Five Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back

I am writing on Wednesday morning. This is generally our "Independent Study" time, in which we work on PP projects or what have you until lunchtime, then we get together with our cohort for a "Players Only Meeting," then we start class in the afternoon.

However, Monday and Tuesday were brutal, so I slept in and am taking it easy this morning.

Tuesday started slow, with the cohort getting an hour or so to brush up our "Mini-Lesson" plans that were to be delivered at 9:00 a.m. However, due to technical glitches and unscheduled meetings on the part of Terry and a scheduling lapse on the part of Lee, we didn't really start doing our lessons until almost 10:30 a.m. Mini-Lessons are supposed to be taped, so that we can watch our mini-lessons and critique our performances. I checked the taped from our last mini-lesson yesterday. Nothing on it. Apparently there was a screw-up with the dubbing or something. So, we waited around for about 2 hours doing not much at all. Waste of our time, essentially. I am finding that, as our schedule and projects mount, I have less and less tolerance for wasted time.

Our lessons went pretty well, for the most part. I did mine on the Supply and Demand Curve, explaining to my audience of Stephen, Abby, Mauricio and Wendee how they were derived and what they meant. The lessons were to be 20 minutes long. I think I covered everything, but I got caught up in a couple of minor details in the middle of the lesson that made it a little confusing to observers. I also neglected to use color in my graphs, which would have made things much more clear for the students. I had them work together as a group to answer a couple of extrapolated questions from the lesson. With only a little assistance, the group came up with all of the answers, which I think surprised them. I was a little disappointed in the fact that I had spent a couple of hours putting together my presentation and other PPers kind of "winged it," and didn't put any work into the exercise.

In the afternoon, we had a guest lecturer, discussing the "6 Traits," the model for writing in the Poudre and Thompson Valley School Districts. It seems to be a basic, but very good, structured approach to writing. I have seen posters and signs regarding 6 Traits on the walls at CLP, so I know I will probably have something to do with this in the future.

Unfortunately, at 3:00 p.m., Tim, Robert, Lynn and I had to get up and leave for our Business Methods class. This is the class that chewed up 12 hours of my life in recent days completing a curriculum mapping exercise worth 50 points out of the course 750 points possible for the semeseter. The instructor, Teresa Yohon, was out at a meeting. A friend of hers, Patsy Krechel, a Marketing teacher at Monarch High School in Boulder, has been coming up to our class to give input once in awhile. She was there to conduct the class. She is a very nice person and has lots of good stories about teaching Marketing and running student Marketing organization activities, but all we really did was sit and listen to her stories of how things work in Boulder for three hours.

As I mentioned previously, at this stage of the game, I have no patience for dead time. Methods class was nothing but dead time for three hours. In a stuffy little classroom with no windows. And with no break. We did not talk about the assignment that is coming up for next class period and we did not really cover any of the day's topics on the syllabus in any detail at all. Argh! We have had alot of concerns about Methods procedures and deliverables. Over the last couple of weeks, our emails have not been answered and the instructors office hours have not been honored. This is very frustrating.