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.

 
I spent most of the weekend typing two separate reports. One was a first person monologue based on a book that we had read. I had Fred Saberhagen's "An Old Friend of the Family" on my reading pile so I grabbed it, latched onto a character, and read the book. Then I told her story. It was supposed to be only a page or two long, but mine turned out to be about 2200 words long on four pages. It was easy to write but the longest one in the class that I knew about. It felt more like a book report than an essay, but I know if I had been given this kind of assignment in middle school I would have liked "A Separate Peace" and "The Good Earth" a whole lot more than I did.

The other large chunk of typing was on a critical essay for my Dimensions of Learning class. This is a more formal essay with a clear thesis and analytical perspective. I did a prewrite, outline, and rough draft of the paper on Saturday, then Sunday I finished it. I had to sacrifice my weekly dinner at the in-laws to finish writing the second draft, which was like pulling teeth. The other versions came out swiftly but when I tried to put them in a certain order they just didn't want to go. I'm not sure which version of the essay I want to work with. I need to get some feedback from Steph to figure out which way to go.

This morning we had another student led lesson in Literacy. This one was on word problems and right up my alley. It wasn't a hard problem and I realized that when I am demonstrating a procedure I do a Think Aloud first, then I move on to Guided Discussion. We read through our monoloques. Mine took a long time to read. I think it is well written but I covered most of the story from Kate Southerlands point of view. Two people did readings from Harry Potter books, and I know two people did monoloques based on "The Outsiders" which I remember reading and watching the movie in class one year, but I don't remember a whole lot about it, other than it made living with a bunch of friends more appealing than living at home, which is damn silly because I had a great home life and great parents. Of course I was 11 or 12 and probably just wanted to escape.

The tutoring was a little disheartening. Both A and R seemed to forget what we had covered. I know they were quite successful when they left on Thursday. I suspect that my presense is helping them. I am a scaffold for them and I need to learn how to back off and let them work on their own. I think I did better today. I had them work independantly, then together, on a small quiz. They got the answers mostly right. A is a bit younger and few years behind R, so some of her mistakes were just out of the blue. I have no idea what she was doing and neither did she. I think I got her straigtened out.

Lunch was miserable. I had an invite to sit with some folks from the cohort who I get on with well, but I had to sit with M.C., my partner for the Literacy lesson that we'll present on July 15. M.C. is not easy to get along with. She's been teaching in the classroom and is constantly reminding us that she has lots of classroom experience, and she has lots of successful students, and that she is really smart, et cetera. She is not a pleasant person to work with. She was supposed to give me a copy of the lesson plan for our segment, which is going to be about translating simple English phrases into Mathematical sentences to attack word problems. She never sent me the script, so this weekend I updated the rationale for the project that I wrote last week and then I did a treatment for the script. I guess I'm still thinking in theatrical terms, but it works for me. She said that we were going in completely opposite directions, hinting that I was wrong in my approach. I was writing for my eventual class, high school mathematics. M.C. was aiming for an 8th grade level, which is what she's been teaching. She has been very critical of my approach to teaching, telling me (in front of the whole class) that my methods will turn kids off of math because it's too complicated. I don't think it's too complicated, and besides, aren't teachers supposed to raise the standards a bit. Expect them to perform well, encourage them, support them, but don't drop the standards because some kids aren't getting it. I am learning with A and R how much I can put into a 50 minute lesson.

Educational Psychology was another informative session. Dr. E. is very good at keeping us on our toes and I don't think there has been a single misstep in her class that she didn't recover from effortlessly. We discussed how people learn and how they don't learn. It was three hours of metacognition. We started with another attention getting display. She had a student lie on a towel on the floor wearing safety goggles. This is not something you'd expect a teacher to ask. Then she stood on a desk and dumped a box full of mail on top of this poor student. After the laughter died down, Dr. E asked her a few questions about the contents of the mail. The student couldn't answer any question, of course, and was deemed a failure of the educational system. We then looked at what the student was doing wrong, and what was wrong with the entire situation. That demonstration had a lot of concepts about learning. We discussed the mind-brain connection a bit, but we stuck mostly with the mind and how learning actually takes place.

Information comes in through the sensory receptors of the mind, and some of the sensory inputs are handled by short term memory. Some of these items are then put in long term memory. We looked at how this works in greater detail, and of course we were given great practical tips on getting attention, how to help students encode information at a reasonable pace and with good retrieval cues so they could recall the information.

Tonight I have to finish a cirical essay on the philosphies of the purpose of school and how I think it will affect me, and I have a lot more reading to get done.
posted by Josh English at 7/07/2003 07:37:00 PM