Dews and Doughnuts

Yesterday in class, Jim listed his top 10 dews and doughnuts of teaching. These are the main ideas that Jim wanted us to take away from Educational Psychology. I really liked the list and will talk about a few of my favorite dews and doughnuts listed. First, I liked this dew "dew remember that money spent on books, travel, and adventure is never money wasted." I think that anything that will broaden your horizons and shape the way you think is a good thing. By reading, traveling, and having adventures you are opening yourself up to something totally new, which will end up giving you experiences to base your thoughts and actions upon. Doing this for students is an incredible gift to give because you are introducing these kids to something that could profoundly impact their lives.

Another dew: "Dew remember that most people don't get to their death bed and regret not having spent more time at the office." This is actually one of my life's mottos. I enjoy being busy and active, but I believe that in today's American culture work is stressed far to much. I think that being an adjunct professor at a community college and then doing some part-time research or conservation work that lets me get outside would be amazing. I'm sure that someday I'll want a full-time teaching spot somewhere or I'll become a naturalist, but when I'm young I want to have plenty of freedom to live. I think teachers need to apply this attidude to their students, also. Kids need more development than mental development, and if we give to much work they will be missing invaluable physical and social development. We not only need to help form strong minds, but happy and healty kids.

And a doughnut: "Doughnut forget that people are as happy as they make their minds up to be." I have found that when I decide to be happy, I am happy. When I am feeling down, it's usually because I have let something affect me to much and I can start feeling better with just a simple change of mindset. Even if a situation doesn't have many (if any) good aspects, a lesson can be learned from it in the end, which always gives me a sense of optomism. I think that we have the ability to teach someone how to change the way they are thinking about something so they can be more positive. Spending a little time in our classes to work on creating optimism will help our students out so much more than just teaching them the material.

iMovie Presentations

Last Monday, we watched iMovie projects that our classmates have been working hard on for weeks. I loved this idea, because, although I couldn't read every book, it let me experience what all the books were about. I learned a good deal about each book by seeing these presentations. In fact, some of the movies made me want to read the book they were about. I thought that every group did a great job.

One thing I enjoyed particularly about the iMovie presentation night was that others got a chance to see the movie I worked on. I do not want to sound conceited, but it was very rewarding when people commented that it was well-made, presented good ideas, and was fun. I think that all people like to have recognition of their work, and I think that including projects and activities in the classroom that give that work the opportunity to be recognized are beneficial. When I am an educator, I will incorporate ways for students to not only get involved with one another and work on projects like this, but to recieve feedback from their fellow students.

Also, for your viewing pleasure, I have put my group's youtube video on my sidebar.

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.

Mark London: Have We Reached the End of the Amazon

Tonight I went to one of the Paideia lectures. I was required to go as part of my J-term trip when I will be going to Ecuador (including the Amazon), but I would have attended it anyways because it's a very interesting topic. Mark London spoke about how he had not had much formal science education and how he didn't even know much about the Amazon before he went there. He said he just wanted to do something out of the ordinary, and a trip to the rainforest was about as unordinary as he could think. When he arrived, he just kind of went with the flow and discovered that he had a passion for the forest. He then traveled back to the states and returned to work at his law firm. He told a friend who worked for the Chicago Sun-Times about his trip and his friend suggested they both go there and do a series for the newspaper. Mark thought this was a good idea. However, the Sun-Times wouldn't fund just any trip: it had to be with the formost expert on the Amazon. So, that's that Mark and his friend portrayed Mark as. Then, Mark went to the library and read every book on the Amazon or South America or Rainforests that he could find. He also taught himself Portugese. Then then were able to go on the trip and become famous, yadda yadda.

Actually, the yadda yadda stuff is quite interesting, but it would make this post far too long, so I just want to write a bit about Mark's informal education. Although he knew next to nothing about the Amazon, London realized he had a passion for it's future and that he could do something to make that future a bit brighter. He did this in what sounds like a relatively simple way: he educated himself. The complication is that he educated himself about everything that might pertain to it. I think that, as teachers, we will have students who have this kind of drive, but they will likely all differ in what moves them. As Woolfolk points out, we need to do what we can to support these interests. But, in some cases, they won't fit into our curriculum. This could happen by it not being "important enough" to teach about or, for us secondary teachers, it might not be in our subject area. In this case, I think it would be best if we could somehow incorporate our student's passions into our class. An English teacher could let the students choose what their argumentative research paper is about, or a History teacher could have the students do projects in which they could learn more about thier passions. We will have the opportunity to show our students that interests can span across subject lines.

October 13th Panel

So this post is a bit delayed, but I want to make it anyways. On October 13th, two administrators, one from the Decorah High School and one from the Decorah Middle School, came to talk to our class. I really thought they had interesting perspectives to communicate and I'm glad they came. I especially liked how they described "good teaching." Here are some things they said good teaching was: kids actively involved in class and know what they are learning; teachers facilitators, and are intentional and preplanned about what they are doing; teaching is about reaching all learners, not trying to fit students to bell curves; teachers are centered on the concepts of differentiation and individualism; and a connection with the kids-kids must know that the teachers care about them.

When we become teachers, we will need to know how to work with the administration, so I am glad that we had a chance to get to know the kinds of views an administrator would have. I was actually kind of surprised that they did not call No Child Left Behind bad. However, they didn't seem to wholeheartedly support it either. I am guessing that their view is that since NCLB is here and we need to comply with it, there is no use dissing it. But they would probably appreciate some changes to it.