Dividing my efforts to 'just get by'

Is being a full time student, really being a full time student? Do I really have the time in my day to put in 3 addition hours of homework for every one hour that I'm in class? Take my day for example. I'm in class 26 hours a week. 26 class hours x 3 hours per class = 78 hours of time required in addition to class attendance to meet the requirements of the course. Now, take the course requirement time, a combine 104 hours weekly, and divide it over 6 days. We come out with just over 17 hours a day, leaving only 7 hours left in our day. What do full time students do with that 7 hours a day? They eat, sleep, spend a brief moment resting and then walk to and from class. They work upwards of 20 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, to help offset living costs. The single students try to oblige our religious and educational leaders and date often in hopes of finding a spouse. Those that are lucky enough to find a spouse have now become a mediator/negotiator between 'spousal time' and 'anything else time.'

24 hours is not nearly enough time in a day. If I were to have one Christmas wish come true this holiday season, it would be for an additional eight hours in each day.

I often wish that I had a little more whit in my writing... this is a pretty cool idea that could really come to life if I had the verbal skills to shape it. The thought came from connecting two things that Geoff had shared with the class. The first was when he had offered an A grade to those in his psychology class that went above and beyond. None of the students got an A that semester, because they were complacent with simply fulfilling the requirements of the course. Later Geoff said that kids will rise to the occasion. If you ask them to do 15 push ups, they will struggle to get 15. Take that same kid to do 25 push ups and he doesn't struggle until the last few. He was completely capable of doing the 25 push ups, but 'rose to the occasion' of 15. We do what is asked of us.

And now I'll try and tie everything together.

I only have 24 hours in each day. 10-14 of those hours are spent staying alive - eating, working, sleeping, etc. 6-8 more of those hours are spent attending class, leaving only a few hours available to do homework, pay the bills, run an errand or two, or spend some never enough time with my wife.

(Bringing it home...)

I would really like to be able to spend 30 hours designing my home for our Google SketchUp project. I would love to be able to compile an extremely extensive Teaching textbook. I would have loved to spend more time mastering the different Adobe tools. But there just isn't enough time! So we students 'Rise to the Occasion' and do the minimum required for the grade and then roll our time over to the next task.

Maybe in heaven, or Hogwarts, we'll be able to manipulate time and excel in all of our assignments.

Jeff Dude

Jeff worked in the industry for several years before going back to school for his teaching degree. The defining thing that stood out to me as he spoke to us for 45 minutes was his love and passion for teaching. He put his heart and soul into his classes... it wasn't just a paycheck to him...

Jeff paralleled several things that our professors advocate. Both he and Geoff mentioned that middle school teachers have a greater influence on the kids. Geoff explained that it's not the quality of teaching, rather, the state of life that the kids are in. They're young and malleable, receptive to good teaching... A state that leaves kids as they grow up. Returning to a child like state has a little more significance now...


Teaching Grade school
I was only nervous when Geoff came around to my station while I was teaching. :) The rest of it was cake. The kids were great. They responded well, did what was asked of them, had some fun, and produced a few good looking cereal boxes :)

Reflection 10 - Teaching the Elder's Quorum

This last week I taught my Elder's quorum a lesson on Teaching. We had been hitting home teaching pretty hard the last few months and so I wanted to bring a fresh angle to the table. My lesson was taken directly from my Geoff's lectures. It's funny how we don't really appreciate how well something is taught until we try and recreate it ourselves. I did notice, however, that I was instantly a better learner when I decided that I wanted to reteach what was being taught. I used several mixed methods of presenting information to break up the monotony of a typical EQ atmosphere and also used group work to give everyone a chance to participate.

Jerry is a middle aged man with several mental and physical handicaps. He is allowed to attend church when accompanied by a full time staff from his 'halfway home.' Jerry had no fear of speaking up, whether invited to or not. His hand came up every time that I asked the class a question. In the beginning I honored his hand raise each time and called on him to speak. His comments weren't always related and he was incredibly difficult to understand. I felt a little foolish when I couldn't fully validate his comments by summing up what he had said or agree/disagreeing with him. Soon I learned that if I wanted the flow of my lesson to improve I would have to stop calling on Jerry. I felt a little bad, not calling on him as often... But the flow of my lesson improved dramatically.

I think that as a teacher facilitates learning that there has to be a structure with boundaries in place even during an 'open ended' style lesson that is so prevalent in the modern LDS Elders Quorum.

Assessing my own teaching

This week I watched videos of myself teaching. It's always a little awkward watching yourself but I'm glad that I did. The overall feel that I now have after watching myself teach three times to my peers is that I really need to improve the flow of my lessons. I have awesome ideas and plenty of excitement, but the way that I structure my lessons and introduce concepts has got to be revamped. I need a process that helps me to shape the overall lesson of my plan. Maybe a good idea would be to start by asking myself the ultimate question, "What is it that I want these people to learn?" Or feel, see, know, etc... I also know that I need to pick one or two ideas and expand them more, versus slamming 10 ideas in and jumping all over the place.

Edutainment... is good?

Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the balance between Content and Entertainment. I read a KSL job add that was asking for an 'Edutainer' to give English lectures at a boarding school. It surprised me because they came out and called it as it was. They were looking for someone to entertain, and maybe slip a little bit of content in. For some reason in my mind the term "edutainer' had a negative vibe to it, something that American education has digressed into. Now! I may be changing my opinion of it's place in modern education and instruction.

Reason 1. Entertaining an audience with the motive to teach them something could be translated into capturing the audience. If no one is listening or even cares than what's the point of going through the rest of the lesson or lecture? Gong says that a teacher's success is measured by the efforts of their students. If your students aren't into what your teaching than you're toast...

Reason 2. If I'm entertained, I'm motivated. In today's lesson with Carissa's candy sculptures and Rashel's bumper chairs I had an enormous amount of positive energy towards learning! Each lesson left me wanting more! I wanted to design what my flower bed in real life could look like and then develop a new energy to run my house.

Reason 3. Pedagogy is the art of teaching. Teaching often isn't as simple as 'One plus One equals two.' Each teacher is on a journey to becoming a better teacher, and refining their presentation skills along the way.

STL 5 - 20 min lesson

I thought Charades went really well! The class got into it and seemed like they were having a good time. They had a chance to get out of their seats and participate in something not so ordinary. Charades brought a lot of positive feedback.

Though I did work on the speed of my speech, I blew past a lot of good discussion. Todd made me nervous with an answer that I wasn't expecting. From there I was just trying to get through the material and done with the lesson. I should have asked someone else the same question and brought up a little more class discussion. Todd's answer was simply, "Yeah..." I could have fired a follow up question asking him why he thought, 'yeah..." And then I can ask others what they think and why!

Another good comment that I want to address was the fact that once my charades activity was done, I didn't return to it for class discussion. It would have been great to use the Dam and Corn Field as a framework for discussion on environmental impact from technology.


PE Teachers...

Just because you're a succesful coach does not mean that you'll be a successful PE teacher. I took a exercise Wellness class at BYU-I from a man so large that he couldn't hardly jog a lap, let alone the 6 minute miles that he required of us. Most of his lectures were side tracked with stories of his glory days and his personal philosophies - regardless of what the book said. Now here's the kicker. The tests were written according to the book, contrary to most class instruction.

I'm experiencing a similar thing right now in a coaching class that I'm taking from BYU's Track and Field head coach. Though Mark doesn't lecture wellness blasphamies, his mid-term wasn't very consistent with his lectures. Instead of asking us to describe a phase or technique within in an event like he did each lecture, he hands out a 50 question bubble sheet test that asks very specific questions that Mark mentioned in passing. And, without a textbook to refer back to and so much variation in the articles we're collecting from the internet, consistency is impossible.

Tomorrow we'll get our scores back. The nice thing is that Mark bailed the whole class out by saying that we could argue for our answers. And that questions largely missed would be thrown out. :)

html=death

For three days now we've been working on HTML coding. I've never really been exposed to the language before and was pretty much completely lost the entire lecture that Andrew gave on day one. A few connections started to happen on day two when I got to play around with dreamweaver on my own. Finally I jumped on Lynda.com and went through their basic html tutorial to be able to piece together a workign three page website. I probable put in five or six hours of work for a smurf-blue-barely-passable website.

So! A few things that I would have done differently, had I taught HTML to myself. Start with the wire frame. I need to see the overall picture before I can start visualizing what goes where and what to type when. From the wire fram pull out a column of HTML coding to the left, and CSS coding to the right, explaining how HTML and CSS interact. Then I would get into the dirty with specific codes for headers, columns, links, etc. I just didn't have a very good overall picture of what the heck was going on when I was supposed to be learning it.


Disciplining my Neighbors

I'm finding that the same skills and tactics taught to manage a classroom of children are useful in managing the adults around you. I manage an apartment complex for families, mostly students, in Orem. There are 32 units divided up into eight fourplexes that are built around a cul-de-sac. There are certain rules and regulations that the owner likes us to encourage tenants to follow. Rules such as: pay your rent by the 5th of the month or you'll be charged a late fee. Or: don't park in the circle or you'll be cited for a parking violation. As soon as I let a few people get away with parking in the cul-de-sac it seemed like the entire complex was parking in the circle. I couldn't all of the sudden tag them all with parking tickets... that just doesn't seem fair? So! I decided to turn over a new leaf, and bring along some consistency. I posted a parking notice on everyone's door saying that we would begin enforcing the parking regulations the following Monday (today). I printed up a bunch of parking violation warnings and plan on citing each car that I see parked in the circle, even for only a moment. :)


Elders Quorum - Picking on Richard

Our presidency thought it would be a good idea for the elders to review the Priesthood Ordinances from our handbook. We don't carry around our misisonary hand book in our white shirt pockets anymore so most people are pretty rusty. This last week was my turn, and I thought it would be fun to talk about dedicating homes.

I put together a little handout that would have made any RS president proud that included instructions and suggestions for dedicating one's home. I had this awesome anticipatory set mapped out in my mind where I write on the chalk board, "I want my home to be..." and then list a thousand things that the body of the quorum shouts out to me. I wrote my sentence on the board:

I WANT MY HOME TO BE:
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-
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I looked around the room to see who was following so far and called out Richard's name. I fully expected him to be on the same page as I was and be able to participate in my little activity. Instead, Richard says, "Yeah?" It took me back for a moment, thinking, how could you not understand what I'm asking for? So I gently asked him to fill in the blank after my prompt, "I want my home to be..." Next I called on someone else for additional help. They knew right what to do.

I learned two things from this. First off, I should have vocalized the question, "What do you want your homes to be." And second, it probably wasn't a good idea to randomly pick on Richard.