I’ve been meaning to get some sort of blog going ever since I left lovely Covington eight weeks ago, but the whirlwind of things that happened between then and now have made that pretty difficult. I finally found time and initiative to sit down and put on paper some of the things that I’ve been up to for the last 8 weeks or so. Even this will have to be quick, because school officially starts the day after tomorrow, and I have and ENDLESS amount of stuff to do to prepare for it.
So, at the end of June, I left home with everything I own in the back of my truck, and headed east (sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s accurate). I stopped in Spokane to see some buddies, and made it to Colorado after 3 days. I had a weeklong induction in Denver with my 59 person Teach For America Denver corps, where we were introduced to Teach For America vocabulary, processes, and underlying mindsets. In the evenings we had dinners with big sponsors, the superintendent of Denver schools (who’s amazing), and the mayor of Denver. The day’s were fairly long (maybe 7:30 to 6:00, and then a dinner till 9:00), but it was a cakewalk compared to what we had in store for us next.
After a week of orientation, we all headed to Los Angeles for a five week intensive institute to prepare us for being teachers. I had heard countless stories about how difficult, intense, and challenging institute was, and I had kind of braced myself for the worst. Well, it was as bad as everyone made it out to be. Every morning started at 5:30 am to get dressed, eat breakfast, and prepare for the day before the big yellow school buses left at 6:40 to take us from California State University at Long Beach where we were staying, to the schools in south central Los Angeles where we worked for the summer. We stayed at the school until 4:30, took the bus back through heinous LA traffic, and made it back to CSULB at about 5:20 every day. From there, we ate dinner, and either worked on a mound of work that needed to be ready for the next day, had meetings with advisors or collaborative groups, or went to a night session, usually from 7-9:00 ish.
I was stationed at a school called Samuel Gompers Middle School. It was a fairly old, little bit rundown school with a ton of character. It was lined with a tall barred fence, and was pretty typical of what I expected from a school in this area. I never ever felt unsafe in or around the school, but the graffiti on the walls, and the bars on the all of the windows fit the stereotype more than I expected it to. For the first week, all us corps members did was sit through an INSANE amount of classes learning about educational theory, classroom management, assessment, introducing academic material, checks for understanding, etc. Teach for America has developed a very VERY detailed rubric that outlines what they think makes a successful teacher, and these classes are designed to educate you (as much as possible) in these rubric rows. Every corps member was placed in a 4 person group called a collaborative. This group consisted of people that teach your same content and grade level. Starting Monday of the second week, every collaborative was given a summer school class, and we officially taught. Classes went from 8:00-12:00, and we sat in more teacher classes from 12:00 to 4:30.
Man, this is taking much more time than I thought to explain. There are about 1,000 more details that I want to share, but for now I need to prepare for my class that I’m going to get on Monday. I’m a bit scared, really nervous, and insanely overwhelmed at the thought of teaching these kids for an entire year.
More Later.
So, at the end of June, I left home with everything I own in the back of my truck, and headed east (sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s accurate). I stopped in Spokane to see some buddies, and made it to Colorado after 3 days. I had a weeklong induction in Denver with my 59 person Teach For America Denver corps, where we were introduced to Teach For America vocabulary, processes, and underlying mindsets. In the evenings we had dinners with big sponsors, the superintendent of Denver schools (who’s amazing), and the mayor of Denver. The day’s were fairly long (maybe 7:30 to 6:00, and then a dinner till 9:00), but it was a cakewalk compared to what we had in store for us next.
After a week of orientation, we all headed to Los Angeles for a five week intensive institute to prepare us for being teachers. I had heard countless stories about how difficult, intense, and challenging institute was, and I had kind of braced myself for the worst. Well, it was as bad as everyone made it out to be. Every morning started at 5:30 am to get dressed, eat breakfast, and prepare for the day before the big yellow school buses left at 6:40 to take us from California State University at Long Beach where we were staying, to the schools in south central Los Angeles where we worked for the summer. We stayed at the school until 4:30, took the bus back through heinous LA traffic, and made it back to CSULB at about 5:20 every day. From there, we ate dinner, and either worked on a mound of work that needed to be ready for the next day, had meetings with advisors or collaborative groups, or went to a night session, usually from 7-9:00 ish.
I was stationed at a school called Samuel Gompers Middle School. It was a fairly old, little bit rundown school with a ton of character. It was lined with a tall barred fence, and was pretty typical of what I expected from a school in this area. I never ever felt unsafe in or around the school, but the graffiti on the walls, and the bars on the all of the windows fit the stereotype more than I expected it to. For the first week, all us corps members did was sit through an INSANE amount of classes learning about educational theory, classroom management, assessment, introducing academic material, checks for understanding, etc. Teach for America has developed a very VERY detailed rubric that outlines what they think makes a successful teacher, and these classes are designed to educate you (as much as possible) in these rubric rows. Every corps member was placed in a 4 person group called a collaborative. This group consisted of people that teach your same content and grade level. Starting Monday of the second week, every collaborative was given a summer school class, and we officially taught. Classes went from 8:00-12:00, and we sat in more teacher classes from 12:00 to 4:30.
Man, this is taking much more time than I thought to explain. There are about 1,000 more details that I want to share, but for now I need to prepare for my class that I’m going to get on Monday. I’m a bit scared, really nervous, and insanely overwhelmed at the thought of teaching these kids for an entire year.
More Later.
