R.M. ArceJaeger's Blog, page 17

Day 6: Practice Teaching

Once again, I am writing this blog post well after the fact. (I got only 45 minutes of sleep on Thursday, so I was in no shape to write anything by Friday.)

Today was actually a pretty neat day. I forget what we did in the early morning, but we spent the mid-morning section learning about the behavior management cycle (state directives, narrate behavior, and take corrective action). I definitely drifted for most of that session (the majority of which was video watching) and almost lost my bala...

Day 5: High Expectations

Today we began our school day in our CMA (Corps Member Advisor) groups. My group consisted of myself, seven other corps members, and our corps member advisors. We went in a round-robin sharing our “vision” for our summer school classroom, with the others commenting on the positive aspects and on ways it could be improved. The other corps members seemed quite impressed by mine for some reason and hardly critiqued it at all.

Next, we attended a session that talked about the importance of having...

Day 4: Lesson Plans

I’m going to start writing about this day in the middle, since it’s actually been four days since all this occurred, and I no longer remember the details.

Today was the first time we saw our kids. My teaching group (myself and three other corps members) filed into our FA’s (Faculty Advistor’s) classroom to observe her teaching her kids. We’d never met/seen either our FA or the kids before. The FA didn’t acknowledge us, so we just sat in the back of the classroom and watched. She was teaching h...

Day 3: Classroom Vision

The morning began much like yesterday’s, except that I didn’t fall out of bed this time around when my alarm went off. Breakfast today was Special K, and once again I managed to board the bus before it was time to go.

At the school, we signed in and then immediately filed into our Curriculum Specialist session. The first lesson today was how to develop our “teacher voice.” We watched a video of several teachers and discovered that (without being militant) what made their classes well-behaved w...

Day 2: B.E.S.T. Academy

I am so tired, but I am going to tell you about my day instead of going to sleep. You should feel very important, because you are!

5:00 am didn’t dawn (it was still dark), but I got up anyway. Rather, I fell down, as my bed was about four feet off the ground. I ended up getting a rugburn on the top of my foot from the fall, but at least I didn’t break a leg.

I left my apartment by 5:55 am to go pick up my lunch for the day. The mentor in charge of the line made me leave my computer bag outside,...

Day 1: Welcome to Atlanta Institute

It hurt to wake up at 6:30 am. Not really, but kind of. My comfort was the knowledge that I would get to sleep in the car on the way down to Atlanta.

I packed my morning stuff, loaded my bags into the car I would be riding in, and went to turn in my key. My driver got a little lost picking me up, but with the help of another corps member’s cell phone, we were able to get under way.

The woman I was driving with was a chatter, which was okay with me, because I’m not a huge talker. Several times I...

Day 5: Story of Self (Last Day)

Breakfast today was at 8:30 am, so I had an extra 15 minutes (well, twenty-five; I snoozed my alarm for the first time) to sleep in. When I got to the dining hall, there was a line leading into the room for us to pick up an envelope and notecard in order to send a message to one of the kids who had come to our dinner on Day 3. My kid hadn’t shown up, so I had to choose a child at random to write to. Even though by necessity my words had to be generic, I still tried to make my card sound as pe...

Day 4: Reflection and Kids

Breakfast started at 8:15 am today instead of 8:00 am, which meant I actually arrived well before we began…I even had time to grab two KFC-style biscuits. Yummy!

Josh introduced someone new this morning, a black man named Kwame. He talked to us about how Teach for America is built upon the recognition of race, class, and privilege, because only by recognizing and being unafraid to refer to such thing can we seek to rectify the biases that our society is built on. We got into groups and discuss...

Day 3: Hiring Fair

I got so much sleep last night! Nearly five hours. Seriously, I was excited.

I had to get up early because there was going to be a hiring fair in the afternoon, so I had to look really nice. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining at all today, so the humidity wasn’t quite as problematic for my hair as I was expecting it to be.

I left my dorm at a good time, but we were meeting somewhere new this time and I went in the wrong direction. In my defense, I was looking at the wrong dorm designation on my map...

Day 2: Transformational Change

I awoke at 7:30 am intending to skip breakfast, as I was really tired and preferred my sleep to food. It was raining outside (warm, steamy rain) which naturally made my hair frizz, which meant I had to spend more time than I had planned to trying to calm it. I arrived for TFA’s opening session right at 8:00 am, but they’d already gotten started.

Session today began with an exercise — trying to stand three golf balls on top of one other. I got two to balance fairly easily, but the third eluded...