I wasn’t really excited when I learned what I have to do for my internship. On the very first day I have to draft two surveys for visitors and homeowners at the Lake Gaston area.  After that I have to update all their records of homeowners’ association that has been done 5 yrs ago by calling all the numbers and making sure they still work. As expected many of them were disconnected, assigned to different people or just not working anymore. Some of the homeowners were really helpful while many also were outright rude. I was really getting discouraged and was asking myself why oh why I signed-up for this. It was really difficult to find any connection to my classroom what I was doing since my mind and heart was not really into it.

Since we were not getting anywherewith phone calls, my mentor decided to go for the records – the tax records. On the website we discovered GIS – Geographic Information Services, and it was really amazing for me.  I can find information that I needed at the tip of my fingertips since they give public access on the website and I don’t have to make phone calls anymore! On the other hand, I have to make sense of the data, do away with many different information I don’t need, arrange them as needed, make the tally AND THEN interpret. All I can say is that the program really is amazing and at the same time I found out that sitting down for five days, working on data is NOT really as exciting as being in the classroom. 🙁

I’m thinking of writing my lesson with GIS as one of my focuses where my students will gather data from real offices in our area and then interpret the results.  However, I am not even so sure on whether that will be my final lesson since I have not been to my other mentor’s office yet. I will eventually make the connections for these two when I start next week on the other office and then I will go from there.