WEEK SIXTEEN- Daily Log: Monday, June 11, 2007

• Mme. Mercer was absent today, so a supply tacher was present instead. I introduced myself to her, and figured out that I had worked with her on a previous occasion. Before class time rolled around, I decided to work on some booklets that Mrs. Cekota (the ESL teacher) had wanted me to complete. The booklets were all to be cut into eight pages. They were about educational topics, such as plants and exercising. They were very basic books. The hard part was that the pages were not numbered, or in order. Therefore, I had to read each one, and make sense of the story in order to put them together correctly. This made the job extremely time consuming. I also had to trim the edges of each booklet, because they were not even.


• I then went to class with the supply teacher. Mme. Mercer had left lesson plans that said the students had to translate a passage in their textbooks. The supply teacher let the students use the dictionary on the computer if they could not find a word in their dictionaries. This would have been fine, if it wasn't for the abusers. Some students had decided to type up the whole passage and then let the computer translate it. When I saw this, I immediately told them to exit the program and get off the computers. They had abused the proviledge that we had given them, and so I decided to take it away. They responded quite well, as they got back to work very fast. It feels great to have the kids see me as more of an authority figure, because I now get more respect. I am so proud of myself for improving in this area.


• During planning time Brian wanted to show me the power point that he has been working on for graduation. The slide show is so good! I gave him my opinions, and he has done an amazing job on it. For the rest of the day, I worked on the booklets for Mrs. Cekota. There were so many of them that I felt like I was getting no where, but when I looked at the finished pile, I saw just how many I had done. I still have many more to do, but I'm sure I will finish them before my last day here at my placement. I have to start thinking about what to get Mme. Mercer as a thank you! I worked for three and a half hours today.