Thursday, September 29, 2005

More!

I am currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Education (MAEd) program at Virginia Tech. As part of that program, I've begun my student observation this fall at William Orange High School in nearby Croatoan. My cooperating teacher is also a part-time administrator at the school, and so I also observe the teacher who shares the room with her and seems to be, to some extent, her protege. Both are very liberal, atheist, and vocal about the same. I don't know if they realize that I'm a conservative-ish Christian or not. In any case, however, they each seem to be effective teachers who care about their students, and the students pick up on this. I may go more into details on that in another post. My cooperating teacher, whom I'll call Kathryn, and the younger teacher, whom I'll call James, teach a total of five classes between them. Kathryn teaches honors World History and a special class that meets before school called Theory of Knowledge for IB students. James teaches honors US/VA History, Holocaust, and Street Law. Those last two are electives, with Holocaust being pretty much about what you think it would be. Street Law seems to be a mix of Civics and Sociology, and he sometimes refers to the class as Practical Law, with the idea being that students learn more about society, their rights, and how laws work. However, what would a post about my internship be without some quotes?

"Ponga su arma en la tierra o le tiraré!" ("Put your gun on the ground or I will shoot you.")
-"Daniel," another intern's cooperating teacher. He was in the Marines and served in Panama, and this command is the limit of his Spanish.

"Ooh, you taking Holocaust? Learning about them Jews?"
-one girl talking to a friend of hers during a fire drill. Incidentally, for the fire drill, they simply rang the bell and kept it ringing. Everyone very casually left the classroom, stood about ten feet away from the school, waited at most for two minutes, and then went back in. At my high school, a fire alarm meant that a loud and flashy thing went off, we stood almost across the street, and typically were out there for at least ten minutes, and often more. When I lived in the dorms, fire alarms were extremely loud, we had to almost stand on the street, and sometimes were out for as long as 45 minutes.

"...that's why I don't believe in all this religion hooey." [ten minutes later] "I hope and pray I can get this in on time..."
-to-be-unnamed teacher

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