Final Essay

Here's the link to my final portfolio essay on google docs.

Blog Entry for Week 7

For this week, I did my third lesson as an intern on Thursday on Conclusion Paragraphs. It was the week to the last one, and it was very pleasurable, indeed.

On Tuesday, we had another presentation by a lady named Ariana from the financial aid office who handed out a brochure to everybody and explained in detail the way to get it and how to be qualified and etc. She also took any questions that students had. The information was very helpful, even for me, because I never really had anybody explain these things in such detail. Or perhaps I did in high school but at that time I didn't know much to be able to understand the importance of it all as I do now. For these adult students, money is a real issue and so they can understand and pay more attention to the financial aid process and how it works.

At 7 pm, Ariana was done with the presentation and left. So then Linda started the 'Teacher Man' by Frank McCourt that the students had to read over the weekend. She first began by talking to the class about the book itself like the publication, the reviews on the back, and the author. Linda even took it further to ask the students what they usually look at when they want to buy a book and some students commented the summary or the first page or just the back of the book. She also asked me what I look at to be able to critically judge a book and I told her I look at the introduction and the contents page.

Afterwards, Linda asked students to take out their 'Triple Entry' assignment to read the quotes they have chosen along with their comments. A lot of people raised their hands to participate in this portion of the activity. Most students were able to make a personal connection with the author. She also asked me what my opinion was as soon as she gave her own opinion of choosing the quote that McCourt gave about not sitting behind a desk as a teacher in a class. Interestingly enough as soon as she mentioned that, I was amused that it got my attention too as I was reading. I so told this to the class about how when I read that I remembered Linda and reasoned why she always moves away the desk and does not sit behind the desk in the class.

For the next activity, students were taught how to write descriptive paragraphs by looking at a sample and learning about "RENNS" (reason, example, number, name, senses). They were then asked to write two descriptive paragraphs about somebody they admire right there in class. This was done at 8:40 pm and she gave students the rest of the class time to do it. As they were writing their descriptive paragraphs, Linda warned them that they will be exchanging their works with classmates on Thursday. At about 8:55, she let the class know to do the rest for home work and took the last 5 minutes to ask students what they wrote about and basically go over the home works they have to do. Although she wanted to originally do some Math in the end since there was no time, she changed her mind to do that on Thursday instead.

On Thursday, August 19, the class started with Linda reminding the class of the descriptive paragraphs they had to finish up for home work. Students took the paragraphs out and went right into the first activity of exchanging it with classmates to read it and to take notes on it about 'RENNS' and see if that was applied in the essay. Since there was a bigger amount of people this day than on Tuesday, she asked one of the students to please explain what they did last time to those who weren't here.

Once that was over, from 6:30 to about 7:45, I taught my 3rd lesson, which I have already made a blog of.

Right after my lesson, Linda reminded the students about what I did and how some extra things to remember about conclusion paragraphs and let them know that for home work, they must do a conclusion paragraph (based on what I did) for their two descriptive paragraphs. So then they took a 10-minute break until 8 pm.

From 8 to 8:30, Linda did a "mini-lesson" on Pythagorean Theorem [PT] (a squared + b squared = c squared), a formula used to find the missing side of a right triangle. She explained it in such an easy way that I was amazed. I was able to see where the "squared" came from based on the diagram she did on the board. For me, I learned the theorem when in high school but I only learned to memorize the formula not really understand where it came from. For the next 30 minutes of the class, students worked on the PT packet and Linda and I went around to see how they were doing.

I have to say, I'm very sad to be seeing the class coming to an end, or should I say my role as an intern in the class. I've grown very close with all the students and I will be sad to let go.

Lesson 3

For my third lesson at the GED class, I taught 'conclusion' paragraphs.

Although I made a 3rd lesson plan, I have started to truly believe in improvising. I think I have definitely improved myself as a teacher in the past couple of lessons. The first lesson was something I was very comfortable with and have done before many times so it came naturally to me. However, the second lesson was a topic that took a lot of effort, because I was trying to find something to do with the class that is not just boring run-on sentence exercises and something interactive that will make students interested. Also, I tried to fit in too much into one lesson and of course I went over an hour. However, for this lesson, I did a lot of research to try to find something to do. I taught how to do conclusions, and again, I wasn't sure how I can teach that to the class in a simplified way.

The first hand out I gave to the students was after I put the introduction on the projector and tried to get out of the students, the points and suggestions needed for a conclusion to this introduction. Followed by the first one, I also gave out the second hand out that had the model introduction and conclusion paragraphs.

In the second portion of the class, I first just handed out the introductions of two paragraphs and the conclusions but cut up in strips that they had to put together (as mentioned in lesson plan). Once they finished putting it together on the big papers, I then handed out the answer key to them in Hand Out 3.

I only went about 10-15 minutes over but I overall I was very happy with the lesson and I know that the students were as well. It was very interactive, and it made the students get out of their seats to work together and they had to defend their cases as a group so a lot of team work was involved. Also, when explaining how to do the conclusion at all, I again used a lot of personal experiences as a tutor in the writing center to explain it.

The evaluation that I got from the students of lesson 2 showed that the ones that were there in class did remember and understand the topic; however, only one student mentioned that I did not clarify the topic in a way that I did not make it simple enough. I like and congratulate her honesty in this because I did feel that this is the case as well. The truth is, grammar is a very hard topic to touch upon and at times it is hard to think of a way to simplify it because in today's world, there's never a definite answer since language is changing so much.

I have learned so much from all of my lessons at the GED class and I will definitely be able to use these experiences for my teaching career. I must say though, I will be very sad to leave the internship next week around the same time...

Blog Entry for Week 6

For this week, I unfortunately missed Tuesday's session. However, on Thursday I went and really enjoyed the presentation in the beginning of the class, indeed.

Erika Carrera and Josue Clement came from the academic advising section of Continuing Education to give a presentation on going off to college and about the programs in LaGuardia Community College in particular to the class.

Erika had prepared a power point presentation but she also incorporated many activities that made the students get up and move around. The first thing she did was to go around the room and have the students introduce themselves, which is exactly how it is done in college. She asked them to give their future plans 'when' they passed the GED. However, some students said "if" I pass the GED I'll do this or that but Erika corrected each one and told them to always say "when" believing that they will definitely (eventually) pass the GED exam.

After the introductions, she started her activities. The first hand-out was a 'quiz' that the students had to take that were "Myths of College". However, instead of giving out the second hand-out, which had several points about preparing for college, she divided up the students into groups and asked them to come up with several. Meanwhile Linda along with Erika and Josue went around the room and checked to see how each team was doing.

After Erika went through each point and checked off the "common points" for each team, she gave the power point presentation that had all the different LaGuardia programs. She took all questions that the class had. I think this is so useful because as I took the evaluation and from what the students commented themselves several times, it seems that going to college is part of their plan. However, many students at times do not understand the steps they must take to go to college. So, Erika's presentation was very successful and it really did get everyone's attention. Now, the students know that "when" they pass the GED, they can always turn back to this same program to take the next steps necessary to go on to college.

After Josue and Erika left, Linda also had prepared a powerpoint presentation about the different "certification programs". She then handed out one of the pages of the power point presentation, which included all the certification-related websites that the students go into to research about their fields. After the presentation, she asked the students if anybody had questions and also told them that if they ever want to to some research they can always refer back to her because she is willing to go and "discover" with them just as a friend if even.

At 7:27, she gave a 13-min break to the students. It was a break well-taken since they were so concentrated on the presentations and had to get their attention back to class-work. At 7:40, as expected, students got back into the class. Linda started by having me collect home work and asking students to work on the "Volume" packet that she handed out to them. Students were given 30 minutes to work on the problems. Although there were only three problems, they had to do a lot of calculating and converting to get the solutions so alotted time was needed.

Once the students were done, at 8:15, the students who knew exactly what they were doing went to the board to do the solution and explain their work to the class. I have to say, even I had some trouble doing these questions because I did not recall some of the formulas and I had to really work on them to be able to come up with the right answer and this is why I couldn't go around much and help the students since I had trouble myself.

At 8:38, as the next subject, Linda asked students to take out their GED sample questions that was also handed out on Tuesday and asked of the students to do for home work. Finally, the subject of the questions and the reading text was Social Studies. It also included some political cartoons that the students had to interpret to answer questions. As always, Linda went through the problems in a way to make the students discuss the reading and share with the class what their opinions were. The questions sort of reminded me of DBQ questions (Document-Based Questions) from high school for the Global History and American History regents. This knowledge of course made sense to me that the board of Education would want the GED to have some similarities with the High School exams so that they can have about the same level of knowledge when entering college.

Since there was barely time, unfortunately Linda went only 5 minutes over, and at 9 when the questions were done, she handed out the "Teacher Man" books and told the students that as part of the program, the books are theirs to have. She just talked for 2 minutes about the book and asked students to read the necessary pages and also had me hand out the "Triple Entry" forms that required the students to find a quote, paraphrase it this time, and have them give their opinions about it. She went over one of the examples to make sure everybody knew what he/she must do.

I was very excited about this portion and happy that students will finally be starting this novel. I have not yet finished reading it but I find it very interesting. McFadden's writing is very similar to Mike Rose's and the writing is almost interactive that engages readers of any kind I'm sure.

Lesson 2

For my second lesson at LAGCC Internship, I taught Run-ons, which was a very difficult subject to do. Instead of one hour, it took about an hour and a half. The lesson plan itself showed that it would take an hour however it did not take into consideration, the difficulty level of it, the question-answering of the students, and the overall preparation for it. The teacher's toolkit that I designed shows the skills and rationale of the lesson.

Before beginning the lesson, I handed out an evaluation of Lesson 1 to the students. I took this idea from the previous intern at LaGCC who took it from another theorist. The point of this evaluation was to see if the students who were in class last time and are here today, possibly remember what we discussed last time and be comfortable to share with me what they did or didn't like about the lesson. The responses that I got from the students showed that most students in the class remembered exactly what happened last time. The last question I asked them was what they did not find helpful or that I did not clarify for them in my lesson. Most students wrote that they understood everything and a "thank you" as well but only one or two students actually wrote what they did not find helpful. One student wrote that she was still confused about doing conclusions, which was not the focus of my lesson of course.

For this lesson, I prepared three hand-outs. The first hand-out includes 10 examples of run-on sentences. I went over the first three questions and asked the class to work on the rest in groups of 2-3 as I mentioned in my lesson plan. I found these examples from different sources from the LaGCC Writing Center. The second hand-out I gave to the students is a chart that describes the four ways of "fixing" run-on sentences. I took this out of a grammar website and cited it on the page itself.

The third hand-out , I must admit was the hardest one for me to figure out. As I discussed it with the teacher beforehand, I was trying to find two paragraphs from a sample essay and have run-on errors in it to demonstrate to the class how they can fix run-ons in their own essays by learning how to proofread by reading out loud to themselves. As I mentioned in my lesson plan, I asked the students to pay attention to what I do and then presented the hand-out on the board and read it out loud. Of course I exaggerated my process of fixing the run-on errors in the first paragraph but the point of it was so that students can understand how they can do this on their own. After working on the first paragraph, I asked the students to do the same on their own, working individually, on the second paragraph. The difficulty for me was finding the two paragraphs itself. At first I found something online literature-related and Linda told me that it would be too difficult for the students to understand in the first place. The content instead, has to be on a very simple topic so that students don't get stuck on the content when the concentration is really about fixing the run-ons. Thus, after much research, I found a sample essay online about rock bands, which I thought would be so much more interesting for the students and not at all hard.

My overall reaction to doing the lesson was as I expected; it took a lot out of me! I was worried about my time while doing the work and also worried that I was giving the students too much information at a small amount of time. For this reason, I asked everybody if they had questions virtually every time I finished one activity or finished going over each concept and aspect of run-ons.

I was intrigued when I received some of the students' questions as I taught. One student who was paying very close attention to my explanation of fixing run-ons, asked me what the difference between putting comma before "because" and before "and" was. I tried to explain it as best as I could but Linda jumped in to save me and said to the student that in fact, English is just a very difficult and growing language. Rules in the English language seem to always change. For this reason, one does not have absolute answers to grammar in this language knowing that there are many exceptions to many rules.

Blog Entry for Week 5

I would like to try to summarize my blog entries more carefully for the next few remaining weeks for it seems that my fellow readers have had trouble taking them all in at once. In fact, I will have no difficulty doing so because for this week of class, I taught my second lesson on Thursday. The lesson took over half of the class time, which I will go in details for in a separate blog entry.

On Tuesday August 3rd, the class worked on more Angles for Math, answering the questions of the students, the pie charts that they had to do from the annual or weekly salary data that the students find from the "Nickels & Dime" newspaper article. For the pie charts activity, which the class worked on in the first half an hour of the class, was very interesting because there was Math and a great reading comprehension discussion going on. As always, Linda did a great job of incorporating both subjects (Math and Writing/Reading Comprehension) in one activity. The article was very interesting and it even got students that don't usually participate, raise their hands to make comments. The article follows the life of a very poor woman who is a single mother with 6 children trying to make enough money for rent and support the children with a part-time tutoring job that only pays $10/h.

We also worked on Quadrilaterals in the last hour and a half of the class. This time, Linda first did a 20-minute lecture on perimeters and areas of quadrilaterals and explained the packet that she handed out to the class. She then gave a chance to the students to work on the packet at first individually and then in groups just like last time with the Angles. This was a lot more successful and she and I went around and checked people's works u

On Thursday August 5th, the first hour and a half or so, I taught my second lesson: "Run-ons". There will be a separate blog on it where I describe extensively. On the second half of the class time, after students took a break, the class went over their "double entry" assignment where they had to pick out quotes from the Introduction of "Nickel & Dimed" book and write their opinions on it.

Students were very inspired by what they have read and it was obvious that they have all taken the time to at least read part of the assigned reading because everyone handed something in. In addition, most students raised their hands to share the quotations they found with the class, which was very impressive.

At about 8:30 pm, Linda collected students' works and moved on to do Math. Although most of the time of the class was spent doing English grammar and the reading comprehension and discussion, the teacher made sure to also incorporate ate some Math in. In fact, they had to take out their Quadrilaterals packet that they had to do for home work. I think it is very important to go over home work because students feel the necessity to do their assigned work outside of class.

Although at first it was planned to have the students write the answers on the big papers with markers, since there was not enough time, Linda used the overhead projector to get the images on the board and ask the students to come up to the board and explain their answers to the class.

One thing that was important was that although there wasn't much time, Linda did not rush through the problems just so that she could say she went over the whole thing before class finished. No. She made sure everybody comprehended every question and its solution and answered students' misunderstandings as well. Then at 8:57, even though there were only 3 minutes left to the end of class, she asked the students if it were alright to do one more problem with them and they replied: yes, for sure. The way students answered her showed their enthusiasm for learning and comfort of being in the same page with the teacher and with the class.

The last problem was pretty straight forward but the students needed to have used decimals to answer the question correctly. The teacher told the students to not be afraid of decimals and use it if necessary in GED Math. It was funny that she mentioned this to the class because I have always been "afraid" of decimals ever since I learned them, since Elementary school! But she is definitely right, because dealing with decimals in the world of Math and in our world even, is inevitable!

Google doc of Essay 1

Here is the first part of my essay (Parts A & B) along with the GED questionnaire (in google docs) that I gave to the class to do my report.