Day 1: Monday, May 10th

 11:30 am

Today, I started with attending Voices of Color at 11:25 in LC3W with Shauna. My Senior Project is being a TA for Shauna Turnbull, and helping her design a curriculum for this course in the fall of 2021. I had a pretty hectic morning, but everything settled itself out once I started watching the students' presentations. These presentations were on the book they are all reading called "Little Fires Everywhere" by Celeste Ng. Each presentation consisted of a summary of their assigned chapters, significant scenes, symbols/themes, quotes, questions, etc. Some groups even ended with a fun Kahoot! to keep everyone active and participating. After class is over, Shauna and I will be discussing topics for the final project for Voices of Color.


12:30 pm

After Shauna let the students go, we chatted about my new goal for my Senior Project. My mission for the rest of the term is to come up with a curriculum for Voices of Color in the fall semester. This is going to include selecting books, figuring out discussion questions, paper topics, and fun projects based off of said books. What I will be doing for the next several hours is researching books written by authors of ethnic minorities and choosing two that I believe would attract the most interest from students considering the course. Right now, I will be starting a folder in my google drive for all of my brainstorming, research, and eventually my final drafts of rubrics and expectations.

1:30 pm

So far, I have researched two books and an essay that I think will fit right in with each other. I have chosen "The Water Dancer" by Ta-Nehisi Coates and "Beloved" by Toni Morrison. The essay that I have chosen is also by Toni Morrison called "The Site of Memory". My goal for the rest of the day is to figure out how long it would take to complete each novel, and if this is a reasonable amount each night for an elective class. I need to do some more research on the novels and figure out paper and project topics for each of them before I leave today. Tomorrow, I will need to go more into depth about parameters of these projects and paper topics, including rubrics and guidelines. 


2:30 pm

Within the last hour, I have come up with paper topics for each of the books, but I am still struggling to come up with a fun project idea that fits in with the Voices of Color guidelines. This is what I will be working on next, as well as reading more in depth about the themes and major takeaways from these novels. I also still need to figure out how long each of these books are and how long it's going to take to finish them. This is actually a lot more tedious than I thought it would be and I thought that I would finish it quickly and have a lot of extra time that I didn't know what to do with, but I was wrong. Although it's challenging, I am really looking forward to seeing the end result of how this curriculum turns out. I'll be back in an hour!

4:00 pm

I just completed my fourth hour of the first day of my Senior Project, and I think that I have a pretty decent start. I was not feeling my best, so I ended up coming home to finish up my project. My drive home took about 30 minutes, which is why the time stamp is a little off. Tomorrow, I hope to wrap up researching the books and focus more on the outline for the papers and projects that coincide with them. I feel good about the progress that I made today, and I hope tomorrow goes as smoothly as today did. See you then! 



Location: Andover, NH, USA

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