11 Hours of Sleep

Yesterday was the first full day of training.  I woke up at about 5:30 to ensure that I could commute from Ridgewood Queens to 137th St in Manhattan by 9AM.  I expected a very long commute.  Turns out, it took about an hour instead of closer to two.

Training was interesting.  At about 9:15 after some complimentary breakfast danishes and orange juice, administrative people from City College and NYCTF were introduced.  After some logistics, science immersion fellows (including me) left to go get our City College IDs.

After waiting in a long line with only one person operating one computer to create the IDs, I left to the college cafeteria to enjoy a tasty but quick lunch.  I was pretty impressed by the selection in the cafeteria compared to my college!  Well, I guess at this point, my alma mater.

In the latter half of the day was the real nuts and bolts of training.  Two gentlemen lead science immersion fellows in an activity where we all discusses and presented descriptives of effective teachers then reflected on the process of the activity.  We also received a short assignment to write a reflection about two articles given to us by Isaac Asimov and Brian Greene.

During the second session of training, the guy was kind of over the top.  He was good, great in fact, at teaching.  He totally blew our preconceptions about a heliocentric solar system out of the water.  I watched at people used poor logic to prove to him that our universe is heliocentric and not geocentric.  To you, the reader, this may sound confusing.  But think about it... How do you KNOW the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa?  That was his point.

From then on, we worked in small groups to complete activities dealing with the idea of how the sun casts a shadow throughout the day and how that reflects the location of the sun in the sky etc.  The point is that we focused on content and pedagogy simultaneously.  The man was intimidating, but effective.

Anyway, I went to bed last night at about 9PM and woke up about half an hour ago at 8AM.  Some quick math tells you that's about 11 hours of sleep.  It was much needed rest.  I better go and prepare for my second day of training now.