Growth as a blogger

I have grown as a blogger mainly in that I have blogged more, so the body of my blog labor has grown as a result. I don't know if I am any better at blogging now than I was at the beginning of the quarter. I suppose my recent entries have been a bit more to the point and in terms of narrow topics, but whether that is better depends on what one's goals are and by what criteria one is evaluated as a blogger. I have some thoughts on whether my writing is interesting. The blog posts that are interesting for me and that I enjoyed writing like the one about the declaration of independence and the one about assessing virtue had no comments on them, while some others that I cared very little about garnered more comments. Perhaps I need to learn to pander to my audience better, but I care more for writing something that I care about, I cannot control what other people think. My comments are not very good, and on no occasion have I seen them create greater discussion, whether they cause thought in another person I do not know as I have been given no evidence one way or the other,

Thinking back on my metaphor, and forward to my teaching

My simile was: teaching is like new underwear. It is a reference to the 1992 comedy classic Wayne's World starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. When asked about a recent change in his environment, Dana Carvey said, "it's like a new pair of underwear, at first it's restrictive, but pretty soon it becomes a part of you." I feel that teaching is the same way. Our classes and the government make teaching sound really restrictive, and that there are so many rules to follow that there is no point in having a thinking human do it, especially when we are told just to do exactly what we are told, and to teach exactly what the administration wants us to teach and how they want us to teach it. However,  as I have been in schools, I have found that it's not as bad as all that, and not as scary as some of our classes make it out to be (seriously, I feel like the whole of Spring Quarter existed just to scare us). I am really beginning to get the hang of it, and I am seeing at my dyad that there are multiple ways to teach well. I am thus confident that I can myself find a way to teach that isn't too forced, and maybe even works well.

This leads well into the next question, who will I be as a teacher and a colleague. I don't know. I want to be a good teacher, and a good colleague, and I think I have the capacity and the tools to be as such. However, I also know that I have the capacity to royally screw it up, I hope not to, but I know that I can. All I can say is that in the present I want to work hard in order to be a good teacher and a polite colleague. I believe that I have guidance and will continue to receive guidance from the Holy Spirit to do so. I have some confidence and assurance that there will always be those present to help me improve as a teacher, and I will have innumerable opportunities to do so. Man is free however, and with that freedom comes the potential for evil and failure, and uncertainty in my own ability to follow guidance both human and divine. In the specific outcomes of my practice, I must then defer to Wittgenstein and say, "whereof one cannot say, thereof one must be silent."

Chipotle

I have come across an interesting way to build relationships with students. It has come through a fictional obsession with the popular chain of Mexican eateries Chipotle. The facts are these. In my first period seventh grade Language Arts class on October the 29th, I was reading a list of vocabulary words to the class and for each word I thought of a sample sentence that uses the word. With no prior planning on my plot, two of my sample sentences were about my enjoying Chipotle. For example, using the word "roused" I said, "I could be roused out of bed if I heard the town crier announcing a sale at my local Chipotle." Or something similar to that. For whatever reason, in the mind of a few boys this really stuck in their head, one of them still just calls me Chipotle, which I should probably attend to (unless he only wants my attention, however I don't feel annoyed so I'm not sure if that's it.) First of all, this has helped me build relationships with a few students so that is nice. Second of all, some students I have seen getting more excited about learning vocabulary words, since they want to think of sentences about Chipotle that accurately use the word. I am very interested and am thinking hard as to how I can use this to further educational goals. For now though, it is really funny to me at the very least.

The Importance of Proper Planning and Meter Sticks

This past thursday I was given a chance to co-teach a lesson at our dyad with my Dyad partner Caitlin, and being in middle school we had the chance to do it twice. This is a fact I am very glad for, because after the first go, I was not satisfied with my own performance, but after the second time I felt that I had been adequate. This change was brought about in two main ways I think.

1. For the first time we did not plan as much as we maybe should have planned. We relied very much on the pre-existing power point and we essentially read alternating slides to students and ended up having a very unequal distribution of work. In addition the general confusion lead to us stepping on each others toes a couple of times. However, before the second time we taught the lesson, we took some time to really talk through what we were doing, get on the same page as each other and break down the lesson into manageable bits and plan for some assessment. This worked marvelously, from my perspective it freed up my mind to relax a little bit and focus on delivering the bits of the lesson that were my responsibility. This was a valuable lesson for me as I am frequently tempted to take the, "just wing it," approach. I have found though that with careful planning, my mind is much more free to be interactive with students and to be in pleasant spirits.

2. The second time I was holding a meter stick.

I'm really glad I had this learning experience, and it really reinforces my belief that the placements have been far and away the most useful thing we have done in the whole program.

How to Assess Values

I was planning a series of Sunday School lessons recently and I tried to apply backward design to it. At first it was easy, there were a few Essential Understandings that I wanted to communicate, and a few Essential Questions for the children (3rd through 5th grade) to ask themselves. But when I got to the bit for assessment I was really stumped. Part of it was because I was working within an existing framework with a very limited amount of time and a whole lot of content and with a few other people, but the other part is that what I really want to teach are virtues and a way of life, which are hard to assess. To be sure, the only true assessment of whether one learns a value or a virtue is to look at how they behave in their day to day life, and in the constant and minute decisions that life offers, especially in times of hardship. However, the times of hardship where lessons of morals and values are most valuable cannot be artificially constructed by a classroom teacher, they happen in unpredictable moments of crisis or sorrow. The case of teaching christian virtues is not directly applicable to public schools, although we do often teach similar morals. It did however remind me of our social studies textbook and how it talks about teaching democratic virtues and it made me wonder, how can we construct assessments for these? We can of course have them write about making good decisions, or have them behave virtuously in a simulation, but it is a sight easier to act like you possess a virtue in a classroom environment than to actually live by it as a lasting part of on'es being. Can one ultimately assess a child's true character? This itself may only happen on an informal level in our observations of the child's interaction with each other, are they kind? are they just? do they live their neighbor? do they do as they have been done by? In this way, knowing the student takes on an even greater role, that of assessing the content of a child's character. And a good character is perhaps the most important part of the child a teacher can tend to and help grow.