Friday, July 13th Lesson Plan

Morning Session
1. Introductions - TR name game. Motions with a name.
2. Island game - Everyone chose one object to have with them when stranded on an island. Broke into two teams to combine the objects for survival.
3. Oxford Heroes
- family vocab and tree
- food and workbook exercise
- clothing, used students to model clothes to learn vocabulary
4. Hangman
5. Telephone

Speaking Club
Mother may I (for younger kids)
Hot potato with English
Debate (Are boys smarter than girls)
UNO (saying anything in Russian will warrant a card drawn)
Categories (if group is small)

Evening Session
1. Name cards
2. Review vocabulary
3. Go through lesson book
4. Game
5. Water break
6. Writing 1-2 sentences using new vocabulary from today. Have someone read the story aloud.
7. Game
8. UNO

Why wait?

Six years after my own college application frenzy, my little brother is going through the very same process but in a very different playing field. With an almost identical GPA, higher test scores, and solid extracurricular activities, he received his first and currently only decision letter back from Cal Poly a few days ago. "Thank you for your interest in our school. Unfortunately..." I couldn't believe it so as any good older sister would do, I went on collegeconfidential.com, a frequented resource at my recent admissions consulting gig, to look for answers. Nothing significant turned up so I emailed a former colleague at ThinkTank. Still nothing. Last night, as my brother and I watched the Big Bang Theory over dinner, he mentioned several other good students being rejected from SCU due to late documents from the high school. As an aspiring education grad student, I begin to think, "Why should I wait till grad school to start making a difference? Why not get to the bottom of these late documents and fix this issue if not for my brother's class, for all high schoolers to come?" The next day, I found my brother's counselor's email address and sent her a firm, but polite email inquiring about the late documents. We exchanged a handful of emails that afternoon, but instead of exposing yet another flaw in the public education system, I found a flaw somewhere else. My brother. He had failed to turn in a form that the counselor had needed to send out his required documents.

Although this didn't turn into the huge expose that would help hundreds, if not thousands, of future high school students (as I had imagined), it made me realize that by a little bit of vision and being proactive, can go a long way. The longer I wait around for my graduate school admission decisions to come back, the more restless I'm becoming. However, I don't need to wait around for graduate school to validate my ability to affect change. My ultimate goal is to make an impact in the educational realm, and who's to say I can't start doing that now. That's the purpose of this blog - to bring up educational ideas and issues that are worth talking about to generate innovative solutions. Though I'm still waiting to hear back from my last school (which hopefully will not be a rejection), I'm going to start my journey now into the educational realm.