The Amateur PROTEACHer

2003-02-04T22:56:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking that, for a lot of reasons, I would really love to get to do the Socrates-type thing and take like three or four students (tops) all day every day and educate them like that. I have a lot of motives behind this wish, but right now I'm mainly considering just one, which is probably silly but is on my mind: you eliminate the need to treat students like cattle. Here's the story.

This evening discussion was made of an event almost completely unimportant in the long run but which is a matter of fair contention within my family. However, the reporting on that event was done by only one of the people who witnessed it. This wouldn't have been too bad by itself, except that 1) my view was quite different and 2) the listener made directive comments in line with what was heard but largely at odds with my view and intolerant of it as well. It ended up in a total loss of conversational momentum, strained discussion between the two witnesses, and unfinished business besides. I didn't like that.

I really hate (as you may have figured out!) having my personal input, views, comments, etc. ignored. I'm not saying that everybody should agree with what I say, or even that we should exist in perspectual (is that a word?) relativism where it's always, "hey, that's my opinion so you can't say I'm wrong." (I don't mind being wrong as long as I can change my mind so it's right!) I'm just saying I should get equal time in court. Usually, I'm able to make SURE I get that time, but sometimes I don't manage it. And when kids in class get into disagreements, they hardly EVER manage it.

You get two students going back and forth, "he punched me" "he poked me" "he started it" "no, HE started it" - and then the teacher steps in, usually with a generic "knock it off" or whatever designed to make them both be quiet, with no acknowledgement of the humanity (strong word, but you know what I mean...) involved. "I don't care who started it, but you're both ending it. NOW," even if one of the students has given her story and the other has not. Now, theoretically and in light of my feelings about equal time, this does not cut it. It's not fair. But practically and in light of the fluorescent bulbs in the classroom, there aren't a lot of other (better) ways to do it. There's not enough time, it'll never really be fair, the teacher can never be sure she's getting a straight answer. So it's avoided completely.

But this means that my philosophy of behavior towards other human beings is very much in conflict with my philosophy of behavior towards students being scrappy, which is a conflict I'm uncomfortable with. Certainly there's a difference in levels of seriousness, effect on the future, and so on, but still. This makes my bones itch. As dumb as it might seem to listen to both sides of a student disagreement, I want to do it. I mean, maybe I could have some kind of cut-off point: for stupid disagreements pay no attention, for reasonable and/or interesting disagreements offer consideration, and I guess that's really what's in practice. But I still say it would be easier if I had four students and COULD give their comments and perspectives all the time in the world....

2002-12-01T23:35:00.000-05:00

Well, here we are [sniff, sniff.] Although I will probably update this sucker every now and then, this is the last official Blog post for the semester. Absolutely unbelievable - as dumb as I know it sounds, I remember my first Blog entry as if I wrote it yesterday. But all I have to do is take a look at my notebooks, stuffed to the breaking point with completed assignments and questions and comments and (amazingly enough) notes, to know that not only have whole months gone by but that they've been very, very busy ones. And now it's the two-week press, and before we know it it'll be Christmas. Whoa.

The semester has gone better than I ever hoped it would. Cool instructors, cool classmates, enough work to make me concentrate and be at least a little impressed with myself for finishing it, two nice conferences, and a partridge in the pear tree. I wonder what next semester will be like, though. I don't doubt that I'll enjoy myself and be hugely busy and all that, but there are some things I look forward to discovering: will our group dynamic change when we don't see each other quite as frequently? will I have to buy books for the two classes we'll be in? will I completely mess up those poor sixth-graders consigned to my charge for ten weeks? I'm hoping the answer is "not really" for all of those questions, but I'd be willing to buy (cheap) books if that meant I could say "no" to the other two questions....

One last thing, Allan. I don't know if you care about my feelings toward the Blog one way or the other, and I don't know if you'll be in a position to do this with next year's class or what, but: I think this has been a cool part of the course. We didn't have to post with annoying frequency, and it's been fun composing my thoughts for someone else's reading (whether you actually read the whole of each entry or not.) I have only a very vague idea of what my classmates think about it, but I liked it. Blogger rules, man! ;-)

2002-11-25T11:30:00.000-05:00

Okay, this weekend totally rocked. I was fog-loose and homework-free by six on Thursday morning, which was a nice start to the whole thing. But it was followed up by lots of really cool surprises, like a decent hotel room, a much niftier Atlanta than I had imagined, a very enthusiastic bar singer called Blaze, lots of interesting sessions, a water tower that said "The Fabric of Our Lives" on the side, and of course not getting killed trying to drive through the rainstorm during the very first part of our trip. All very impressive.

But now we are back in Gator Town, which, although I do miss Atlanta, is really just fine with me. I like the one-grad-student-per-bed, additional occupants optional ratio I've got going on here, and there are less one-way streets to avoid getting run over on. Plus, of course, it's Thanksgiving week, which means it's almost time not to quit doing homework but at least to do it more slowly. Besides all of that cool stuff, coming back makes me think about something I always ponder when I return from a trip, which is (get ready to polish your idea of what a nerd I am, folks!) a certain idea of home. I have several "homes," of course - New York, Boynton Beach, Gainesville - but usually home means Boynton, where my family is, and for the most part this doesn't require definition when I'm talking with people. The casual use of the word "home," though, is pretty different and changes fast. When I went on a hiking trip in west Florida, home had gone from Boynton Beach to Gainesville to the car campsite to my truck all by itself in a dusty parking lot to a tent on a bluff over the Apalachicola River. The change was not quite as dramatic in Atlanta - we generally had an actual roof over our heads - but it was still there: from Gainesville to Missy's aunt's house to the hotel we stayed at, and also in a way to the hotels where the conference was held. (The sense that those places were home was really heightened after our little venture into Five Points, after which any place where we weren't going to be offered drugs was looking pretty homey....) Also, when you're a little out of place, it's funny how much anything familiar can be home, too: don't get the wrong idea, Allan, but having lunch with you was part of being home, and Cheryl being there made it even more so, just because she was a vaguely familiar face who had come from Gainesville and is a friend of someone I know reasonably well (that would be you, in case you were wondering.) Seeing Dr. Pace at the Louise Rosenblatt thing was being home. Seeing Dr. Golub was a LITTLE bit of being home, just because I'd at least seen him before.

One other thing I found interesting, and which I will tell Dr. Pace about later today if I can, was that no matter how unfamiliar you are with your physical environment and the millions of people from Illinois it might contain, you can still be at home mentally. I'm not really talking about knowing what cities are like in general and so having an idea of what to do with Atlanta (which, I have to say, some members of our group absolutely do not understand) even though that is another interesting business. I'm talking about the fact that we proteachers generally had a very good idea of what was going on at that conference. Louise Rosenblatt made a joke about the poem or something, and I was able to laugh because I actually understood what she was talking about. That guy Evan mentioned the literacy club and I knew who had said that first. We got into conversations about all kinds of stuff we never would have gotten before, and I'm thinking that kind of demonstrates part of the point of what we're doing. Very, very cool, and in a way I wish all of our classmates could have gotten that reminder firsthand along with those of us who made the trip.

Okay. In the interest of time, I'm not going to sit around contemplating what might pass for a witty conclusion, which is something I've never been terribly good at. Instead, I'm going to eat lunch and get ready to leave, heading back to my version of normal life. To paraphrase the words of Samuel Pepys, "and so to school."

2002-11-18T21:34:00.000-05:00

Blog time has rolled around once again, so here we go. Mostly this week I'm trying to get out from my personal head-fog, finishing up some stuff for Kate, and getting ready for Atlanta. However, I'm also trying to get my sister to clean the house, and (more successfully, I hope) attempting to determine whether I'm wussing out on teaching high school just because my particular practicum class is not so hot.

On a happier but completely unrelated-to-anything note, I finally took a few minutes yesterday to look over the massive collection of Scouting books I got at the library book sale. It was interesting to me not only because I am a long-time aficionada of these types of things but also because some of the older ones - from the fifties - have the craziest advertisements in the back, for such items as hatchets and athletic supporters (two things you need to be a real man, I guess....) The subjects of the ads are not the interesting part, though. What really gets me is that as big as advertising is today, it was a lot more direct back then: the athletic supporter one says "More top athletes buy Bike supporters than any other brand. Make sure you buy one too." And what's more, the "make sure you {insert buy, get, have, purchase here} one, too" model of persuasion is found in lots of the ads in these books. It amuses me, because though it's barely a step away from how we do things today, the modern consumer at least likes to pretend that he's more sophisticated, and I wonder what made that happen.

So that's what's on my mind right now - 1957 advertising for the ten-year-old boy. Probably I should work on getting a life, but hey: I have a good time.

2002-11-11T14:33:00.000-05:00

I'm afraid I don't have a heck of a lot to post today. I'm just working on my Language Exploration Project, trying to get ready for tomorrow's lesson (which I HOPE goes better than the one on Thursday did), and being glad we have two days off this week.

I guess one thing I am thinking about is the fact that that Chaucer lesson the other day really got me... uh, well, worrying might be a little strong, but "concerned" might work. I mean, I know the challenge of getting high schoolers engaged is a fascinating one, and as I wrote in my post, the kind of thing that makes you want to go to work and try new things and stay interested. But what happens if you can't do that? What happens if you end up with a bunch of bumps on a log? If they NEVER do their homework? And I can say I have answers to that - do reading in class, like that one teacher we read about who didn't want to send "all the good stuff" home, give really interesting assignments, make sure I tailor what I'm doing to the class - and I'm pretty darn sure that I'm not boring enough to let apathy happen and think that's fine, but still. It's kind of scary.

Middle school, on the other hand, is looking more and more attractive as we go along here. The kids are still pumped to break out the crayons, still all about role playing, still fascinated by smelly garbage cans or beautiful birthday cakes, as Iris and I asked them to write about in Ms. Manduley's class. You probably can't get into the same KIND of deep discussions you'd find in a high school classroom (one that works well), but you can still get good things happening, get kids talking - and benefiting. And if you get 'em a little earlier, maybe you can have even more of an effect on how they approach their last years of formal schooling.

So, I'm conflicted. I'm glad we still have the internship coming, I'm sure that'll help me make up my mind. It'll be interesting to see what happens.

2002-11-03T18:47:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to get a little better caught-up, in terms of bloggin' it, I decided that I should probably sit down and fire one off. The amazing thing is that I actually have something to write. I mean, I generally manage to come up with something, but often not till after a few false starts, so this is pretty cool. Here goes.

I just posted for Kate's class. We were supposed to come up with an answer - something relatively specific - for one or more of our quandaries. My answer was: think; know why you do what you do and make sure your students know you know why you do what you do. And although I fear my answer was not quite specific enough, that's not my biggest question about it. Instead, I'm hoping that this remedy is as powerful as I imagine it to be. Kinda like I wrote in my philosophy, I figure that if I am thinking through all the things I'm doing - what I'm teaching, how I manage the classroom, what kind of work I give my students, and so on - I have a pretty good shot at doing the right thing. And for the moment, that's really all I can come up with. All the tools and strategies and everything we're getting in class are great - I certainly would not have come up with most of them on my own, and I think they'll be hugely useful - but if I don't know to what end I use them, then they probably won't be much good. But I guess I'll see what happens, won't I... not much longer till I'll be in my own classroom. (Eeek!)

2002-10-31T20:55:00.000-05:00

Yikes. All of a sudden we are embroiled in a soap opera, and I am not down with it. Being a member of one group by definition but feeling pretty much 100% aligned with another is not an unfamiliar place for me, but for a variety of reasons it's harder now than it has been before, though I can certainly still think of tougher places to be in this situation. Anyway, there are more interesting things to think about, things that I can act on (or at least can plan to act on.)

One of those things is this nobody-loves-whole-language business which I learned about in the process of completing my webquest. The fanatical approach of a lot of phonics pholks is really bothersome, especially since we have such a nice example of how to be not only pleasant but realistic about reading instruction in the whole language camp's response. Even worse than that, though, as far as I'm concerned, is the way research is obscured. I'm sure that if I undertook a book- and journal-based project on this topic, it would be a little easier to sort out, but trying to determine who said how much of what truth is just about impossible on the web. That whole California standardized test bit was annoying, for instance. Phonics somehow interpreted overall low scores as DECLINING, even though they had actually been increasing over the course of 12 years or so, and blamed the "decline" on whole language. Now how am I supposed to believe anything else that comes out of that researcher's mouth? I can't. But of course there are two sides, and untangling them is not easy, so my reaction is to say forget you all and I'll do it myself. Which, as annoying as it is to have a reason to want to say that, does make me happy, because it's just another little reminder that I got the career thing right this time around. So darn cool.

Hung out for a bit with JB yesterday. When he talks about some of the things he did back in the day, it makes me so excited to be getting ready to teach English, and (someday) to teach English teachers. I will not say that other subjects aren't important, but come on: how often does a science teacher have the chance to do something like take a bunch of inner-city kids to see Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet and then out for coffee one little group at a time so they can see what it's like to have a conversation like that? How many math teachers get to let students learn it by BEING it, like his one student became Antigone? How dedicated are other subjects' teachers to cultivating lifelong, emotional attachments? It's fabulous, it really is. Enough of these little reminders in a small period of time and I might float right out the window.

Anyway, looking forward to sleeping in a bit tomorrow morning. Plan on a nice, easy-going Friday (if I can help it!) and nailing (ha!) down a lot of little homework pieces this weekend. I think it'll be lovely - especially if we can put the smack on some Dawgs Saturday...

2002-10-23T19:29:00.000-04:00

WHOA! I guess time flies when you're having fun, because I DEFINITELY would not have said that it's been over two weeks since my last post! A lot has happened in that time, too.

For one thing, Iris and I finished our days at Kanapaha [sniff, sniff]. The teacher rocked, the kids were cool, and I'm really loving the middle school thang. Our last lesson was pretty good, I think, and preparing it actually helped me to kind of answer one of the teaching questions I'd thought of, namely what can you do to turn students into solid descriptive writers. I had been thinking you could force it out of them, with guidelines for fail-safe analysis and a list of what to replace with what, but that really goes against my idea of what writing should be, of course. Then I was thinking you could offer them some examples, maybe of the teacher's own writing, but I'm afraid that if the teacher is not very careful with something like that, the students will just end up copying, or practically copying, which isn't really writing either, if that's all it comes to. But like I said, preparing that lesson (with a jump-start from our teacher in the form of that list of possibilities for the Show Not Tells) was instructive, and - surprise, surprise - a LOT of fun. We were pretty sure the kids would like it when we found that WE ourselves were having a great time trying to figure it all out, and it seems that we were right! I also think Allan was right (surprise surprise again ;-) in saying that wait time would have helped things stay a little calmer - but still, I'm pretty pleased with how it worked out.

I'm also pretty pleased with the way the conference worked out! I simply cannot believe how nifty the whole thing was, and the "Probster" showing up was 1) a big surprise and 2) totally, totally cool. I would sum it up on a scoreboard like this: Good Sessions - 6, Sessions Featuring a Shamelessly Self-Promoting Comic Strip Writer - 1; Nice People We Made Friends With - 6, Slimy Napoleon-Complex Wrestling Coach - 1; Good Glasses of Wine - several, Bad Glasses of Wine - only 1, and that's because it got spilled; New Conference-Addicts - 4 (one of whom's not even gonna be an English teacher!), New Conference-Phobics - definitely 0. We had a great time.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite as devoted a fan of our new practicum just yet. I think the students are probably very cool - and I'm not just saying that because I think all kids are naturally perfect or something; we actually talked to several of them... - but for a variety of reasons they are not showing that during work time. Anyway, we are of course glad just to be placed - what would happen if nobody would take us? [sob, sob] - and I find GHS particularly interesting, because it's a lot like my own high school, where I'm thinking about fishing around for a job, so for the time being that's all I'm going to say about that.

What else? I hammered out two essays yesterday in less than three hours, impressive compared to my much longer write-times in undergrad, so that's pretty cool. I'm still completely enthused about all my English proteach classes as well as the vast, vast majority of the other people in them. I'm forgetting less, remembering more, waking up on time but not snoring my way through my own classes, and even actually learning a few things here and there, so I'm thinking that I probably WILL make it as a teacher and even (yikes!) as a ph.d. student one of these days. Practice, practice, practice is part of what it takes, I guess.

Okay, I'm out of here - it's time to see if I can apply that speedier writing style to my, uh, assignments I need to work on. But they're assignments for NEXT week, of course... I'm no procrastinator.

2002-10-06T14:47:00.000-04:00

Well, I am feeling pretty accomplished for the moment. I'm finished with everything for Monday and Tuesday, will soon be done with what I need for Wednesday [ :-P ], and don't see a problem with getting what's left for Thursday taken care of. I'm even thinking ahead: contemplating what I'll do for "Book Fair", trying to come up with a pre-writing microteaching for a couple of weeks from now, and figuring out some items to include on my questionnaire for the Language Exploration Project. Amazing. (I need to catch up on my journals, but hey, what are you gonna do.)

The biggest thing I got done today was finishing With Rigor For All, which I liked very much. I had some issues with the author's comments about YA stuff, and I still don't want to say as she does that "classics", even though that's a very inclusive category for Jago, are the only good way to inspire students to ask questions and make connections, but overall I'm happy with her argument. This is kind of like the way I felt about that Delpit article: I was displeased with some of her supporting points, but I agree with her specific purpose.

A professor I had once told our class that "expanding where you're 'at home' is an expansion of your soul". Even though that was offered as an overarching concept for the course rather than something specific to memorize, I wrote it down. It really captured my own overarching concept as I had never particularly thought to do, and I find that it is applicable in almost every arena - the middle- or high-school class I'll be teaching included. That, for me, is a better reason to get kids to learn Standard Written English along with all kinds of dialects, as Delpit would like, than to tell them that they should do it because Whitey said so. Let's show them that they can make their capacity to express themselves bigger when they have more ways to do it, and that this doesn't take the place of what they did before but adds to it. (Actually, capacity is probably the wrong word, because it implies holding, while a finer ability to express is just the opposite.) It's a better reason to include the classics in everybody's curriculum ALONG with YA and lots of other stuff. Let's help kids see how much is out there, because the more they know the more connections they can make, and the better they know where they are. Reading classics doesn't have to alienate people; it can make them even more than what they were before.

Both the inclusion of SWE along with dialects and classics along with YA are really just little pushes toward making students "at home" in more places. But being at home is bigger than that. In fact, I think it's HUGE. It works on a variety of concrete and abstract planes. It works in school, social life, relationships, culture, music, you name it. Doing things to become at home makes people bigger, more thinking, more experienced, more empathetic. Doing things to become at home, I think, makes people happier. And that is really what I want to do with my students.

2002-09-28T21:20:00.000-04:00

Wow. It doesn't seem like it's already been ten days since my last blog post. I usually post on Tuesdays, and I can't think of what kept me from posting this past Tuesday... Oh well. Whatever it was, I hope it was more worthwhile than creating another fine post for this nifty tool we call Blogger. Yeah, nifty.
Anyway, I'm thinking proteach is fabulous. It takes up close to all of my time, but that's cool. It kind of demands that we students be pretty darn dedicated, which is actually very refreshing after a fun and informative but not exactly intense four years getting a bachelor's degree. And I don't know about the other students, but I really like the way the way we're being taught. I don't WANT teaching prescriptions - do this, do that, do the other thing and you'll be set. I don't WISH to agree with every single thing every instructor says or gives us to read or whatever. I LIKE having the chance to refine my ideas by being confronted with information including research AND what might be opinion pieces. I ENJOY trying to find connections myself (it's not too hard, the way it's all been structured.) I am GLAD Proteach is not FLUFFY! because that's what rumor said it was gonna be, and I wasn't too happy about that. Fluff is not going to help me reach my academic goals, and more important, it is not going to help me be a good teacher. Fluff is good for pillows and that's about it.
Now, I'm not saying there are people in our group who are looking for teaching prescriptions etc. But I know there are people out there who are. And I gotta say, I'm not sure how they think that kind of preparation would work out. The whole thing about teaching is that you never know what's gonna happen. You have to have the knowledge and willingness to make each situation work as well as it can. But nobody can say what the situation will be. It's kinda like taking a wilderness survival course. The instructor can't begin to guess in what conditions you will have to survive, so he or she teaches you broad-reaching concepts and a few basic and flexible rules, reminds you that attitude is the most important thing, and out you go. It would be pretty dumb to learn every speck of information about surviving in the desert - only to end up in the middle of the woods. A waste of money, a waste of time, a waste of effort, and a big waste of brain space. Come on now.
Okay, that's it for the latest edition of Regine Gets On Her Soapbox. Up next week: Why the Gators Special Teams should really be called the Gators "Special" Teams...

2002-09-17T23:00:00.000-04:00

Things are going well. asdffffffffff

Okay, sorry. That was my dog, who is an 80-pound Golden Retriever, deciding to sit on my lap. And my shoulders. And my hands, which I couldn't get off the keyboard before he jumped up here. Anyway, as I was saying, things are going well. This whole practicum business has made things a little more exciting - I remember to go to school in the morning and forget to meet my boss at Housing when I'm supposed to - but I'm thinking I'll get used to it, just like I was really getting a handle on the general grad school thang. It's fun, though; the readings are mostly very cool, the discussions are not un-academic or lacking in rigor, and our instructors are excellent. (Well, except for Allan... ;-) I'm loving it.
Thinking a little about Dr. Townsend's class, it only makes sense that having more than one way to speak is advantageous. You get a lot more versatility, a better chance at saying what you want to say exactly how you want to say it - which I think is one of the biggest and most interesting challenges in writing. So why would we want to coerce kids into using Standard Written English with pronouncement about power structures? Isn't it nicer, more personal, and less adversarial to talk about it the other way? I can't picture myself telling kids, hey, the best reason for learning this kind of English is to be able to use the power language - but I can definitely see telling them, listen, you have a lot to say, and the more words and structures you have to choose from the better you'll be able to do it. Much less divisive, and I'd bet more effective.

2002-09-10T01:39:00.000-04:00

Last week was long and, for a variety of reasons, very difficult. The weekend was not that hot either - why we couldn't play the last two and a half quarters with the energy of the first quarter and a half, I don't know, but I completely lost my voice yelling rude words about it in the stadium. Anyway, the good part is: this week is off to a much better start. For instance, when we talked about Plato's dilemma and authority and all that today, I thought we were headed in a direction that my personal compass isn't too fond of. It seemed at first like the only answer would be to accept practically ANY reading of a given text and to treat all evaluations equally. All I could think of was the time someone in Adolescent Literature tried to tell us that S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders was actually about the American Indian Movement. First of all, I'm pretty sure that would have been kinda tough, chronologically speaking, and second, Hinton was FIFTEEN years old when she wrote that book, and it wasn't supposed to be her big history project or anything. There is absolutely nothing in the story to promote this idea. Even so, the professor for that class (who I really respect and like a lot) could only nod his head in weak acknowledgement, because he had never demanded that we make our readings VALID. And this is what saved class for me today - Rosenblatt's two rules. I mean, I'm all for interesting explanations, and I certainly want my students to feel that they can speak up. But I would like them to think for a minute first, and sometimes I feel like certain groups would accuse me of stifling students because of that. I was VERY glad to hear that proteach is not one of those groups.

2002-09-08T16:02:00.000-04:00

This is my teaching philosophy (duh.) I'm just posting it so I won't have to retype it tomorrow on the Macs at school.

I believe that the most important thing I can do for my students is to let them see the value in learning, generally speaking, and more specifically in the topics we discuss. This should work well as a guide for my teaching because it is not often an automatic process, as much as we might hope that it would be, and it will require that I continue to be thoughtful in my treatment of students, in my planning and delivery of instruction, and in my attention to the subject area and how it ties not only to other subjects but to the overall understanding of our world.
This goal demands that I regard my students as people with cognitive function rather than as otherwise inert animals who respond only to extrinsic rewards. The idea that learning is its own reward may sound trite, and there are certainly several difficulties associated with it, but it is this perspective that allows us to differentiate between “education” and “training”. It is central to something we spend a lot of time talking about – respect.
It is also central to the considerate planning of a lesson. If I am supposed to let the students see its value, I ought to be able to see it myself. This is not to say that what I find interesting or worthwhile will necessarily match what my students will find interesting or worthwhile – clearly, I would not insist that students agree with me about everything. I will, however, insist that opinions be informed and reasoned. A large part of my task is not to open the metaphorical doors to knowledge – they’re already opened – but to encourage students either to walk through them or have good reasons for refraining. I want to pique their interest as often as I can, because the self-prompted learning that might follow is for me the best sign I have done my job well.
I can only be with students for nine months. If the results of my work with them last only for that period of time, then I have engaged in a useless endeavor, like the demon who had to “straighten” a curly hair. Every time he let it go, it went back to being curly, because he had not modified the essence of that hair. On the other hand, I certainly don’t want to turn out a pack of clones whose essence has been modified to match in every detail my own. Instead, my real ambition is to inspire students to see the connections, ask the questions, and above all, enjoy the answers in what would become a self-perpetuated, lifelong education.

2002-09-04T01:09:00.000-04:00

Okay, at this point I'm tired of talking about technology. I like it, I think it's useful, but I have problems with it and I have written about those problems everywhere: here, on the discussion boards, in a letter to myself, and I think I might even remember spraying something about it on the 34th Street Wall. Now I want to talk about journals. It seems I've got a lot of those these days, and it's kinda hard to keep track. This is one, of course, and I've got, let's see... oh, a bunch of others, especially if you count the discussion forums, which are really half-journals themselves. Maybe our instructors have journals about our journals. (Of course they do. It's called a grade book, and I am really glad I'm not in charge of it.)
Anyway, school goes well. All of us proteachers made it through okay and so did Ron Zook, so I think we're gonna be all right. (Not that I really had any doubts about us students...) The second week will be interesting. It'll be our first time coming back to grad school after days off, and I wonder to what extent a sense of familiarity will exist. Yeah, it's only been five days, but hey, we've done a Tuesday as master's students before! So I guess we'll see what happens.
PS - I tried to post this yesterday and couldn't. So I'm posting it today, and I'll tell you what we English proteachers felt: cold. Our composition class was FREEZING. Other than that, things are great.

2002-08-27T12:55:00.000-04:00

I think it's pretty cool being a grad student - which is good, because according to my plans I'll have at least five more years of it after I teach for a little bit! The first day was long, but I was able to get a lot more done in between classes (and that meeting!) than I had expected. And thankfully, the technological aspect of the program doesn't seem like it's going to be a big pain. I'm definitely not a technophobe - I love e-mail, web surfing, downloading music, you name it - but I HATE HATE HATE when technology for education turns into technology for... technology. On the practical side, I feel like it de-values the importance of what we're supposed to do as educators. And on the other side (I'm not sure what to call it, exactly) it sometimes seems to me that heralding technology as the savior of today's brand of education is a real insult to the great teaching that has been done throughout all human history. Yes, we have to go with the flow, get with the times, and keep up with the Joneses (the Joneses being other countries with higher test scores, I guess) - but expecting computers to do something dramatic for education simply by being put in classrooms is getting a little cliched.
And Allan, I can't stand it when we call computer programs "interactive", either.