Yesterday a co-worker told me that it seems like I've been at work every day this summer. :) I haven't been there every day, but I will say that I have been working a bit in the past few weeks. I've learned that I've got to do a better job with planning out my summer work. My brain has taken a vacation even if my body has not.
It's been difficult for me to focus. I don't know that a vacation away would cure me of my brain's holiday! In the meantime...I just found the muppets on YouTube. Gotta love Beaker! Enjoy!
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Change for the sake of progress
I have been thinking lately about teachers and their reasons for not changing things in their classrooms. Teachers are full of excuses (some of them good ones) for not changing habits of practice in their rooms. There are teachers in every school that are doing things virtually the same way they have done them for the past ten years. Now, that doesn't make them horrible teachers or horrible people. It makes them pretty average. They may or may not have a formula for success that doesn't need changing. BUT what happens when we apply the same thought process to the REAL WORLD...
Ten years ago, I didn't have a car and my friends catered me around during my senior year of college. Not one of my college professors used a projector or (God help us!) an interactive white board. There was no blackboard access. We used to depend on the phone--landline! to communicate urgent messages. If there was an emergency, you had better hope the radio broadcast the message. The only cell phone in my life was a big one my dad bought for his work travels. Internet? Well, I was accessing email through dial-up at my apartment. Internet research? I was able to do more of that from school with a higher speed access. It wasn't a google started search though...strictly databases. The Internet wasn't so much for entertainment or daily information YET. I had a part time job at the continuing education office-then underneath the cafeteria- setting up video conferencing courses and video-taping them for archiving purposes. I spent lots of money xeroxing articles to take home for research papers AND to make copies of my papers for classmates to critique. I relied on email to remain in touch with friends abroad and had no inexpensive way to contact them. If a group of us had to write a paper, we had to sit together and hash it out face to face in a small room in the library. If we were lucky, the small room had a white board to help us outline in multiple colors! Paper maps were the way to find your way from place to place. I guess we called places for directions...did we have mapquest 10 years ago? Sharing pictures meant printing them out in multiple copies. Sharing video? Are you crazy? If somebody wanted to know more about me, they had to ask me or ask around at school...maybe if they saw my room they could surmise some conclusions from the posters on my wall or the cds stacked next to my boom box. CDs--the storage! and VHS--the quality!
Things have changed in ten years.
DVDs & cell phones & Internet & search engines & wikis & blogs & online course management systems (blackboard, angel) & MWC becoming UMW & UMW opening a graduate campus NOT underneath the cafeteria! We can email documents to each other rather than mailing them or making a bajillion copies! We can meet in virtual spaces online without too much trouble. Everybody has a cell phone. We complain about those people that share 1,001 photos of little baby joe taking his first steps. YouTube is highly entertaining...Napster came, went, and came again. Mapquest! GPS systems in your car and in your phone! Phones that are organizers and photo and video cameras! I have my very own car (yay!) and I'm not schlepping to a part time job anymore. DSL, Fios, Fiber?! Facebook & myspace...Thank goodness for HDTVs! & HD Programming...say goodbye to analog programming in just one more year...
Things have changed and I'm not even talking about the classroom.
Teachers resist change and cite that there is 'no need' for change. Why fix it when it ain't broke?
I'll tell you why. Change can equal progress.
Progress indicates forward movement. Our schools and our students need some serious forward movement.
Do we expect our children to succeed in today's world in the classrooms of AT LEAST ten years ago?
How can we depend so highly on things like cell phones, mp3 players (ipods), cable, high speed internet access, DVD players, GPS, computers, cars with fancier computers than the mechanics of ten years ago could fix, digital information management, online shopping and banking, email, texting, etc...and yet resist them in our professional environment? What kind of real world environment are we providing our students to not have the very things that shape our real lives as part of their instruction? Our schools need to experience a change so progressive and so profound that it would be monumental--a complete shift in educational practice and theory! But the thing is, we are living in that world already. That shift has already occurred in our real lives. Change has equated to progress in our real lives...so what is up with our schools?
I think I was inspired to write this post by the cell phone touting, email checking, chatty teachers from a class I was teaching a few weeks ago. I bit my tongue to not fuss at them like 7th graders. I wanted to say, "Do you see yourselves? You would NEVER let your students walk in with a cell phone, an iPod! You would kick the email checking, IMing student out of your room!" Why are we granted one level of expectation and our kids another? Are we really protecting them? Is that truly the best excuse anybody can offer? Because I think we're punishing them...they are not learning to effectively multi-task. They are bored with worksheets...I mean SERIOUSLY!! It's not that it bothered me that they were exploring and multi-tasking. It bothered me that the same people doing these things are the teachers that YELL at their kids for similar behaviors. They are SHOCKED that kids would think to carry their cell phones when we tell them not to. They cannot believe that they would dare to use a proxy to get around the filter. OMG! But why is it okay for them? Perhaps because it is a part of them that they can't disable while sitting in a classroom. Perhaps it is a part of their life and their need to communicate and work and multi-task...so again, why are we yelling at kids for doing the same thing?
I had some incredible teachers (Mr. Holder, Mr. Hills, Ms. Yalen, Ms. Mills, Ms. Wilson, Mr. Head & others) without all of the technology stuff that is available now, but they drew us in to the real world experience through projects, discussions, problem solving...many of the 21st century skills in the 20th century environment. But perhaps the integration would have been fluid in project choice, podcasts of important class lectures, notes posted online in a wiki for the class to modify...the curriculum would have been enhanced. It's not about change for the sake of change. It's about change for the sake of progress.
Ten years ago, I didn't have a car and my friends catered me around during my senior year of college. Not one of my college professors used a projector or (God help us!) an interactive white board. There was no blackboard access. We used to depend on the phone--landline! to communicate urgent messages. If there was an emergency, you had better hope the radio broadcast the message. The only cell phone in my life was a big one my dad bought for his work travels. Internet? Well, I was accessing email through dial-up at my apartment. Internet research? I was able to do more of that from school with a higher speed access. It wasn't a google started search though...strictly databases. The Internet wasn't so much for entertainment or daily information YET. I had a part time job at the continuing education office-then underneath the cafeteria- setting up video conferencing courses and video-taping them for archiving purposes. I spent lots of money xeroxing articles to take home for research papers AND to make copies of my papers for classmates to critique. I relied on email to remain in touch with friends abroad and had no inexpensive way to contact them. If a group of us had to write a paper, we had to sit together and hash it out face to face in a small room in the library. If we were lucky, the small room had a white board to help us outline in multiple colors! Paper maps were the way to find your way from place to place. I guess we called places for directions...did we have mapquest 10 years ago? Sharing pictures meant printing them out in multiple copies. Sharing video? Are you crazy? If somebody wanted to know more about me, they had to ask me or ask around at school...maybe if they saw my room they could surmise some conclusions from the posters on my wall or the cds stacked next to my boom box. CDs--the storage! and VHS--the quality!
Things have changed in ten years.
DVDs & cell phones & Internet & search engines & wikis & blogs & online course management systems (blackboard, angel) & MWC becoming UMW & UMW opening a graduate campus NOT underneath the cafeteria! We can email documents to each other rather than mailing them or making a bajillion copies! We can meet in virtual spaces online without too much trouble. Everybody has a cell phone. We complain about those people that share 1,001 photos of little baby joe taking his first steps. YouTube is highly entertaining...Napster came, went, and came again. Mapquest! GPS systems in your car and in your phone! Phones that are organizers and photo and video cameras! I have my very own car (yay!) and I'm not schlepping to a part time job anymore. DSL, Fios, Fiber?! Facebook & myspace...Thank goodness for HDTVs! & HD Programming...say goodbye to analog programming in just one more year...
Things have changed and I'm not even talking about the classroom.
Teachers resist change and cite that there is 'no need' for change. Why fix it when it ain't broke?
I'll tell you why. Change can equal progress.
Progress indicates forward movement. Our schools and our students need some serious forward movement.
Do we expect our children to succeed in today's world in the classrooms of AT LEAST ten years ago?
How can we depend so highly on things like cell phones, mp3 players (ipods), cable, high speed internet access, DVD players, GPS, computers, cars with fancier computers than the mechanics of ten years ago could fix, digital information management, online shopping and banking, email, texting, etc...and yet resist them in our professional environment? What kind of real world environment are we providing our students to not have the very things that shape our real lives as part of their instruction? Our schools need to experience a change so progressive and so profound that it would be monumental--a complete shift in educational practice and theory! But the thing is, we are living in that world already. That shift has already occurred in our real lives. Change has equated to progress in our real lives...so what is up with our schools?
I think I was inspired to write this post by the cell phone touting, email checking, chatty teachers from a class I was teaching a few weeks ago. I bit my tongue to not fuss at them like 7th graders. I wanted to say, "Do you see yourselves? You would NEVER let your students walk in with a cell phone, an iPod! You would kick the email checking, IMing student out of your room!" Why are we granted one level of expectation and our kids another? Are we really protecting them? Is that truly the best excuse anybody can offer? Because I think we're punishing them...they are not learning to effectively multi-task. They are bored with worksheets...I mean SERIOUSLY!! It's not that it bothered me that they were exploring and multi-tasking. It bothered me that the same people doing these things are the teachers that YELL at their kids for similar behaviors. They are SHOCKED that kids would think to carry their cell phones when we tell them not to. They cannot believe that they would dare to use a proxy to get around the filter. OMG! But why is it okay for them? Perhaps because it is a part of them that they can't disable while sitting in a classroom. Perhaps it is a part of their life and their need to communicate and work and multi-task...so again, why are we yelling at kids for doing the same thing?
I had some incredible teachers (Mr. Holder, Mr. Hills, Ms. Yalen, Ms. Mills, Ms. Wilson, Mr. Head & others) without all of the technology stuff that is available now, but they drew us in to the real world experience through projects, discussions, problem solving...many of the 21st century skills in the 20th century environment. But perhaps the integration would have been fluid in project choice, podcasts of important class lectures, notes posted online in a wiki for the class to modify...the curriculum would have been enhanced. It's not about change for the sake of change. It's about change for the sake of progress.
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