Out of town

I have accomplished no work this week. I have thought about my courses and stressed about what I am unable to do but other than that productivity has been a nil. As lovely as work has been the stress I am feeling about school is making it almost not worth it. I have had limited internet. I have started doubting my original convictions in collaborating with Ms. Bozorth. It is intimidating to think of writing a unit using 8th grade Spanish as the subject when I do not speak Spanish. A media coordinator is going to need to be able to work with all teachers at a school, not just the ones who teach familiar subjects.

Collaboration buddy

Working with my classmate Melanie is a real treat. She is such a strong person, I have looked to her as a mentor during this class. She has developed an impressive time management philosophy that allow her to balance all of her responsibilities with her family, her full time job, as well as course work. She taught me how important it is to discuss expectations at the start of any collaboration. We struggled with the expectations of this project because we both are much better at following guidelines than creating them ourselves. We stumbled a good bit at the start of the assignment. We had trouble with the open ended nature of the assignment. After collaborating with the other members of the class we shed our self doubt and decided to take the assignment step-by-step. We made it through and I feel really positive with our collaboration, though I know future collaborations away from the class will be quite different. I hope I can model some of what I have learned to the school-based educator.

Teacher Interview

Having gone to Lake Norman High School, I am familiar with many of the teachers at the school. For this assignment I wanted to interview a teacher that I knew would have an interesting teaching philosophy. I have been in many different classrooms because of submitting and student teaching. One class I had the pleasure of substituting for is an English class, belonging to a first year teacher, Mr. Walton. He had a guitar in the corner and video game posters mixed among Shakespeare quotes. The sub in me cringed assuming this teacher had no classroom management plan and that this was going to be a long week. How wrong I had been. His classes were respectful and self-motivated. The students work hard. I was eager to meet this teacher. So when I chose him for my interview, I was looking forward to seeing him in action. He has the philosophy that his students are responsible for their progress and grades. He will not repairman them for not paying attention but mark down for his own records so if the student scores poorly the will know why. He has never given a worksheet to his students and his lessons are individualized and relate to the students lives. We need more teachers like this one. His students respect him and he actively collaborates with other teachers and isn't afraid to ask help.