Week 8!

This week has been busy so I haven't captured or reflected on much.  I finished up our lesson plan for the rov things with Nate over a Google doc.  I love Google docs.  They are so convenient for me because I can't meet with groups but I have plenty of downtime here at work so its no bog deal if I spend a couple hours on a Google doc pounding out some details for a paper or project.  We talked about technology in class on Tuesday and I thought about mechanical advantage and why we have technology and its just cool.  We have technology to make up for what we are incapable of.  I can't be everywhere at once but I have the internet to make it as easy as possible to complete assignments and other stuff.  We may not be all powerful beings that have no limits but have amazing minds that come up with solutions to complex issues and I love it!

Week 7? Reflection 7 at least.

Today I had the opportunity to go and observe two classes in the same time that I would normally only see one.  I Went over to maple mountain high school and observed Mr. Roberts wood shop class where all the kids were working on nightstands.  Utah makes all the wood shops make night stands as one of the projects because my brothers both made the same kind of thing but much better quality.  There were a bunch of kids in there working on their projects and they weren't doing a very good job because the night stands were all crooked and messed up.  The teacher said that was his slacker class.  He said it always seems to happen where one of the classes are full of slackers and kids that don't care or listen too well.  It was unfortunate but you can't get around it.  I helped out some of the kids as they were putting their panels together for the top of the nightstands.  That was a fun experience.  After Mr. Massic's prep period was over the welding class started.  It was fun to watch but most of it was out in the welding booths and you need protective masks and gloves to get in there.  We didn't stay much longer because it was already ten o'clock.  He had some interesting methods like the time clock that he had the students use to log their hours for attendance and they also get state credit for the time they put in welding.  That was cool.
I would probably do things similar but the wood shop class needs to be tightened up.  The kids being slackers isn't okay.  At the same time, you cant make kids care about the subject you teach so you can either let them stay or kick them out.
I will have to watch how I manage things with my kids.  I know I don't really like letting them get into things because they make such a mess but i just can't help trying to keep things straight and clean at home.  That is as good of an "action" as I can think of.
I also wanted to mention my experience with the other high school that I went to this week.  I wont mention names but the teacher let me know what to expect as far as pay was concerned teaching in this school district and possibly its the same in others.  It was slightly more than I make now by about $10,000 a year.  I didn't consider a career in teaching to make it big and live a fancy expensive life but I feel like putting all this work in to get slightly better pay per year than I get now seems like a bad deal.  Honestly that scared me.  I hope I don't sound greedy or ungrateful,  I just want to be able to live.  4+ years of schooling and barely making more than what you can make at an entry level position is not a good trade.

BYU Library Instruction Class

So we have to take a class here at BYU and probably all universities called technical writing if you are in the engineering school or just some form of third year writing class for all the other majors.  My gripe is this little hour long instruction is probably meant to help us but what they don't realize is that we usually try to avoid this crap at all costs.  We do not come to the library for research as undergrads and if you are a graduate student then you probably have the ability to do this stuff already.  The teacher knows his stuff but I just don't care about this library stuff.  Even if I wanted to know how to do this stuff like finding sources and do it all right and proper then I would ask for help because that is how I learn stuff.  I do not do well with this mass instruction on stuff that is pretty boring.  Anyway, maybe one day people in authority will figure out how to take feedback and design stuff before they design activities that are particular.

New Handlebars!

I got my new bars in the mail on Saturday and had them on in a couple hours.  It took longer than I wanted it to because the cables and the wires had to be tucked in and made to fit.  the cabling on this bike is a mess.  i need to make new cables for it and clean them up.  I opened up the headlight bucket and tried to stuff some of the cables in there but it was just such a mess.  The starter button doesn't always work now either.  If it is the first start of the day then you need to push start the stupid thing but if you were riding within the last hour or so then you can hold the button and twist the throttle til it decides it wants to start.  Its a weird thing.  I think I want to make some significant changes tho this bikes electrical once ive got it out of service for the winter.  Clean up the wiring.  maybe even run the cables in the handlebars or something.  The bike looks pretty bad but with the new bars it is much more sporty feeling.  I love the riding position.  Much more comfortable.  I will order some new mirrors to replace the old ones because right now it looks way too busy.  the seat will stay for a while until i can find some tubing and bend a rear hoop.  I have access to a tubing bender at school and I can weld it to the bike once I can make changes without needing to ride it home.  Im thinking I want to paint the tank grey or silver and most other things flat black.  I like the idea of a brown or tan vinyl seat.  I would like leather for a seat but that might not do so well if it was to get wet.  Still getting bad gas mileage.  Ive been getting about 90 miles out of 3.6 gallons.  Our camry got better gas mileage than that.  I don't know if I need to sync the carbs or something else but that hasn't been done since I put in the new jets so its a fair assumption.

Week 6?

I feel like its a good thing to not be exactly sure which week we are in during the semester because things start to blend together and we forget how far we have come and how far we still have to go.  Anyway, we had a good week this week as far as our training goes.  We were able to go observe another middle school on Tuesday.  Mike and I went out to frontier middle school and sat in on Jay Anderson's class.  He has a wood shop type class and they were turning ball and cup toys when we were there.  It was cool to see them get it so quickly.  He gave a demo of the way it was supposed to be.  Lead them on the path to the hands on learning and then let them go for it.  Kind of like training wheels.  The students were also working on boomerangs.  It is clever to have the kids do two projects to make up for the fact that there aren't enough machines.  I feel like when that happened to me when I was in school we ended up doing regular book work while all the other kids did the fun stuff.  We all eventually got to do the fun stuff but this way none of the kids were hating the activity.  Its hard to have an action for this one because we aren't teaching yet but I guess we can make sure to do this when we finally get there.

October 3, 2013

Capture-  Today Ben Crabtree and I had the opportunity to observe the class of Bret Christensen at Mt. Nebo Junior High.  It was a great experience.  They have this time called flex time which is about 20 - 30 minutes long and it is for remediation which I took as help with work the students are behind on.  For the students that aren't behind they get to go to which ever flex classroom they want.  Mr. Christensen teaches electronics so he asked if we wanted to teach something.  I taught about transformers.  I was understandably rusty but we had fun.  We didn't get crazy into it but it was productive.  After flex time the regular classes start and go for about an hour it seemed.  They went pretty fast.  There was a starting assignment on the board that the students worked on and then went to work on the computers to further design their ideas.  Ben and I went around and asked what some of the ideas were and tried to push for further thought development but with some kids it was more difficult.  Most of the students did fine but a few gave us the whole I don't know what to do bit.
Analysis-  As we interacted with the students, I remembered that at different ages they would have different methods of surviving.  I think these were 7th graders and for the most part they were emulating things they see.  I talked with Ben on the way back and he noticed that as well.  The ideas they came up with were slight variations on successful things or sales.  They were asked to brainstorm a business idea and make a business card and brochure and stuff like that.  At this stage kids don't seem to be really thinking for themselves when it comes to tasks that they are compelled to complete.  
Action-  I don't intend to teach junior high but if I find myself there I hope to guide kids to think for themselves.  That may not work so well and I may need to just teach older kids.  other than that observation I really liked today's activity.