Finally, The Institute Chronicles...

Hey, there. It’s been awhile, I know.

Sorry for the delay in posting. I’d originally intended to update my blog every single day of Summer Institute, to share my experiences, highs and lows, so you could get a good view of what we were going through during those (e.ter.nal.) six and a half weeks… but that didn’t work out so well. Turns out, Institute was so, so, so much more exhausting and mind-draining than I thought it would be, and by the end of the first day (literally), I was down for the count. Nevermind getting further into Institute week after week, and trying to muster up the extra energy to backtrack and update the blog…. Good intentions overall, but things just didn’t work out like I thought they would.  So, now that Institute is O-V-E-R  [YAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!!!!!!] and I’m actually free and have nothing due and can thing straight again (hehe), I’ve decided to go back and cover Institute week by week so the experience isn’t lost.  All that said and done, here goes!  J

Institute, Week One (three days only, W-F)

How in the world can I be this tired already???

Yay! We’re all excited that Institute has finally, finally started, and we can start getting to really know our cohort and make some new friends, etc. We’re all happy and excited and shiny and new. Institute has not yet beaten the life out of us, and we start our mornings with big smiles and excited voices that can’t stop talking about all the stuff that’s coming our way – did anybody really read that whole 600+ Guidebook before the Summer Institute started (yes, most of us actually did), did anybody take the time to read the pages and pages (and pages) of work that we had to do for our Independent Study Guide before Institute started? (yeah, I think they actually did. We used the answers for our ISG one day during Framework sessions while we worked in groups, and then really didn’t mention all that work again for the next six and a half weeks. Bummer.) When do we start our Student Teaching? Where will we be? How many students will we have? Man, I hope my Cooperating Teacher (CT) is nice… and helpful… and understanding, etc., etc., etc.

So we have a short opening ceremony as a whole group, and then break into our teams with our leaders (PTAs, or Practitioner Teacher Advisors). We get our school assignments (mine is High School, US History, yay!), our Cooperating Teacher’s name and find out what our usual daily schedule will look like for the next month or so.  Looks like we’ll arrive at our schools at 7:15 or earlier every morning, set up and spend planning time with our CTs until the students arrive for summer school at 8, then student teach lessons until 1:30 in the afternoon. At 1:30, we leave our sites, and have an hour to drive back to the main location where all the Framework sessions will be held. That’s Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, we spend all day at the main site, mostly doing Framework Sessions all day after a short opening all-cohort meeting.

You can either shove down your food during the 20 minutes the kids have for lunch as you do simultaneously do lunch duty, or you can wait and take your time to eat when your student teaching is done for the day and you’re driving back to the main site for Framework sessions. At first, I chose to eat with the kids while doing lunch duty. After several days of having an upset stomach from shoving food down in an inordinate amount of time, I eventually opted to just wait and take my time eating my lunch as I drove back to the main site each day. Everybody kinda worked out their own solutions with this one.

For the first week, though, we stayed at the main site and went through what the program called “Framework Sessions”. We were each given this (h-u-g-e) binder with Modules that we’d slowly go through during the duration of Institute, and we knocked out one and a half modules for the first couple of days. It was fun at first. Breaking into groups and working with ‘elbow partners’ had its novelties, and everything was cool.  Our group was still new and we were getting to know each other and all was well, so this worked out great.  Stay tuned!