Blogboard

After a lesson she had spent eight hours preparing for was killed because of scheduling changes, English teacher Waterfall goes metaphorical:

Imagine a schedule is a rug. A small rug on a slippery hardwood floor. It can be moved around, and it slips every now and then, but you like to think that it's going to stay put when you're standing on it.

Now, imagine this: Every time you set foot on the rug, someone comes up behind you and whisks the rug out from under you. You go flying and crashing as if you've stepped on a banana peel.

That's what being a teacher is like.

Bet they don’t tell you that in ed school.

(A Sort of Notebook.)

Posted by at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With just three days to go before she goes on maternity leave, Posthipchick offers some instructive observations on the awkwardness, both physical and social, of teaching while pregnant:

It's very strange to have something so personal happening to you while constantly being watched and monitored by 100 people a day. Especially when the personal/professional line becomes blurred, as it is wont to do when your students see you running out of the room to puke, or go to the bathroom, or when your belly is slithering around as you are trying to teach. None of it feels inappropriate, ... but I really try to keep up a boundary with my students, and pregnancy sort of forces it down a bit more than I would have chosen.

(Posthipchick)

Posted by at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Can blogs and other community-building Web tools become agents of radical educational change, uprooting decades-old paradigms of teaching and learning that have outlived their effectiveness? That’s the question underlying the discussion—or "distributed conversation"—taking place on a number of tech-oriented teacher blogs.

Literacy teacher-cum-Web enthusiast Doug of Borderland, for one, acknowledges he is doubtful that interactive technology can make immediate inroads into most classrooms. What with accountability and testing requirements, he says, most teachers are too “overloaded with a barrage of demands that limit their openness to new self-selected challenges.”

Plus, he notes, not everyone’s on board with the revolution:

I made a presentation about blogs to a group of teachers last summer. After I talked for probably too long, a woman raised her hand and asked, “Why would anyone want to do this?” I didn’t know what else to say. You either see it, or you don’t. We lack consensus—not only for technology—but for our vision of schooling.

But then, as teachers are fond of saying, there are no dumb questions.

(Borderland)

Posted by at 2:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

New york-based teacher writingsam is forced to ponder the changing mores of students when, during a small-group writing workshop, one of her 4th graders nonchalantly asks her, “Are you a virgin?”

And the craziest part about it, was that the three students [in the workshop] didn't even respond, didn't even look up from their work, just continued on with correcting the paragraphs I had edited. It was almost as if asking your teacher if she's a virgin is equivalent to asking your teacher if she has a pencil.

As one of my coworkers always says, I wish my kids still had cooties. Instead, they're going to a school-hosted seminar with their parents about HIV/AIDS, nonchalantly asking their teachers if they're virgins, and bringing condoms to school. In the fourth grade.

(clean up on the aisle of life.)

Posted by at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

"Epiphany in Baltimore," a 28-year old high school English teacher in Charm City who also works as a waiter to pay his bills, recently learned something about matters of the heart vis-a-vis his punishing schedule:

At CPR/First Aid training on Saturday, our instructor told us that the five jobs most affected by stress resulting in heart problems are police officer, lawyer, doctor, fire fighter, and... of course, teacher. All these people have no set schedule, and live for the sake of others. I'm reminded of this fact as [I] ponder my 85-hour work week last week and look over the course of the next week, which also [is] going to be jam-packed.

Pop quiz: Which one of the above professions collects neither overtime nor six-figure salaries?

Got a mirror handy?

(Epiphany in Baltimore.)

Posted by Scott J. Cech, Teacher Magazine at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Newoldschoolteacher vents after a bad day:

My one class … who never do their homework all just bombed a quiz today. A couple of them--ones who do work and/or listen in class--did fine. The rest BOMBED. One of them said that Abraham Lincoln, before he was a politician, was a MAILMAN. Someone else said a gardener. … They make me feel completely incompetent. They are OUT of control. Mainly there are 3 instigators, and the rest are happy to follow along. …

Parts of her post (including the title) aren't exactly what you'd call—well—nice. But then, we're fairly confident she's not the only teacher out there who's had a day like that.

(Oh, Snap.)

Posted by at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Konrad Glogowski, an elementary-level language arts teacher in Canada, writes that he saw an unusual phenomenon in his class the other day that helped him corroborate his transformation as a teacher: His students were actually reading the comments he had written on the tests he passed back to them.

This wasn’t a coincidence or paranormal occurrence, he says, but the result of a change he has made in the way he responds to student work:

Why were they reading my comments? Why were they so involved? Well, after years of teaching and, what’s even more important, after two years of teaching within a classroom blogging community, I have finally learned to write comments. I stopped writing as someone who dispenses knowledge. I stopped writing as someone who cares only about syntax and organization and who has forgotten what it means to get lost in a good piece of writing. I stopped writing as someone who is reading to assign a grade. Instead, I started reading as someone who wants to learn, as someone who cares about ideas, as someone who wants to join a conversation.

He continues:

Personally, I have never learned anything from my teachers’ checkmarks or their efforts to summarize my work in one banal phrase, such as “Excellent,” “Well done!,” or “Keep up the good work!” I do not expect my students to take my comments seriously if they suggest to them that their work can be summed up in “Great effort!” So, I have learned how to respond to student work by unlearning how to respond to student work. I have learned to abandon my teacher voice and started responding as a reader.

(blog of proximal development).

Posted by at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Rachel Previs, an elementary education major at the College of William and Mary, hopes that, when she becomes a teacher, she’ll be able to balance her desire to be seen as a professional with her innate silliness:

I think teachers often get so swept into the fears of standardization and cramming information in that they forget to laugh every now and again with students. … I always think it’s a great thing to remember is to learn to laugh at yourself. Be prepared to make mistakes and embarass yourself, but learn to laugh it off!

Out of the mouths of babes ed. students. ...

(Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach).

Posted by at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)