First day of graduate classes

My Saturday just disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Today was our first meeting at Pace for our graduate classes. It was actually pretty good. I'd heard from a lot of '04 corps members that the Pace classes were a waste of time. Well, they revamped the whole structure of the program and from what I saw today they did a pretty good job. Instead of meeting for classes twice a week after school, we only have to go one Saturday a month from 9:00-5:30 and then complete online assignments during the week. Our Saturdays essentially consist of three classes that we are taking: Curriculum and Instruction, Child Study, and Learning Teams. We're grouped all day by our content area so that we are always talking about things in the context of what we're teaching, which is nice. I think that the best part of the day is the Learning Team. The Learning Teams are led by TFA curriculum specialists. In this part of the day we have the opportunity to really discuss what is going on in our classrooms and ask specific questions that we have. I also like that this part of the day is led by TFA because I think that it helps to refocus on our goal of significant academic gains. In our training with the DOE, which was only two days, I already started feeling disconnected from the movement. Now we will be able to come back to that every month.

In other news . . .I found out today that we have a new addition to our corps. One of the displaced corps members from New Orleans has joined my region in Brooklyn. She's been through so much and now she's starting all over again here in New York. She's from Brooklyn so it was easier for her to come back home than to move to Texas (where a lot of New Orleans CMs have gone) or wait for the schools in Louisiana to reopen. I wish her luck.