Weekly Reflection #1

This week, I learned that it takes a lot more work than I thought to design a curriculum for a class. It was a lot of tedious work like making spreadsheets and researching novels, but the most time consuming so far has been reading through the first novel I chose “The Water Dancer” by Ta-Nehisi Coates and coming up with discussion topics. Although it’s a lot more work than I thought it would be, I am really enjoying myself. I like that I always have something productive to be doing and I feel good after I get something done, even if it’s a small task. One thing that was kind of upsetting to me this week was that no one signed up for the conference slots I had set up to help the students in Voices of Color with their college essays. I guess I can’t be too upset about it though, I probably wouldn’t want to talk to some random senior about a personal piece of writing either. I am also a little discouraged about how long it’s taking me to read the novel, but I am hoping that I will be able to make a decent sized dent in it on Monday. Everything has pretty much gone accordingly to plan so far (except for the conference thing) so there isn’t much to complain about. One thing that I learned this week is that I need to manage my time a lot better in terms of how many hours I am doing per day. Luckily I did extra hours on Thursday and Friday so I didn’t fall behind today, but I need to be careful about that. I also think that I need to stick to a more structured schedule, as I have been enjoying my sleep-ins maybe a little too much. I would say that I have definitely benefited from what I have done this week in terms of mapping out what needs to be done to complete this project. I am hopeful that I will have the majority of the curriculum done by the end of Senior Project so that I can hand over what I have done to Shauna and she can easily design an entire class around what I have researched (maybe with a few tweaks here and there, I’m no professional, obviously). So far, so good. Hopefully it stays that way!