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.

 

Orientation

This morning we had orientation for the MAT students. Out of 60 cohort students there were ten to fifteen men in the group. We met some of the faculty and got an introduction to the program that starts at 7:30 Monday morning. I met several students but the talk around them was that there were two cohorts split between primary grade teachers and higher grade teachers. I plan on teaching at the high school level and most of the people I met were going into elementary schools, so I won't meet the smaller group of high school level teacher wanna-be's until Monday.

The day started at 8:30 in a recital hall. There was a start off problem on the board about mixtures and we were supposed to write down our answers to the problem. I got frustrated because the problem asked "Which beaker is more homogenous" and I have always pronounced the word with the emphasis on the second syllable. Everybody else pronounced the word with two long o's and the emphasis on the third syllable. It didn't sound right. We will revisit the problem next week in class, but the lesson was twofold: Always have a problem ready for the students when they enter the class to get their brain working, and the answers are going to be analyzed for the process behind them, not the correctness of the answers. There was discussion of cognitive dissonance and I will probably get sick of hearing about it over the next few weeks.

We were given a good orientation to the eight core values of the school. These are the driving principles that should keep us going if our teacher manuals get lost. In one icebreaker exercize we were split into three groups and then smaller groups of three or four to describe a few items under various categories about what makes good teachers. Randomly selected answers were checked against these eight core values and they filled all the niches. Some of the principles make a lot of sense (in fact they all do) but a few will be a bit of a challenge for me.

When I went through college as an undergrad introducing yourself was easy. It was easy to ask "What's your major." In a school where everyone is learning to become teachers the question has to become "What are you going into?" It makes sense in context. I met one person who has never drank a whole cup of coffee, and I there were two others in the room who had never drank coffee. In the pacific northwest, this was quite unusual. I met a woman who worked as a blossom twister at a restaurant that makes incredibly fried foods. I think they fry them up, then redip them in the batter and fry them again.

We were also treated to a picnic lunch. It was a free meal for sixty plus college students. We were happy. Afterwards I found the last textbook that Amazon still says is unpublished and bought a sticker for my car. I guess I can show a little school spirit. I only have one shirt and a water bottle from my old university.
posted by Josh English at 6/20/2003 05:07:00 PM