I am a bit sad to be writing this particular blog past.  I know that I will always be a Kenan Fellow and I will continue to be active in the cohort.  I missed the banquet – stupid broken ankle – and I missed seeing my friends.  I have found this experience to be invigorating and and invaluable.  Meeting everyone involved, attending the conferences, learning the technologies have all added so much to my abilities.  My new relationship with Dr. Muddiman and his team at NC State has been awesome.  I will be attending a national conference in June with the team and then working with them again this summer.  Just the chance to do research, after being in the classroom for 20 years, is just such an exciting opportunity that it is hard to put into words.  I know that the curriculum that I have developed for my students based on my experiences has been challenging for them, but I think that has been a good thing.  I hope to continue my experiences with both the Kenan Fellows and NC State going forward for many years.

I’m a bit behind here – been a tough new year.  Got severely sick in January, recovered from that and broke my ankle in February, had surgery in May.  Been difficult to keep up with anything.

I was disappointed that my cooperating mentor didn’t get a chance to come speak to my students this semester.  I broke my ankle two days before he was supposed to visit and school got canceled on the scheduled day anyways.  He still actually volunteered to come (even though I wouldn’t be there), but that wasn’t ok with my principal.

My missing a month has hurt my developed curriculum a bit – since it’s mostly built as an extensional project, I have lost too much time to talk about it with my students.  I did start it earlier this semester and that proved to be a good decision.  I will have to reserve further judgement until the actual projects come in (second week of May).

I really enjoyed developing the curriculum.  The biggest challenge as I see it is simply that the vast majority of the concepts related to my Kenan externship are perhaps a bit too advanced for my students.  If I was still teaching AP Chem or IB Chem II like I did at my last school, I think that I might do a bit more with it.

I am excited that Dr. Muddiman, my mentor, has hired me back to work in his lab at NC State this summer.  I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing, but will start the summer off by traveling to St. Louis for the American Mass Spectrometry Association conference.