Day 5

I just remembered that I forgot to do a Day 3 post. I think I'll do that one tomorrow to make up for it.

Today I spent a long time trying to figure out the website. I ended making two, because the first one I wasn't happy with. The thing is that you pick a template and then are stuck with it. It's not like you can change it afterwards. I figure using a template is better than starting from scratch, but the whole system is a lot more complicated than I gave it credit for. I've never made a website before so I'm fumbling through it really slowly.

I also heard from several of the teachers my Spanish teacher emailed. I'm working on replying to them - I wrote up a draft of what to say but I want to get it checked before I send it, so that should hopefully happen soon.

This first week has helped me realize some areas that I need to focus on and improve. The biggest of all is organization: My mind, and consequently my project, is all over the place. I need to reasses what I'm doing and lay it out so I can get out of this brain fog. The second area is the rules of formality. I'm having trouble knowing when to use what level of formality. Come to think of it, I rarely have to act professional, and I'm really not sure how to do it.

With my project right now, it looks like what I'm doing is making profiles for all the schools I visit and comparing them to the ideal. The trouble is that I don't know what the ideal would be. I've read a bunch of stuff, and heard a lot of opinions - but all this information I have is very scattered and incomplete. I know stuff thats good when learning a language, but I don't know how that stuff could be put to use in a classroom. There are so many subtleties of teaching and students and classroom dynamics coming into play, that I was originally hoping to avoid.

EDIT: Ok, crisis averted. I'm just going to make a disclaimer and ignore the details. I've finished and finalized the survey and contacted 2 schools. Tomorrow and Monday I'm going to work on the website. I have a very rough sketch of what the "ideal" in my eyes will look like. Please disregard the other two paragraphs of worrying.