Monday, April 27, 2009

Semester Finals

Semester finals have always been an interesting thing to me. I am not that great at school work or especially diligence, so they have often been a "make or break" for many grades (mainly math and science). This semester is not different than others - the end of the semester has arrived and I am frantically spending hour after hour trying to complete work that I have known about for 15 weeks.

This semester I took 2 classes: Creative Activities for Young Children and Statistics. I started the semester with a lot of prior experiences in creative activities and absolutely no understanding of what statistics is even about. As I reach the end of the semester - I can say the same is still true. I can come up with a creative activity, but I still couldn't even begin to tell you what a one-tailed test is or whatever that stat stuff is about.

The irony of it all.

I loved my creative activities class. There was a lot of busy work (which is never fun), but I learned a great deal about teaching. I learned lots of new strategies, techniques and ideas. I spent a great deal of time in a classroom this semester trying out all my newly learned tricks and teaching precious little Kindergarteners (and I loved every second of it). I just completed my final project for the creative activities class, which showed none of the things I learned. I completed every portion on the rubric and the final result (although good) shows no evidence of that which I learned this semester.

My statistics class - I took it online. That is the funniest thing I have ever done in my life. I made a "B" last summer in my technology class, so a 4.0 was no longer an option. This meant I really didn't care about anything, but passing the class. I have managed to take 15 quizzes and I have yet to learn 1 thing about statistics. I did however manage to figure out how to use the SPSS computer program to compute stats for me. I completed my statistics final project this weekend and received a perfect score.

Education is a subjectively interesting experience!
I haven't taken my final stats test and I am sure that will be a different story grade wise, but this is still an ironic ending to a long semester. I have unti May 10 to complete my final test. More on that later. (FYI - the hair is still being deliberated on - any suggestions are welcome.)

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