Charter School Job Fair

Usually I spend my Saturday mornings sleeping in, catching up on the lack of sleep from the week, but this morning I woke up bright and early to attend the MAPSA charter school job fair in Southfield. My first reaction to it would be WOW! There were so many people there (more than I ever expected). The lines for each table were winding around the room, which made it hard to figure out what lines to even stand in. There were significantly more people there than there were at the University of Michigan job fair which was interesting to me. Although I got some positive feedback at it, the amount of people there made the job search process seem even more daunting. Granted, there were people there for elementary education as well, but the experience made it very clear how competitive the job search is going to be. I do think that we will stand out from MAC and a full year of student teaching, but we will see! Happy job searching to my fellow MACers :)

trying to teach the skills or the literature?

The topic of this blog post is something that we have talked about a lot in my field instruction, but I don't think that t I fully understood the controversy until I began teaching the Odyssey to my ninth graders. The Odyssey is obviously a very difficult text with very formal diction, and although I think that it has been going well in my class, I leave school each day wondering if it would be more beneficial to my students to teach a different text. We spend most of our time in class covering the plot, and spend very little time moving beyond the text. I am not saying that working just on the plot is a loss, as the students are working on a lot of reading strategies, but I would also like to be teaching my students analytical skills. Would it be more helpful to use a text that we could spend less time spent on issues of plot? I can however see the other side of the argument in that the Odyssey, like many classic texts, is referenced throughout literature and our culture. I do not want my students to be disadvantaged because they did not learn the Odyssey in 9th grade like most students do. I really am struggling with this issue....I guess this something that I will have to work through in my teaching career.

Technology Beyond the Overhead

Lately my mentor and I and some of her colleagues have had conversations regarding technology in our classroom. I think it is safe to say that we are behind most classrooms in the building, with the extend of our technology use being the overhead. We have a TV in our room that is supposed to connect to the computer, but we usually have difficulty getting it to work correctly. The only piece of "technology" we use regularly is the overhead, which in this day and age is not considered new technology anymore(I think my parents had those in the classroom when they were in school). Needless to say, our classroom needs to try to catch up, but how? The English department at Romulus does not have any projectors, so to use one would require borrowing it and setting it up every time, which ends up being a hassle when there is only five minutes between class periods. I suppose we could use cell phones for polling, but the kids would not be able to see the results besides on my mentor's computer screen, which takes away a lot of the excitement of it. The other day I had them use Googlelit trips, but that was not in our actual classroom; we had to go to the computer lab which is not always easy to get time to use. How can we catch up? I do not want to put my students at a disadvantage because of the lack of technology in our curriculum.

Liveblogging at MACUL