Reflection 14-15

Reflection Weeks 14 - 15

Leigha Tracey - BSU Intern
Carmel High School
Nov. 25- Dec. 6

Note: Hours include holiday short week

Teaching (30)

I have had an intense, but rewarding two weeks in the classroom. I am the adviser of record for this publication of the HiLite newspaper. This requires a lot of time, energy and responsibility. Thanksgiving week was a bust. I took a professional day on Monday for meetings at Ball State and then had to take an extra day to see the doctor due to an infection.

This past week has been busy. I implemented a rather involved lesson plan on story approaches and angle development, something my journalism I students are struggling with. The lesson utilized group work, brainstorming and developing individual story assignments for an in-class grade. My class of 25 was relatively easy to work with, but I found that more time and a lot more organization/explanation was needed for my class of 52 students. Quite a challenge keeping a group this size focused and on task.
Students also had beat reports due this week. There were several conferences each period and collection on Thursday. I have over 70 stories to read, grade and conference before Wednesday of next week. In order to be fair and accurate, I only grade about ten at one time, then set it down and work on something else. It is a long process, but valuable to the students.

In addition to all of this the newspaper comes out next week. I have held before and after schoolwork sessions all week and have a Saturday session this weekend. This is a five-hour block of work and editing time. So much for sleeping in!

Journalism students in all of my classes have final exams due by 7 a.m. Monday. This has been a very big deal. I have been helping students prepare by conferencing and going over important concepts that will help them do well on their finals. They are a mix of stories, photocompositions, graphic designs, layouts, photo-illustrations, ad campaigns and web projects. Whew. Although I am interested to see what they have come up with, it has been a lot of work for me. I even prepared a work session for all classes during SRT where they could come in and I reviewed their projects and critiqued. I also arranged peer-editing sessions.

Out of this came a reward on Wednesday. One of the students that I conferenced with gave me a thank you note! She was very grateful and seemed to feel good about her story after I helped her. I think I will save that little note forever.

Observation/Participation (15)

One of the interesting things that have come up in the past few days is a possible instance of plagiarism. I was having my journalism 1 class edit pages and I was modeling by doing it with them. One of the reviews in the entertainment section was very impressive to say the least. Basically, if a student wrote it, they should consider quitting school and getting a job at Rolling Stone magazine, it is that good. There were many clues that it is not authentic work, so I took it to Tony Willis. I then had the page editor read it and give me her impression. She felt uncomfortable with the quality as well. She had a meeting with the student telling him that we had some concerns and wanted to make sure that it was his original work. She asked that he e-mail her with a statement saying that it was his original work and that we should print it or he could say that he didn’t want it printed. We will see what happens next week. Tony helped me with this in terms of telling me that it is important to have a paper trail to cover yourself. I will be interested to see what the student does in this case. I have tried to locate the article/articles he may have taken the information from, but with no luck. Maybe he is just that talented. Better safe than sorry is what I learned from my mentor teacher this week.

Last, I have had some really nice feedback from all of my participating teachers this week. They have all given me very nice reviews and letters of referral. We also had a valuable intern meeting on Tuesday. Karen brought possible interview questions and we went through them as a group. It was helpful and a quality exercise.