andy reagan only the interesting stuff

Spring Break 2010: Teaching, tending to my wounds, cooking, pictures, and my first stop-motion!

This break, rather than go home or go to somewhere exotic, I stayed right here in Blacksburg. Since the dorms are closed, I spend the week (and am currently) at David Henry's townhouse. He works in Roanoke, and so he was here all week too, although he just left to go home for the weekend, so Arturo and I have the place to ourselves!

It's really quite a mess, but it's somehow cozy

Getting up early to teach wasn't so hard, because I'm used to getting up early from both classes and from racing.  But because my wounds were leaking some hydro-colloid, I didn't want to wear my nice new dress shirts, so I wore sweatpants underneath my khakis and two undershirt under a polo.  For the first few days we, basically observed class, and it felt a lot like being back in high school, but East Montgomery is worlds different than Marcellus and I was looking at it from the other side: teaching.

East Montgomery (EastMont) is classified as a high needs school, because many of the students come from very low-income families and it is a small school, graduating only 50 students per year.  I learned a ton from the experience, am considering teaching (possibly at the high school level) but am probably going to steer clear of the high-needs schools if that is what I do.  We actually had to keep journals of our experiences, which I'll quote from include at the end to summarize the week, which is pretty much what today's journal was.

Monday night Dave cooked most of dinner, with me and Arturo out in the kitchen helping.  It was really good! Here's a link to a picture of our homemade meal. Tuesday night we cooked dinner for Dave so it was ready when he got home, attempting again to make break, which came a little salty and dense haha, but still alright!  Then Wednesday I got out for a 20mile ride at 4:30, having to put the new bars, open my brakes, and wipe some of the blood off the bike (there's still a lot on there now...), and get ready to ride which was more than I had planned.  But I got out, and got a really great ride with Jim Stoll, who is a grad student at Tech.  I missed dinner with the other interns and math-ed grads, and so Dave and I went out to Mike's, but that was closed, so we went to Backstreets.  We tried to see who could drink the most water, but we couldn't really get fast enough service to test the limits haha, Dave finished with 8 glasses and we only had enough to fill 7 and 3/4 of my glasses haha, so I guess he won.  Then Thursday, I went out to Panera with Arturo with the math-ed grads, but only one of them ended up making it.

Then Arturo and I went to Carol Lee's to try and get some free donuts, knowing that they closed at 5:30 we showed up at 5:29 and the dude gave us a whole huge box of them!  Then I went over to Catherine's dorm, where her, Emma, and I all had dinner and talked about Bike and Build and how excited we all are to be doing it this summer!!  Then tonight I'm just layin low I guess, did a lot of clothing order stuff and am still putting off doing real homework haha.

Wounds

The more I reflect on the crash, the better I feel about how I came out of it.  I didn't break any bones, didn't hit my head at all, and didn't really lose tooo much skin.  The hydrocolloid bandages are supposed to work wonders, I went to Schiffert on Monday and they hooked me up with a bunch, and I've been tending to them all week.  I've made a lot of progress, from barely being able to move Monday, to going on a 20mi bike ride Wednesday, to being able to lift my arm straight up today (although painfully).  I took some pictures, which I'm going to include next, after a disclaimer haha.

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT!! really not so bad, but everybody is different, so better safe than sorry lol

My shoulder, which took it pretty hard

Took it the hardest, pretty sure it hit the ground hardest, and is definitely the deepest of any. Pretty stiff to move, but I was hopping up two stairs at a time today!

The right knee, just some scrapes really

The elbow lost some major skin too, which I didn't get and pix of, but yeah on the whole not so bad really!

More pictures! Of racing and such

Everybody loves pictures, right?!

Pic that Lauren got of my second lap attack! There's no one in front...

The car got in the way...but just look at those ripping quads haha. Many many hours of training!

Not a great picture of me, but look how long my hair is getting! I need a cut soon, very soon haha.

Teaching Journal

Since I don't really feel like editing it, here is my uncensored Noyce journal entry, it should give a glimpse into the week and what I thought of the whole experience if you care to read:

"

Today was definitely the closest experience I have had to actually teaching, or will have at all before deciding for sure if it's what I want to go into.  I got to run class for two blocks using the powerpoint that I made yesterday and following Krista's lesson plan.

Today I introduced tessellations, the different types, and we did two activities to reinforce the concepts.  Like always, class started with two SOL problems, which they copied into their notebooks and I went over before jumping into the powerpoint.  I attached that in case you want to look at it.  They wrote the definitions of the two different types into their notebooks too, and after a few examples, we broke into two groups and did the hands-on activities.  I ran the tracing blocks into tessellations activity and Tyler and Valerie did the cutting out and gluing shapes into tessellations activity in blocks 2 and 4, respectively.

I thought that being up in front of the class with them listening was the highlight of my week, and I was very grateful for the experience to actually teach, although I think I was still doing Mrs. York a favor so she could do other things too.  It would have been a lot more work had I made the lesson plan and decided upon the activities myself too, but even just making the slides, there is quite a bit of time that goes into planning class that I never had an appreciation for in the past.  I definitely think that putting time into planning effective activities could significantly affect how well the students learn, and their feelings of math in general, based on how much they enjoy going to class.  The cut-out shapes were from the VCTM's "illuminations" and it's great that there is such a resource, without collaboration between teachers it would be so much work, and I can see why the first years of teaching are the hardest when still assembling lesson plans and materials to use.

Overall, I am very glad to have taken part in the Noyce Internship program, and it has definitely helped me to decide what I want to do, and whether I want to teach math in a high needs school.  The levels of respect and discipline problems that are associated with high needs schools are definitely real and affect the ability of all students to effectively learn, and there were a lot of times that I felt like students were being force fed math, when they didn't really want to learn.  It is easy to get frustrated, and talk negatively of the students like many of the teachers do.  Teaching in that environment is very draining, and I think it would be hard to do every day.  Given these obstacles, I'm not sure that I want to teach in a high needs school, but I haven't really decided anything for sure, I have to think about it a lot because that's a big decision.

The best parts of the week were interacting directly with students and helping them to actually learn.  And the most difficult parts were having to deal with students that don't want to learn, are disruptive, and are disrespectful.  It's the helping students part that keeps the teachers coming back every day, and the difficult students that make it a challenge to do so.  So, for future years, things that I think should be emphasized are the directs interactions with students, and getting a chance to stand up in front of the class by one's self.  The things that I could've done without are the negativism (the teacher's lounge) and the students being disrespectful, but those are both part of teaching and of teaching in a high needs school, so I think that they are also just part of the experience."

Stop-motion compilation, 1 hour compressed to 13 seconds!

I also got around to putting together my first stop-motion video!! Check it out:

[vimeo 10051828]

And some other links that may be of interest:

I submitted an entry to Art of Manliness's photo contest: http://bit.ly/c8giSH

Found a pretty cool techy blog: http://www.labnol.org/

I got a 44/45 of my ES Paper that I was totally stressing about last week! LD_report_Reagan_3_4_10

Found a pretty awesome Jay-Z parody, actually from google's twitter: http://bit.ly/9YLhm2.

And that's pretty much all I got, stay tuned for more!