portfolio was due this week

The teacher education program people had our portfolios due this week which means we have no more work to submit this year, woohoo! I still have a couple more classes but no more work! One of the classes is my seminar where I believe a panel of graduates are going to come speak with us about the process of getting jobs and relocating. That should be entertaining and informative, I'm sure I have plenty of questions to ask. In my next class, history methods, we are going to the national constitution center! This is gonna be a blast. They recently put up on exhibit all about Thomas Jefferson and Im pretty excited to go it.
At times I felt like this year was never going to end, but now it seems like it flew right by.I think Im going to move to Los Angeles in a couple months and pursue a job in education there...we'll see what happens. I do still have a few more things I wan to do in Philadelphia that I would recommend to people just coming here.

1st I really want to attend a Phillies game. The tickets are relatively inexpensive and even though their a horrible team I can always cheer for the team theyre playing. Also next week they have a student appreciation night where students get $10 of on their tickets.

2nd I want to use my Penn ID to get into more places for free. I can use it to go to museums and libraries but I haven't used it yet this year. Now is my time to take advantage of these opportunities so I won't miss out.

3rd I want to start going out to dinner more and experiencing all the culture in this city. On average I walk past 5-6 unique looking restaurants  a day, but now since I have all this free time I going to go in and actually try out their food.

Ive got a couple weeks to complete this list and add on to it as well. Ill be sure to keep in touch and update you all along the way. Thanks and take care for now!  

first week off

so this has been my first week off since like Christmas. I'm all done with class but still have my thesis due in a little over a week. It's only Wednesday and I already find myself amazingly bored during the day. I continue to apply for any jobs that I can find on the internet but Im still waiting to hear back....hopefully that happens soon. Ive been able to listen to a lot of music in the last few days so thats always nice. Too bad the Phillies (and their fans) suck or maybe I'd try to go to one of their games.
The entire year has been so busy that once I'm done with it, I seemingly have nothing to do. I think I'm gonna go back home to NJ tonight to spend some time with family which is always nice. I get to be back for Easter and then come back here to Penn to finish my thesis.
Speaking of my thesis this year is one of the first years at Penn where our entire final submission (portfolio, thesis...whatever you want to call it) is due in the form of a website. If youre familiar with web design we use this site called WEEBLY. If youre not familiar with it and plan on joining the TEP program, I suggest you make yourself comfortable with it. Im a little upset because I have no web design skills and Id imagine those who have better design on their webpage (combined with the depth of their research) may receive better grade. Who knows, maybe Im just whining because I have nothing else to do?
Anyway, the year sure has passed by quickly. Im thinking once I get back to Penn after Easter that Ill go to the high school I was working at just to do something with my time. I dont know if I mentioned it but last week I played basketball with a few of my students and I think today is the first day Im not sore. Theyre quick and athletic little kids. Sure was nice being able to build a relationship with em outside of school though. Too bad it had to be so late into the year. Take care for now, fools!

last week at school

This was the last week of student teaching for me and it went really well. On the last few days the students and me got to reflect on the year and give feedback to one another for the future. It was a good learning process for me as well as a chance to reflect on my pedagogical approach this year. On my second to last day I actually went to a local park and played basketball with some of the students. I wish I could have done this earlier in the year but it was a neat chance to see the students outside of the classroom and interact with them.
On the final day of school we had a mini farewell party and played games throughout the day. The whole year seemed to pass by in a flash but I'm happy that it's finally over. Now my life is consisting of working on my inquiry thesis and looking for a job. I've scheduled some interviews so I hope something hits soon. It's going to be great to have the next week off from class and try to gather all of my thoughts for the final project. Our final paper is due on the 24th of April so as of right now I'm trying to put a little work in each day so I don't overwhelm myself.
I also get the chance to go home to NJ this week so I'm pretty excited to see my family. It'll be good to catch up with them and spend Easter at home for once. I'll be sure to write again next week explaining how my inquiry is going along with the job search. Take care for now!

This past week at school was extremely productive! I thought the snow day on Monday might foul up our schedule but we started off the week midway into our unit plan on identity and we were actually able to all but finish it too. The only day we have left in going to be Monday in which the students and I will have a chance to reflect on the unit together. I have an article that discusses “The American Identity” which will be given to the student immediately upon walking into the room. After they work on it for about 15 minutes we’ll go over it as a class and have a larger discussion framed around our identity timelines. The final step in our ID unit plan was to create our own personal identity timelines. The students were given an option to create a power point timeline, a standard linear drawn timeline, or write an autobiographical timeline. I figured that given them 3 options would appeal to the majority of the students being that most of them like to either work with computers, draw, or write. Every student was able to complete and hand-in their timeline by the due date which really impressed me.
One thing I tried out this unit was asking the students how they want to present their timeline. We had the option of doing whole class presentations or to break the class into groups and have smaller presentations. The class overwhelmingly voted to present to a smaller group of people so that’s what we did. As I walked around the room I noticed that students were very open with the things they included on their timeline and were willing to share to the groups they were in. Allowing student voice is a big thing in our school so it was nice for me to get a chance to see how it played out in the classroom!!

This past week in school was a bit crazy because we had a lot of guests come into our class for special lessons. My favorite guest speakers were these two undergrads from Penn who were trying to recruit for a Model UN team from Constitution High. They spoke to us on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday about issues going on throughout the world. It was an enthusiastic presentation and then we all participated in a simulation...very similar to the structure of Model UN. The two presenters broke the class up into 8 separate groups and had them each represent a country. The entire class was given an issue to deal with and had to come to some sort of compromise. Each country had a unique fact sheet about how passionate their country viewed certain issues and how much they were willing to budge from their current sticking point.   Simulations, if ran correctly, are one of the greatest methods for informing high schoolers. It was great to see most of the students working together with people they didn't normally converse with in class. The simulation also provided the space for students to negotiate with one another from neutral standpoints. Even though ultimately no compromise was reached in our class time I still believe that the students learned a lot from this exercise. Some of them were taken out of their comfort zone and showed the ability to thrive in a position they weren't use to performing in. Overall, it was a very impressive few days in class and I'm sure the students were able to come away from this lesson understanding a little more about international relations.

This past week at school we began our Olympic bid pitches. The students were able to present to the rest of the class their projects and explain why their country should be able to host The Olympics. I went into that day’s class wondering how the audience would behave and was surprised by the result. I imagined that students would get bored and begin talking so I created a worksheet for them to fill out highlighting positives, negatives, and questions about other presentations. The questions portions was probably the best idea out of the 3 because it provided the structure for a good back-and-forth discussing once the presentations were completed. Some of the students tried to stump/embarrass the opposing groups after their performance asking them difficult questions. It was impressive to see some of those questions being asked though because it showed that students did their homework on opposing countries too. The assignment was framed around the idea of why your country should host the Olympics and why it shouldn’t be in other countries. The presentations supported the why factor but the question asking highlighted the why not. I was generally surprised with the amount of work the students were able to complete after only doing research for 2-3 days. This was a lot smoother than our previous NHD projects and occurred in about 1/10 of the amount of time. Hopefully lessons continue to go this smoothly and I’m able to still create plans that will excite the students into doing good work.

This past week we had a whopping 2.5 days of school. I began the week introducing an Olympics Unit to the class by putting on a model Olympic Bid pitch. I was expecting the students to collaborate and conduct research together later in the week, but due to the snow that hasn’t been able to happen. One thing that I noticed a few weeks ago that I was able to re-implement this week was goal worksheets. When I have the students working in groups, I’ve noticed that some tend to slack off while others do the majority of the work. I brought back our NHD goal-setting worksheets with hopes that they would get the students to set their own goals and try to achieve them daily. From my monitoring of the classroom I was able to see that the students were, as expected, setting daily goals and reflecting on them at the end of each class. I was really impressed by this. Last time I noticed a few students filling in their reflection at the beginning of class because they forgot to the day before, but this time they looked like they were all doing what they were suppose to. I haven’t had the opportunity to collect and closely review all of the goal-worksheets yet because of the stupid snow, but I’m hoping from the improvements that I’ve already seen that these goal worksheets are going to be even more impressive than the last batch.