Passing Judgment Upon My Superiors

The first part of my evaluation will be evaluating the evaluation procedure.  We had 5 separate formal evaluations to fill out this morning and now we also have to write a blog offering our evaluation, which, in addition to being redundant, seems to undermine the anonymity of our previous evaluations.  Points have been docked.  I guess I'll just try to hit a few things that might be of interest to outsiders.

Summer School:  The summer school is pretty much as good a training experience a program of our size can set up.  While it would be nice to have larger classes and a more realistic classroom environment, I had enough practice and headaches to get some sense of what the year will be like.  I have some objection to the activity club, though from the perspective of a teacher I really enjoyed it.  It just seems that summer school is hard enough on kids, they shouldn't have to stay an extra 45 minutes for "fun" activities when they probably have more fun things they could be doing without us.  The added interaction with kids and practice in those kinds of club environments is good, but it seems a little cruel to do it everyday.  Altogether though, the summer school is probably the best part of the summer training

Evaluations/Role Plays:  The evaluations were generally helpful, but I wish that helpfulness carried over into the role play evaluation process, insofar as one existed.  The team teachers all put in effort and had good plans, but there really wasn't enough structure to make them into legitimate learning experiences.  For example, if we're acting out a scenario where a kid gets in a verbal confrontation with a student, there should be specific guidelines or a handful of different guidelines for different teaching styles, concrete approval or disapproval of what the pretend teacher did, and a limit on the behavior of the people playing students so that role play doesn't become about something else entirely.  Altogether, as much as I didn't enjoy them personally, I'll admit that role plays have the potential to be beneficial, but I'm not sure that they were this time around.  I would say this needs the most improvement.

I expended most of my pithy comments and obnoxious references on my classroom management today, so, with my arsenal sapped, I will move onto the last required post of the summer.