It’s been a week since my grad school classes started up for the summer semester. I’m halfway into my program, with a year left. The start of this semester has me feeling quite frustrated. It’s an education program. We are all educators. We understand how people learn best. People have different learning styles and learning needs to be relevant. You know, the core of best practices in teaching and learning and all that jazz. It’s all over the textbooks that I’m paying out the nose for.

So WHY do those concepts not apply to the actual program that I’m in? I’m a student, right? Shouldn’t I get some meaningful learning experiences, too?

Then why on earth am I doing chapter summaries? I have to read, summarize, then comment on four other people’s summaries (that are pretty much the same as mine – because it’s a summary). I don’t like feeling like I’m doing busy work. I’m even summarizing chapters on Understanding by Design and Differentiated Instruction. If only these assignments reflected those methods….