The End of the Week (Finally).

I had a pretty hard time getting out of bed this morning. We have "Technology" on Friday morning from 8:00 a.m. until 12:00 noon. Frankly, we aren't doing anything in that class that is new for me. Today, we were supposed to create a short PowerPoint presentation outlining what might be learned in your classroom at your Junior High School. I whipped out a quick presentation and then spent most of the rest of the morning helping out other people and goofing around. However, a number of other PP members that aren't very well-versed in PowerPoint indicated that they got alot out of the class today, so I guess it was pretty good. Next week, we work on a "Personal Web Page." To be honest, we have yet to do anything in this class that we haven't already done in my Computer Applications class back at CLPJHS.

We had "Planning" in the afternoon. We spent more time talking about Lesson Planning and going to Caliche for our Rural Experience in a couple of weeks. We wrapped up the afternoon by practicing "People Maps." This is a tool for outlining the strengths, dreams, choices and goals of a student. As it turns out, I have done a ton of these. When I was a Case Manager for Centennial Developmental Services, Inc., in Greeley, we used the "People Maps" as the basis for the Individualized Plan, put together each year to help set annual goals. It was actually fun remembering the tool and its uses.

This weekend, I turn 40. Yeah!

What Happened On Thursday...

This morning, the class began their presentations of Lee's Behavior Theorists. We were presenting "Transactional Analysis." I had put together 8-10 wrapup slides for the presentation, as I was "wrapup" guy. I put them all on a floppy disk for transfer to Wendee's notebook computer when I arrived.

Unfortunately, Wendee's computer doesn't have a floppy drive. Little did I know. So my slides for the presentation never made it into the presentation at all. We did pretty well, I suppose, but I didn't have alot to say without my slides.

We got through all but two of the presentations this morning. We then had a guest speaker, Joe Cuddemi, the principal of the new Kinard Junior High School, just opened this year. Kinard is now operating on the second floor of the new Fossil Ridge High School, which just opened south of town. Of *major* interest is the fact that Kinard opened this year with only seventh graders. Next year (when I will be looking for work) they will be adding 8th graders as well, and looking for teachers. Good to know.

Anyway, Joe was in to talk with us about Classroom management and Transactional Analysis (the same topic we had presented earlier in the morning.) It turns out that Joe is an amazing speaker, very dynamic, very interesting and very captivating. His talk and discussion really made alot more sense than I got out of the article that we had read for our presentation. It almost made some sense. He even included some roleplays with Lee and with one of the PP members, Julia, to demonstrate the use of the techniques.

I would be thrilled to have a chance to teach at a school with Joe in charge. He was an awesome presence.

In the afternoon, we met with Ali and reviewed some of our assignments that are coming due soon. I am not sure how the liaisons meeting went with the instructors at lunchtime, but Ali seemed anxious to "be on the same page" with the class about deliverables all of a sudden.

We then did some hunts in the computer lab for Lesson Plans and then called it a day.

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.

Music of Junior High School

On Monday, I was talking to M., the student that I will be shadowing next Monday, and his friend, S., who are both in two of our classes. They were talking about music and a band they liked, Linkin Park. I asked about the music and S. pulled out a copy of their "Meteora" CD and said, "You want to listen to it?" I told him that I wouldn't be able to get the CD back to him for a week, and he said, "It's cool, I have copies."

I have not had a chance to listen to the music since then, but put it into my CD player this morning. Linkin Park is called "Alternative" music, but is actually a combination of really hard electric guitar riffs and rock and roll lyrics with a generous nod towards rap music.

I did not particularly like the music at all, but I was very surprised at the lyrical content. Almost each song talked about being confused, not knowing who to trust, feeling betrayed, wanting to hide, wanting to run away, not being who people want us to be, feeling lied to, feeling numb and so forth.

If this is the mindset of the younger generation, they must be a very lost group of kids...

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.

Back To School!

It is Monday, and I am back at CLP Junior High School again. It is so good to be back. After sitting in the classroom at CSU for 8-10 hours per day (as much as I love that) it is great to be back with the kids again. I will be here on Mondays for the next couple three weeks, then we go to our rural teaching experience for a week and then I will be here full time.

I had surprises in almost every class. The Seventh Grade Computer Skills class surprised me by not progressing nearly as much as I thought they would. They have completed their "Dream Vacation" project and have done some work with our Graphics program, but not much else in the last two weeks. Today, they worked on typing.

In most of the other classes, I was surprised at how much the kiddos (as Sara would call them) have gotten done. The Web Design Classes have been working on alot of graphics stuff over the last two weeks. First assignment was to bring in a magazine article and then reproduce it exactly in their graphics program. They are allowed to use Internet resources to find pictures, etc. Some of these really looked great. Next assignment is an "emulation." Kids were to find a graphic webpage and take a screenshot of the page. They are then to reproduce the look of the page as closely as they possibly can, using only materials that they create themselves in their graphics program. Some of the kids are doing awesome stuff here! They are reproducing whole webpages, down to the colors and fonts, all by creating them out of little circles and squares in their graphics program. Great stuff. Unfortunately, many of the kids are now way past my skill level with the graphics and I have a hard time answering their questions reliably.

In the Computer Applications classes, the kids have completed their PowerPoint commercials and are now working on an actual PowerPoint presentation, in which they will actually have to speak to the class. I got to grade all of the commercials, which was really neat, as I helped many of the kids find material or figure out techniques. Some of the commercials were very creative and funny. The commercial for "Visit China" made me laugh a number of times.

As we need to identify a student to "shadow" for our case study, I have arranged to spend the day with M., a student in two different classes of Mr. Jewett's, next Monday. The nice thing is that I will actually be able to be in Mr. Jewett's class twice during that day and M. is taking the "Personal Economics" class in which I have interest. It is the closest thing to a "business course" at the Junior High level, so I am interested in seeing what the class is all about. M. is a classic underachiever. From what I understand, he does work in Mr. Jewett's class because he likes computers and is on the football team. In all other classes, he tends to do nothing. It will be very interesting to see what his day is like.

Friday and Everything After

We had a Planning session with Terry on Friday afternoon. She invited in a guest speaker, Jane Nicolet, who went over some very solid information regarding Lesson Planning. So far, lesson planning in our Project Promise and Methods coursework has been alot of stabbing and guessing. Jane did an excellent job of really laying out some nuts and bolts of Lesson Planning, based up on the Direct Instruction method of teaching, mostly borrowed from the work of Madeline Hunter. After alot of confusion and mixed signals, Jane's approach and templates were very straight-forward and useful.

After class, a number of us got into a discussion with Terry about the appeal of Jane's approach and how it was quite divergent from the approaches that we have been exposed to in other areas. We continued on to discuss the concerns that a number of us had regarding our impending Student Teaching, both in our Junior High School and at our Rural Experience in Caliche. We do not, at this point, feel properly prepared and we are feeling quite bogged down by peripheral assignments regarding behavior theorists and theories of learning. Terry promised that she would look into our concerns.

I got home from school about an hour late, to find that Shannon, my wife and Emma, my 4-year old daughter, were both violently sick and vomitting heavily. I spent the rest of the evening tending to the two of them. At 5:30 a.m., I awoke knowing that it was my time. From that time until 11:00, I lived with a large pot in the bed, needed for frequent puking sessions. For the rest of the day, I was feverish and ached like hell.

This morning (Sunday) I finally felt human again. I have spent most of the day working on my Methods Curriculum project. I think that I finally have it done. I have put about 8-10 hours into this project. Yikes.

Time to wrap up and go watch the football game...