Category Archives: Issues

Issues

More Than Texts

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As he was leaving today, a student paid a compliment to my Hero with a Thousand Faces class.  I’m not sure if I was meant to respond to the comment.  I didn’t.  We were chatting about our schedule on Thursday, which differs from a usual Thursday schedule for a lot of reasons that aren’t germane to this post.  The student said something about liking the usual Thursday schedule because he can come in late (he’s a senior and must not have a class before mine) and go to a class that’s about more than just the text.

I have not given a lot of assignments in this class, but we have engaged in some deep discussions about Joseph Campbell and his ideas, and we are delving into a serious discussion of Star Wars at the moment.  I really enjoy the class.  Even without the carrot (or the stick) of grades looming over the students, they do the work, are involved in class discussion, and are engaged in the material.  I conduct the class more like a college seminar than a standard required English class precisely because it is an elective.

The same student mentioned looking up information about Star Wars at home in his free time, completely unprompted by me, so he could learn more about it.  He was impressed by the sheer amount of information online.  Another student picked up the Harry Potter series for the first time because he was intrigued by some of the class discussion of how Rowling’s work displays Campbell’s influence.

A colleague of mine, a science teacher who often participates in the discussion and has really become a co-teacher in the class, has added so much to the class just by her enthusiasm and presence, often filling in gaps in information I have.  I am not sure how the class would have differed without her presence because she has added so much to our discussion and to our understanding of the subject matter.  She participates in the class during her planning time, which effectively causes her to lose time she could spend grading or planning lessons.  I think the students have really come to appreciate her presence a great deal, and they miss her when she is unable to come.

I’m not sure if the student realized what a compliment I considered his statement.  Some might interpret his words to mean we’re not doing enough “English” in the course, but I understood him to mean that we are engaged in larger discussions and conversations that involve the text, but also go beyond the text and are stimulating in some way he found it difficult to express in other words.

One of my goals in this class is to transform the way students read literature and watch movies, and I feel good about my progress toward reaching that goal.

Blogging, Issues

Grouch Alert

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I am becoming increasingly irritated with requests, nay offers, from people I don’t know to do guest posts on my blog.  Let me get this straight.  You are offering me the opportunity to loan you my blog to promote your [fill in the blank] in exchange for…. what?  Decreased control over the content on my site?  Decreased respectability among members of the education blogging community?  The opportunity to look like a shill?  Let me get this straight, you want to borrow my blog, which I have built up to a fairly decent size, respectability, and readership over three and half years, in order to promote yourself because you are too lazy to do the exact same thing?  And to top it off, you have the nerve to make the request without reading my site policies, which clearly state that I do not accept guest posts?  Clearly you aren’t familiar enough with my site to make such outrageous requests, or you would have seen this policy declaration, which is not hidden.  To prove how accessible it is, I won’t even link it, and I’ll just see if any readers have trouble finding it.  If you do, let me know, and I will make it even more obvious.

Can you believe the gall of some people?  I can’t be the only education blogger who gets these requests.  What do the rest of you do?  I said I would ignore them, but they make me so mad that I respond with a link to my policies.  Should I just ignore them, or call them out on their rudeness and obvious lack of knowledge of the site they’re requesting to grace with their presence?

Issues, Technology

The Value of Floundering Around

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Searching the NetI have been plagued with a question over the last few days.  When students ask me questions about computers (mostly software, how-to type questions), I most often take the easy path and show or tell them.  But they don’t remember how to do it later.  So the question that’s been on my mind is how much should I let my students flounder around and try to figure things out?  I mean, that’s how I learned my way around a computer.  I poked and tried until I got it to do what I wanted to.  Sometimes it took hours.  But later on, I was able to do it on my own.  I value that learning in myself, but I don’t think I am fostering it in my students.  If they ask me answers to problems or issues that come up with their reading or writing, I don’t always show or tell.  Sometimes I throw the questions back or tell them to think through it a little harder.  So why don’t I do that with computers?  Should I do that with computers?

To that end, I began a new feature in my classroom blog called Tech Tips.  Each week, I will explain how to do something.  I have already subscribed all my students to the blog, so ostensibly, they should have access to the tips and can make of them what they will.  One of my frustrations as a teacher is how little my students appear to use the classroom blog.  I haven’t yet become so frustrated I felt I should just quit, but I have come close.  Which brings to mind another frustration I have.  Students are willing to learn how to use Facebook or IM, but it frustrates me that they won’t poke around my site and learn to use it as well as they do other tools.

I do think it’s valuable to flounder around and even fail for a while before you get it.  So how do I put that into practice without feeling like I’m being unhelpful?

Creative Commons License photo credit: macluke170

Issues, Technology

Twitter Redux

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OK, I asked before what the big deal is, and I suppose I cannot assuage my curiosity unless I actually try it out, so first I watched this video:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ddO9idmax0o" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

And I signed up for a Twitter account, and you can follow me if you like.

I think the true impetus for getting an account is that my husband now uses Twitter, and I can’t stand it when he one ups me technologically speaking.

Delicious and Diigo, Issues

Education and the Web? Not Really

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One of the first classes in my IT program is a course entitled Education and the Web.  Based on the title alone, it was the one class I was really looking forward to because the title led me to believe it would treat up-to-date tools and uses of the Web in education.  How silly of me to leap to that conclusion.

My problem with the class is that I am not learning anything useful about Web tools or education-related sites.  One assignment I found particularly pointless dealt with the difference between the Web and the Internet which basically required some background reading on the history of the Internet (and the Web… because it’s critical for our purposes that we get the difference).  It was mildly interesting, but I didn’t advance my knowledge of how I can use the Web in education.  My biggest issue so far, however, is with the journal of Web sites.  I am required to collect and categorize a minimum of 50 Web sites that are useful in education, providing a link to the URL and a brief description of the site.  OK, no problem.  I am required to do it in Excel.  Can someone please tell me why, in a course called Education and the Web, they didn’t think to ask us to use a social bookmarking service like Delicious?  Delicious would enable me to collect and categorize through tagging.  It also allows for providing a brief description.  The URL and site name would be saved automatically.  What’s more, I could share all of my sites with my classmates as we could have been required to share and subscribe to each other’s feeds.  And we would be using the actual Web to learn more about Education and the Web.  Instead, I’m using Excel?  It reminds me of a remark Will Richardson made about presenters at NECC taking notes in Word.

This whole deal does not inspire confidence.  When the one class I thought might be most useful becomes the one I’m not learning anything from, what do I do?  Will my other classes similarly be at least five years behind the times?  Because that’s deadly for an instructional technology program, in my opinion.  I hope I get a chance to do a course evaluation.  I don’t have a problem with my instructor.  I’m not sure who wrote the course, but my perception is that a department of teachers all teach it at various times, so it may be that my instructor has had little input on the curriculum or it may be that my instructor created the curriculum.  Therefore, I am not sure whether it would be beneficial to advocate for myself and my learning by saying something to my instructor or advisor.  Some people would consider it useful constructive criticism and address the problem.  Others would see it as an attack.  I worry more about my classmates than I do about myself.  I have a pretty decent grasp of how to use the Web effectively for education, and because I keep up with so many savvy folks, I also know about some useful tools.  But what if my classmates were counting on learning the same kind of information in this class?

Issues, Recommended Reading, Technology

Tom Discusses Teacher Shortcuts

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I really enjoyed Tom Woodward’s recent post “There Are No Shortcuts at Bionic Teaching,” but I left a comment that really didn’t say all I was thinking.

Tom mentions using fun fonts to make boring content exciting (and has particular ire for Comic Sans).  I have been known to use fun fonts, but I hope I graduated from using them to disguise boring content many years ago.  One of the main issues I had with a recent word processing assignment I did for one of my grad school classes is that it was intended only to see if I could do a variety of different tasks in Word rather than make something attractive, interesting, and substantial in Word.  The resulting document looked like an aesthetic mess to me because I had to single space, double space, triple space; use three different fonts; prove I could bold, italicize, and underline text; and manipulate images for different effects.  I didn’t wind up with a document I could use for anything later.  In fact, I was embarrassed by how it looked (I was following the directions to the letter).  The content was not an important part of the assignment.  I wound up riffing on what I was currently doing with Beowulf in my classes and putting a bunch of Beowulf-related pictures in the document.  I suppose I proved I can use Word to manipulate images and text, but I don’t think the assignment proved I can use it well to create a document that has substantial content and an attractive design.

That said, I don’t use Comic Sans because I teach high school, and I consider it an elementary font, but I don’t have any particular hatred for it.  Still, I think Tom’s larger idea is that some of us create documents that are crammed full of proof that we can manipulate images and text, but that contain little substantial content.  In the interest of full disclosure, though I labored over this decision, you can download a PDF of the document I created here, but I removed my required heading because I think it’s the polite thing to do.  I also removed the file name from the footer because even though my files cannot be accessed except by my teachers and me, I don’t want to give folks who are interested the encouragement to try to break into my files.  By the way, inserting the file name in the footer of only the last page was the only new thing I learned in doing this assignment.  How useful a skill is it?  I don’t know.  We’ll have to see.

Tom also skewers using technology to make a boring assignment interesting.  Too many teachers fall prey to this trap with Power Point.  I have seen more Power Point presentations that make me want to tear my eyes out!  I would much rather listen to someone talk without visuals at all than view a poorly designed Power Point.  I think this guy captures Death by Power Point really well:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/lpvgfmEU2Ck" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

And this guy shows how you can use it effectively to enhance a presentation:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/vXFi7AdhhGk" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I liked what Tom said about “digital native/digital immigrant” terminology.  I have yet to meet more than a handful of students who know as much or more about technology than I do, and that’s not boasting — it’s an observation.  Granted, I think I know a bit more than the average teacher, but everything I know I taught myself by playing around with it.  I haven’t worked with too many students who are willing to play around with a bit of code or a piece of software to see what happens.  To my discredit, I admit sometimes (a lot of times), I take the easy way out of showing them instead of letting them struggle with it a bit.  How much better would they learn if I asked them to teach themselves a bit?  Likewise, teachers labeling themselves digital immigrants can be a way of giving themselves a pass on being ignorant about technology.  I’m not saying teachers all need to be Vicki Davis (though she’s wonderful and it would be great if more of us were on her level), but I think we’re past the point at which it’s OK to be a complete luddite.

As an addendum to Tom’s admonition about “faking it,” as he did, I can say only that when you genuinely like and understand something the students like, and connection is genuine, it’s wonderful.  I don’t pretend to be up on everything my students listen to, but the ones who like classic rock know I’m a pretty good resource, and if they have a question, they ask me.  That’s genuine interest.  I can talk about my passions, and Tom is right — that’s what students are interested in seeing — not that I like what they like or that I’ve latched on to the latest trend in education.  I can remember vividly the occasions when I saw my teachers’ passions shared and finding what they had to say intriguing even if I didn’t necessarily share that passion.  A good case in point was a recent class of my own that was derailed by a passionate discussion between a visiting teacher and me about why it is important that “Han shot first.”  Truly, the students couldn’t have cared less about the issue (we are going to study Star Wars in that class beginning next week — it’s my Hero elective class), and most of them haven’t even seen the movie (!!!), but they remarked later on how interesting the discussion was.  I felt like a failure after letting my class go off on such a long tangent (we discussed The Iliad very little that day), but perhaps it will be valuable in some other way down the road.  At any rate, they saw two individuals talk about an issue they both knew a lot about and felt really strongly about, and I think their interest in studying the movie is piqued.  And I suppose we were both certainly really ourselves in front of the students.

If you want to a see a teacher who is passionate about what he does and uses technology effectively not only to create handouts that are informative and attractive but also to have his students create thoughtful presentations with Power Point, you need to check out my friend Joe Scotese’s site.  He blows me away.  To me, Joe is a perfect of example of avoiding the shortcuts Tom discusses in his post.  At any rate, Tom’s post resonated with me so strongly that all I could really do was agree at the time.  After spending a couple of days thinking about it, I decided that for all the reasons I have discussed, Tom’s shortcuts shortchange our students, and they don’t make us good teachers or help our students learn.

Blogging, Issues

Busy!

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I started my master’s degree on Monday, and I have been so busy!  I had a problem with direct deposit and my student loan, so I had to wait until today to get a new computer for school.  The nice Mac iBook that Betsy gave me months ago died.  It made me very sad.  Well, I probably needed to go ahead and get a new computer for school because of the type of degree I’m pursuing.  For those of you who joined me late or forgot, I’m working on an ITMA (Instructional Technology Master’s Degree) at Virginia Tech.  So far, I am enjoying the program, although I had trouble doing assignments at school because I was so frequently interrupted.  One of our first assignments (which is fairly common, I would imagine, among online programs) was to introduce ourselves to our classmates via a listserv.  It looks like I will be learning with some interesting folks.  Some of us have already found each other on Facebook. I already submitted a few assignments.  I think as I go further into the program, I will begin to learn more interesting things.  It looks like the introductory classes are designed to make sure everyone has the requisite skills, so they’re not too challenging, but as I’ve taken on a leadership role in my department at school, it’s good for me to start slow.

Speaking of which, I am enjoying my role as department chair.  My department is hard-working and professional, and just a real treat to work with.  I think at this point we’re all just about done with summer reading.  I am really enjoying my Hero with a Thousand Faces elective.  I set up a closed network for the class on Ning, and I really like it.

I mentioned I bought a new computer.  One of my students told me that a former student of mine works at the Apple store at the mall not far from our school.  I messaged him on Facebook with several questions, and he was so helpful.  I bought a computer from him today — it’s a new MacBook.  I am totally in love with it.  I was able to get a free iPod Touch (as part of a promotion for college students and eductators).  Well, it will be free once I get the rebate.  I wish I had been able to afford the printer today — it, too, would have been free, but I had to purchase it first and then obtain the rebate, and I couldn’t quite swing it.  However, I do feel ready for school now, and perhaps I’ll feel a little less frantic.  Also, I might actually be able to update this blog once in a while.

For those of you who haven’t heard the news, it looks like local school system Clayton County has indeed lost their accreditation.  It’s very sad for the students and the teachers that the board leadership so mishandled the system’s affairs that SACS felt they had no other choice.  I am warily allowing comments on this post regarding this sad news, but I remind new visitors that unless you abide by the posted comments policy, your comment will not appear.

Issues, Recommended Reading, Teaching Literature

Is Online Reading Really Reading?

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The New York Times has an interesting article about how literacy is changing as more teens read online.  I am obviously an English teacher, and I have a lot invested in books, but I also read a lot online, and I see the value.  What do you think?

Issues

Twiggs County Schools Reinstating Corporal Punishment

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Twiggs County Schools, a small system in Middle Georgia, is reinstating corporal punishment.  As a first year teacher, I taught English at Twiggs County High School.  They definitely had a major problem with discipline at that time.  In fact, I’ve never seen anything more insane in my life.  However, violence in the form of gang activity was already a huge part of the students’ lives.  I’m not sure what Twiggs needs to do to fix their discipline problem, but I’m not sure hitting kids is going to have the effect they’re after.

Issues

A Sticky Problem: Teachers and Grammar

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Laura Diamond at the AJC’s education blog Get Schooled discusses a sticky problem: teachers who use poor grammar in communication with parents.

Many of us admit we have poor grammar and horrible spelling skills. So why do so many of us get concerned when we see these same faults in teachers?

Can you respect a teacher with poor grammar? Do you worry he or she won’t be a good teacher?

OK, so I admit I make typos on occasion, and I’ve even done it on handouts or assignments.  If I catch them I correct them, but there have been times when I haven’t caught them because I didn’t proofread carefully.  However, when I send e-mails to parents, I always proofread carefully.  I am acutely aware that parents will have little faith in an English teacher who makes grammatical mistakes, and if my children had such a teacher, I would be concerned.  I suppose my answer to Laura Diamond’s question depends on how bad the mistakes are.  If I see an obvious typo in a teacher’s communication to me, I’m forgiving.  If I see embarrassing grammar mistakes that indicate the problem is not proofreading but knowledge of grammar, I do question whether or not the teacher can be effective.  Engaging students is great, but if you don’t have good communication skills, how much knowledge are you going to be able to impart?  Honestly, good communication skills apply to everyone, and all teachers ostensibly have college degrees; therefore, I don’t think it is expecting too much to insist that they be able to communicate using proper grammar.

Teachers are also our models.  When I was young, it never occurred to me that a teacher could be wrong about a fact.  If my teacher said it, I thought it must be so, and when I was presented for the first time with evidence to the contrary, I remember questioning the accuracy of that evidence!  I don’t think teachers need to be perfect, but they do need to be aware of how much stock students put into what they say and do, especially in elementary school.

Have you encountered this problem?  What’s your take?