Blog 1 Spring 2012: Two Artifacts Connecting to Two Characteristics

The First artifact I will discuss relates to Characteristic #10: we believe that the novice teacher should be liberally educated.  In Economic Geography during my tutor year, one significant project my class was assigned for the semester was to create a commodity chain.  A commodity chain represents the stages of production or the changing of hands that a product or good must go through to rewind up in a particular place.  For the assignment I made a PowerPoint slide that was projected on to the wall like a giant poster.  In my slide or commodity chain I demonstrated how beef cattle change hands numerous times before ending up in the grocery store for consumer purchase.  As part of grade for the assignment I had to present my commodity chain to the class and explain the different stages.  For the project I received a perfect score of 50/50 for both the poster and the presentation.  Everyone in the class seemed to enjoy my commodity chain which made me feel very proud of the work I had done.

The Second artifact I will describe corresponds to Characteristic #6: we believe that the novice teacher should have in-depth knowledge of content. During my History 456: Appalachia Regional History class there were five quizzes throughout the semester.  My professor Kenneth Fones-Wolf brought to our attention that he was going to replace the midterm and final exams with these five quizzes.  The quizzes would serve as smaller tests to check our understanding of the content more often.  One particular quiz in the class everyone seemed to struggle on, but I did extremely well.  I earned a 104 out of 100 on the quiz and felt very proud of myself. This was after Professor Fones-Wolf had given five extra bonus points because he thought the material we had covered was so difficult.  I would later receive an A in the class for the semester.