Back to CSU

Well, this was our first day back to Project Promise at CSU after our student teaching at our Junior High and Middle Schools for the last two weeks. For the next 5 weeks or so, PP16 will be attending classes at CSU from 8:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday through Friday. Monday, we will continue to be in our schools with our kids. As I noted in a previous post, this is a difficult transition for me, as I got used to working with the kids very quickly.

We started the day with a chat session, followed by a little "getting to know you again in a circle" activity. It was great hearing some of the stories of other PP members. I continue to be glad and grateful for my excellent placement at CLP. While not everything is exactly "by the book" in our classes, I am learning alot about student interaction, as well as computer applications and web design.

We talked about the next couple of months and how our schedules would look. We also appear to be heading for a small rural school out on the eastern plains of Colorado, called Caliche Junior/Senior High School. This school is apparently located about 15 miles NNE of Sterling, Colorado, out near the Nebraska border. The website for the school can be found here. We will be heading as a cohort to this school the week of October 4th. We will be "taking over" the school and teaching lessons to the kids out there. During our stay, we will be living with student's families. It should be a very interesting and exciting experience.

In the afternoon, we began talking about our "STEPS" program that we will be following over the next 5 weeks or so. STEPS stands for "Students, Tools and Technology, Environments, Planning and Success." This will be the meat of the coursework that teaches us how to teach and manage a classroom. I am looking forward to the learning, but the days will be long. We spent much of the afternoon learning about "Constructivism," hands-on classroom experiences designed to extract students' knowledge in group settings to encourage deeper learning and understanding. A briefing regarding constructivism can be found here.

On Tuesdays, such as today, Robert, Lynn, Tim and I, the four Business members of the PP16 cohort, leave at 3:00 p.m. to go upstairs for our "Business Methods" course. This lasts until 6:00 p.m. This makes for a very long and tiring day on Tuesdays. It really sounds like Teresa Yohon, our instructor, has alot of good things planned for us, but the class is worth 4 credits, so there will be a ton of work to do. Today we began formulating business course plans, with units mapped to State, National Business Education Association and Content Standards. I am working with Tim and Robert on this project and we will be creating a continuum of courses regarding computer skills. This will encompass three courses, Intro. to Computers, Computer Applications and Graphics and Web Design. Coincidentally, these are the three courses that I (and Tim and Robert, as well) will be teaching at our Junior High Schools come October. I plan to use this project to develop working course outlines and unit plans, so that when I am in the classroom teaching, I am ready.

The picture shows "ENIAC," the world's first electronic computer. For more information regarding this machine, please click here.

Enough for now. I am beat.