Collaging is Fun!!

I Reflecting back on collaging (which, fyi, Pages in iWork does not think is a valid verb - silly Pages....)- ok, so it’s been a few weeks, but better late than never, right?  I’ve been trying to figure out what lessons I can take from this assignment and the ensuing discussion over the following weeks, and it’s a bit hard for me.  Personally, I always hated school projects growing up - they always seemed like a lot of work to me, and usually pointless work at that.  In my mindset, why do I need to go through the effort of creating a physical object when I can just have a test on whatever was supposed to be learned, and do just fine on said test? (I can’t honestly remember having more than a dozen or two difficult tests in all my schooling until I got to college, where they got so hard the word test just wasn’t sufficient any more.)  Projects were just always sooo hard for me.  So one thing I learned in this assignment is that 6th grade work (collaging, in my mind, fits in this category) is a heck of a lot easier in 18th or 19th grade.  I mean, let’s go back to vocabulary tests every friday and geometry quizzes, and life would just be a whole lot easier.  But seriously, how do I apply what I’ve taken away from this to my teaching?  I think for one thing, I can realize that everyone has an intricate set of life experiences that shape who and what they are in this moment.  Somehow, taking the time to appreciate this fact, be it with a future student or coworker, or anyone for that matter, seems to allow me to appreciate that person more, even if I can’t relate to any of their particular disparate life experiences.  Another thing that strikes me is that this project was pretty easy to do because it dealt with just about all of the things that I am interested in.  I know it doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary, but one of the things that I’ll be working on is trying to figure out how to make math seem interesting and/or important to my students.  Another thing I might try - although I’m not certain about this yet, as I haven’t yet been in a classroom - is to get my students to share a little about themselves (probably not to the extent of our project, but something) with the hope that learning about one another will build a bond of mutual respect or appreciation, and maybe this can translate in caring about class?  I don’t know, it’s a stretch, but maybe worth a try.  This is all for now.

Another Blog Entry

Here’s a thought that just occurred to me - I’ll throw it out there to see what you think.  I just got back from work - I had a short 3-hour day before I came back home with an unusual amount of free time with which to do homework before I have to get ready to go to class tonight. (That is, about 2 1/2 hours)  Well, here I am, blogging, trying to get caught up from all of those days when I finished work with no time left to take care of school work (this honestly seems like every working day) and I’m reflecting on how easy I actually have it.  By this I mean to say that, while my job is by no means always easy mentally or physically, I can survive with my one job.  An 8- or 10- hour day may for me, four to six days a week assures that I won’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from or how I will make rent this month.  I have never in my life had to take a night shift job to supplement my income from my day shift employment.  I am extremely lucky.  So I sit here and remember a conversation we had a few months ago about educators who judge some of their students’ parents who don’t seem very involved in their children’s academic lives.  Why?  Because they don’t show up to things like parent-teacher conferences.  But while I might otherwise have been one of those educators out of ignorance, I know that I will never be one now.  How could I, who finds it so hard to find time to do my own schoolwork right now, while working no more than 50 hours a week and taking only two classes, ever be so arrogant as to pass judgement on parents, most of whom are doing the very best they can - some of which will be working 12-hour days or even as many as 16 hours, to make ends meet.  I guarantee you my school production would be seriously inhibited under these circumstances, and if I had children, I can’t imagine that I’d be able to make it to rigidly- timed conferences during work hours or immediately after.  (We’ll leave out for the moment some of the other issues mentioned in class about lack of transportation et. al.)  Maybe knowing some of these hardships, I can now try to take steps to try to involve parents who would like to know how their children are doing, but cannot adjust to my school’s schedule.  Sometimes I feel like half our job as urban educators will simply be thinking creatively outside the box.

The Pedegogy of Procrastination

Greetings, fellow future-teacher procrastinators!  So I was just here reflecting about how, like the good college student that I was, and now the good grad student that I am, I have picked up and perfected the art of “putting off for tomorrow what should be done today,” of squeezing every last second out of a loose deadline, so long as I got the work in before an automatic F would result from turning it in later.  I then started thinking about how, going into teaching, at least in my experience, not much will change.  Come on, we can all remember teachers we’ve had throughout the years who put off deadlines, handed assignments and other materials late, and took 2 extra weeks getting those tests and papers back to us (for some of us, this was torture, for others, a blessing in disguise).  So relax, sit back, and keep procrastinating, because our fellow teachers 2 years from now will be doing the same things, right?  Well, maybe.  But something about this seems wrong to me.  How will we, as educators, expect homework to be turned in, papers to be written, projects to be presented and exams to be studied for in a timely manner, if we ourselves aren’t performing our educational administrative duties in a timely manner?  If there’s one thing I know about kids, it’s that they can absolutely smell hypocrisy from a mile away.  “Do as I say, not as I do” never works well for anyone, let alone young students.  So I propose we (or maybe just me, if I am honestly the only one) get our acts together, and start training to lead by example in the punctuality department.  I think this might just be one of our most important demonstrative jobs as educators.