Planting Seeds

I am excited to be posting my first blog entry, as I’ve been hearing about this trend for quite some time, but yet to partake in it myself. Our environmental education project, is coming along with all of the effort that the Amanda, Suzanne, Justin, and I have been putting into it. We have met at least once every week since class started, typically on Monday nights, and we have really been examining the different possibilities that we all have in mind as far as the approach we will be taking. I think after speaking with both of the two possible teachers that we would be working with, we will feel much better about how to create the curriculum and what we should and should not include. I think we are all working really well together, dividing up the tasks we need to accomplish by our next progress report. We discussed the possibility of cutting back to three lessons instead of five, so that there would always be two of us leading the lesson, instead of needing to go into the classroom solo(which might have proven to be rather intimidating). Then on the final day, we would all go together after having met with the class one time each while going in pairs.
It seemed to me like the contact Amanda made with the student at Columbia was a really great meeting, and could be potentially very useful as the idea seemed to match well with the teachers plans. Our only concern here was that we might need to follow a different curriculum than we had intended to teach, but it would likely be similar regardless. However, we are still planning on speaking to Matt Gilbert, as another option which might provide us with more flexibility. Right now it seems that there are lots of different ideas and opinions about the direction we should take henceforth, but I think this will be sorted out by our next meeting on Monday. Hopefully Justin and Amanda will be able to get some more feedback after class tomorrow (Suzanne and I both are not available). I think once we have a more solid foundation with which to work, we will be able to progress more rapidly with the creation of our project. We are off to a really good start, and I look forward to seeing our progression with the project over the next few months.