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.

 
As usual I started the day in Literacy, which digressed from discussing
tensions in the educational system to a half hour discussion about the
No Child Left Behind act,
which is considered by many to be one of the worst pieces of education
legislation in history.

After we settled down we did a Think Aloud excersize, but we did it a
bit differently. We were handed a short piece of writing called "Bouki's
Glasses" and we were supposed to write down our thoughts after every
sentence. The way it started I though instantly of a childrends novel.
Perhaps I've heard so many since I have a 7 year old sister in law.
Several people had social and political assumptions because the story
started in Port-au-Prince. References to a trail and an oil lamp led
some to think that the story is set about a century back or so, and
others (the political ones) felt it emphasized the extreme poverty the
main character lived in. It was a good excersize to watch my own reading
process and hear what other people said. It would be more interesting to
hear the story one sentence at a time and have pause to write down our
reactions. That would be cool.

We were also reminded of an interesting use of the word 'read'. People
read the wind to fly a kite, others can read the water to go fishing.
I'm sure this will have some implication later on what we mean by literacy.

We had two more training sessions for the tutoring that is coming up.
The first one was about the iBooks, digital camera, digital video
recorder, and CD burner that would be available to us. It was good to
have more experience with OS X, which is amazingly cool. My brother told
me it had great eye candy and it does. It runs fast and so far I haven't
had a single Mac at the school fail on me.

The next session was about Power Point and the U's online community. My
Dell running XP was incredibly slow, the drive ground to a halt (I could
hear it) and it crashed so hard that I couldn't get it to reboot without
pushng the power, which stuck. People wonder why I prefer Macintosh.

In Educational Psychology we covered multiple intelligence and some of
Vygotsky's theories. It was a cool demonstration, especially since I was
it's subject. Dr. E and I tossed a football from the great distance of 1
foot. After she goaded me to saying that it was boring, she had me go
outside to the hall, closed the door, and threw the football. Naturally,
I missed. After three failures she asked me to find a comfortable
distance to catch the ball. I cought the ball from across the room three
times and finally she got some suggestions from the class about catching
the ball through a closed door. It was decided that I would throw the
door open just after she threw the ball so I could catch it. I
surprisingly did. This demonstrates Vygotsky's theory in a paragraph.

We moved on and discussed Intelligence and Intelligence Tests, which
have historically been skewed towards educated white men. We discussed
the advancement of the tests and we got a few problems that were closer
to an accurate measure of intelligence:

1. Plant 10 trees in 5 straight rows, each having four trees.
2. On a three by three grid of dots, connect all nine dots with four
lines without lifting your pen from the paper.

The second one I knew, I had to figure out the first. We moved on to a
video of Howard Gardners Multiple Intelligence theory. One of the goals
of good teaching is to address as many of the seven (or nine) classes of
intelligence of our students. I had a few plans for this without knowing
that I was doing it.
posted by Josh English at 6/26/2003 08:31:00 PM