Eating in Place

On November 21 I went to the "Local Foods: the Story of Eating in Place" lecture. Although I did learn some on how to go about eating local, it was really a bad and uninspired lecture. Going into the lecture I thought it would be pretty interactive and that it would convey a lot of practical knowledge. It did neither of these. The lecture, which was based on the book of the same name, consisted of a good 10 minute introduction and then each contributing author of the book just read what they had contributed. The introduction was really the only educational part of the lecture. The man who did this part really gave a good amount of information for someone who is looking to begin to eat local. However, the rest of the lecture was terrible. The contributing authors stood at the podium and read straight from the book what they had written. To make matters worse, they all thought what they had written was funnier than it actually was. Although it was a pretty bad way to spend a couple hours of my Thursday night, I did learn something about education: you can't expect to hold attention or inspire if you just get up and talk. I am pretty sure I will never forget how slow and painful that lecture was. I hope that it will always give me a perspective that helps me realize the importance of having interactive and dynamic classes.

First Half of Chalk

We watched the first half of the movie "Chalk" in our Monday night class this week. So far it has really been an entertaining movie. Although it was funny, it had specific relevance to educators also. One concept from the movie that I want to bring up is the concept of teachers dating each other. I just want to point out that I am writing this without having seen the whole film. When we were introduced to the possibility of a romance between the gym teacher and the newer social studies teacher, I was thinking it would just be a fun twist. However, I thought about my own school in rural Iowa and realized that many of my teachers were married to fellow teachers and that many younger teachers were dating each other. The intraschool relationship that I dealt with most was my chemistry and physics teacher, who is married to our French teacher. What enables me to see if this changes teaching is that his wife started with our school my senior year, and I could find no difference between my science teacher before his wife was in the same school district as he was and after she began teaching there. So, I really don't think that relationships between teachers is a big deal, but I think the teachers need to know how to handle students. An example, I remember one of my friends joking to my science teacher about him and his wife sneaking back into the lab stockroom during breaks. I really can't remember what happened after this, but I know that there really weren't any problems of distractions throughout the year. Hopefully I'm in a large enough place where the only young single girls aren't teaching at my school, also.

November 10th Panel

I am very glad that we were able to have a panel with some parents from the Decorah community. All teachers will need to know how to work well with parents. I really like the way that one panelist put it that the teacher, the student, and the student's family are a team trying to get the student to learn.

I think that many future teachers are more nervous about dealing with parents than they should be. I know that it will be intimidating in some cases, but nearly every parent will be supportive if you seem like you truly want to help their child. I think that students going through Luther's education program shouldn't have much trouble interacting with parents because it teaches us how to become competent at our material and how to best care for and help our students.

I thought it was interesting to see the varying degrees of teacher-parent interaction among the panelists. One of the parents, while involved enough, did not crowd in on his children's school life. I think that that would work well if the children are generally high achievers and feel confident in telling their parents what's up at school. One of the other panelists was a bit more involved, but she had children who had special needs. I think that it may be necessary to be more involved in this child's school life because the teacher might not know exactly how to approach their weaknesses. Also, the child may not be as open to their parents about problems at school. As future teachers, we need to know how to work with parents to help their kids learn and feel comfortable with themselves.