A Pretty Bad Day.

I have been fighting off my allergies for a month or so now, but over the last couple of days, they have been hitting me pretty hard. My sleeping patterns have gone to hell and I have started feeling strange, an effect of the poor sleep. I generally feel like I look weird, sound weird and probably smell weird. This is not a particularly good feeling. I tend to feel quite alienated and wish to be away from people and interactions as much as possible.

This being said, I felt pretty lousy today.

This morning, we continued with Lee's discussion of "E"nvironments, discussing the first days of school and proper and useful first day techniques, interactions and exercises. He presented us with the "1000 Lockers" problem, which I actually managed to figure out in an orderly manner.

We then moved on to Terry's section, Success, the last "S" of the "STEPS" program. Success deals with strategies for keeping teachers sane and positive. Terry brought in Pam, a guest speaker, to work with us on the "Way of Council." This is a ritualistic exercise designed to bring out the hidden of the personality. Unfortunately, I was not in the right frame of mind for the exercise, due to my already fractured emotions, brought on by lack of sleep. I choose not to participate in the activity. Afterwards, Keith, Jay, Dave, Julia and Carolyn all came up and offered sincere support, which I greatly appreciated. Terry was particularly insightful and empathic and offered to help if she could.

The "Way of Council" exercise left me completely drained of energy, with a screaming headache. The rest of the day was rather a blur.

Ali began her talk of Tools (STEPS). She endeavored to discuss Cooperative Learning. I did not get as much out of the material as I should have.

Now, I must try to get some research done on our "Methods" project and try to get to bed by 10:00 p.m.

Of Fishing and Moving Furniture

Today was the first day of our "Independent Study" mornings on Wednesday. As many people in the class are out Wednesday morning at their Social Studies Methods courses, the rest of us are set free to complete "Independent Study." As there was only one short article for us to read, Tim, Robert and I got together and began working on our Methods course project regarding Business course Curricula. We did some brainstorming and got out some good unit ideas for our three computer classes that we will be plotting and mapping to standards. Now, if we only understood the standards, we would be somewhere...

We started the classtime at 1:00 p.m., with Lee giving us a 15 minute review of his recent two week fishing trip to Alaska. He had lots of pictures, including a picture of the 27 inch Rainbow Trout that his son caught. Wow!

We then began the "E" part of our STEPS program, Environment. I think that this section will be of great interest to many in our cohort, as we will be discussing classroom management and discipline. Today, however, we talked mostly about the "physical plant" of our Junior High School classrooms and how we would change them if we could to create more inviting learning environments.

On the bureaucracy front, I spent some time at the office of the Dean of the Graduate School today. I need a signature from the Dean to complete my registration. A full load for a Graduate Student is supposed to be 15 credits. With my Project Promise coursework and the additional Methods class that I need to take, as it was not offered this summer, I will be carrying 22 credits. From what I gather, there is a new Dean of the Graduate School that started today. Being new, she seems to be interested in investigating any anomolies and oddities, like my schedule. I am hoping that the form will be ready in a couple of days.

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.

The Teacher's Lounge

The Teacher's Lounge at CLP is a rather small painted cinderblock room (as is most of the rest of the school, built in the 1940s.) There are two microwaves, two restrooms, two small tables and chairs, a pop machine and a fridge. There is a door leading back to the copy room, as well.

I have lunch period with some of the nicest teachers around. They are all very talkative and pretty funny. They like to tell horror stories, adventure stories, teaching stories, long bus ride stories and just about anything else that will get a laugh.

We have a group of 8th and 9th graders in our 1st period that put together the CLP News twice per month. The kids do little stories about upcoming events, sports, new teachers, etc. They did a skit this week that should come up to be very funny. It is "Inside the Teacher's Lounge." Instead of going to the teacher's lounge, they came down to the media center, where there are a bunch of couches and lounging chairs. They took about 5-6 kids from our 1st period Computer Skills class and had them in the video with some willing teachers. Teachers are shown lounging on the couches, while 7th graders fan them and feed them grapes, etc. Then, the art teacher, Mr. Hall, comes in from offscreen, wearing nothing but a towel saying, "Boy, we really need to turn up the heat in the sauna!" It should be pretty amusing, especially since it the exact opposite of the real Teacher's Lounge.

The Last Day

Well, I took the weekend off and did not do any posting to this blog. I also didn't get much of my homework done for my "Methods" class, so I will need to stay after school for an hour or so today and get it done.

Today feels like a "Last Day" for me, because I will not be back tomorrow. Tomorrow, the cohort starts the "STEPS" lessons. These are classes to refine our teaching techniques. We will be going from 8:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday through Friday. On Tuesdays, I (and the rest of the business teachers to be in PP) will leave at 3:00 p.m. to get to our "Methods" class, which will last until 6:00 p.m. This will make for some long, long days.

On Mondays at CLP, if you remember, students have all 8 of their classes for about 44 minutes. Not much gets done during this time, but I will be able to see all of my kids, at least. I have been telling each class that I will only be here on Mondays for the next 5-6 weeks or so. Some seem like they are concerned that I won't around for awhile. Others seem like they could care less. Such are Junior High Schoolers, I suppose. Of course, next Monday is Labor Day, so I won't really be back at CLP for two weeks. This will seem like a very long time.

I will really miss the kids. I have grown fond of quite a few of them in a very short time. I know that I will be able to stop in on Mondays, but I will be out of the flow of the classes and will not be able to see the little, day to day improvements that go on.