student teaching week six

So, week six was my last week at Central, and I was really sad to leave. Happy to move on to the next great thing, but sad, as I'd started to feel really at home! :) They took mighty good care of me there, and the principal was kind enough to come talk to me on my last day about the fact that Nancy's retiring and they'll have an opening, which made me feel really good about the way everything went.

I had just enough time to wrap up most of my loose ends before I moved on, so that was good. I spent the early part of the week looking for good websites for a teacher to have world history and geography students research people and countries, and then I made her some handouts to copy and give to them with the names of the sites and brief instructions on how to use them. Then, when she brought them in on wednesday, I walked them through using each site, as well as how to use the catalog to find some print sources. The usual laptop for presenting lessons decided to freak out and not connect to the catalog in her first period, so I got to ad-lib a little, but it worked out fine since we were meeting in a computer lab; I just told them what to do, and walked around while I talked to look for problems, and then I got a new computer for the other three classes.

We finished moving the books and furniture around--at least, finished until they decide to play with things some more--and it's shown a lot of reaction. Kids are going straight to the newly reachable fiction, which makes me really happy, because that was the point of it all! We used the now-empty shelves behind the teachers' desks to just put up a bunch of face-out displays, which looks nice, and the kids are going to those where they hadn't been going when the shelves were full. We reckon that means they can pick out their books by the covers from afar and then feel comfortable to dart back there just long enough to grab it off the shelf, where they weren't comfortable standing back there and browsing close-up before. A couple of teachers have made small gripes about the new arrangements, but along the lines of "I just don't like it different because I liked it fine before" rather than raising any real reasons that it doesn't work. My personal opinion is that I'm glad they liked it fine before, but it wasn't working for the students (who we're there to serve, after all) and since we haven't changed a thing about the teachers' desks, I can't much sympathize with resisting the change. Paula and Nancy think so too, and it's their library, durnit. :)

That week I also finished a sample calendar with suggestions of books to rotate through the new front display I'd made, showing bibliographies of 10-12 books on enough different themes to change it out every three weeks for next year, and I put them on a calendar to align them roughly with seasons (football in august, prom/makeovers in april, etc.). That way they can just pull titles real easily. I changed out the music books I'd put up and did a black history month display instead before I left, and then since I had those music books out, as well as two stacks I'd pulled while making the sample calendar (poetry and science, the latter containing an awesome-if-terrifying picture book called The Tarantula Scientist), I went ahead and put all of those out on display on top of the row of shelves that's now in the middle of the fiction section. We ended up gaining a ton of display space through the move in its various stages, which was great.

Then my last little project on friday was to look at the way the other high schools have their TEL worked out. Since I'd been working with TEL a lot for my lessons and inservice, I'd found that when the new TEL portal went live on the web, nothing changed with the current portal that Central was linked to. This was mystifying Nancy a bit, so she asked me to go see what other schools were doing, as well as just to look at what databases they'd moved around to emphasize, since it turns out you can do that. The answer, if you're curious, is that most schools have done pretty much nothing to their TEL portals except link to them, but they're all still on the old portal; this is important, because linking properly through the old way means you get TEL statistics counted for your school, whereas going straight to the new portal on the web just sends all stats straight to the state. I assume they'll eventually change it so schools can get stats from the new portal, but it's not so right now. Austin-East had actually done something really odd, maybe copying and pasting a URL from Farragut's site (they have a new librarian and I wouldn't be surprised if he'd gone looking for help or a quick fix that way), such that it sure looks like their site links to Farragut's portal and therefore sends all their stats to Farragut. The interesting high school TEL portals to go look at, in case you are interested in making changes of your own, are Central, Fulton, and West, who have only selected a few sites to show as particularly important (everyone else has them all on the default "select all"), and Hardin Valley, who has them all selected but has carefully changed their order in the list to group certain ones together.