Summer School

Jul 24, 2008 at 6:58 PM
Post a comment

The summer school training was a crash course in lesson planning and classroom management, coupled with practical experience through the Holly Spring's summer school. Unfortunately the Social Studies group had only one student.

The most helpful part of the experience is hard to assess, at least at this point in time- I doubt I will know that until later in the fall. Right now I feel like the second year teachers and their advice, coupled with writing and teaching our own lesson plans, was the most useful part of the training. Maybe in the fall my opinion on that will change.

The least useful component was the afternoon role playing session- I found each contrived and poorly executed, especially after going through 3-4 of them over the first couple of days. It was overkill, plus several people got injured during them. That said, given my experience working under stress I may have a different perspective than some of the younger first year teachers. Or maybe I am just plain wrong and the scenarios will be of great benefit come fall.

Maybe next year there should be fewer of these days and more emphasis on something else; yet I doubt that I have the knowledge base or expertise to suggest what they should be replaced with or if they should be replaced at all.

The most frustrating component was the fact that some of my classmates did not get the things they were promised, whether it be a MAC, a timely stipend, or their teaching license, even if they turned everything in on time. If the program makes a promise then the program needs to keep that promise. No excuses and no delays in getting out the information that there may have been an error or a glitch.

All that said, here's the best quote of the summer, from Justin, aka Captain America (every morning in the Deaton bathroom):

"Today is a great day to get better."