The Plot Thickens...

...a little bit. I just felt like I needed a dramatic title for once.

A few interesting things happened in the past two days. First of all, I was switched from a Language Arts class for my Practicum (yes, I'm teaching Social Studies next year) to a math class. And, that's not the only complication with my Practicum. We all showed up to our school on Monday morning only to discover that the orientation is actually TOMORROW (Wednesday). So, the principal at the school showed us around everywhere and gave us a brief run-down of how the program works. It sounds like it'll be a really good experience. I won't really get to have too much experience with content, but it should be good from a classroom management and "think on your feet" perspective.

In my Social Studies content class today, we were talking about realistic course outcomes for our classes. These are basically a list of the skills that you want your students to be able to accomplish by the end of the school year. For example, one for me might be (probably won't be after today) "Students will be able to (SWBAT) compare and contrast two opposing views in primary documents in a five-paragraph essay." You might spend one unit just having them glean information from documents, another unit working on topic sentences, a third unit on writing a full paragraph, and another unit on writing multiple paragraphs (each unit would be on a different area of history/civics/geography) so that by the end of the class, we would have built up to a full, five-paragraph essay. Unfortunately, I found out that this is wildly optimistic to expect from my students. I will apparently be teaching much more basic things like how to get information from a map, chart, and/or graph. I'm lost now in a new world of much less exciting projects than what I had hoped I'd be able to do. Luckily I have a great mentor teacher who is in his second summer of ACE and faced a similar situation (if not even a little worse than mine) last year.

Also in my Social Studies Content class today, I realized just how big of a nerd I am. Our professor was pointing out that history is simply the vehicle we use to convey skills such as map-reading or paragraph-writing. I am such a nerd that I just think that learning historical facts alone should suffice as a reason to teach/learn social studies. This revelation, taken together with my more realistic expectations, has kind of shocked me out of a lot of things that I wanted to do with my 7th graders. I realized that thinking back to my experiences is not going to be an effective way to measure what to cover. We were writing 5-paragraph essays in Mrs. Slaughter's 6th grade English class. We were pretty much told today that this would not be a very realistic expectation. I guess we'll have to see.

Finally, one more development...apparently the countdown I started on the top of this page does not work in Internet Explorer. It definitely works in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox (I'm not sure about Apple Safari). If you are just dying to see the countdown, I would recommend downloading and using Google Chrome as your Internet browser.

Luckily, my laundry went off without any unexpected complexities. That's about the only domestic chore I have down pat. Good night!!