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.
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