Chris Lehmann has a brilliant new post I recommend you read. He’s written often how teachers are good people in a bad system and I always wondered what he meant by that. In this post, he fleshes that out quite a bit:
And yet, there are teachers all over this country doing their best. . . They are in the classrooms for 10-12 hours a day. They are bringing home papers to grade, and doing physics experiments with paper towel tubes, and as they hit their fifth, tenth, twentieth years in the classroom, they are forever making Faustian bargains about the balance between life and work. And let me say this — that’s no way to run a public education system. I want to celebrate every teacher who has made this job a calling. Thank you. But my concern is that this nation thinks that building an entire system around martyrdom is the way to go — that if you aren’t spending 80 hours a week and thousands of your own dollars, you can’t be an effective Title I school teacher.
Sound familiar?
I think because teachers rarely talk with colleagues outside our own schools, let alone outside our city, let alone outside our state, that we think we’re the only ones. We think it’s our own personal failings that are preventing us from finishing our work in a reasonable amount of time. Or we blame it on the demanding principal. Or it’s an unreasonable superintendent. Or it’s NCLB.
Then we feel guilty. What’s too much when it comes to the future of a child?
But it’s not just us. We’re all working very hard and more and more is being asked of us. And we’re getting tired. We’re losing control.
We hate to complain, we really do. But when our job starts to take over our entire life, we’re not just talking about dedication anymore, we’re talking about something else - something very unhealthy and out of balance.
At the end, Chris asks a good question: “How can we create schools where it does not require Herculean efforts to be a successful teacher?” Is such a thing possible?
Mark Wagner very helpfully linked to his NECC submissions in his latest blog post. Although I would’ve found it even more helpful if he had posted that before yesterday when we were scrambling putting our proposal together, it’ll be a very helpful resource to people who are in a similar position in the future.
I don’t see any point in posting our submission if it doesn’t get accepted, but if it does get picked up (and if it’s okay with Shay), I’ll also post our entry online so first time submitters can also use our proposal as a example.
I also found it interesting that he ignored the Supporting Research field because “in the past I either dropped in a mountain of mildly relevant sources (that didn’t impact the session at all), or else really wasted a lot of time finding a few good resources (that didn’t impact the session at all).” We probably fell into a middle area - we wasted a fair amount of time finding a few mildly relevant sources that won’t impact the session at all. It’ll be interested to see how his proposals fare. If his gets accepted, I’ll probably take his lead on that one. Assuming I ever have another idea to submit with, of course.
After a lot of last day rethinking and revisions, we did it: We got our NECC proposal submitted.
Yesterday morning, I thought we were pretty much done - I just wanted to get our sources were correctly cited. I then made the mistake of looking at session descriptions from last year’s NECC and realized our session description was much different than what other submissions had. Oops! So we hurriedly rewrote it, and I think it’s much better as a result.
Our proposal is similar to the one we’re presenting at TNT next month, about using blogging as the publishing step of the writing process. It’s such a no-brainer, I don’t know why every book on teaching writing isn’t saying this, but I guess since we’re the some of the very few people saying this, we might as well take advantage of this opportunity.
I’m not sure of our chances though. Wes Fryer said he submitted seven proposals last year and only had two accepted. Hopefully the fact that we’re a school, we’re actually doing it and we make it public will help. Sometimes I wonder if we’re doing that well, but then I look at what other schools are doing and we definitely have nothing to be ashamed of. We could be doing a lot better. We are still only scratching the surface of the power of these tools.
So we’ll see. I made a promise that if our proposal were accepted, I’d go to NECC next year, and if it wasn’t, I’d wait until NECC 2010 when it’ll be held closer to home (Denver). Wish us luck!
Like last year, my blogging output has slowed to a crawl, now that school has started. I’m get so busy with other things (such as the job of approving students’ posts), that I have very little time to think and write on my own.
Today I had to plan for the meeting of the tech cadre group at our school, and I got the idea of having them do a VoiceThread on one of the sessions they attended earlier in the afternoon. It seemed to get really well. The teachers were able to get into VoiceThread and upload their pictures very quickly, and then started experimenting with adding their narration. One thing surprised me: I gave them the choice of either working on their own project or working with someone else and I thought they’d all partner up but they all chose to work by themselves.
Here’s the one I did:
VoiceThread is a great tool for getting content online quickly and simply, but for some reason we haven’t been able to get much use out of it yet. Once we get the new headsets in, I’m determined to have some classes do some projects with it and see how they react to it.
One thing that I’ve been noticing over the past few days that certain students have mysteriously been getting their comments approved without me seeing them and I know their teacher has not been seeing them. Upon further research, I’ve discovered a few glitches in the WordPress MU software when it comes to comments.
The most concerning one is that even though in one of the settings we always click that “An administrator must always approve the comment,” that really is not the case. All that does is stop the comment from appearing instantly. It then goes to the comments page, waiting to be approved. Which is great, but authors and contributors have access to that page and can approve their comments! Obviously that shreds our pretense of safety if anyone can leave a comment and it can be approved without any adult seeing it. Worse, the students are able to see the commenters email address in that comments section.
So after a lot of research tonight, I’ve come across this plugin which solves the problem in a very inelegant but effective fashion. Now when an author or a contributor tries to get to the Comments page, it goes to a VERY simple page that tells them they’re not allowed there.
I wish there was a better way, but, for now, that’s the way we’re going to have to do it.
Imagine how good the Minnesota Vikings could be if they had a hint of a passing game.
That was the main lesson of the team’s loss against Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Cots on Sunday.
Despite dominating the line for three quarters on both offense and defense, despite a grand first half performance by the best running back in the NFL, and despite a 15-point lead deep into the third quarter, the Vikings couldn’t seal the deal.
In fact, while most power running teams take over the game in the fourth quarter after wearing down the defense, the momentum in this game was completely on the side of the Colts. Since the Vikings had no other offensive weapons, the Colts were able to focus on the running backs and effectively contained them in the last part of the game. Manning was able to take over the game and the Colts were able to score 18 unanswered points to claim the victory.
Blame clearly lies at the feet of Viking quarterback Tavares Jackson, who threw for a measly 120 yards, and his wide receivers, who made no contribution to the team effort. Although the team proved it could move the ball, it was unable to score a touchdown and all the teams points came on five field goals. If they could’ve turned just of those field goals into a touchdown, they would’ve won the game.
The feeling of lost chances especially haunts the Vikings this year after rumors of a deal that would bring Brett Favre to Minnesota leaked over the summer. Instead, Favre went to the New York Jets and the Vikings are left contemplating what might have been.
Our school blogs are up and running for the new school year. It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of them. There are five teachers using them with their students, and they’re all approaching them differently. Some of them are giving their students the choice about to write about, and others are having them type out the writing assignments they’ve completed in class.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a right or wrong way to do it, as long as students are getting the sense that there’s a reason why they’re doing this, that there’s a real audience out there that’s going to respond. But the proof of the pudding will be the quality of the writing that goes into the blogs over time.
Right now, the overall quality isn’t that great, but there is a lot of writing going on. I think that’s a good sign. If students aren’t writing and don’t see the value in it, you can talk about skills until you’re blue in the face and it’s not going to do a bit of good. Students need that desire, that reason, to improve within them first. As they see people they care about reading and responding to their work, they’ll start trying to put more thought into it and being crafting their message more instead of putting down whatever pops into their head next.
You can see some early attempts of students reaching beyond the average “this-is-what-happened-to-me” type of post:
I really like this post Naomi wrote about the treatment of Muslims following 9/11. I believe this was something that was being talked about in class, so she summarized the topic and wrote her opinion of it.
Yes, it devolves into pure incomprehensible silliness at the end, but before that, this post was great silliness and displayed a certain amount of ambition, I think, to sustain it so long.
Drew won the Grandparents poetry contest with this poem. “If you only knew/how your love seals the brokenness of my heart” is a very powerful line.
And then there’s Johanna, who uses many of her posts to explore her identity in ways that are at turns playful and intense, sometimes simultaneously.
I also think it’s important that teachers are writing as well, and students can see this writing. One reason is I think it puts teachers in the shoes of their students and it reminds them of the challenges of writing, but also they become a powerful role model for their students. Our school is lucky as we have several teachers willing to publish their work, but this year we’ve all been out done by Ms. Ward, who’s been publishing a couple of great pieces a week.
Here are some interesting websites I found during the last month that I want to keep for future reference:
NECC 2009 - The big grandaddy of tech conferences is going to be held next year in Washington, DC, and is currently accepting proposals.
TNT 2008 - The annual technology conference they put on in El Paso.
Google Reader Preview - This Firefox add-on makes Google Reader even more valuable for people that like to (or need to) visit a lot of blogs. What it allows you to do is go right to the blog website without leaving Google Reader, so you can leave a comment or get into the admin section. To get this going, first you install Greasemonkey and then you install the Google Reader Preview script.
WordPress Audio Player - The other WordPress audio player I’ve been using (Inline MP3 Player) is nice, but I’ve been noticing it doesn’t appear with some themes. I’m trying this one out and it’s been working well so far.
Creating Student Accounts Using One Gmail Account - Have you ever wanted your students to make use of a website only to find they need to register with an email address? Sue Waters shows you how you can use your Gmail account to generate as many email addresses as you need.
ThemZa - This site has free themes for a lot of web services, most of which aren’t anything to write home about, but the ones for Moodle are very nice, and it’s not easy finding Moodle themes.
Top 100 Interactive Games - A wonderful resource of educational games for your students in case you need something to do the next time you’re going to the computer lab.
Cover It Live - This website provides a very interesting way to do liveblogging, where you cover an event similar to the way a journalist would but in the moment. I’m sure there’s some educational application here, I just haven’t got it figured it out. Maybe it could come in handy covering inservices?
JayCut - Edit movies in your browser? Incredible! Applications on your computer are going to do the job faster, but if you don’t have access to them, I’d try this site out.
Living Historians - This is a great idea. You can schedule an videoconference with an historical figure like Abraham Lincoln. But why does it cost so much? Can’t things like these be done for less than $200 an hour?
Cadet Chronicles - An online newspaper they’re doing at Scotsdale, a nearby elementary school in El Paso.
Class Projects - This lists some projects classrooms are invited to participate in. The “A Room with a View” projects looks like fun. You take a picture once a month over a school year to record some of the changes that take place It doesn’t say anything in the directions, but I think it would be good if you took the pictures all at the same time so you could compare the positions of the sun. In El Paso, you better make sure a tree is in the picture, otherwise I don’t think you’re going to see much change!
For a brief twelve hour period, our household had new pet. Isn’t he cute? He flew into our house last night, took several swings our house looking for an exit before he gave up and perched himself on our stairwell wall where I found him the next morning.
It would’ve been very nice to keep him as he was very pleasant company while he was sleeping but it was a little scary to see him swooping around the house at night. Besides, I don’t think we have quite enough insects in the house to feed even a small bat. Yes, I think it’s for the best that we returned him to the wild.
But how to get him out without hurting anyone?
I was tempted to leave him alone until dusk and then open up all the doors in the hope he would finally find his own way out. An online source suggested putting a wet towel over him and carrying him out, but that would mean actually touching him. What we ended up doing was putting a translucent garbage container over him and then sliding a piece of cardboard between the container and the wall to trap him in.
It went surprisingly smoothly. We coaxed him into the container and he started making his echolocation sounds, but the didn’t thrash around at all, he stayed very still. We carried him outside and removed the cardboard. I was expecting him to fly right out, but it took him awhile before he was willing to come out. He finally flew out, went around in a few loops before attaching himself to the side of the house.
I hope he’s able to fly out tonight and meet up with the rest of his group.
There is no doubt that our world is faced with countless problems, but the biggest mistake a person could make is to look into the future and only seeing those problems. The trick is to seeing them as opportunities.
Let me give you a small example of what I mean. While I’ve been planning for the blogging-as-publishing sessionMrs. Hulburt and I are going to present in November, I’ve been noticing that there’s no perfect way for a classroom teacher to start blogging with her students. I think the best solution is WordPress MU, which we use for our students’ blogs, but that requires a lot of steps to get it up and running. Worse yet, there’s are no clear directions available that an average person would be able to figure out that explains it for them, let alone one that addresses the specific needs of schools.
That’s a pretty big setback if that’s something you’re interested in doing, isn’t it? But therein lies an opportunity for someone. This is a situation that’s practically screaming for someone to step up to task of explaining it to less tech-savvy people. (Or better yet, figure out a way to make it easier!) Which is exactly what I’m working on.
No, it’s not going to earn me a million dollars or make me famous. But there are opportunities out there that will, you just need to learn how to keep your eyes open for them. There’s needs out there that are big - cures for diseases, more efficient batteries for electric cars, to name just two - and small, just waiting for creative solutions.
So the next time you hear yourself beginning to complain about how a certain needed resource is not available for you, remember that an accompanying opportunity also exists. Maybe you can be the one to create it!
Entries (RSS)