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....

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! ;-)

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."

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.

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.

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!)

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...