Day 7: Monday, May 17th

 10:00 am

Today it will be just me in Voices of Color because Shauna could not make it in today. The students will be working on a response and using the rest of class time to work on their college essays. While students do this, I will be reading through some more of "The Water Dancer" and helping with essays when the time comes (although they do seem to work pretty independently). Class does not start for another hour or so, so I will be filling this time working on what a typical class day looks like in Voices of Color. 

11:00 am

I read through three chapters of the book in the last hour and added some discussion topics to my brainstorming list. I am not going to be able to finish the novel as soon as I had hoped, but I will have it done by the end of the week. I still need to read through the second book that I chose, but it should take me only half as long to read that one because it is a graphic novel with lots of pictures and there aren't as many pages, either. Class starts soon, so I will have to break for a few minutes from reading to get the students settled into taking their assessment on the book that they have just recently finished. 

12:00 pm

The students are currently working on their assessment and I have finished another chapter of the novel. I also mapped out which classes will have student-lead teaching duos based on how many students will be in the class. Right now there is 15 students, so I assumed that there will be 14-16 next fall. This leaves 7-8 classes of teaching duos, so I need to find other things to fill the class times that we will not have these duos. I am not very hungry today, so I think I am just going to get grab and go for lunch and come back to the classroom to work more. 

1:00 pm

I read through a few more chapters of the novel and wrote down some more discussion questions. I also came up with a materials list for the class, which includes roughly 20 copies of each book and roughly 20 composition notebooks that students will write in daily to answer the discussion questions brought up by the chapters that they read the night before. We might not need as much as 20, but this was just a rough estimate. I feel pretty good so far about the progress that I've made today and I think that I am in a relatively good spot. A bonus to all of this is that "The Water Dancer" is SO GOOD and I have a hard time putting it down. 

3:00 pm

I didn't do a 2:00 check in because I got carried away with the book, but I have to stop to go to practice now. I did 5 hours today which brings my total up to 29 hours so far. I am planning on sticking to the 10:00am-3:00pm schedule everyday this week (except for Wednesday and Saturday) so that I can stay as structured as I was today. Today went really well, I'll be back tomorrow!



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