Monday, January 01, 2007

Ready or not, a new semester

Well, ready or not, here is a new semester. I love teaching the MAT students, perhaps because I think that a middle school reading course [or more accurately, a content area reading course] is what my own MAT program at Emory lacked. I even sent the director of the Emory MAT program an e-mail to that effect last year and got a good response from him - of course, I don't know whether they have decided to do anything about it.

I especially enjoy teaching the MAT group who are student teaching. The ideas and strategies in READ 867 are so applicable - and it is easy to tie assignments to what they have to do anyway in the classroom. So, spring semesters are favorites of mine -- almost makes up for not having college football in the spring. I'm currently watching Tennesee lose to Penn State - and hoping that in the next three minutes things will change, but I doubt it.

I am still not finished with the syllabus for 867, but will work on it tomorrow. Today, hopefully before the Rose Bowl game, I have to get all the Christmas decorations packed away - they are down, and ready to be stored for yet another year, but it is always such an easy task to put off -- except that this year, I have boxes everywhere -- and have to clean them up so I can walk around the house. When even my clutter limit is reached, I know things must be bad! I also have to clean off my desk at some point -- I've got about 5 layers of papers, journals, folders, books, and articles stacked up on the desk. Hopefully, I'll be able to see the desktop surface in the next few days. Oh well, another year and I'm not dead yet -- I guess that's a good sign.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure if this is a posting that you wanted comments on but something came to mind as I was reading it.
I believe that I have benifited a good bit from this class. There have been some great teaching strategies introduced and reinforced. However, I believe I would benifit more if the class was content specific and made up of science and science/math only students.

Nevil said...

I'm not sure if this is a posting that you wanted comments on but something came to mind as I was reading it.
I believe that I have benifited a good bit from this class. There have been some great teaching strategies introduced and reinforced. However, I believe I would benifit more if the class was content specific and made up of science and science/math only students.