Who I am

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Internships

Spring Term 2014

As for my second semester at Big Picture South Burlington, I interned at a local computer repair store called Pine Computers, located about 5 minutes down the road from SBHS on Williston Road. For the duration of my time there, I worked a lot on computer software repair, such as virus removal. I did very little hands on hardware work while I was there, the exact opposite of how it was during my time at Resource . However I very much enjoyed my time at Pine and I would be very interested in going back to intern there again at some poin in the near future. I would very much like to have some pictures to post here, however while I was the only work I really did was installing and running computer programs, so there wasn't much to photograph. A brief overview of how I spent my time there would be, installing and running cleaning software, with the occassional hard drive swap or the like. OVer the course of my time there I learned a lot about computer software repair as well as numerous tips on how to keep one's computer fast and virus free.

Fall Term 2013

For my first internship at Big Picture, I decided to work at the Resource store (ReStore) down on Pine street. I went to this internship with an open mind, seeing as it was my first internship I didn't expect the best, but in the end I was quite satisfied with what I got. I went to this internship with the goal of learning more about computer hardware in general, and what it's like to work on hardware for a living, what I learned is that it's very arduous, and sometimes rather unpleasant. For my first few weeks at my internship there I worked testing printers. For about 6 hours a day. Mind you that might sound like an easy job at first, but after the third or so hour of stacking printers and waiting for new drivers to install it becomes very unpleasant. After close to three weeks of this I was able to start working on stripping desktops in the upper part of the store. This task involved taking the cover off a computer and removing the CPU chip, heat sync, RAM cards, hard drive, disk drives, and power supply. This part of my internship actually taught me quite a lot, and gave me a lot of insight on how a computer functions hardware wise, I also learning how to properly take apart/reassemble a desktop, which is always a nice skill to have. During my time there I also learned how to test computer power supplies as well as how to properly test Ethernet cables. All in all I think it was a very nice learning experience, however I don't believe I'll continuing this internship for next semester.

PBGRs

At Big Picture students graduate using Proficiency Based Graduation Requirements (PBGR). As stated in an article from The New England Secondary School Consortium (NESSC), "Simply put, a proficiency-based diploma is a graduation decision based on students demonstrating what they have learned. In practice, it means that every student must show- by writing a paper, delivering a presentation, or completing a challenging project, for example- that they have acquired a minimum level of proficiency and competence when it comes to mastering the essential knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college, work, and life."

APPRENTICING (Internships): CIVIC AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY COMMUNICATION PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT REASONING AND PROBLEM-SOLVING

Projects

BP work

Required Work Although BP does primarily independent work around a student's self designed learning plans, there is also required work. which comes in two forms, Socratic Seminar writing prompts, and quantitative reasoning challenges Socratic's are designed with the intention of displaying a student's reading and writing comprehension through engaging writing seminars. The students of Big Picture are also required to write three journals a week. Of those journals, at least one is required to be an LTI (Learning Through Internship), that talks about how their internship day went for that week, and discuss any other issue or items of importance to the student. Every student is required to have handed in all five of both the QRss/Socratic's, as well as twenty five journals at the end of the term. Quantitative Reasoning challenges or QR's for short are mathematically based problems that are being in a sense that gives the knowledge we're learning real world applications, QR's are generally based around real world problems and scenarios (though I don't think I'll be dealing with any pirates anytime soon). I think this is a great way to keep students engaged in their math work as well as teach them valuable math skills. An example of a well done QR shares a summary of the problem and then the student's process to acquiring the answer they believe is right. An example of a well done Socratic is a three paragraph essay that displays a well written intro. followed by a body paragraph that either strongly sides with or refutes the primary focus of the Socratic. Followed up by a strong conclusion that demonstrates the student has a solid grasp of the topic as well as a very good sense of reading comprehension. If you care to view any of my QR/Socratic/Journal work, (which I have no idea why you would), contact me at Schuylerlyons@gmail.com specifying what you want and I'll share it with you via Google drive.