Friday, October 19, 2007

Granite Technical School

Okay - this was by far the coolest visit ever. First of all the school is incredible - by far the nicest facilities I've been in yet. The teacher was awesome - he was running 2 classes at once - they were made up of student from high schools all across the district. It was a really relaxed classroom environment and the students were just working on their own most of the time. The teacher was doing some awesome things I want to do when I teach.
He had recorded all his longer lectures about how to use Maya and posted them online so the students could watch them again as a tutorial if they were lost.
He was using the moodle incredible efficiently - he said this was his main source of contact with the students. He also interviewed them once a semester to build solid relationships and talk about grades.
He posted all their work online on a public website so they could show it off to friends. He did this rather than printing out everything they make. This saved on printing costs, but he also told them that if they made something really incredible he would print it off and mount it somewhere in the class.
The students work was incredible - they were making things that I could never make. It was awesome - by far the best one I've seen. Pretty much there wasn't anything that I would change about that whole set up.
Posted by Scotty B at 7:24 AM 1 comments

Class

Well besides the fact that no one was there to get out the video camera for us for the first 25 minutes of class, I thought today was a great day in class. I liked the STL that Rachel presented on agriculture and the changes in technology that have been made in that field. My first impression was - "this is dumb, who cares about agriculture?" Then as we began to discuss the changes that had happened, and the way it affected us today it became clearer and clearer to me why I needed to know about it. I was thinking that this will be an interesting thing to teach to high school students - they could probably care less about that kind of thing - but, they need to know it. A wise men once said: "Kung nakalimutan mo ang pinanggalingan mo, 'di ka darating sa pupuntahan mo." Or in english: "If you have forgotten where you came from, you'll never get to where you're headed."
Posted by Scotty B at 7:10 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

3 Amigos Video

Posted by Scotty B at 8:18 AM 0 comments

Monday, October 15, 2007

San Diego

Well we didn't have class on Thursday but I was in CA anyway . . . :) I thought I would write anyway because I did learn some good lessons in the past few days. I was at work at the MTC tutoring when my supervisor came in to observe me. He sat there quietly for awhile and afterward I asked him for some feedback - He gave some positive feedback and then he dropped the hammer. He said: "This is great, but why only here?" He then went on to explain how as he observed me teach he kept asking himself why I kept referring only to things they would do in the tutoring room and not ever mentioning things the missionaries do in gym, or at the dorms, or in class, or during their personal study, etc. It hit me pretty hard - as most good feedback does - and I realized that he was totally right. I need to help the missionaries make the connect better - what they learn in one place will help them everywhere else, and vice versa. I realized that this is the same in the classroom - it's all good and fun if we teach some students something, but we have to help them see how it can apply to their English class, and their home life , etc.
So this is my new focus for the next little while - helping those I teach see how everything they are learning is extremely inter-connected and inter-dependent. I found this funny as I was reflecting on it since the first time I taught STL 3 I tried to make the point of making connections using chocolate chip cookies - a lesson I apparently didn't learn well enough myself . . .:)
Posted by Scotty B at 7:18 AM 0 comments
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