Surviving ACB

by Christy Corbally

The weeks leading up to my ACB semester were filled with nervousness and a sense of doubt. I had heard plenty of horror stories about the trials and tribulations of the ACB experience and I was not overly confident that I could handle a 20 credit semester. Thankfully, during the first week of class, some of my worries were eased when all of our assignments were laid out for us on four month wall chart. It was a relief to see that there was a definite end and that the work may not be completely impossible.
In the weeks that followed, the work started to increase little by little; it was very gradual. Having five days of class took a while to get used to, but the early alarm clock simply became part of my daily routine. We also started to develop a relationship with our 6th grade cooperating teacher and the 77 students in our three language arts classes. Soon we learned that our unit would revolve around a novel, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. I was excited to learn about our unit topic at such an early date, but I was also a little on edge about the responsibilities surrounding the teaching of a novel.
After spring break, the work really started to pile up. Not only were our units due, but we were also responsible for keeping the students on track with the novel on a week to week basis. It was a never ending cycle of class, homework, lesson planning, and a minimal amount of sleep. Again, once I found a rhythm, the workload seemed much more manageable.
Next came full time with our 6th graders. We had planned it so that the students finished the novel before our 2 weeks of full time began. This gave us a chance to do some lessons that our cooperating teacher needed us to accomplish, as well as lessons for our various professors. We did several lessons on prepositional phrases, vocabulary, and the interview process. The main part of our two weeks of teaching surrounded a newspaper group project. Almost everyday, students were given a portion of the 90 minute period to work on these group projects. As of now, we have seen about ten presentations and all of them represent hard work and good amount of group effort. Overall, I feel our project and our experience in ACB was a success and I feel as though, I received more from this experience than the students.