The "Players Only Meeting"

Well, we got together this afternoon for our cohort meeting. I think of it as a "Players Only Meeting," similar to that in sports, where the team is stinking and the players close the doors to the coaches and have a heart to heart meeting about getting things back on track.

Wendee acted as the facilitator and we used our "Talking Piece" that we created for our "Council Meeting" exercise a couple of weeks ago. If you held the Talking Piece, you had the floor for one minute. Everyone got to speak.

A few recurring themes came out. The cohort, in general, is frustrated with the lack of cohesion in our Program. We seem to be doing a lot of things redundantly, in our Planning, our Technology, our Methods classes, etc. I am particularly frustrated with "dead time," time in which we could be accomplishing and learning, but instead are waiting, rehashing or tap-dancing.

A couple of the people in the cohort do not particularly think that the workload is excessive or that they are having much of a problem with scheduling. I note, however, that these all tend to be single people without family responsibilities. If I were single without kids, I would also have little difficulty getting everything done. I am not. When I come home from my 8 hours at Project Promise at 4:30 p.m., I start watching the 11 year old, 4 year old and 1 year old. I get them dinner, get them baths, get them ready for bed, etc. Everyone is usually in bed by 10:00 p.m., then I can start working on my homework. I think that the normal Project Promise courseload would be doable for me. I am struggling to complete all of the regular PP stuff PLUS our Methods assignments.

Anyway, our liaisons will be meeting with the instructors on Thursday, so we will see how things progress.

In the afternoon, we met with Lee to review the Six Traits lecture from yesterday and review much of the Rules information that we had covered last week. We spent the last hour of the day discussing the "Cover Sheet," the "Start of the Year" document that you give to students and parents to cover the rules of your classroom.

Tomorrow, we have our presentations in-class for our Behavior Theorists. Dave S. came up with a pretty entertaining role play that we will be going over to impart our knowledge of "Transactional Analysis." This is actually not really necessary:

"Transactional Analysis"= Treat students like adults.

Hmm.