Whew. So, I've been to each of my classees once (and, in one case, twice) so far. Rundown time!
Accelerated First-Year Latin meets every morning at 10. And by "accelerated" they mean "intensive;" we're going to be covering something like two chapters a day in 50 minutes. The class is pretty cool, though, since the workload means that everyone in the room wants to be there. The prof. is from England, I'm pretty sure, and he seems to enjoy his subject.
Adv. Spanish Grammar and Composition is "eh" so far -- we didn't do much on the first day, but I'm sure it'll pick up soon. Our first assignment is to write a poem, which I'm not looking forward to, but the prof. is nice enough and a native speaker (I heard two of the girls in my class discussing a SPanish IV prof. who apparently has a horrible accent).
English Grammar should be ... interesting. The prof. went into great length about how the "traditional grammar" we learned in middle school is "flawed" and wrong. Fine by me; I never learned grammar the traditional way, so I have nothing to forget for this class. The prof.'s sense of humor is dry as dirt, but he seems ok.
Greek Archaeology promises to be a LOT of fun. The prof. is a field archaeologist with a great sense of humor (*coughandhe'scutecough*). Which will hopefully make up for the fact that the syllabus is teh scary. We have to keep a journal, there're lots of readings, three essays, and our first quiz is memorizing the Greek alphabet.
Physical Anthropology is self-paced, so hopefully my biggest problem will be making it to the special lab we have to take our weekly tests in.
And now I have to go to work.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Dinos!
Yeah, I made it through the first week of school (at work; college doesn't start until the 30th). AND the first Monday, since last week was a short week.
The first day back was pretty confusing, considering the complete lack of communication between the transportation system and, well, everyone else on the planet meant that half the kids didn't show or showed up late. On the other hand, I have some pretty great kids this year, and I'm looking forward to a month from now when they've settled in enough that we can do more than one thing a day.
Oh, and apparently we don't have class on Fridays anymore. I was disappointed because I had already done lesson plans for the next two weeks and thought I would have to squeeze everything into four days instead of five. BUT (!) it turns out that almost every kid in class already knows at least the basics of dinosaurs and fossils, which actually puts us a day ahead of schedule. Way cool.
Today, I was really pleased that the kids were engrossed by the online sites I wanted to show them. We actually got through all the dinosaurs on the interactive site at discovery.com, with time for discussion about which dinosaurs were bigger and smaller and faster and slower. Most importantly, I was glad that the one girl who showed up today was showing just as much interest as the boys. Also, getting done early gave me time to let them "design" their own dinosaurs.
And now, it's time to go grocery shopping.
The first day back was pretty confusing, considering the complete lack of communication between the transportation system and, well, everyone else on the planet meant that half the kids didn't show or showed up late. On the other hand, I have some pretty great kids this year, and I'm looking forward to a month from now when they've settled in enough that we can do more than one thing a day.
Oh, and apparently we don't have class on Fridays anymore. I was disappointed because I had already done lesson plans for the next two weeks and thought I would have to squeeze everything into four days instead of five. BUT (!) it turns out that almost every kid in class already knows at least the basics of dinosaurs and fossils, which actually puts us a day ahead of schedule. Way cool.
Today, I was really pleased that the kids were engrossed by the online sites I wanted to show them. We actually got through all the dinosaurs on the interactive site at discovery.com, with time for discussion about which dinosaurs were bigger and smaller and faster and slower. Most importantly, I was glad that the one girl who showed up today was showing just as much interest as the boys. Also, getting done early gave me time to let them "design" their own dinosaurs.
And now, it's time to go grocery shopping.
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