I’m still only writing weekly blogs – I’m too busy! Monday and Tuesday were TPA#3 all the way. I am so glad my teacher asked me to look this over: it was not consistent across its 24 pages and it lacked depth (My teacher recommended that I use the State-provided rubric to self-score my TPA. I was in the 2 – 3 range in most sections and I needed to be in the 3 – 4 range to guarantee a minimum passing score of 3 for overall content. My TPA#3 could have gone on either side of 2.5, the tipping point between passing {3} and failing {2}.). To solve this, I looked up all the technical explanations of what I was attempting to do for my experiment and made sure I included all that in the text. I also did a complete read-through and tweaked my explanations and procedures so that they were consistent throughout (part of the reason the front didn’t match the back of this TPA was because I had initially written the first five pages of material before I ran the experiment and by the time I ran the experiment, I had changed some of what I wanted to accomplish… and then I didn’t write about it for five weeks, so I sort of forgot about what I had originally intended and wrote about what I had done instead. I was in such a rush to turn TPA#3 in last week that I didn’t do a complete read-through (as I had done with the other three TPAs) because I barely finished the conclusion in time to turn it in. The TPA is now 30 pages long and so much better. I might even get a 4 out of 4 on this one. Now I’m a little worried about TPA#4. I don’t think it was as good as TPAs 1 & 2 and those got 3s.
On the Chip front, I was simply too focused on TPA#3 to do any chip work so I didn’t get to it until Wednesday. Fortunately, the job was pretty easy and I completed it in a few hours. The next step is for the company to decide how to proceed, and their two contract designers have opposing opinions on how to solve the problem. I don’t expect to see any more work for maybe a month while they hash this out.
Thursday was spent cleaning my office so I could move on to my next project: creating a portfolio – the last hoop towards getting my credential… aside from completing my classes. The office doesn’t look much different than at the beginning of the day, but my piles of paper are organized by subject/topic, making it much easier to compile the portfolio.
On Friday, I was a substitute for Middle School Science. The kids were taking a sex ed. test. I suspected that this test (a quiz really) wouldn’t cover the whole 50 minutes, so I had prepared a mini-lecture on the adolescent brain as a back-up. Good thing I did; many of the kids were done in 10 minutes, and the last kid was done in 30. That left 20 minutes in all five classes to do “something.” Depending on how good the class was, I either gave my lecture as “punishment” or I allowed them to choose what they wanted to do. Three classes got the lecture, one class chose to do homework and read silently, and one class chose to sing camp songs. I taught them the “bunny” song. For my prep period, I filled-in for another Science teacher. That class was writing blogs on the science of everyday activities. I really liked the breadth of topics I was seeing. My two favorites were the science behind playing the piano and how practicing typing skills leads to increased typing speed and accuracy.
Saturday, my family, plus some friends, went to the river. I read a book. I’m not much for the river park, but I do like being with my family.