The last two weeks were on teachers and students, and particularly on communication. The one thing that was reinforced for me was how little you can really learn from the websites for each school, or even from looking at classes (particularly demo classes). You really have to dig into a class, and I wonder if you don't have to actually teach it to get a feel for what you can do and what you can't. This reinforces the importance of student teaching for this type of classroom, just as you need it for any other classrooom--even if you don't call it student teaching, at least you can't assume that taking a PD course will be enough, so mentoring for sure, but I actually think you need to follow someone else's course before you teach your own.
I was glad to see that the assignments led some students to move their schools on the Google doc. It is amazing how these schools manage to convince people about what they are going without any evidence whatsoever that they are doing it--the power of a good website.
