Chris's Life

I ended up spending a really long time preparing for session II, and even so I didn't feel all that prepared. It went OK, I guess, but I was very nervous. I also didn't eat very much on thursday because I was distracted by all of the preparation. The lack of sugar really hurt my ability to absorb information quickly, and I gave some really dumb answers when called on. Not all the time, and I don't think that they were completely stupid, but it was embarassing and just added to the stress.

My own teachbacks (Kaplan's term for when a trainee teaches a section as if they were teaching in class) were decent, but not as good as I would have liked. I was very nervous and couldn't relax, which I think impacted my tone and pacing negatively. It's somewhat odd. I was nearly this nervous when I started out as a TA, but I got much better. For some reason I've regressed in my comfort in front of a class a bit. It's probably just a combination of it being a new type of class and that I'm being evaluated and a job depends on my performance. Oh well. I think that the next session will be easier. It's about the same amount of material and I have more days to prepare for it.

On the plus side, I apparently taught well enough for training because I did get positive feedback from the trainer. The things to work on were not grave, and hopefully shouldn't be too hard to fix. The point about going into too much depth I was much better about in my second teachback. The issue of showing too much of the thought process will be harder, since that's my own preferred way of learning. If I can see how to think about a problem, I generally find it very easy to learn it and consequently that's how I teach — showing the thought process. I'll be able to adjust, though. It won't be easy because I don't even notice when I do thought process versus conclusions, but I'll be able to do it. Picking up the pace will help a bit, I think. It will largely be a matter of remembering that Kaplan courses are really training for a goal rather than teaching for the abstract aquisition of knowledge.

Oh well, I've already pulled the next group of pages out of the large TEL (Teacher's Edition of the Lessons) into my small binder, now it's time to go highlight them and start reading. Tuesday's session will be math. This should be much more fun than Reading Comprehension. The idea of 1 right/4 wrong works much better (or at least, more clearly) in math.

I just finished training session 1. It went reasonably well, I think. I was minorly late (due in part to unexplained traffic on route 78), but Dawn (the director of the center and the trainer) was very understanding. I'm going to make a point of showing up like 20 minutes early to the rest of the training sessions.

The little introduction that I did went reasonably well as well. I was able to work in a few little humorous points and got a laugh or two (e.g. when I pointed out that someone who went on to get a MS in math did better on the verbal section). Dawn also mentioned that she was surprised that I said Long Island rather than Long Guy'lndh. I explained that it's the locality and you don't much hear the latter out east on the Island. I'm rather glad that I escaped that little pronuncial quirck.

Training was of course tiring at 3.5 hours, but it gets training over faster and in time for classes starting in early september. The format was varied and involved presentation by Dawn, watching some videos, and doing a few small presentations ourselves. Future classes will be heavier on the presentation, from what I gather.

A real plus is that not only are we going to be paid for the training, but we also get paid for our (extensive) preparation time. Not just for training, but we will also be paid for our preparation time for the actual classes themselves (at $7/hour for prep time versus $16/hr for in-class time). And I expect that the prep time for classes will be fairly extensive. If each class is 2.5 hours long, I can easily see prep time reaching 2 or 3 hours in order to do a really good job of it in the classroom.

The format of classes looks interesting, too. There is a prepared lesson plan using the Kaplan methods, and one goes over it. The instructor version also has notes for things to emphasize and say at some points. All in all it looks to be a good experience.

Tutoring is going to prove interesting, I think. I just conversed with 0's mother and she apparently forgot our scheduled meeting and also that I only tutor only math. Oh well. My next tutoring are both scheduled for wednesday of next week, one in the morning the other in the evening.

In other news, powerblogs is coming along. I hope that it won't take too much more work to get ready to start selling accounts.

I left my parents on saturday and proceeded home, where I met up with Tom. Shortly afterwards, it was decided that we were going down to meet Beth, Teri, and Chris Van Horn in Philadelphia. Thanks to the modern miracle of the traffic jam, we got there by midnight, where we spent time at an overpriced arcade called Dave And Buster's. Virtual Bowling was a lot of fun, though.

Sunday we spent at Linux 12, a picnic to commemorate the 12th birthday of linux. It was a neat event, though the food was very poorly coordinated. Teri has pictures. We of course left late, and made the small change of Beth coming back with me and Tom. Tom left fairly soon as he still have the long trek back home ahead of him, though he left me his DVD boxed set of Futurama Season II. I'm really looking forward to it because it has a few episodes that I missed as well as Anthology of Interests I, which is a superbly funny episode guest-starring Al Gore, Nichelle Nichols, and Gary Gygax (inventor of Dungeons and Dragons). Beth even agreed to watch it with me if I promised never to describe the episode in her presence again!

After Tom left we went shopping at Wal-Mart where Beth got some clothing and I picked up some food stuffs. It's really amazing how cheap frozen pizza is when you think about how electricity has to be spent keeping it frozen from the manufacturing plant all the way to the store, and how salaries have to be paid and everything. Not wonderful food, but good enough when you're unemployed. I also got some Hatfield Sausage. There's something reassuring about a named brand when all of the meats are so cheap &mdash one wonders how they got the rest to be so cheap (hatfield can be bought in other, better supermarkets). I even tried their spare ribs. The trick is that you have to wash them down thoroughly, as they come with some sort of odd-tasting sticky slime on them. Even so, I don't plan to buy more walmart brand meat.

Oh, well. I've got tutoring later tonight and then I'm driving Beth home (where I'll get to print out the stuff for my Kaplan training that I forgot to print out while at my parent's house). Time to get more work done.