wait for August.
posted by Josh English at 7/10/2003 04:07:00 PM