Skip to main content

The start of a new "semester"

I hate to call what we are doing a semester since it is only a month long, but WOW the workload is a semester's worth.  This month I am taking an educational psychology course along with an elementary literacy course that focuses on assessments as well as teaching.  Both are very interesting so I can say at least while I'm being overwhelmed with a lot of work, it isn't boring work!  The biggest difference I'm seeing with this month's workload versus last month's work load is the amount of papers I have to write.  There are an ENORMOUS amount of papers. 

One of my paper's that I must write this first week focuses on Piaget;s theories of cognitive development.  I've found a little YouTube video that discusses what they are so you can get an idea of what I'm learning about at this stage in the program.


I missed the first psychology in class lecture due to my daughter having to go to the hospital, and now I am feeling like I'm flying blind on my work.  The syllabus tells me what the topic each paper has to be on, but it does not tell me when it is due, or the requirements of the paper.  I guess I'm looking for a rubric!  I need to know if I should be persuasive, informative, length of the paper, and even though I've already said it, the due date is just as important!  I'm going to try and email the professor again to see if I can get those questions answered.

My question for you today is when you are writing a paper or doing any assignment, what kind of information do you find helpful to have to complete your task?  I ask this because as a teacher I want to be sure that I don't leave any room for discussion on my assignments.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spiral Review In All Its Glory (Decimal of the Day)

   The school district I am in has cumulative tests covering everything taught each six weeks.  The twist is, these tests are made by administrators and not teachers.  This really isn't a problem to me.  It is a learning tool for me and a teachable moment for my students on the importance of all material covered in class.       We as teachers can really get bogged down in the variables of a test like this.  By that I mean, oh the test question was worded funny or well they were only given one chance to show mastery on this, my students are _______ fill in the blanks, thoughts, and reasoning.  The one thing my school district did was have us put our scores up standard by standard right next to every other teacher in the district who had to teach the same thing we did.  My oh my did I fall short!  I say I fell short even though I had great reasoning as to why my scores looked the way they did... but upon further reflection ...

Spring Break... Explorations!

It is that wonderful time of the year when teachers and students alike get to take a HUGE break from school and relax.  For us, its time to sweep out the cobwebs, shove in some creativity, and of course get some much deserved R&R. I look all over for inspiration because lets face it... sometimes my brain is fried!  All the classroom management, grading, test making, lesson planning, I get excited when I'm on target and look all over the internet to find great ideas for making it even better.  There is no shame in this!  Ok... I have no shame about doing this! HA! Today, I'm going to share my awesome resources :) Teachers Pay Teachers is a great resource for finding all types of lesson plans, activities, power points, tests, Common Core Resources, and so much more.  The cool thing is this stuff is MADE BY TEACHERS, and tested out in their classrooms.  Prices for your favorite selections range from FREE on up.  You can earn credits for fre...

Adobe Creative Cloud

Summer is in full gear and I am in slow motion here lately.  I had surgery earlier this month and am still doing recovery so I'm spending a lot of time in the house.  One of the things I wanted to do was make my lessons more discovery based this year, find creative uses for our technology, and get out of the textbook.  I've been scouring blogs, websites, twitter, and everywhere for inspiration and I've found some pretty cool things that I'm going to incorporate into class this year.  One thing I want to do is make my own pdf's that I can download into my Good Reader account for students to use in class so that they can email me work instead of the LOADS of paper I ended up with last year.  But they can't just be normal Word documents converted to pdf because that would be too easy, and I want something with a bit of pizazz.  So I started scouring more websites, viewing YouTube tutorials to create the elements of things I've seen that I like and during thi...