Sometime during early November of the first of my senior semester, I got an email regarding a pedagogy internship. I looked it over and decided to apply; after completing all the steps, I finished my fall semester, enjoyed my winter break, and was ready to show up to the internship the week of 1/13/25. Imagine my surprise when, by the end of the day, one of the people in the program (who also happened to be my Senior Seminar instructor as well) asked why I chose not to move forward with the internship. I looked confused because, on my end, I was waiting to be contacted with information about when to start and where to go. It’s safe to say I spent the rest of the way home and a little time after contacting everyone I had been in contact with to try to salvage what I could for the internship. Luckily, it was still the first week of the semester; it was still the add/drop period. By the Friday of that week, after being in constant email contact with everyone, I officially completed my internship enrollment process and was officially ready to start.
After making it through all of that, I was finally put in contact with my internship instructor; I introduced myself and waited about another week or two so that all the beginning semester formalities could take place and the schedule would be more established. We ended up getting snowed in for about two weeks during this time as well, so I pushed back my week by at least one. My first week, I met in person with my internship instructor, Dr. Barattin, who is very nice and soft-spoken. She was in the middle of getting ready to properly establish a lecture in the class that would tie into the work I would later do, so I more or less dropped in to show my face and give any necessary information, such as my email. After that, I didn’t do much in my first week or so because everyone was playing catch-up.
The first actual work I received was to do research on a website that I guess Dr. Barattin has been given as an option to do this form of writing assignment she plans to have the students do. I was a GSU website that created more or less blog-type websites. I understood the form, but the actual function of using the software was, for me, a bit dated. I was able to cobble something together to present and get the idea across of what was possible with the provided websites. We met the following week after I spent some time with the program, and I detailed my experience with it and took the time to ask my questions about the intended assignment in an attempt to better understand what she wanted. It was after which I had a better understanding of what her goal was and figured the website given might not have been as integral to the assignment as I thought. As I was working on it, I found it matched two websites I used in High School when I worked on the yearbook team along with the website I needed to create for my senior portfolio, where we used a site called “Weebly.”
I offered the Weebly website builder site as an alternative for the intended assignment she was trying to do on that older GSU website, and while unfamiliar with the site, she was open to the idea, so I spent another week transferring what I had done on the GSU website blog builder page to the Weebly one and the comparison spoke for itself. Dr. Barattin even used it herself to get an idea of what I was telling her so that we could discuss it the following week. She agreed; she, too, liked Weebly and wanted to offer both sites so the students could build their pages for the assignment. I closed out that week looking over, grading, and leaving feedback on a discussion post assignment related to Standard American English (SAE) vs. African American English (AAV), and I proctored a test. Nothing too “exciting” has been planned for this week, but heavy discussion on language and how it’s used are the major themes for lecture/discussion.
