Description:
Reflections from a Not-So-Master Teacher
Contents:
the solitude of blogging
Ideally, blogging is supposed to connect a person to an online community. This has certainly been the case for me with myspace. Ahead of time, I had the guarenteed friendship of Tom (who is friends with everyone) and then various college friends that I had lost touch with. Yet, this hasn't been the case for me with live spaces. I have no friends on live spaces. No one comments and begins a dialogue.
I chose the autumn theme as my background because this is sort of an autumn experience doing a blog for online class. There's a sense of solitude, of slowing down, of contemplating that is missing in a traditional course. Doing a teacher's blog and having no responses has been dissapointing at times. Yet, maybe that's a part of solitude. Maybe that space, that withdrawl from people, which sometimes verges on loneliness, can be exactly what fuels me to teach. Freire made the point that action without reflection leads to activism. Action without reflection leads to intellectualism. I think Tolstoy became an activist and lost his sense of knowing the human soul. Dostoevsky plunged deep into the human psyche but missed the action. Sometimes I wonder if blogging keeps me from being too Tolstoyan, but teaching keeps me from being too much like Doestoevksy.
Solitude is missing from current education. Students, while they are at school, must plough through book work, handouts and lectures in a ridiculous pace. Everything is disjointed and disconnected, often taught in subjects that are irrelevant to their lives. Last year, after weeks of drought, it finally rained - and not a mere sprinkle, but a downpour. Instead of working in groups, students stopped. For fifteen minutes we listened. A few students dared me to stop the silence, but alas the class period ended with the standard school bell. Yet, I caught a glimpse of what silence and solitude could mean in a classroom.
I wonder if blogging can recapture the sense of space and solitude that is missing. What if a blog was a chance for a student to quietly meander the mind? What if the silence could allow them to make the connections between school and life? What if students could have a list of topics or a free write and they could just write? Poetry, short stories, reflections, opinion pieces - whatever they choose, because nothing else is a choice anymore for a child. They are told at school where to go, who to see, who their teachers will be, what classes to take, when to eat, when to use the restroom, how to write a paper, what format to use, where to go for a class. The student handbook is longer than anything that came out of Mt. Sinai. When God can be more concise in rules for humanity than administrators can for a group of two thousand, there's an issue.
Perhaps I am too idealistic. I know that about myself. Yet, I wonder if this tool might prove, if used correctly, to be one of the greatest hidden opportunities available to students.  
can the system be reformed?
This evening, I realized that it is now habitual for me to hand-lock the back passenger side door. Even if we fixed it, I am not sure that I would quit hand locking the door. True, a button would be easier and more convenient, but somehow I would choose what is more comfortable and normal. There are a lot of things that way - poor quality items that I choose to use because change would seem strange. It's not an issue of the pain of change. I'm not referring to those excruciating changes, like going to marriage counseling or watching your child leave for college or dealing with the death of a friend. I'm referring to the type of change that causes no discomfort.
Why is it that I am okay with something of lower quality rather than adapt to something better? For example, I still drink Phoenix city water rather than the bottled water that I have to admit tastes better. Somehow, changing my water drinking would seem strange and foreign, even if better. It would be like trading in my favorite jeans that I bought from Ross for a fresh, expensive pair of name-brand denim. (Denim sounds more formal, for some reason)
There is a process of adapting to what is broken to the extent that it becomes normal. It happens in relationships. Character flaws of friends become endearing aspects of a personality. I forget how odd some of my friends are until they meet a new friend. It happens in marriage, as a couple quits noticing some of the things that used to drive each other crazy. On a larger scale, it happens with nations. To the rest of the world, a fifty-two ounce fountain drink is absurd, yet it's become so normal to us. A movie like Jackass, which is so shocking at first becomes normal as the nation flocks to Jackass II.
The connection to education is that real reform might never happen. I may be pessimistic, but I wonder if a better system won't convince people. Take grades for example. Research shows that they actually hurt intrinsic motivation, drain teachers of their energy, lead to unnecessary conflicts with parents and are arbitrary at best in assessing knowledge. Yet, a better system of assessment may never replace the normalcy of letter grades. Similarly, textbooks, as ridiculous as they may be, probably won't be entirely replaced. Neither will the silly looking teacher posters with a kitty and a "Hang in there" phrase.
reflections on an online class
I am enjoying the freedom and flexibility of an online course. In fact, there is a part of me that would like to pursue this further in the future. Maybe after I have my PhD, I could teach an online course at a university. I specifically think that online courses work well for a few demographic groups. The first would be busy professionals who need a flexible schedule. The second would be people who live in isolated rural areas. Is it any wonder people from our class hail from the likes of Snowflake?
The hard part for me is still the lack of human interaction. For instance, in blogging or in responding to a discussion board, I rarely use humor. In my classroom and with friends, I make jokes often. However, humor doesn't always transfer well to paper - or in this case a computer. Also, not knowing my classmates, I am careful not to offend anyone. Yet, if I knew them in person, they would see the smile or the twinkle in the eye.
My greatest frustration is Taskstream. I don't mind using a lesson template, but I would rather type the entire thing up and then put it online. The taskstream process (which is designed to be easier) requires too many point and click moments, which leads to unneccesary processing time. It would be easier, for example, to simply copy and paste standards. There are some positive points. The rubric builder is nice and the portfolio display looks very professional. However, overall, I am not very impressed.
in response to a Starbucks cup
On a cynical day, I pick up my Starbucks cup carefully maneuver the inside cup so I can read the "the way I see it" on the back. It's a well-written piece by a Teacher of the Year who teaches kindergarten. I can't recall it verbatim, but it has to do with children entering a forest and learning to read. At the end, he explains that it's better for children to enter the forest skipping merrily along the path (which is probably why he doesn't teach junior high) than going at it with a machete.
There's an element of truth to the statement. Children need to explore for the sheer excitement of exploring. I think this is especially true of small children who need to be sheltered from the cut throat "real world." Nonetheless, at some point, they need to also learn to pick up the machete and begin tearing down the edifice of ignorance, the presuppositions of authoritarian prejudice and the destructive forces of apathy. At some point, education becomes a tool for warfare rather than a pleasant stroll in the afternoon.
An education is dangerous. Telling children that it's an afternoon stroll is like teaching them to play with fire. True, we need to let them play. But we are kidding ourselves when we deny it's danger. An education can be a means to broadening a worldview, but it can also darken it with heavy handed indoctrination. It can teach valuable skills to help students live, but it can also teach skills to manipulate others. An education can teach a student self-respect, but it can equally replace the self-respect with self-deception, an inflated sense of self-worth and a vanity that leads to death.
I would argue that education is that machete. It's the machete that tore down Jim Crow laws in the south and built apartheid in South Africa. After all, the Dutch intellectuals who created apartheid had the same doctoral degrees as Martin Luther King Jr. It's the machete that tore down the Native American culture, replacing hate with a thin veneer of civilization, all in the name of Manifest Destiny. But it's also the machete of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. It's the scientific machete of Dr. Salk's polio vaccine and of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's the machete of Mein Kompf and of The Cost of Discipleship.
I wonder if students would respond differently to education if they knew that it wasn't a path through a forest, but rather a dangerous tool that can change lives for better or for worse. 
the wisdom of crowds - impact on teaching
Collective thinking is often more profound, more advanced and more accurate than individual thinking. For example, in the t.v. show "Who Wants to Be a Millionare?" the studio audience is accurate over eighty-five percent of the time. (This is not to say that eighty percent get te answer right, but that eighty-five percent of the time, over fifty percent choose the correct answer) Is this because the show attracts the worlds best and brightest. I highly doubt it. These are not exactly Mensa meetings. Instead, it's a studio audience filled with shallow tourists. A similar test has shown that when a group is asked to predict the number of jelly beans in the jar, the groups median and mean are both more accurate than any individual teacher.
Both examples come from a counter-intuitive book called The Wisdom of Crowds. In this book, the author argues that the best way to make decisions is to have members think and reflect independently, then collect data and then make a decision. The worst way is the common committee structure that often leads to a lack of intelectual diversity (especially when using "experts"). When this occurs, there is a "groupthink" that prevents dissention. Our lack of anticipation with Pearl Harbor, our poor handling of Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs Disaster all stem from this notion of "groupthink."
What does this mean for schools, then? Outside of the classroom, it means that schools should abandon the committee structure and allow staff to offer input indendepently using surveys. After data is aggregated, the leadership should make decisions. I advocated this approach on a professional development committee. What happened was our committee leader brainstormed ways to help professional development. One person said, "We should have each teacher write a professional development plan where they create goals for themselves and ways to measure their goals." Another person suggested mandatory mentoring for teachers within their first three years. They would then attending a "reflecting" meeting once a week. By the end, each person affirmed one another's ideas and we had a list of seven things. I mentioned that we should have staff vote, because many of them wouldn't want more paperwork. When we used the surveys, we found that a third of the new staff wanted mentors (we could then match those staff members) and that ninety percent wanted to restructure our professional development meetings.
I have used this approach in my classroom when we predict ideas in history. For example, I had them independently create a list of ways women would have gotten involved in the Civil War. Every time we had over fifty percent of the class write down an idea, we added the idea to a class list. In the end, the class as a whole identified all but one way that women were involved, while no student could independently identify every way.
taking an online course
This is my first time taking an online course. Therefore, I would like to focus this journal entry on the pros and cons of an online course.
Pros: I love the versatility of taking an online course. I can set my own hours. I can work at my own pace (within the course deadlines) and I do not have to sit through long lectures. One of the hardest parts of being a college student was when professors would lecture us about not lecturing. They would present ideas for active learning using passive learning techniques, such as Power Point or videos. Furthermore, I like how easy it is to use the discussion boards and blogs. Unlike a live classroom setting, it seems that students are more honest with their ideas and that feedback is more immediate and authentic.
Cons: There is something lost in the human realm. A classroom should be a community and that means shared space, visual stimulus, body language and tone of voice. I met with my team member at Starbucks. Finally I have a face and a voice and a story to go with her. She is not simply a name on a screen, but a real person. Futhermore, I think WebCT (like Blackboard) limits professors rather than helping them. The course is organized as well as the instructor can make it, but is that really very helpful? The organization of WebCT is chaotic, visually unnattractive and not user-friendly. My frustrations lie in the fact that I have to use taskstream even though I think it's a waste of a program. I had to drop fifteen dollars for it, which is more than people think for a new teacher.
My accomplishments: I can't say that I have accomplished much. I am learning more and I am using some of the new theories in my classroom. I have started using concept mapping, mindtools and a more constructivist theory. So far, students have responded really well. I have felt good about the research paper. It wasn't so much the grade as much as the positive feedback that was helpful for me. I still need to figure out what I did wrong in the APA format. 
the honest truth about teaching
When people ask me how school is going, I feel the need to justify it with big words or grandiose stories. I tell of lives transformed or really amazing projects. I'll mention the mural or documentary or the awards assembly where so many parents attended. Yet, there is the other side, the hard side, that burns through teachers.
The first side is the administrative b.s. This includes the office politics that keep me out of the staff lounge at lunch. This is also includes the grading, the duty schedules, the painfully long meetings and all of the paperwork that goes into the job. Some of it is hard because it is so wasteful. Other parts are hard because they are tedious-yet-important. This includes grading papers or writing positive notes to students' parents. Today that meant a bus evacuation duty and grading a fat stack of projects.
The second side is the students. Like most teachers, I love the children. Most of the time, it is a blast. Yet, I have to admit that they can be hurtful, disrespectful, careless or apathetic. I'll prepare for a lesson and be so excited only to see withering boredom. Or, it might be a few small things - a student talks during bell work, another throws a paper across the room and I realize that I am tired of being in charge. I am tired of being alert. I am tired of being high energy when I hang out with them before school or at lunch. And that's it - I am tired.
There's a reason teachers need so much vacation. It's not a vacation. It's a sabbatical. It's the time to reflect and to think and to rest. After vacation, when I am dying to be back in the classroom, I realize that I have the best job in the world. I know that sounds so Hallmark, but it's how I feel. 
The Technological Divide: Being in a Low-SES School
The Great Divide
Statistically, the technological divide between suburban schools and inner-city schools is immense. I teach in a low-income school. It is subtly low-income in an area of town (Maryvale) that has been transforming since its inception – beginning as a white-flight suburb, followed by a further flight as it became a solid, working class neighborhood and eventually a gang-infested ghetto by the late eighties. Somewhere in the nineties, the community fought back and now it is beautiful, multicultural enclave in a state of transition.
However, despite the well-manicured lawns and the amazing students, we feel the technological divide. Why can’t our students have computers? Why can’t we do authentic research, global penpals, blogging or concept mapping?
The Problems with Spending
The focus on spending has been using better technology as a means of assessment in order to increase standardized test scores. Thus, our district spends millions on programs such as Galileo, Accelerated Reader, Accelerated Math and a host of other programs that assess rote memorization, while stifling student creavity and construction of learning.
The sad part is that much of the software that is available can be accessed for free through open source and freeware programs. Meanwhile, the basic hardware that is necessary for student learning is not available. In a school of eighteen hundred students, we have two copy machines, three Proximas, four digital video cameras, no smart boards and a computer lab with out-of-date iMacs. When students work on our documentary or our class website, I have to work with a small group of three students every day at lunch or before school, because our class has one laptop with sufficient memory to handle basic html. Meanwhile, the Title One funding forces our school to buy childish picture books that teach misconceptions about American History. Thus, when I want to teach about the Civil War, I cannot do a Web Quest or a concept map or allow students to create fictional blogs as journals. Instead, I am limited to a set of textbooks and a host of picture books about Clara Barton or Robert E. Lee.
I can still teach without the technology. We find ways to be creative and work around the lack of resources.
Home
|
|
