March 12 - Schools as Communities of Care marked complete. Now all courses originally intended for 1st term are marked complete (8 CPU in 12 days). Read units 2/7.
March 13 - Digital fingerprinting appointment, used for both WGU's student teaching background check & my local district's substitute teacher emergency license application ($84). Read units 3/7.
March 14 - Read units 4/7.
March 15 - Read units 7/7. Passed Essential Practices for Supporting Diverse Learners test (54 questions, took 30min total including proctor loading time).
March 16 - Submitted 3/4 assignments. 4th is virtual classroom session. Caught up on all Anki cards.
6) March 17 - Started Creating and Managing Engaging Learning Environments (2 CPU). Read 5/5 units.
March 18 - Submitted 3/4 assignments. 4th is virtual classroom. Paid for Emergency Substitute Teacher license application ($63), which apparently takes 6 weeks to get on average here (time varies by state).
March 19 - Attended virtual classroom sessions for both Creating and Managing Engaging Learning Environments (situation was based on keeping kids positive and on-task regarding a boring assignment) and Essential Practices for Supporting Diverse Learners (situation was based around teaching new geometry terms to a class that included a dyslexic kid).
March 20-21 - Break from WGU due to massive changes at work requiring lots of paperwork, licensing and hours of training meetings. Gained access to local district's substitute paraeducator system.
7) March 22 - Submitted the remaining 4 assignments & 2 revisions (split between 2 classes). Started Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment (2 CPU). Read units 2/7. Signed up for a free online training session (not at WGU) for teaching kids how to get motivated to write more during essay assignments.
What I learned from this section:
- A two-day break is enough time to make you feel like you haven't done anything in a month (I guess that's why we have 2-day weekends nowadays...). I really recommend not ever taking a day off, the forgetting curve is real.
- I’ve forgotten 4th grade math and science, including basic terms like "quadrilateral", "integer" and "protons". I’ll need intensive study to get up to WGU’s standards for the content tests we need to pass to finish our degree (PRAXIS etc). WGU requires a certain score for students to graduate even if it is not required by their state for licensure.
- An assignment question which sounds general never has a general answer. A question like “How do you befriend your co-teacher?” never has an answer like “You get to know them” or “You plan lessons with them”. The answer is always going to be “You use the co-teacher techniques of x, y, z taught in this current course.”
- Book a Mursion time as soon as you open the course (you may need to book like 5 days in advance). Read the entire scenario for the Mursion session (it is on Mursion itself, NOT on WGU!) and actually practice the lesson on your own first before doing the session.
- So far the majority of teacher education is naming old stuff new terms (as if everything has to be a code word), and telling teachers their job is customer service or to be nice to the kids. At first I thought this was stupid and common-sense, to say the least. Then I was told a story of someone my mother’s age who went to a school where students received constant physical punishment (hits with rulers, pinched cheeks, slaps on the face, etc) and verbal abuse (getting screamed at) whenever they had a wrong answer in class, and the only way to get away from it was to get 100% on several tests so that they were moved up into a harder level of class with another teacher who just happened to use less physical punishment. That person still has trauma regarding those school subjects or getting an answer wrong today. The same type of education taught them that if they ever switched schools or didn't finish a course/class they had registered for, they were "giving up" and a "loser for life".
So the modern “teacher education” repeating itself all the time about this concept of “be nice” is not because they think “you” are not nice - it is because the people who wrote these materials are the same kinds of people as who grew up with teachers who used physical punishments (which are also still legal in almost 20 US states today...)
- There are a lot of free training sessions for teachers as well as applications for winning free class trips (even to abroad!) which are advertised on FaceBook and other places. However the ads offering free teaching materials are usually actually ill-informed anti-socialist, anti-communist propaganda in the guise of "educational materials for kids".
March 13 - Digital fingerprinting appointment, used for both WGU's student teaching background check & my local district's substitute teacher emergency license application ($84). Read units 3/7.
March 14 - Read units 4/7.
March 15 - Read units 7/7. Passed Essential Practices for Supporting Diverse Learners test (54 questions, took 30min total including proctor loading time).
March 16 - Submitted 3/4 assignments. 4th is virtual classroom session. Caught up on all Anki cards.
6) March 17 - Started Creating and Managing Engaging Learning Environments (2 CPU). Read 5/5 units.
March 18 - Submitted 3/4 assignments. 4th is virtual classroom. Paid for Emergency Substitute Teacher license application ($63), which apparently takes 6 weeks to get on average here (time varies by state).
March 19 - Attended virtual classroom sessions for both Creating and Managing Engaging Learning Environments (situation was based on keeping kids positive and on-task regarding a boring assignment) and Essential Practices for Supporting Diverse Learners (situation was based around teaching new geometry terms to a class that included a dyslexic kid).
March 20-21 - Break from WGU due to massive changes at work requiring lots of paperwork, licensing and hours of training meetings. Gained access to local district's substitute paraeducator system.
7) March 22 - Submitted the remaining 4 assignments & 2 revisions (split between 2 classes). Started Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment (2 CPU). Read units 2/7. Signed up for a free online training session (not at WGU) for teaching kids how to get motivated to write more during essay assignments.
What I learned from this section:
- A two-day break is enough time to make you feel like you haven't done anything in a month (I guess that's why we have 2-day weekends nowadays...). I really recommend not ever taking a day off, the forgetting curve is real.
- I’ve forgotten 4th grade math and science, including basic terms like "quadrilateral", "integer" and "protons". I’ll need intensive study to get up to WGU’s standards for the content tests we need to pass to finish our degree (PRAXIS etc). WGU requires a certain score for students to graduate even if it is not required by their state for licensure.
- An assignment question which sounds general never has a general answer. A question like “How do you befriend your co-teacher?” never has an answer like “You get to know them” or “You plan lessons with them”. The answer is always going to be “You use the co-teacher techniques of x, y, z taught in this current course.”
- Book a Mursion time as soon as you open the course (you may need to book like 5 days in advance). Read the entire scenario for the Mursion session (it is on Mursion itself, NOT on WGU!) and actually practice the lesson on your own first before doing the session.
- So far the majority of teacher education is naming old stuff new terms (as if everything has to be a code word), and telling teachers their job is customer service or to be nice to the kids. At first I thought this was stupid and common-sense, to say the least. Then I was told a story of someone my mother’s age who went to a school where students received constant physical punishment (hits with rulers, pinched cheeks, slaps on the face, etc) and verbal abuse (getting screamed at) whenever they had a wrong answer in class, and the only way to get away from it was to get 100% on several tests so that they were moved up into a harder level of class with another teacher who just happened to use less physical punishment. That person still has trauma regarding those school subjects or getting an answer wrong today. The same type of education taught them that if they ever switched schools or didn't finish a course/class they had registered for, they were "giving up" and a "loser for life".
So the modern “teacher education” repeating itself all the time about this concept of “be nice” is not because they think “you” are not nice - it is because the people who wrote these materials are the same kinds of people as who grew up with teachers who used physical punishments (which are also still legal in almost 20 US states today...)
- There are a lot of free training sessions for teachers as well as applications for winning free class trips (even to abroad!) which are advertised on FaceBook and other places. However the ads offering free teaching materials are usually actually ill-informed anti-socialist, anti-communist propaganda in the guise of "educational materials for kids".
Finished: 2 AAs, 1 BA, 2 trade schools, 3 ENEB MAs, JLPT N1.
In Progress: 1 WGU MA, 2 Mastercurssos, 3 more ENEB MAs, teacher license.
In Progress: 1 WGU MA, 2 Mastercurssos, 3 more ENEB MAs, teacher license.
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