This is my last semester on campus! It's so weird to think that I have been here for 4 years and even though I still have a year of student teaching after this, these are my last few months on campus.
This semester is very demanding and, I'm hoping, very beneficial in the long run.
Perhaps my most challenging class right now is my literacy class. We meet with a 3rd grader and tutor one-on-one twice a week. Our lessons are encapsulated within the class's thematic unit of the ocean. My student is specifically focusing on the deep sea so all of our readings have been about that. It's been a very interesting experience and honestly I feel that I am learning far more than my student! This class is really wonderful, though, because it is the first time in my college career we have been required to write lesson plans and use them with real students and reflect on them. This is a huge component of teaching and I am excited to finally be applying what I have been working on in all my other classes, despite the workload.
I am also taking my last bilingual education class. We have spent the whole semester thus far talking about dual language and the benefits of it. We have "created" our own dual language schools a number of times, which is interesting because it gives us an opportunity to look at dual language as a whole school program, instead of just a classroom. I hope we will work more on using bilingual education in the classroom, though, because I think that will be more useful to us.
In addition to the 16 hours of classes per week, I am volunteering to teach Spanish to a nearby preschool once a week, I volunteer to Skype with a student in the Chicago Public School system to encourage him to go to college, and I am the Activities Director for another nonprofit organization on campus. I also work 10-20 hours a week, so my days are full!
