The Most Important Thing That I Learn About Myself

One of the most important things that I have learned about myself is that even at my age, I am still capable of learning new things.  Also meeting many different students and sharing ideas has been one of the greatest benifits that has happened to me at NTI.  This past year has taught me how important my relations with my students are and the impact that I can have on their lives.  In my interaction with my students, I now have more patiences and have become a better listener.  Another important thing that I learned about myself is that I needed to be better organized, and to spend more time in preparing my lessons.  By spending more preparation time has made my lessons more interesting for my students and helped me to keep my students more involved.   The NTI experience has given me a different outlook, and that there is more to life than retiring.  I enjoy what I'm doing now and would not take anything for deciding to become a teacher.  It sure beats going to an airport every day as I did for thirty years.

Adminstration

The most important thing that I have learned about working with school administrators is the many functions that they have to perform. An administrators job used to be very simple,but now they are handed more chores every year. There is more paper work, and new regulations and guidelines coming down every year. I sometime wonder if anyone every reads all the reports that they have to file with the county and the state. Administrators are under lots of presure to make sure that the students are performing or meeting certain standards. Administrators and their schools are blamed for problems that are caused by poor parenting or parents that should not have had children to begin with. However, our administrators are always there for us when we need them especially when dealing with parents.

One of the dificult tasks that our administrators have at our school is developing a new curriculum especially next year for our juniors. Ours is supposed to be a school of engineering and technology and not a regular high school. We have had the problem of designing courses that are challenging to meet the needs of students that finish their high school courses in two years. Our administrators have work long hours in dealing with this problem. Although our students will be working as understudies with Universities and Industry their junior and senior year, the administrators have to come up with a curriculum that is designed beyond AP Physic, AP Chemistry, and AP Biology; students could take these courses at a regular high school, and there would be no need for them to come to this school. Adminstrators have a very difficult job.

The things I've learned this year from my students.

The most important thing that I have learned form my students this year is how talented and how capable they are. In my math classes my students need very little help. I can give an assignment for homework and they will turn it in the next day without any help. Another thing that I learned is how competitive these students are and their desire to learn and make good grades. In one of my classes the students challenge one another to see who can finish their work first. I have been amazed at the accomplishments of our students this year. Two of our robotic teams won the state and the national tournments and are going to the world championship. They placed first in history and will be competing in Washington later this year. The math team took top honors at Georgia Tech and will be competing for state.

Yesterday I help set up the art displays and it is hard to believe the talent these kids have. They will be competing for county honors and then state.

Developing as a teacher

The last two weeks have been very rewarding. I have been working in several areas with students in county and state competitions. Our students have won several first places,and in robotics they won the county, state, and region, and two of the robotics groups will be going to the world competition. I am the first teacher arriving at school, so I keep the cafeteria at which time I am able to tutor students every morning. It is very rewarding when the students wrote in the school annual that Mr. Cagle does everything for us. I look on teaching not as a profession, but a calling. I had a long and good career, and being able to teach to me is being able to give something back. It is wonderful every morning to have something to go to that you thourghly enjoy and to have students that mean so much to you. When going on field trips and introducing students to a world that they didn't know existed is so rewarding. We have just finished field trips to Sea Island and to Georgia Tech's nanotechnology lab. The nanotechnology lab at Georgia Tech just blew the students away.

Class Activities

I worked with a journalism class this week trying to publish the school's first newspaper in print and on the school's web site. It is amazing how much talent these students have, especially their creativeness. students were put into groups and given different assignments. Some of the groups were to make pictures, some to do interviews, while others did art work. The art work that these students produced was amazing, and the interviews were very interesting. From the intrviews we learn so much about different cultures and different countries. We have students form twenty nine different countries. Also, we got to know some very interesting things about our teachers. However, the most important thing is that the students had so much fun doing this project. I can't wait to see the final product.

What didn't go well.
Once every semester our students do a theme. This semester they are doing a medival theme. all of our classes are involved in this project. The project is headed up by the language arts department and they coordinate with the history department, math department, music department, science department, and engineering department. The students build catapults, castles, bow and arrows, and other items that were used in this era. The school is working with Medieval Times at Discovery Mall to set up this project there. There will be music and other activities that day. Our students will be there all day. The problem is it is going to cost $30.
00 per student and some of the students cannot afford it. We are $5000.00 short. I was assigned the job of coming up with the $5000.00.

Week Three Post

I have an on-line health class that I have been having problems with students not doing their work. Up until this week I was not receiving any information form the on-line instructor.
When I found out that the students were not doing their work, it was too late, they had already received a zero for a grade. I could not go into the course to see what they were to be doing that day and did not have a syllabus. Finally I received a syllabus and was given the instructions on how to go online and check to see if the students were doing their work. Now before the class period is over, I can check their drop box to make sure that they have completed the day's assignment. All the students are passing now. The bad part was the parents were receiving their grades and wondering why their student was flunking and we were not reporting it to them. Problem taking car of now.

2 week post

Dr. Burns I did miss the point.

One thing that worked well for me was using a seating chart to separate the students who wanted to talk and socialize with one another instead of paying attention in class. This has led to better classroom management on my part and has solved most of my dicipline problems. Also, students are now getting their work done on time. I have also moved to the back of the room where I can better monitor their computers, making sure they stay on task.

Things that have not work well for me are my lesson plans. I have tried to put too much material in my lesson plans and have not been able to cover all of it. This is not only frustrating to me, but is also frustrating to the students. Because of this, it limited student classroom participation, especially their spontaneity responses. It made me realize that it was better to cover less material adequately than to have to rush through the material.

Ten steps for studying for a Test

The first day of class I went over some key point on how to study for a test that I found on the Internet.

Below is a list of some of the points that students should find out ahead of time.

1. What material the test will cover.
2. What type of test(multiple choice, true false, ahort answer,essay).
3. How the test will be graded.
4. How much the test will count toward the final grade.
5. Study in a place that is free of distractions. Have ready all the things you will need, such as paper, pens or a calculator.
6. Study at a time when you are alert and not hungry or sleepy.
7. Don't wait until the last minute to study. Short daily study sessions are better than on long session the night before.
8. Set a goal for each study period. If you are being tested on three chapters, set up four study sessions, one for each chapter and one for a review of the main ideas in all three chapters.
9. Repetition is the key. Read and reread your class notes and the relevant chapters in the textbook.
10. Create you own study aids.a. Make an outline form your notes of just the main ideas.b. Make a timeline of important dates or the order of events.c. Make flashcards for studying vocabulary or events and important dates.

Good Luck.