Day Three

Today the class had to go take drug tests. This class is not only a class devoted to helping the trainees improve their basic literacy skills but also work towards earning a certificate called a Certified Logistics Associate (C.L.A.). The C.L.A. is a certification recognized by most employers in the state of Indiana, it's partnered with Ivy Tech & WorkOne Northeast, and if earned, will make everyone in the class more employable and give them an advantage when applying for jobs. The C.L.A. is mostly used in manufacturing jobs like at warehouses, but being able to show that each client has completed a 10 week course and met the expectations set for them can speak volumes about each trainees' character.

The drug tests are simple urine tests but it was a very slow process waiting in the waiting room for 5 individual so to be called into the room and complete the test. The trainees were all men and they walked out of the examination with an odd look of achievement on their faces.       

Next week my classroom hours are going to start changing due to the C.L.A. I will not be teaching the C.L.A., another teacher will be. For the next ten weeks my schedule will be:

Monday: HSE Class from 9:00 AM- 12:00 PM; C.L.A. Class 1:00 PM- 3:00 PM

Tuesday: HSE Class 9:00 AM – 3:00 PM

Wednesday: HSE Class from 9:00 AM- 12:00 PM; C.L.A. Class 1:00 PM- 3:00 PM

Thursday: HSE Class from 9:00 AM- 12:00 PM; C.L.A. Class 1:00 PM- 3:00 PM

I’m kind of excited about this new schedule, I’ve been struggling to stay within the allotted amount of paid time I am given each week to teach and prep. To be completely honest I haven’t been staying within it, I usually end up working a total of 37-40 hours a week. I’ve been curious about how I could try to stay within my allotted hours and one way I’ve considered it has been to cut class time down, but I haven’t made any firm decisions yet.

We got back from the drug screening around 1:30! Everyone was very hungry and after lunch we only had about 45 minutes left to work as a class.

Using our last 45 minutes I squeezed in a very brief lesson about summarizing and its importance. For the lesson we first established as a class why summarizing is important. I provided an example of how to summarize a very long account of someone’s busy weekend. Then as a class we went over a worksheet I got from Life Skills Activities for Secondary Students with Special Needs, a book a teacher recommended to me and I find myself using all of the time.  The activity in the book suggested an opportunity to apply the lesson by allowing students to watch videos or read news articles and then attempt to sum those items up in one sentence. As a class we went to www.wane.com and selected the news story “Two Officers on Leave After Officer-Involved Shooting.” The story was just the right length and the subject was a huge hit in the class, especially for one student who is very interested in criminal justice.  Unfortunately the lesson was interrupted by a staff member from WorkOne coming in to finish some paperwork for the C.L.A. portion of the class. Hopefully we’ll get to continue this tomorrow though!

Now all I have left to do today is figure out how I'm going to spend the last of my budget for this class which is turning out to be a lot harder than I first thought! I don't know if I'm just incredibly thrifty or picky- possibly both. All I know is I have until the end of this week to submit anything I intend to use in the class which will fit the needs of the students and still fall in under academic material. I start to move in one direction with my ideas but then something about it turns me off or I find myself thinking of a "cheaper" way to achieve my goal without buying the materials. I know, boohoo, other teachers wish they had this problem.