Today's entry will be short because I'm developing a cold and haven't had the energy to do much today. I suppose that means I could have spent all day blogging since it really doesn't take that much energy, but sometimes you just want to not think, you know?
So I've had an idea swimming around about describing teacher's college for those who are curious. I'll probably do some follow-up posts eventually with some thoughts and analysis, but for today I'll just describe the program.
Specifically, I'm talking about the University of Ottawa B.Ed program, intermediate/senior division. I don't know how different programs are across Ontario, and I know for a fact that they're very different in other provinces, so maybe this isn't instructive at all, but whatever.
P.S. in case you're wondering, there are 4 age divisions in schools:
-primary = JK-3
-junior = 4-6
-intermediate = 7-10
-senior = 11-12
And in teacher's college, there are three teachable age groups - P/J, J/I, I/S. So you can either apply to teach JK-6, 4-10, or 7-12. This is different than what you might think, since I think people generally perceive a sharp divide between elementary school teachers and high school teachers, but in reality a lot of elementary school teachers are qualified to teach some or all high school grades, and all high school teachers are qualified to teach at least 7 and 8.
So each semester we take 6 courses, and these are divided into 4 categories.
1) Teachable Subjects - in I/S, you need 2 teachable subjects (mine are math and physics), and you take a course in each of them each semester. First semester is intermediate (for me, math and general science since physics is only senior), and second semester is senior
2) Mandatory General Education Courses - there are 2 of these each semester. Last semester there was one on Curriculum Design, which was a) an online course, b) taught by an awful prof and c) BS. The other was called Schooling and Society, which was certainly more interesting and relevant, though not the sort of work that generally appeals to me (i.e. essays). This semester we have one called Learning Procedures and I Forget the Rest of the Title, which, as I was remarking today, sounds like they needed one more course for the program and just made up the title. The other is something about exceptionalities, which sounds like the most practical of the 4 courses in this category. Also, we had our first class today and the prof is very cool, so I'm pretty pumped.
3) Electives - one per semester. Last semester I took Holistic and Non-Traditional Approaches to Education, or more appropriately, Hippie Approaches to Education. I'm not kidding; the prof was the hippiest hippie I've ever met in my life by a country mile. I might have to write a whole post describing her. Not to take anything away from the course, which was decent. My elective this semester is Technology in the Classroom, one of my most anticipated classes of the year. Hopefully it's not How to Use an Overhead Projector 101, just like that grade 9 business course (which I didn't take thankfully, but I heard the stories) was How to Type 101.
4) 2143 - this course needs a category of its own, and I'm too lazy to think of an appropriate title, but there are 2 main purposes to this course: 1) everything to do with our practicum, i.e. discussing issues, getting support from our prof, creating our practicum binder, etc. 2) creating our professional portfolio. This course is not as interesting as some of the others, but it's easily the most useful course we take.
In addition to the courses, there are a few other things that the program entails:
1) Practicum (aka placement) - clearly the most useful part of the program. We have a 5 week practicum both terms. In the fall we had 1 week of observation, came back to school for 2 weeks, then returned to our practicum for 4 weeks, with the expectation that we would take on 50% of our associate teacher's course load by the end of the 4 weeks. Mine was at a private girls school, and it's pretty likely I'll do a follow-up post or 2 on that because it was great. In the spring term we have 5 weeks straight at a different school (presumably in the other age group and teachable, i.e. since I taught intermediate math last time I should be teaching senior physics this time), and if I'm not mistaken we're expected to bump our teaching up to 100% of our associate.
2) Professional Development Workshops - all J/I and I/S teachers have Tuesdays off by design so that we can attend these PD workshops. Unfortunately they have limited spaces, and if you know me you can guess that I didn't get around to signing up quickly enough to secure spots in any workshop (in my defense, they filled up in like the first week of school). Most of them don't sound very interesting, but you do get a certificate saying you completed the workshop, which is apparently somewhat valuable, so I might try to sneak in to a few this semester.
3) Some sort of week long conference thing - after our classes end this semester and before our practicum starts, there's a 3 day conference and I have no idea what goes on during it. It sounds intriguing and worthy of its own post though, so I'll probably do a recap after the fact.
Okay, hope someone found that interesting/useful!
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