29 posts from September 2006 (page 2)

Here are the articles that have caught my eye this morning:

NYT story about the "segregated swimming pool" in Mississippi. Opening sentence: In the fearful cosmos of the segregationist South, the integrated swimming pool occupied a special place: race-mixing carried to an intimate level.

CL article on the revamped Barksdale Reading Institute, based in Mississippi. Jim Barksdale, founder of Netscape, donated $100 million to improve literacy in Mississippi. The Institute has been around since 2000, but they have not been happy with their results thus far so in the last two years they have revamped the program considerably.

Great blog post by our very own first-year, Lisetta Shah. One of those stories that makes you smile and breaks your heart, all at the same time.

Finally, column in today's Daily Mississippian (the student newspaper at Ole Miss) about obesity. The conservative columnist (ostensibly an Ole Miss student, but given the boilerplate feel of the writing week after week I have a feeling the columns are cut and pasted from somewhere else) comes out in favor of Bill Clinton's proposal to eliminate soft drinks and other sugary snacks from public schools in Mississippi as opposed to a similar proposal put forth by a state task force. Sounds good, right? Both proposals are essentially the same, right?

Here's the catch:

Clinton's proposal goes into effect in 2010. The state proposal starts next year. Thus, the multibillion soft drink industry has put their considerable weight behind Clinton's proposal. Of course, that isn't mentioned in the article. Like they say, if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table...

We've tweaked the home page again. What do you think?

I wouldn't be doggone, I'd be long gone...

Top 50 Colleges for Black Students here.

Left a good job in the city...

Study Guides and Strategies here.

How does Mississippi measure up when it comes to Higher Education? Not well.

Here is the email I sent out to our alumni and current participants today:

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are all doing well. Online applications for the Mississippi Teacher Corps are up and running. As always, please help us spread the word.

The first application deadline is October 22nd. We will have three more deadlines: December 22nd, February 22nd, and April 22nd. With the exception of the last deadline applicants will be notified of their status within four weeks. For the April deadline they will be notified within two weeks. Each deadline gets more and more competitive so people are encouraged to apply as early as possible.

Speaking of applications it is time to set the annual goal. Each year I set a goal for the number of applications we would like to receive. Here is how we have fared the last three years:

2004
Set Goal of 100
Received 120

2005
Set Goal of 200
Received 270 (most we have ever received)

2006
Set Goal of 400
Received 405 (most we have ever received)

So, drum roll please:

The goal for 2007 is…

800.

That’s right. I’d like to double what we did this past year.

800 applications. We will accept 25 to 28. Training will start Tuesday, June 5th, 2007.

Now, here is the tricky part. Once again, the recruiting budget has been cut. This year’s budget is $2,000 (last year it was $5,000). So, as always, we need your help in spreading the word about MTC. Feel free to forward this to email to any and everyone.

On the website we have two pages dedicated to recruiting.

The first is our Recruiting Materials page. This has all of our brochures and handouts in PDF format. If you work on or near a college campus please print out the “One Sheet Flyer” and post it up for us.

The other page is our Recruiting Events page. You can see the various colleges and universities we will be visiting this fall.

If you talk to someone who is interested please refer them to the website or ask them to contact me. I’ve also found that people interested in MTC get a lot out of the blogs that all of our participants keep. The blogs, more than anything else, give a realistic look at the highs and lows of teaching in critical-needs areas in Mississippi.

We now place about 30% of our teachers in Jackson. This allows us to offer both urban (Jackson) and rural (the Delta) placements.

We are accepting Social Studies applications this year. We didn’t last year, but we still had requests from districts for Social Studies teachers, so Social Studies is back in the fold. We are also accepting majors in things like Latin or German, both of which we get request for.

We have a summer internship for juniors, sophomores, and freshmen. The internship is for June and July and we provide on-campus housing and a $2,000 stipend. The online application for the internship is up.

The News article this month is on the recruiting and application period.

Photo of the Month is from the MTC summer school, courtesy of Ruth Kuhnau.

Profile of the Month is on Meredith Horstkotte, Class of 2007. Meredith is a graduate of Smith College and teaches math in Belzoni.

The first and second-years have been teaching for about a month. They have been up to Oxford twice for Saturday class. The second-years are relaxed and comfortable. The first-years are still making the adjustment to being a full time teacher in a critical-needs area in Mississippi. We are continuing with our small mentoring groups, and that is helping our first-years a lot with classroom management.

Meredith has a nice blog entry here about the difference between being a first-year teacher and a second-year teacher.

Elizabeth has a well-written blog on classroom management.

One of our first-years, Holly, has been covering the ups and downs of the first month.

I’ve been trying to blog once a day. The latest posts are on Education Clichés and Podcasting.

You can read all of the blogs here.

In other news:

Jake Roth, Class of 2007, was named an outstanding educator for Jackson.

Ann Monroe (one of our instructors) and myself have been selected to present at the national AACTE conference in New York City. The presentation is on the use of blogs to augment teacher training.

Finally, Jeff Spanogle, Class of 2006, has been a doing a lot of clean-up work on the website. Jeff did the major redesign over the summer. Hope you like it.

As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. Once again, please help us spread the word about Teacher Corps. The online application is here.

Ben Guest
Program Manager
Mississippi Teacher Corps
Email: mtc@olemiss.edu
Website: www.mtcorps.net
Phone: 662-915-5224
Ben's Website
Ben's Blog

http://www.msteachercorps.com/mtcapplication/application.aspx

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/index.htm

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/Recruiting/applications.htm

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/Recruiting/Recruiting/materials.html

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/Recruiting/Recruiting/events.html

http://www.msteachercorps.com/internapp/internapp.aspx

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/MTC%20Main/News/news.htm

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/Media/photo_month/main.htm

http://www.olemiss.edu/programs/mtc/Participants/monthlyprofile/main.htm

http://mtcblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/differences.html

http://elizabethcsavage.blogspot.com/

http://thirtyminutesofwonderful.blogspot.com/

http://mtcorps.blogspot.com/

http://www.jackson.k12.ms.us/homepg_features/060824_outstanding_eds/060824_outstanding_eds.htm

By virtue of being employed by the University of Mississippi I get to take classes for free. I'm slowly working towards my Ph.D in Educational Leadership. I've noticed the same answers popping up with depressing regularity any time an instructor asks a question.

Along with a fellow grad student, I've started to put together a list of cliches that you can use to answer any question that is asked in an education course. You will have a 90% chance of getting the answer right. You should preface the answer with some rhetorical nonsense like "I think what we're really talking about here is that...":

"As educators we need to have high expectations."

"Everyone needs to be on the same page."

"It's a two-way street."

"It's systemic."

More to come...

Had two-day podcast training this past week. A guy named Jim Lengel did the training.

You can see the fruits of my podcast labor here.