Home Sweet Home

It was really great to get to return to my high school this week and observe the teachers in some of the classes that I took while I was there. It gave me a whole new perspective on my teachers and a better understanding of why they teach the way they teach. We started in TV broadcasting and with it being a new school (by far better than the one they put me in) made it a whole new experience. The teachers goal is to make the classroom as much a real world experience as he could and the architect allowing him to give suggestions on the design of his classroom really helped with that. The way the class is run is at the beginning of the year he teaches the students how to use the equipment and how to fulfill the different rolls required to run a news broadcast. Once he finishes he turns the class over the the students and tells them to go to work. There is a count down clock to remind the students they have a time limit and then they are cycled through the different positions as the semester goes by. At the beginning of every class he gives some words of motivation and at the end after the broadcast he goes over what went wrong and has them work out how to fix it before the next one. It is a really cool thing in that it teaches the students to solve problems and work together to obtain a goal however I feel it would be better for the teacher to be involved sort of floating around the classroom as everyone is preparing to give advice or assistance as needed rather than working on his own at his desk or coming and going from the classroom.

We also had the opportunity to visit with one of the newest faculty who this year took the spot as Digital Media teacher. This is his first year ever teaching. He received his education from Florida in 3D animation and worked in that for a while and then came here and got his teaching degree from Weber and found a job opening at the High School. The teacher he replaced used to teach Digital Media 1 and 2, 3D graphics and animation as well as a network administration class but they have cut his schedule down to a few classes of beginner level Digital Media and a general computing class. Geoff you might understand that. Its keyboarding and a how to class for the basic Microsoft programs. He says he is going to try and do everything he can to get the old class schedule back but only time will tell.

All in all it was a really great experience. It was really good to get to talk to the new faculty as well as one of the student teachers from our program who is there. They really opened up what it is like and just made the whole thing more real.