Grad. School Semester Two

In the state of Massachusetts, you have five years from the date you are employed with a public school to begin your Master's degree. Thankfully, I only started this year at a public school, but it has been five years since I started teaching, so I got my butt in gear while I still can, and got into grad school. I am working towards a Master's in Education and hope to attain professional status by 2014. (We don't have "tenure" but after three years of employment and a Master's, you have "professional status" and basically it is not as easy to "let you go.")

Last semester was my first after almost four years out of school. It wasn't that bad, although I don't think I will take an online course again. It was a lot more work than I expected! I was able to "publish" a children's book through my Multicultural Literature class though. That was a pretty awesome course.

This semester I am taking Sociocultural Foundations in Education and Integrating Social Studies and the Arts. So far I am really digging Social Studies and the Arts! Above is a picture of our first assignment. Much of what we will be doing in class can be done in our classrooms. This assignment spawned from an icebreaker we did, talking about where our shoes have been. Our homework was to trace our shoes, add our name to one so that it touched two sides and draw things that described our personalities in the other. After explaining that history begins with us, our professor asked us to add a few bullet points of a time line to our design to later be turned into a paper. Love it!


I can't wait to see what else is in store. I hope many great ideas, new lessons and information. Don't worry, I will try to post about my assignments!