The Malicious Monocle

  I’ve now finished up with my second and third days of student teaching and all is going pretty well. I’ve started working on my long-form lesson plans for my first few lessons and have also started participating in teaching the classes. At this point I’m largely just adding to what their regular teacher is lecturing about. I was kind of worried that I might be annoying him by throwing my own two cents into his lectures, but I spoke with him and he said it was fine. He actually thinks it may be a really good way to transition the students between us as their primary teacher.

The current unit is on the U.S. Constitution.  Friday was spent on key terms and today was spent on the 7 basic principles of the Constitution and the preamble. Tomorrow we’ll probably get into the first article or two.

My newest issue of NEAtoday showed up in the mail today. According to an article in there, the NEA won an appeal in court over the NCLB Act. The federal government is trying to say it doesn’t have to give schools any extra money in order to carry out the mandates in the Act. The NEA feels differently. The case was initially thrown out, but with winning this appeal it means that the government is going to actually have to explain why they don’t need to pay for their legislation.

Over the weekend I also received an email from the author of the WWI blog I have linked here. He wanted to discuss the SmartBoards. It turns out he’s and IT co-ordinator for schools in the UK. I just feel really bad that I accidentally  deleted the comment he left that started the email exchange.