Third Place

This is just a quick follow-up to my last post. My group and I were chosen as finalists in the Innovative Instruction Competition and had to/got to (depending on your perspective) present in front of the panel of judges with six other teams. It was pretty scary, but in the end we won 3rd place! Even though there were only about 14 teams total that entered, I feel so excited that our hard work paid off. They are also going to have a people's choice contest where people can vote for one of the finalists and the team with the most votes gets iPads. So... I'll let you all know when it starts so you can vote for us. :) I'm not sure if the voting is going to be open to anyone, just BYU students, or just students in the school of education. But once I find out I will definitely be publicizing it!

Innovative Instruction Competition

Much of my time this week has been consumed by working on an entry for this new competition at BYU. This semester I am taking a class about teaching with technology, so I had to create a project anyway, but this added a little incentive: There is a $4,000 grand prize, and $2,000 and $1,000 prizes for runners-up. This week we put together our video pitch and we thought it would just take a few hours. Boy, were we wrong. It ended up taking us over 12 hours to film and edit our 3 and a half minute video! Anyway, technology is fun and interesting but it can definitely be time consuming! I don't know what our chances are in the competition because a lot of the teams came up with some great stuff. However, I learned a lot and I think our video turned out pretty sweet (even though I look like a weirdo in the clips of me talking--just ignore that!)

Making plans

Dear blogging world:

I definitely kept you in suspense with that last post, huh? Well, pretty much I have just been trying to keep my head above water this semester in school. Luckily, this is sort of my last semester. It is my last full-load-on-campus semester, anyway. I will probably need to wrap up a couple classes over the summer and then in the fall I will be spending my days at... (drumroll...) ...Mapleton Junior High, teaching seventh grade English. I am super excited. I am doing an internship, which is awesome for two reasons. Reason # 1: I don't have to do regular student teaching (hooray!!!!) Although I have had good experiences with my practicum teaching, it's just difficult to teach in someone else's classroom to someone else's students. Which brings me to Reason # 2: I finally get to have my own classroom. Throughout all of my education classes I have been really anxious to put everything into practice, design my own units, etc. For this first year there is a framework already set up, but I will be the one deciding how to tweak it. Anyway, this is very exciting for me. I asked my ninth grade brother for advice about teaching seventh grade and he told me, "Just remember that they're crazy and they're sevies." (Sevies is the junior high equivalent of squashmores, I'm pretty sure it's a new invention since when I was in junior high.) Anyway, from what I have seen so far, I think he is pretty much right. Luckily I like craziness so I think this next year will be a BLAST!

In other news, Michael just got back from a week in New York City. He went with the other Graphic Design BFA students to see how the business is in NYC. It is a little bit funny because before the trip he was 99% sure he wanted to find a job in NYC after he graduates, but now he is having second thoughts. He decided that the simple life is not so bad after all! Still, he had a good time and it is definitely still a possibility for us sometime in the future.... we are just really not sure right now. But, I am excited to at least have this next year planned (finally.) After that, who knows!