WGU Master's in Elementary Education - Progress Thread

[ss20ts]

Actual experience working in American public schools was honestly making me rethink continuing to get this degree.

Not all public schools are like the ones you've had experience in... kids with special needs being placed in regular classrooms is popular right now, but it's a trend that won't last long, imo, because it's so ineffective for everyone - students with and without special needs, as well as teachers.

Find a school where special ed students still have their own classroom, and your experience will improve dramatically.

Easier said than done due to state mandates/laws along with federal requirements.

[nykorn]

I don't know why anyone would become a teacher today.

Teaching is a job which is essentially AI proof. Even if all the actual teaching is done by a computer program, people still want a physical adult human there to babysit their kids all day. Teaching can also be done by the elderly, by people who have been out of the workforce, or people who are switching in from an entirely different field. Teaching is also one of the jobs which is easiest to get work abroad or across the country with. Aside from that, the past few years, people have started getting addicted to information - both reading new information and passing it along. I think this makes some people think they want to be general teachers.

Anyways, as others have suggested, you have to pick and choose the school. Unfortunately you have no idea what the school is going to be like until you get hired there, but that's the same for all jobs. In my case I am at the only school within commute distance (the next town is 2.5 hours away by bus) so I'm stuck here for the time being.

---

Started a new technique, I printed out a daily worksheet of timed activities to do and set alarms. The alarm has a picture and text to speech telling me messages. To turn the alarm off I have to do a math problem each time. I do an activity for up to 15min at a time, then move to the next one and check off the previous one. I do it so I earn some money then work on homework right when I wake up in the morning, to start my day off motivational. This technique needs some refining but it is working alright so far.

[nykorn]

June 23 - Mentor warned me I’ll be put on probation for inactivity if I don’t do schoolwork or at least interact with a mentor (send Email or have phone call) at a minimum of once every 2 weeks.
June 24 - Revised 1 of 3 answers in 1 assignment revision.
June 26 - Developed system to force me to stay productive and on-task. Consists of me having a paper schedule of work to do in 5 to 15min chunks, the paper is scheduled in chronological order, split into 4 groups with each group color coded. Alarms with images and text to speech set matching the paper, and I have to do math problems to turn the alarm off. I physically check off when I do each item on a checkbox on the paper. This worked for day 1 to get me back on track. I found that while the worksheet was the most effective, on subsequent days all I needed for the bare minimum was for the alarms to continuously jolt me out of something if I was being off-task.
June 27 - Submitted WGU resume, cover letter, and photo for WGU ID card, all needed for student internship. Submitted 1 of 2 remaining assignments for “Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment”.
June 28 - Did 1 of 3 questions for remaining assignment. Received WEST-B scores which I had taken on June 3rd and Emailed them to WGU: Reading 285, Math 264, Writing 289.
8) June 29 - Submitted last remaining assignment. Started and finished “Using Educational Technology for Teaching and Learning” (2 CPU) without doing any of the reading, submitted 3/3 assignments. Submitted 1/1 revisions for the previous course.

Excluding potential revisions, I have now finished the assignments for all the courses required to complete before being able to apply for “preclinical experience” (student teaching internship). All I need left to officially apply is to attend one more WGU webinar, I forget which one but the next are in the 2nd or 3rd week of July.

I started the degree on March 1st 2024. At this point, I will have passed 21 CPUs in my first semester out of 51 required for the degree (=41% complete)… while actually only working on the degree for around 2-3 months out of the 6 months that make up a term.

All the rest of the classes on the degree plan from here are only 1 or 2 CPUs each, and there seem to be only 12 to 14 more classes (18 to 20 CPU total) that I can take without being in an active internship - I can still pass all those before my 1st term ends on August 31st 2024, as long as I work hard and start back up on reviewing my Anki deck in the down time while I wait for my mentor to approve new courses.

What I learned this section:
- I shouldn’t have worried about passing the WEST-B!!

- Due to my work or hobbies, having often been around people with college degrees and even PhDs in stuff like linguistics, civil engineering, and computer programming - fields where I am unqualified or uneducated - and seeing people like that online a lot as well, I have too high a standard for what counts as educated or academic level in my head. I forgot that in general society and the government’s eyes, high school is still a form of higher education.

- Keep a timed schedule and timers on!

[nykorn]

Update: I got an Email from a WGU instructor stating that courses that are only 1 CU (ignore that I wrote "CPU" up there ;P) are designed to "easily take 2-3 days or less to complete".

[nykorn]

June 29 (Sat) - Messaged mentor + school staff (“mentor help team” which works on days mentors are on vacation or not working) asking for next course to be unlocked. Help team supposedly only unlocks next course when the student has finished AND PASSED all assignments of all open courses, but the mentors will unlock courses if all assignments are turned in even if still pending on passing status. School district sent me letter renewing my substitute teacher & substitute paraeducator employee contract for the next school year. You have to sign it and mail it back within 2 weeks otherwise they consider you terminated.
June 30 (Sun) - Previous 2 courses marked as complete - degree is now officially 33% complete. Help Team unlocked “Elementary Reading Methods and Interventions” (2 CU) but it used an entirely different layout than all previous courses, no class chatbox etc, so I got confused and booked time with mentor for next day.
July 1 (Mon) - WGU campus broken until 4pm due to huge influx of new students starting their terms. I killed time by 1) asking ChatGPT to give me lists of words and concepts taught in the subject, which I then turned into Anki cards, 2) finding more cards from Quizlet to add to my Education Anki deck. After 4pm did all reading for “Elementary Reading Methods and Interventions”. Chat with mentor in evening: said all “Elementary…Methods” courses are on old WGU layout & that help Team messed up, I needed to switch to “Assessing Student Learning” (2 CU) instead - its assignments require you analyze videos & assignment result data and figure out how to respond by creating or critiquing lesson plans.
July 2 - Did all reading for “Assessing Student Learning”. 90% of the info is covered in the various previous courses, what’s new is a few more pieces of modern American teacher jargon (“dipsticks” means “have the kids answer in 1min or less”), and a few basic math terms (standard deviation, mode, etc) required to analyze student data.
July 3 - Submitted 1/4 assignments for Assessing Student Learning. Took & passed Pre-Assessment for Elementary Reading.
July 4 - Reviewed all Anki cards for Elementary Reading, then took & passed exam for it. Submitted 1 of 3 remaining assignments for Assessing, then went to work. The bendy webcam stand I bought specifically because WGU's proctoring service basically requires it, broke, so I had to attempt to balance the webcam on the back of a chair to take the assessment. The proctors make you do a full 360 degree view of the room plus show your wrists and under the desk, then maneuver the webcam so it shows both your face and your computer screen at once.
July 5 - Slept all day due to working a day & night shift the previous day. Finished 2 of 4 questions for 1 Assessing assignment. Previously submitted 2 assignments marked as passed.
July 6 (Sat) - WGU Student ID arrived (=took 9 days). Submitted 2/2 remaining assignments for Assessing Student Learning, and 1/1 for Elementary Reading. Emailed Help Staff and Mentor asking for next course to get unlocked over weekend. This time I used the WGU help videos hosted on "Panopto" to help me answer the assignments regarding creating lesson plans.

Got more internship details:
- After finishing “Assessment & Student Learning” I can send in the application to APPLY for my student teaching internship and the team will start working on finding me a placement
- After finishing the 3 courses Elementary Reading Methods, Elementary Language Arts Methods and Elementary Math Methods I will get permission from the school to actually START the internship.
- Your teacher’s liability insurance must be valid for at least 6 months 1 day from the time you APPLY for the internship. There are only 2 insurance places to choose from:

1) NEA (National Education Association) - around $20 for students - has a set insurance valid year, no matter when you buy it your insurance expires at the end of August and the new year starts September 1st. It’s July now so that means if I pick NEA I would have to wait to APPLY for internship until September 1st only due to my insurance.
2) AAE (Association of American Educators) - around $50 for students - insurance expires 1 year from the date of purchase.

WGU said you may be asked to list your insurance on your resume and some employers will actually judge you based on the ideals / morals of which of the 2 you picked.

Other:
- When there is a WGU course like “Blah 171” then “Blah 172”, the first is about the terms, theories and history of the subject, the second is about putting that theory and those terms into practice by doing stuff like creating or analyzing lesson plans or videotaped lessons.
- Mentor said to make sure to watch all the videos in the "Elementary... Methods" courses because those are the best preparation for the NES Elementary Education / Early Childhood Education content exams 101, 102 and 103(?) for endorsement, licensure or graduation: https://www.west.nesinc.com/TestView.asp...tPage.html - I completely forgot we have to take these exams too.

What I learned this section:
- Save all sample lesson plans WGU gives you, and all lists of videos. These are the 2 biggest helps in the entire degree.
- Google image search all concepts. 4 pictures normally does a better job for comprehension than reading the course articles.

[nykorn]

3 Emails came between last night and today - I won the WSAC (Washington Student Achievement Council) Student Teaching grant for $8000 and the WSAC Teacher Shortage Conditional Scholarship for $825, which covers 2 full terms of WGU tuition for my Master's!! It states I’m getting them because
1) I’m getting my first teacher licensure,
2) am low income,
3) am most likely going to do my internship at a low income (“Title I”) school (that just happens to be the elementary school in my town), and
4) I have made satisfactory academic progress during the term.

I had previously read that a lot of people who got scholarships only got them many months into the term, that explains why - they’re waiting to see who does good academically. If I don't get officially placed at an internship for a title i school by January 31st then the $8000 gets forfeited.

First the scholarships get processed through WGU staff who determine the amount. Then if you go onto your "Student Support - Financial Services" page, underneath the tuition payments section a new section called "Refunds" appears. If you don't edit those details, your tuition refund will get sent to you via paper cheque in the mail. If as in my case the grant covers 2 terms, your "future term" tuition cost will also appear as $0.

After talking with my mentor, to ensure I get placed by Jan. 31st and keep the scholarship, before November I need to:
- Finish both the "Language Arts" class and then I should immediately take the NES 102 exam (state test for teaching language arts, required for school teacher license). The mentor said NES tests are scored on an average so if I'm weak in some area it doesn't really matter as long as I'm strong in other areas.
- Finish the two math courses in the degree then take the NES math exam.
- After all NES exams are passed, get teacher liability insurance
- Attend final required webinar
- Finish all the classes which were originally meant for term 3
----
I asked WGU staff if I should get a second MA in teaching English as a foreign language, or if I should just get the same as an endorsement to my license. They replied saying
1) The issue with the Teaching English as a Second Language degree is that your internship is required to be in a separated English Foreign Language classroom and many schools don't actually have those.
2) Some school districts have a much higher pay scale if you have 2 Master’s degrees versus if you have 1 Master’s and a license endorsement. The endorsement is much faster, cheaper and easier to get and most districts treat it the same as a 2nd Master's, but if you don’t know where you’ll be working or if you'll be working abroad you might want to get the 2nd Master’s. The districts should be able to give you the pay scale if you ask them, or should have it in their job ads.

[Vle045]

I have never seen kids ripping up their own textbooks or climbing on top of library bookcases. Maybe this was because we allowed the school to spank kids.

Additionally, if a child was acting up, they were usually put out in the hallway for the rest of the one-hour class period, with the door shut. Kids were often more afraid of being bored out there alone, so they behaved well.

This school is very "progressive" and "modern" and so they do the opposite.

- Kids with autism or learning difficulties are generally NOT put into a separate special ed class. This means multiple times a day, an autistic kid has a "meltdown" in the general classroom, a kid with mental issues refuses to do work, etc. The other kids see this behavior and start to copy it. I have had parents tell me personally that their kid comes home and tries to throw tantrums like what they saw a certain classmate do earlier that same day. When I was a kid, any kid who regularly refused to do their work got transferred out and sent to a special ed class regardless of if they had an actual mental issue or not.

- When a kid is having a "meltdown" we call on the walkie talkies and another teacher comes into the room. All other kids leave the room and either sit out in the hallway or go to recess until the coast is clear. It is the total opposite of having the tantrum kid leave the room.

- Even when a kid is sent to the office, the kids have told me "We don't get punished, we just play games. So we like going to the office." When I was a kid if you were sent to the office you were staring at a blank wall!

- The teachers regularly try to use "talk therapy" with the kids. They don't say "That was wrong of you" or "That was bad", they say "That was a red choice" (as opposed to a "green choice"), and verbally try to explain to the kids "We don't hit people" and so on. All I can say is, it is certainly not working in class. Sometimes the teachers put on little plays and show examples how to act or how not to act, the kids don't seem to learn anything from that either, if anything it demeans the teacher because all they get out of it is seeing the teacher acting like a 4 year old. That is the big so-called "millennial parenting strategy" you see people posting about on places like FaceBook - yeah it's really occurring. From the teachers I have talked to, all of them are older and hate this strategy and know it doesn't work, but it is being imposed on them by the big bosses.

I have seen A LOT of this during the years I was at brick & mortar K-12 schools.  We had kids with emotional disturbances disrupt the entire school building.  In one case, the child needed treatment and medication and the parents constantly refused. That meant we had to call them in the middle of the day to pick up the child.  When all interventions fail to get the child under control, including pulling in a resource officer, the child has to be removed.  After a year of this, the parents finally got the child to a doctor and with medication and working with a psychologist, the daily disruptions stopped.  But there was always another kid to take the place.  Teachers who couldnt get a student under control would send them to the office.  Which meant they were sitting with ME - the administrative assistant…. Not the principal or a counselor (we didn’t have one in the building every day).  Not much I can do. But you better bet my “mom voice” came out.  If you are in the office for behavior, here’s a math worksheet you have to do.  Yes, it’s going to be graded (It wasn’t).  Multiple kids in trouble….  No, you can not sit by each other, there’s no talking in the office.  Here’s a math worksheet.  Turn it in when you are done.  (I got them from a math teacher).  At one school we had students whose parents were drug addicts.  Tables  were flipped by a kindergarten student who came at her teacher with scissors.   The night before, she watched her mother get beaten up by an abusive boyfriend who was high.  I had a set of twins who had a PFA against the step dad.  He showed up at school to pick them up.  That was fun.  I’ve been screamed at, had things thrown at me, and called names by PARENTS.   It’s a crazy place sometimes.  I loved my job, but at this stage in my life, I am glad to be working from home.

[nykorn]

WASC says the bulk of what I won, the $8,000, is a grant with no strings attached. All I have to do is get a student teaching placement before the end of the year. The second bit I won which is the "scholarship" of around $800, has strings attached & requires me (after graduation) to teach at a low income public school for whatever % of the year that $800 equals of my tuition. That means I am only required to teach for 2 months or less. And I have TEN YEARS to fulfill that requirement.

July 7 (Sun) - “Elementary Reading Methods” marked complete. 1 assignment for “Assigning…” returned for revision but evaluator’s comments were vague and confusing - stated what I had written has no basis in the data when it does and I clearly justified it.

10) July 8 (Mon) - Course instructor emailed me with much better info for how to revise. If you need to compare two data sheets where 1 has numerical or percentage data and the other has data in symbols (such as “++-”), you are NOT supposed to convert the symbolic data to a percentage (“++- = 66% correct”) in order to compare the two sets of data - which is what I had done (with an explanation attached) and which is why the evaluator had claimed what I wrote had no basis. Additionally when you give feedback to students it is supposed to be positive (apparently they don’t want us telling the kids their weak points on the assessment, they just want us to address it via further instruction or something without explicitly commenting on it). Mentor unlocked next two courses.

July 9 - Started “Language Arts Instruction and Intervention” (2 CU). Notified I won 2 scholarship/grants. Previous courses all marked as complete.

July 10 - My state exam scores (equivalent of PRAXIS) got inputted into WGU, they appear as if they were courses. Not sure if they add to the percentage or not but degree is now 41% complete.

July 11 - Had issues with WGU for several days, it would continuously refresh while claiming it couldn’t load any info, impeding my progress. Eventually saw that clearing out the URL bar and inserting simply https://my.wgu.edu/ often works. Attempted pre-assessment without doing any of the course reading - failed it.

July 14 - Finished all reading for the language arts class, retook pre-assesment and passed. This class contains maybe 80% the same material as in previous classes. The new stuff is details on the SAMR model, examples of how to get kids to read and write more, a few aspects on language output issues, and some new teacher slang like “mirrors and windows” and “mentor text”. The new stuff is sandwiched in the middle of the chapters.

July 15 - Took & passed exam. Tried to schedule NES 102 test required for internship, but their online proctoring system blocks Windows accessibility features so had to message them and delay the test. Began “Mathematics for Elementary Educators” (2 CU). This class teaches: Geometric Shapes & Properties / Transformations, Congruence, Similarity, Coordinate Plane / Perimeter, Area, Surface Area, Volume / Measurement / Data Analysis and Statistics / Probability. However I graduated high school in 2009 and haven’t studied math since then - they have changed how they word things on top of teaching some stuff we never learned.

July 17 - submitted 1/1 assignments for the language arts class.

July 18 - Began process of getting my whole family Italian citizenship by ancestry, via my grandpa's grandpa. My grandpa, who is really proud of his Italian heritage, just got diagnosed with 2 cancers and leukemia... hoping to get the citizenship for us (including him) all before he passes as a sort of present. Paused WGU. Still waiting on NES reply.

July 27 - Submitted last assignment for Language Arts.

July 30 - NES never replied. Messaged WGU who said "we can't do anything about 3rd party tests". Language Arts marked complete. With 33 days left remaining of my first term, my degree is now 45% complete.

Aug 15 (only 16 days left of term 1) - Fell off the bandwagon again. A coworker in my department had left without even 24 hours' notice, so I got scheduled for 24 hour shifts and/or working 7 days a week. That finally ended on Aug 15th. Met with mentor, who said:
- I’m now approved me for Preclinical Experiences. Just “buy liability insurance, submit it then hit apply”. Bought 2 years of student AAE insurance for $79 and requested the certificate proving membership.
- After I finish the Preclinical stuff I can apply for Student Teaching.
- WGU is now promising to get people their Teaching placements within 45 days of applying.
- I need to have the remaining 15 CUs of my degree all done by, absolute latest, the first week of December in order to get my placement & keep my scholarship.
- The hardest course for me that I have left is actually the math course I’m on right now. If I can just push past that everything should be smooth sailing.

---

@Vle045:
There are a lot of parents on drugs at this elementary school too, or so I've been warned. It gets worse at the high school because by then the kids themselves are also on drugs. And yet this town has much less drug use than all the neighboring ones. Very sad.

[nykorn]

Aug 24th - with 7 days left of my 1st term, I finished all reading for “Mathematics for Elementary Educators - D128”. This course was written very badly compared to all the previous courses & it looks like they actually outsourced the writing to a company. A lot of the terms in their quizzes or end of section flashcards weren’t taught in their text. They made some equations unnecessarily complicated (taking the long way around), yet in other equations - which I never learned in high school - didn’t show their thinking process almost at all. When I asked ChatGPT for help, it spit out the same stuff as their course - skipping the same steps, etc - so I don't know if some of it was machine written. They renamed terms compared to what I learned in school in the 2000’s but didn’t introduce the old terms.

Some of the stuff I am required to learn which I wasn't taught in high school:
- Statistics & Probability - stuff like multiplying branches on flow charts to get the probability of an outcome.
- Different names for "flip, rotate, transform" on a coordinate plane
- Calculating the area of 3D objects
- Calculating the rotation of an object based on a point elsewhere (not inside the object) on a coordinate plane
- Determining what type of geometric shape a series of coordinates is based on applying equations to the coordinates
- Determining the distance or difference (when an enlarged or shrunken shape) between coordinates based on applying equations

I did a bunch of flashcards and took the pre-assessment but failed it. So now I've started trying to speed-run a lot of math through Khan Academy, which teaches much better than this course. My mentor has put a notice on my course saying it will be incomplete before the term, and then I'll be required to complete it within the first month of my 2nd term.

[nykorn]

Sept 15th 2024 - Finally passed the pre-assessment for Math for Elementary Educators. Started “Elementary Mathematics Methods”.

Sept 16th - Passed exam for “Math for Elementary Educators”, course marked complete!

Sept 19 - Finished all reading for Elementary Mathematics Methods. Started “Elementary Science Methods”.

Sept 23 - Passed exam for Elementary Mathematics Methods.

Sept 30 - Submitted 1/1 assignments for Elementary Mathematics Methods.

Oct 2 - Elementary Mathematics Methods marked as complete.

Oct 3 - Passed NES 102 exam required for licensure (Elementary Education - English Language Arts & Social Studies). Went to figure out where to report I had passed, and noticed I can now apply for my internship (I didn’t get any Email saying I could) and applied.

Oct 4 - WGU approved my request and sent out an application to my local school district asking for a placement for me.

Oct 6 - Passed pre exam for Science Methods.

Oct 8 - Passed NES 103 exam.

Oct 11 - Official scores from NES 102 were sent from NES to WGU.

Oct 14 - Passed exam for & submitted 1/1 assignments for Science Methods.

Oct 16 - Science Methods marked as complete. Degree is now 57% complete.

Oct 17 - Started “Application of Elementary Physical Education and Health Methods” (1 CU). This course can be completed without doing any of the reading. WGU followed up with me to say they hadn’t heard back from my local district yet but would call me as soon as they did so.

Oct 30 - Submitted 1/1 assignments. Started “Elementary Disciplinary Literacy” (2 CU) and submitted 1 of 2 assignments. This course can be completed without doing any of the reading. Additionally you can modify two lesson plans you wrote for previous courses to just insert something about reading/writing and submit it for the two assignments for this course.

Oct 31 - Assignment from Elementary Disciplinary Literacy needs a total revision, not a single thing can be reused. I accidentally wrote on the entirely wrong topic after misunderstanding something my mentor told me. Sends me into a funk.

Nov 1 - Application of Elementary Physical Education and Health Methods marked complete. Degree is now 59% (25 out of 51 CU) complete .

Nov 4 - WGU says my local district is being too slow to respond (1 month!) so they have sent out a backup application to another school which is 1.5 hours away.

Nov 5 - Start Pacific Northwest K-12 Integrated Methods and Curriculum to avoid redoing the assignment from the other class. Submit 1/1 assignments.

What I learned this section:

The majority of the later classes are just "write a lesson plan". No tests or anything and you can skip like 90% of the reading because so much of it is repeated from previous courses. You just have to know which exact part to skip, which means you still waste time reading anyways.