long time, no see

So my plan to blog while student teaching royally failed. I became way too busy and was just plain exhausted after a day at school to write about it. Hopefully I’ll do better now. Since I last wrote I finished student teaching, passed my board exams, graduated from the University of Tulsa, moved to Denver, was accepted into the masters program of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Denver, and became a substitute at Denver Public Schools. It’s been a very busy summer. I want to go ahead and start getting my masters now while I have the time and energy. I picked this masters degree because I believe every child has a right to education and we as educators need to alter the curriculum to engage every student. The problem in today’s society is that we are only teaching to the test so we can compare ourselves to other countries statistics. Well the first problem with that is that in other countries like China, not every child is given an education. Only the brightest are allowed to continue schooling. How can we compare our scores to them? We take all children from all walks of life. Don’t get me started….I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say once I get started in my classes.

Substituting in relatively new for me but so far I am liking it. I can’t wait to have my own classroom someday. The worst part of it is the 4:45 wake up calls. When I hear that noise I never know what is happening. I’m in the Far Northeast section of Denver which is near the airport. I didn’t even know there were that many schools in that area. It’s a rougher area but I’m used to it. I love shocking all the kids when they are speaking Spanish to each other and I respond to what their saying. Yes I may be young and blonde but I DO speak Spanish kiddos!
Today while substituting we watched the Obama speech to all schools in America about Education. I don’t know what anyone’s problem was with him speaking. He said nothing about the healthcare plane, nothing political at all for that matter. All he talked about was overcoming the odds and always doing your best. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are from, who your great great grandma was….you have the power to succeed if you do your best in school. Without educated your all of our jobs are going to be outsourced to smarter more literate countries. I also liked how he said that it doesn’t matter how pretty the school is, how many computers they have, if they have the best teacher in the world, if you’re not willing to work hard and do your best, we can’t help you. Finally someone was taking a tiny bit of pressure off of the teachers. The only bad part about all of this was that the third grade class today did not pay any attention at all. They were talking or sleeping through most of it. I guess when you’re that young you don’t think that any adult is actually talking to you. We’ll see if his speech made an impact on any other students.