Showing posts with label English. Show all posts
Showing posts with label English. Show all posts

Monday, January 26, 2009

One more time with feeling

Well here I am back at Boston College for one last and final semester. As scary and sad as it is to say that I will be leaving this place in 4 short months, I am super excited for all that is to come this semester.

We're about two weeks into classes, and I'm settling into the new courses I have for this semester. I'm taking two courses for my Human Development major, Personality Theories and Adult Psychology, and then two electives.

One is called Humor in the English department, with famed BC Professor and Poe Expert, Paul Lewis. We spend the first half of the semester looking at what makes humor, and the second half as a writing workshop, where we get to create our own humorous skit, play, parody or video. I love the class already, our first assignment was to collect 5 jokes from our friends, and then spend class telling jokes, AND we get credit for this, totally awesome!

My other class is called Capstone: Decisions for Life. BC has these great courses called Cornerstones (which you take in your freshman year) and Capstones (which you take in your senior year) and they are meant to welcome you to your BC experience and then close it out as you prepare to leave and reflect back on your four years of college. As a freshman I took Courage to Know, which is a Cornerstone, we read a bunch of different books and talked about how the themes in those stories resonated with our experiences in college so far. It was a fantastic class to welcome me into BC, and was a fifteen student seminar style course with a Professor and two Senior Mentors. I actually was a Senior Mentor for the same Professor I had last semester. However, now onto the class I am actually taking, my Capstone. My Professor, John Boylan I have decided is absolutely crazy but so incredibly fantastic, already on the first day he told the whole class how much he loved us! Basically what we are going to be doing this semester is reflecting back on our four years here at BC, and how the lessons we have learned from our various experiences can help us as we go forward and make life decisions.

So those are my academic musings for this post, but I will be back again soon to talk about all those things occupying my time outside of the classroom.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Chalkboard Introductions


Hello, hello. I'm Nick Grasso, a senior in the Lynch School of Education. I am originally from East Haven, CT. I am majoring in English and elementary education. This semester I am actually taking very few classes at BC because I am student teaching. Above is a picture of the classroom I am working in all set up for the first day of school back in September.

The teacher education program at Boston College strongly connects theory with practice. Education classes taught at BC all include some field based assignments. These assignments give you the opportunity to try and test the theories you are reading about and discussing in class with students in "real" classrooms. You complete three pre-practicum experiences, where you work one day a week in a school for a semester. The program culminates in a full-practicum experience in which you work in a school every day for a full semester.

So I spend every day this semester teaching 22 5th graders at a Boston Public School in Brighton along with a veteran teacher. I've mainly been teaching math every day. We are doing a social studies unit on the election and have just started a reader's theater unit with a play called, Revenge of the Nerd. The student's love sharing their acting skills and even give up recess time to rehearse!

Although teaching has been a lot of fun, the challenges of urban education are both exciting and daunting. My 5th graders have a lot of energy, but it takes a lot of work to focus that energy on learning.

I look forward to blogging this semester about my experiences in the classroom. Feel free to post any questions about the School of Education or about my teaching, I'll be happy to answer them.