Day 4: Thursday, May 13th

 10:00 am

I got here kind of early today because I felt restless at home and wanted to get a head start. I'm not sure yet exactly what I'm going to be doing today, so I am going to start by seeing how long the chapters are in "The Water Dancer" and map out how long it will take to read the whole novel. Heidi luckily had a copy in the library, and she also has a huge stack of other books to choose from too which is wicked rad.

11:00 am

During the last hour I went down to the library and got "The Water Dancer" from Heidi and got to skim through some of the other books that she had picked out. They all seem pretty interesting and intriguing, but I think I want to stick my choices for now. I got to skim through "The Water Dancer" to get a rough estimate on how long it will take to finish it, and it seems a little long. I am hoping that when I go through and map everything out it will come out okay, but we will see. I will be spending the next hour dividing up chapters for nightly readings and how many pages those readings will be. 

12:00 pm

I just finished going through and figuring out how many pages per night students will be reading and it honestly wasn't that bad. I asked an external professional resource (Mel-Dawg) and she had said 25-30 pages of reading is exactly what teachers shoot for, which is roughly what mine are. The readings don't exceed 32 pages, and don't go under 10 pages. We might be able to knock off a class with that 10 pages but I'll check with Shauna later on. I also planned out which classes we will introduce papers and projects and which class they will be due. For the next hour I am going to work a little more on the final project for "Little Fires Everywhere" and see if I can do a little more with that.


1:00 pm

I have been trying to make the final project for this spring more structured, and I think I've narrowed it down a bit. Voices of Color is about to start, so I will be observing class for the next hour. Once class is over, I hope to have some one on one with Shauna to discuss my next steps and how I've been doing so far. See you after class!

2:00 pm

So, I got to class, and Shauna had said that they probably will not be doing a final project in this class. It kinda made me bummed because I had spent a lot of time working out the details, but I guess stuff happens and it's not the end of the world. Instead, they are going to be more focused on college essays which is also something that I can help with. I have already created a spreadsheet for setting up conferences, I just need to figure out when to send it out. It seems like for the next week or so, I will be working on college essay stuff with the students. 

3:00 pm

I've talked with Shauna and we decided that I should read through the novel before I go any further with class planning. We made a few tweaks to the nightly readings, but other than that everything looked pretty good. I still am a little upset that over an hour of today's work ended up being for nothing, but it's definitely something I can make up for in the days to come. I ended up putting in 5 hours today, which brings my total up to 17 hours so far. I might put the same in tomorrow so that I can knock a few hours off of Saturday. See you tomorrow!


Location: Andover, NH, USA

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