...And then there was only Term V

To recap, for those of you just joining us:

Although we're studying a lot of different things at once in the Teacher Education Program, our year is generally divided into five thematic terms.

• Term I was the summer. It focused on the context for teaching. We studied "School and Society," among other things, and our final product was a study of the neighborhood where we would be student teaching. 
• Term II was the first half of the fall. It focused on getting to know students as individual learners, as well as theoretical approaches to teaching and basic assessment & instructional strategies. Our Term II assignment was a study of a specific student from our classroom.
• Term III was the remainder of the fall. We focused on lesson planning, ultimately developing and teaching small-group lessons in each of the major subjects.
• Term IV is the beginning of the spring semester, and focuses on curriculum planning and working towards enduring understandings. Over the course of Term IV, we develop a full, cross-curricular lesson plan for a two-week full takeover.

And those are all now officially DONE! I'll write a recap about Term IV soon, but for now, I just wanted to report that I have finally reached...

• Term V: Praxis. Term V is different from the other terms -- we're only taking one class a week (one session of seminar, rather than two), but we're student teaching full-time now, ultimately building up to a two-week full-responsibility teaching takeover. There's not technically a "Term V assignment" -- but instead, we're working on finalizing our Master's Portfolios. We'll be going over more of the details tomorrow, but the TEP website describes this assignment as a "web-based portfolio addressing a critical issue that rises from their teaching and supporting their arguments with artifacts from their teaching experience." 

And that's really it. At this point in the year, "Classwork" has frankly subsided to Priority #3 -- behind "Student Teaching" and "Finding a Job," but still ahead of "Cleaning My Kitchen" and "Updating My Blog."