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 Eleven - July 9

Late Again

The traffic gods really hate us. the construction we had to pass not only tried to push three lanes into one in one small city block, there was some crazy woman in a Golf honking, yelling at people, getting out of her car to yell and people, and finally getting in her car and speeding past two people trying to manage a merger in a gridlock. I was one of those people. Talk about the automotive harassment society.

Today's literacy class had all the potential to be one of the highlights of this course for me, and it was. The guest speaker on literacy in the math class was marvelous. She opened my eyes to the stuff I'd been doing wrong, or more accurately, she opened my eyes to the fact that I have not been as creative as I could be in applying this stuff. Who knew how difficuly Math textbooks are to read? I never noticed until she did a think aloud, which she says that she does on the second day. It was incredible to watch. I walked out of the class humming with delight at the potential I see in all of this.

The tutoring went well today, too. We set up three stations in the classroom and had the students go between them separately to do the work. They had to describe it out loud and on the board what they were going to do. R picked up on it quickly and despite her previous attitude seemed to be ok with all this on the board stuff. A picked up a few things and understood them but she didn't apply them to the next problem like R had. Considering A is two years behind R, I suspect this is normal.

A group of us got together to discuss the Ed. Psych midterm we were going to have in the afternoon. I realized that for the past two weeks this is one of the favorite classes, partially because it will grade our learning with normal tests like we're used to, and when we got the information for the midterm and final paper for another class, no one paniced (yet), but with this run of the mill multiple choice, true/false, and paragraph answers, we developed a lot of anxiety. Go figure.

We started the class with an hour long review. It was a very creative review and calmed us down. Then we took the test. In fact, most of them are still there. I spent an hour on it and answered all of the questions as best I could, turned it in and left. I feel pretty good about it. I feel like I'm around 90% on it, in fact. I'll find out Monday how I did.

Tonight I have to do some prewriting for the essays that are due in our Dimensions class, and work on outlining a few lessons for the final project in Literacy. I may even get to spend some time with Stephanie in front of a ball game on the telly.
posted by Josh English at 7/09/2003 03:33:00 PM