Internship week 14:

For this week I was in charge of the class while Sarah was out of the state. Luckily however, I did not have to worry about lecturing for the entire 4 hours, because Sarah had arranged several speakers to come in and present, this encompassed probably around 90% of class time. I was still responsible for taking attendance, handing out quizzes and the like...but really most of the work was spent in the preparation leading up to the class: by printing out worksheets, reviewing material, writing email, having meeting and lugging around boxes of field journals.
This internship has taught me many things, but I think topping the list is a new found  respect for the amount of preparation and planning required to make teaching a large class run smoothly. 

Campus Trail Mapping

Now that the most recent aerial photographs of the campus grounds were made available. Sarah and I were finally able to print a large campus map, in order to make my job of accurately mapping the campus nature trails somewhat easier.

Internship week 13 part 2:

Later in the week I had a long meeting with Sarah to discuss plans and activities for the following week, when I would be in charge of the class (with the help of several speaker) while Sarah was out of town.

I also met with Susan Cooper, to get feedback from my lecture she observed earlyer in the week. Susan thought that my overall presentation was good; she noted that I used a variety of methods to engage the class and that I tried hard to encourage critical thinking, instead simple bulk memorization. She said that I could have improved my presentation by slowing down my pace and leave more time for students to answer questions. But that I am overall off to a good start :)

Internship week 13 Alternative Energy Lecture:

Since my internship centers around becoming more proficient with teaching; one of the main activities that Sarah wanted me to gain experience with was designing and presenting lessons. I needed to come up with a topic that I was knowledgeable about and would relate back to the current chapter material. I settled on Alternative Energy, because I personally find it fascinating and I think that it is an issue my generations is dangerously ignorant about.
      Earlier in the semester I spoke with Susan Cooper concerning statigies for trying to engage students with the curriculum. I wanted my activity to make the class think about the issue, before giving them all the answers in my presentation. To do this I created a worksheet where each student would pretend to be the town mayor, trying to list alternative energy sources, on which to run the town after an oil embargo with the middle east.

Overall the presentation and group discussion went quite well. The class particularly enjoyed the examples I brought in of different alternative technologies. Susan Cooper and Mike Savarese were also kind enough to observe the lesson so that I could receive some extra feedback.

Internship week 12: The Amazing Race

While the class finished their exams, I ran around campus distributing clue envelopes-- (Each clue contained several facts about sustainability initiatives being done at different cites around campus). After the exam was finished, I explained the event and passed out worksheets.---The sheets gave a rough description of the clues location and several questions that needed to be answered. Sarah was nice enough to provided aluminum water bottles as prizes for the winning team. I was very pleased and surprised by level of enthusiasm shown by the majority of the class. A few students tried to BS the worksheet off of Google, but most legitimately put effort into it. Overall almost everyone seemed to have enjoyed it and learned something in the process:
very cool!!! :)

Internship week 11: part 3

At the end of the week I led an exam review session, while Sarah was away at a meeting. Although not very many students showed up for the review; I still think the overall experience was very useful for both the students (because they needed allot of help) and for me, because teaching a small group is extremely different from lecturing to a large class.
It was also very satisfying because at the end of the session the students seemed much clearer on the concepts and less fearful about the test on Monday.

Internship week 11: part 2

My next big assignment for my internship was to design a class project on my own. Sarah liked the idea of doing some sort of scavenger hunt around campus and relate it back to environmental initiatives. So I spent a good part of the week walking around campus and jotting down ideas for sites that were engaging in some form of sustainable initiative. I also met with Sarah several times to go over my progress and see if she wanted me to make any changes. 
Stay tuned next week for: The Amazing Race/ FGCU style.