Learning Alive!

Ok, ok, I admit it, I’m a slacker. I am even a bit embarassed. I have not used this blog to my full advantage and have neglected its up keep for nearly, get this, 2 months! Well after a short hiatus, I’m back in the saddle again. As the semester kicks into 5th gear, I need to step my game up as well. The pressure of lesson plans, looking dates, and even now football, have mind in a million different directions all at once.

During my Field Experience this semester I have been granted with two great placements that couldn’t contrast each other any more! Arcadia is the school with a plan, a direction, while at Wilson Foundations, it is the school with a vision but rough road. It is a tale of two cities. I feel as though my persona changes in both schools and I try to ask myself why I do this? Is it human nature, possibly. Is it fear of acceptance and not being a weirdo outcast, perhaps. Is it the differences I find in each school, again perhaps. I can’t pinpoint it in my mind yet I can only say that it is a powerful mixture of all of these factors. As a future teacher, this is the time to learn and absorb. However, I feel like I have just been questioning and asking much bigger questions. I know that my place in life is in front of a classroom doing what I was made to do, teach. However, if I were to give advice to those coming up through I would say, take this opportunity and get everything you can from it. I am probably more excited than anyone to be in front of a classroom but it is the discipline of fine-tuning skills and never becoming complacent that I need to work on. My biggest positive and negative about myself is I truly am my worst critic. However, in order to be a great teacher, we must have the ability to do both but also see that what we are doing is making a difference. I believe I will find what I am looking for.

 On a side note, I would like to apologize to Dr. Jacobs because my complacency has gotten in the way of my progress. Thank you for helping me see that. 

Last week in class, we discussed in our groups how to form, organize, and create Rubric’s pertaining to different assignments. Easy. Not even close. My learning last week was not through my success, yet my failure. The rubric that our group created was argued over, debated, checked, re-checked, argued once more, and finally presented it.

It is truly moments like that in my life that I want no part of, yet on the same token, it forces me to reflect and think about the entire process. I am just thankful that I had my handy dandy textbook (Content-Area Writing) to get me through and simplify the process. To refresh, this rubric was designed to grade our Wiki. As a group we had to come to a consensus as to what criteria we would look for and make it as clear as we can to our students. This is a very realistic moment that will be all to familiar to us when we have our own class. My point of writing this blog is that a rubric is not impossible and as a teacher I need to set my learning goals to the rubric. Simple is not always bad. We just need to move one block at a time until we have a feel for how the cube truly fits.

The process of settling back into school is not an easy transition. However, slowly but surely, we are coming back into our groove of literacy and education. The next week we did hands down, the most beneficial exercise we have done all year; examining Tommy. This was a great experience because it is so relevant to what we will ALL experience as teachers. We had to break apart every aspect of Tommy’s life from home life, to interests, to reading fluency. This was amazing because as teacher’s, in order to identify the issue, we need to be detectives. We must leave no stone unturned.  Tommy was interested in flying and wanted to be an Air Force Pilot someday. However, he wasn’t on the right path to get there. It comes down to school. Making an education connected, engaging, and relevant. We needed to break apart Tommy’s thinking and attitude and although we know we cannot change it all at once, we must believe that we can help and guide our students. We gave great strategies for helping Tommy and by integrating his interests into the classwork as a type of motivation and as a supplemental.

The next item we took on our the Wiki’s. I have a feeling this will be extremely useful in my classroom because it can serve so many purposes. However, my learning curve on the Wiki is a little slow but I will surely master the Wiki before the end of the week. My students can benefit from this because it can be used as a database of knowledge, links, contacts, discussion, and even a chance to just talk and blog about learning, class, and life.  This is a great literacy tool which is relevant to my life and I can hope that when modeled correctly, can be for my students as well.

Well, after nearly a month hiatus, I am back. Sorry for the technical difficulties and I will make up for both last week’s blog and this weeks as well. We started last week’s classes by getting to know each other and getting used to the atmosphere in the classroom. During the past week, we focused on new strategies we can implement in the classroom.

One activity that I enjoyed in the class was when we created our “dream” classroom. This was a great opportunity to think outside the restraints of a budget and administration and just see what we could use as valuable in a classroom. The one problem I ran into was the amount of technology I had in my classroom such as a projector, smartboard,wireless computers, tv, dvd, and even a popcorn machine. I know these may have been a stretch but the technology was so vast, it become a question of content or technology. What I mean by this is it may have been difficult to balance all the technology with the content without losing the focus and goals at hand. I feel a classroom needs to be inviting and exciting. I can not wait until I put my classroom together because it will be the perfect mix of history, education, and society. During this week, we also did the Dictoglos which was a strategy for reading, listening, and comprehension. I felt that this was an extremely important strategy in the schools because it hits on so many levels. When used properly, this will be a great technique for reading and comprehension and learning beyond the text. Especially, because the Regents exams will have an oral section on the exam. Modeling is key to this strategy. How to listen, what to listen for, structuring notes, and then what to put into your essay and summarization. This may seem like alot, however, it is all inclusive when modeled and used by scaffolding the steps!

Anyone who can tell me what a Polyglot is, gets extra bonus points.

First of all, I cannot believe how ironic this is that earlier in the day, our Asian American history class had a 40-minute discussion on Bilingual and ESY education in the schools. In the NY Times article written by Joseph Berger entitled, “Building a Nation of Polyglots, Starting With the Very Young” . This article ties in with every single aspect of education that we as future teachers will encounter both in literacy, education, and technology.

This story chronicles a thrid-grade teacher at an elementary school in Sleepy Hollow, NY, where (not to have a plot spoiler), is teaching the students Spanish as a second-language. That’s right, 3rd graders. This quote sums up in minimal words the need for a bilingual exposure and education:

But with an economy that recognizes few geographical borders, and with people from all over the planet becoming our next-door neighbors, more Americans are demanding language instruction earlier in school. Under the new regimen, where almost everyone studies two languages, teachers are noticing that Hispanic and white children are more likely to play together and that parents from different cultures are more willing to approach one another.

As teachers and as humans, we must break through stereotypes and the lines that divide us because those lines are rapidly fading. We are at the forefront of a silent technological and social enlightenment. Sure there are flaws, and the program can sometimes bend and break. However, it is where we break where we grow the strongest. It only raises the question of why Spanish? Why not French, Italian, Cantonese? Is it our responisbility as Americans to educate all of these groups and if so, who with limited funds and poverty that we face. Read the article and formulate your own opinion.

I am sorry to write my blog so late but I always enjoy listening to what other people have to say about last week and come up with some thoughts of my own. Rather than sit and describe the different events since we did that on class, I want to express what Four Freedoms means to me and in our lives.
Four Freedoms week I feel is a crucial part of our education but yet I also feel like it is over looked by many. First of all, it is crucial because it is so much more than boring history that occured in the past before we were born that doesn’t matter in our lives. I am sure I am quoting someone on the campus or at least summing up their thoughts about history in general. I am not going to lecture on why I feel history is more than that, yet break it down into the freedoms we “have” in our lives and how it is influenced today. We, including myself, take freedoms for granted everyday and we often overlook the powerful issues in our society which, according to Bruce Jacobs, is partly the media’s fault. Four Freedoms week allows for that big epiphany in a persons life, where the true learning occurs; self-reflection. Four Freedom’s week not only makes me think about myself but how I can positiviely impact others. Maybe I am just a History geek that took too much out of this week but it seems that we move so fast in life that sometimes, we forgot what and who we are, and where and why we are going. This issues of race, religion, morality, are still prevelent today. We see them through different lenses in our lives each day.
The exhibits and speakers for Four Freedoms week were for the majority, superb. We saw life through the same lens these people do and make us sit back and understand what is needed in our culture; compassion. Four Freedoms week is growing and improving every year and I only hope the rest of Fisher campus can take the time to self-reflect and see where they have come from, where they are now, and where we are going.

I had the pleasure of attending a seminar during “Frankenstein Lives” from 1:45pm-2:45pm. Stephanie Brown Clark, M.D, Division of Medical Humanities from the U of R Medical Center entitled Frankenstein and Other Monstrosities: A Medical and Literary History of Congenital Malformations in 19th Century Britain and France. This was an interesting seminar because it was such a basis which had implications on major aspects of life such as morality, religion, and eventually the emergence of Science.
Dr. Clark began by giving us a general history of where the term “monster” came from and how we used it to classify those humans as such. It was an amazing phenomenon because it gave the different for why people were different and the major culture separations between people. We saw the changing world of exploring new territories and the new “monsters” that lay at the ends of the world. Dr. Clark also gave us her own experiences when dealing with “FLK’s” or funny-looking kids, a debatable name for such but nonetheless true. She saw children who were deformed and would have been considered “monsters” in the past but now due to the emergence of Science, biology, and DNA, we can begin to map and erase those myths and taboos our culture created. We examined the famous case of the “Elephant Man” and how we could see that underneath this hideous front he was human. This is the corollary to Frankenstein in the means that the timing of Frankenstein’s release (1830) was the same time that a medical journal was published of the non-natural being. Frankenstein’s monster was the ultimate means of a “monster” but was very intelligent, sincere, albeit lonely. This seminar was a fantastic experience and gave me explanations about our past and the emergence of our future mixed in with the taboo and awe of monsters.

In schools, the level of stress seems to rise with every passing hour and exam that passes through a classroom. When those stress levels reach the point of no return, it seems that these students become over-burdened with the perils of school, sports, friends, and everything else in between. One Principal has a solution: Yoga. In an article written by Sara Rimer entitled Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/education/29stress.html?em&ex=1193976000&en=88d19b713cc95446&ei=5087%0A. URL is not working right now!

we see how one administrator finds the balance between society and relaxtion. This takes place in Needham, Mass in the evenings when the students are done with practice or just done doing whatever they were occupied doing, he opens the gym and they begin their medititation practices. The principal Mr. Richards, has already caused a stir by not publishing the Honor Roll because he feels that a stress-free environment is the best one to learn in. Mr. Richards is undeterred. “It’s not that I’m trying to turn the culture upside down,” he said. It’s very important to protect the part of the culture that leads to all the achievement,” he said. “It’s more about bringing the culture to a healthier place.”

Instead of jeers, I gave Mr. Richards and congratulations for realizing how stressful and how real this situation truly is. He is not just enforcing rules but he is giving these students an environment to work and live in that doesn’t always push stress to the breaking point.

At first, I was skeptical about the midterm writing assignment. I honestly did not know what to write about and how to structure my thoughts into an essay that encompasses myself as a learner and person. So, I just started writing. Four pages later, I was finishing. I felt that four pages wasn’t enough. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write and so on and so on and I felt that my voice should be heard.

I am writing in blog to assess my review because I really have never considered how important literacy was and really the meaning of emotion. I believe that literacy is about emotion and letting your personal voice shine through whether it is through blogging, papers, or class activities, no one truly appreciates themselves as learners or literacy, until they reflect. We must look to our past in order to get to our future. My personal experiences have shaped me like others and have given me a lease on my education and outlook on life. I know I will have student in my life who are not as blessed and it is up to me, to help show them the path and that people do care and are willing to go that extra mile to help. My literacy journey has only begun.