Our guest artist continues with his glimpse back at mrC’s first real job – teaching independent study stylie – while mrC (his present self) studies for Saturday’s CTEL test. 1991 – Rich (continued) “Do you have your history homework for me… today?” “I did it. ” It sounds like deed it. “But do you have it? Here? Now? At this place and time?” “I left it at my pad, eh.” Re: His American history homework. He is currently taking (which means he has a copy of the textbook) US History A. The district curriculum guide lists this as a semester-long course. The class is worth 5 credits out of the 225 that are needed to graduate from the high school. The book that he took home a week ago is about 200 pages long, with 44 chapters divided into 8 units, and purports to cover the time period between the pilgrims and the Reconstruction. Each chapter is approximately 3-5 pages long, and is followed by about 2 pages of MC, T/F, and fill-in-the-blank exercises, with some time-line exercises and find-a-word puzzles thrown in for variety. The time-line ones can often be quite entertaining. To introduce the concept, the book shows
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I got my credential in 1990. My last cooperating teacher of my student teaching days would have chastised me for using the word got, but there you go. Then I spent a year subbing (sorry, we call it guest teaching now), and I enjoyed that. It was also my in for my current job; someone I had subbed for a lot (another no no adjective for my old master teacher) suggested me for an opening 16 years ago. I also enjoyed being able to take the phone off the hook (can you tell I don’t have a cell phone?) if I didn’t want to work that day. In 1991 I took a job in a high school district about a 1/2 hour drive from where I live. This “commute” is one of the things that drove me to my hatred of the automobile, but that’s for another day. This is about the job. It was part-time, teaching what they called independent study. For a while it was the perfect part-time job. I worked 8-1, and the last hour was considered pe, so I played hoops with the kids. We got free hot lunch trucked over from the high school (we
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(Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]
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