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 One, Morning

A little catch up on the journaling here. The first class of the day was Literacy Across the Curriculum. We coverd a few basic concepts. What is literacy? The ability to understand and describe information. We spent some time discussing our reading histories. The introductions took up a lot of class time. It was pretty typical for a first day.
I had to consider how I plan on using reading in my future math classes. I've thought about this one for a while, and I figure while story problems and answers written in English are a good start, I can also cover translating the English Language into Mathematical Language and vice-versa. I also plan on using more anecdotes about mathematicians and their biographies, as well as some of the exciting stories in math history. There are quite a few.

We discussed two basic and extreme styles of teaching. On one end of the spectrum there is the "Read, Do Problems, Correct Answers" style of teaching, and on the other end is the "Lecture so well that students don't need to open their books." Good teaching lies between these two things.

Reading is done for the individual, according to the professor. It enables students to work independantly. Reading comes from the heart first. The text must draw the student in to be read. Part of the introductions was describing an important book, and I really don't have one. I read way too much

The next part of the day was taken up with an introduction to the One on One tutoring program we will be working on. It's not really One on One, but Two on One or Two on Two. I'll have a partner, I don't know who, and one or two students to work with. Normally this wouldn't intimidate me, since I've worked one on one with at least a dozen people over the past two years, but that was always catching up to the student. Helping them with the homework that somebody else assigned. We have to develop lesson plans and assessment methods on our own. We should be getting help with that over the next few days.
posted by Josh English at 6/24/2003 12:14:00 PM