An Observation

Well this Monday we finally got set out on a trip to the elementary school. All I can say is this “man time flies.” I felt like we did not spend enough time in the class.

The teacher it seemed gave off a sense that she was someone to be respected. The students did what was asked of them without any complications. The teacher handled one situation in which one of the students was running in class, which is against classroom rules, simply and without making a big deal about it. She did not raise her voice but simply reminded the student that he’s not supposed to do that; the student walked back to his table then walked back to where he was running to. It was interesting that within the first five minutes of class the teacher had established what they were going to be doing that day and broke the class up into groups and everyone went their way to the station they we assigned.

Sydney and Daniela jumped right into it with helping out the students at their stations. I am a little bit more laid back and mostly just observed what was going on. But somehow I missed a lot of things in the class. Sydney and Daniela who were busy helping students caught things I hadn’t noticed. It wasn’t until we reconvened out of class when we were talking about what we observed that I realized how much I missed. I hadn’t noticed that the teacher was simultaneously teaching students at one station while also keeping track of the students at the other station. The teacher used new technology to enhance the learning experience of the students but not relying too much on it; that in my opinion could also hinder learning if used too much. The room was much more spread out and colorful and not dull and cramped.

Teachers need to be able to multitask, observe and keep track of their students, and help each individual student understand the content. I feel like I need to work on this much more if I want to be able to teacher a class. Working for RFKC has helped me tremendously but I still need to sharpen my skills in this area.

The things that I noticed happened outside the classroom unfortunately they were, at least in my opinion, not positive. I overheard a conversation that they still had silent lunches and the other I observed that students were accompanied by teachers everywhere they go and in straight lines without talking. Maybe it’s just me but I remember when they first implemented this in my elementary school.

We were not accompanied by teachers everywhere we went, we didn’t have to go everywhere in a straight line, and we could talk at lunch without being told only students who didn’t “act up” could talk. The best way I can put it is that it was a lot like high school for kids. Kids in middle school would always talk about going into high school like a prison mate talks about getting out of jail. The student was entrusted with more freedoms without having teachers constantly monitoring them. In the same way that was how my elementary school was.

Then one year we were told that we to be accompanied by a teacher everywhere we went, always in a straight line with a finger over our lips and with cameras lining every hall every ten yards. We were never allowed to talk at lunch and if we did there was a teacher with a bad temper with a megaphone yelling at us and we were not allowed to go out to our twenty minute recess. They also enforced a strict dress code that if broken you were not allowed to go into the school. They also introduced new strict word bans and anyone who broke them, even if they were just joking, was severely punished.  

This is the main reason why my family moved to the other side of the state, for a better education. Education is so incredibly important that people will move to another part of the state they live in or to another part of the country for their child’s education. This is not a small or light thing to talk about. I know I sometimes focus too much on the negative instead of the positive. After reading so many blogs about our experiences almost every one of them had positive and enlightening thoughts on what we observed but I feel like someone has to say something negative, to give a different view point on the subject. This is the reason I sometimes act so hostile towards schools when I see them implementing anything that resembles what my own school did. School is supposed to be a place of learning, a place where a student shouldn’t have to be afraid that he may say or do something against “policy” that will get him into a lot of trouble. School is supposed to be a comfortable and safe place to learn not a prison to escape from.

Anchor

This week has probably been the hardest week I’ve had in a long time. Four tests, five projects, a hundred pages of studying terms I can’t even pronounce, and the urge to put all of them off and do nothing. I’m up to my neck in projects, tests, and research studying but no one said life was easy. I think when times are tough and you are being tested physically and mentally on a regular basis it’s important to have something to hold on to that renews your determination to come up on top otherwise we crumble.

Why are we doing this? There are plenty of others jobs out there, why this one? We could have taken an easier journey, the one most traveled.

We knew to challenges, or we do now, so what do we do with it?

What is it that will keep us moving forward when we face the first sign of resistance? This is just the first wave, they get bigger as we move forward.

Many of us know or have an obscure notion of why we chose this path. It’s important to never forget it. And it needs to be a good reason, a strong one to stand against the cold winds that blow hard on our faces as we climb this mountain.

They say being a teacher is not a job it is an art. It is not reading from the approved text and blandly reading it word for word hoping the students will just “get it.” Plutarch says that “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited.” We are to be the match that lights the fire.

It wasn’t until recently after these questions came to my mind that I found that thing that we hold onto when times get tough. For everyone it is different, for some it is their love of children, others it is a sense of duty, mine is a bit different. Mine is fear, a fear for the future and the future generations. It has become common for many students to accept ideas and teachings without question. I watched a hidden video of a class at the University of California where a student stood up and said to the professor “just tell me what to believe and I’ll believe it even if it doesn’t make sense” to which all the student shook their heads in agreement. I’ve seen similar videos before at other universities as well. Maybe it’s just me, I’m a bit paranoid sometimes, but I fear the surrender of our free will and individuality. But I hold on to this and it helps me when days are hard to know why I’m here and why I’m doing this.

As teachers we carry one of the biggest burdens knowing that we are responsible for teaching the next generation. They will make the laws, run the businesses, and teach the generation after them in a long and unending cycle. We carry this burden. There are days when I frown when I see some of these people in schools we call teachers and then there days when I see our own class and the students in it who will become teachers and smile.

TTLF Tonight Show

            Hello and welcome you’re tuning into Teacher: The Last Frontier. I’m your host Dalton Blackmon and I’m joined today by my colleague Augustus Phluareo. Last week on TTLF we reported on the future of teaching and technology this week we will be reviewing the last two hours of today’s debate in Class 250.

DB: Now Augustus we heard today from Mrs. Johnson about her views on grading in class. She says that maybe we should do away with participation grades.

AP: You know I couldn’t agree more

DB: Why’s that?
AP: Teacher’s today, thanks to government bureaucracy, no longer care if their students actually retain the information. As long as students just show up to class they will get an A, it doesn’t even matter if they are actually paying attention in class. You get an A for just being alive and sitting in a seat!

DB: Can you blame them? The state and federal government require these teachers to prove that their students are learning and the easiest way to do that is show them that they are passing the class. And while we’re in the generation of short attention spans the teachers are having a hard time getting these students to pay attention. And there are quotas they have to fill in order for the school to get a paycheck. I’m not saying its right but can you blame them?

AP: I’ll admit that it’s also the duty of the parents to discipline their kids to do their homework and study and pay attention in class. But some of the blame lies on the teachers. Many of these teachers are using outdated teaching techniques to teach their students. The techniques they’re trying to teacher these students is thirty years old! This generation of kids doesn’t learn the same way you and I learned back in the day! These teachers need to adapt to the needs of their students! Make what they’re learning interesting and relevant!

DB: Like allowing students to use iPads and laptops to do class work and turn in homework?

AP: Exactly. You know I had a friend of mine’s son went to a psychology class and one of the things his teacher made the class do is wear a blind fold the next day. From the moment the students entered school in the morning till they got to his class, whether it was their first class or their last class. Every student had a friend guide them from class to class all day and stumbled around the halls. The whole thing was for the students to get into the mind of a blind person and feel what it was like to be blind. Then they wrote a paper on their experiences and explain what they had learned. That right there is making the learning experience interesting and relevant.

DB: I wish I had that teacher mine just made us read a textbook and complete some multiple choice questions. Alright moving on to our next subject. Mr. Peterson went even farther with this in saying that we should reconsider putting in homework into the student’s overall final class grade. Your thoughts?

AP: I don’t know if I agree with him on this. Homework is a way to test to see where a student is in their learning.

DB: I agree with him in part. A lot of students as soon as they leave the class will get together and will give each other the answers. The whole point of homework is to challenge the students to study, know, and comprehend the information. If these students are all cheating off of each other’s paper it has destroyed the whole point of having homework.

AP: Well what the alternative?

DB: Okay let me detour here so I can explain it more clearly. There are some teachers that will give their students points on tests for putting their names on the paper.

AP: What? No, that’s absurd I’ve never heard of that before.

DB: Well it’s true.

AP: I don’t believe that.

DB: Nonetheless it happens. Back to what I was saying; I think, as I think most people will agree with me, it should not add points to their grade. Most schools will not add points to the student’s grade but they will subtract it from their grade. Because its common place it’s expected of you, you shouldn’t get points for just writing your name down. I think in the same way doing your homework should also be commonplace. I don’t think students should get points added to their final grade for doing their homework but the students should get points off their final grade for not doing the homework.

AP: Well that’s not going to stop people from cheating. It would only remove the reward for cheating but not the incentive. By cheating they would only escape punishment for not doing the work themselves. To escape punishment is still an incentive.

DB: Well that’s where we would have to redefine what homework is for. Today homework is just another tool used by the school or some politician to brag about their program. It would be like saying that the school has ninety seven percent of its students passing and graduating but the percentage of students who actually learned something and retained the information for years later the percentage would be more like thirty percent. Homework is for their, the students, benefit. The homework is supposed to be a tool for the teacher to see what information the student has retained and how the student learns. It’s like a survey; you fill out the questionnaire and give it back to the person who gave it to you. The surveyor then reads over the questionnaires and the answers everyone put and he gets a general idea of the consensus among the population. In a similar way the teacher gets a consensus of how the class as a whole is progressing but also how the individual is progressing. It is meant to inform the teacher of how the individual students learn so that the teacher can adapt and or help the student to understand better.

AP: That’s not the only thing that would have to change. Many of these students get very easy A, B, C style questions on their homework. It’s a cookie cutter style of homework.

DB: One size does not sit all.

AP: Exactly, every one of these students is different when it comes to learning. These students aren’t being trained to think critically; they’re being trained how to “memorize” some stuff for their tests and when it comes to take the test they just spit out whatever the teacher told them. After that they won’t be tested on it again and they won’t remember any of it.

DB: I agree, my friend a few years back was in college and had a chemistry class at Kennesaw State and on the first day the professor told his class that even if they got hundreds on all their tests that would only account for sixty percent of their final grade. The other forty percent was the final where they were given a list of scenarios where they would have to apply their knowledge of all the content they had studied and think critically to pass the exam. The professor did not count the homework as part of the final grade but counted it as preparation for the final.

AP: I don’t think that would fly in almost any school.

DB: I know but it is an interesting concept.

AP: Well it looks like that’s all we’ve got time to talk about. We’ll be back after the break but first a word from of sponsor.

Back To The Future... Or Something Like That

From what I saw and heard today it looked like a lot of minds in class were boggled and or blown. The idea that kindergarteners are learning in school on iPads is in my opinion a bit unexpected. Most of us in class remember when there weren’t any computers in the classrooms and when we still used projectors. It seems like technology is moving so fast that we can’t keep up with all of it. We would need to be learning more about technology that is being developed and won’t even be on the market for four more years in order to be ready for teaching in two years. The teaching styles that were used to teach us is ten years obsolete; the teaching styles used to teach us right now will be in only a very few years also obsolete. The fact of how students are being taught right now is on equal or superior footing than how we’re being taught.

This new generation that came after us, the ones we will be teaching, is so fast paced and its refusal to stand still for only a moment creates a real challenge for us. What do we do now? How will we compete? We will have to be on our toes and always be ahead of the curve or else we will fall behind and will be replaced by someone that can keep up.

This can be disheartening but we don’t have the luxury to back down and quit, it’s too late for that; we’ve made our choice now it’s time to step up and honor it.

It is sometimes scary to see things pass right by you in the blink of an eye. After hearing what has been going on in the academic world in the now and a few years down the road it is scary what lies not too far from now. Schools are now having students use iPads to do tests, quizzes, and homework on. This is so vastly different from our own upbringing and studies. I have always been an old school kind of guy with holding an actual book in my hand, doing my tests and homework on paper, etc. This is somewhat frightening to hear that all of that has been thrown out the window.

They are now having students doing their homework, tests, quizzes, and classwork on iPads. From there it will become the normal thing for schools and will be all over the nation from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Next it will move to where some schools will incorporate a virtual class where students don’t even need to be in a school building. A few years after that it will also become the normal thing for schools. From there school as we know it, a building with teachers and principals and students all under one roof, will be obsolete. The new class room will be comprised of one teacher and thirty students all broadcast from their computers from every corner of the country. There will be no need for even a school building and so they will cease to be used for educational purposes. They will be left to rot or they will be repurposed into offices, stores, etc.

The entirety of the hierarchy of the school system will most likely change drastically. Many of the offices and positions in schools today will not be necessary for “schools.” Instead what will happen is that teachers will instead of being interviewed by the principal or someone else in the school; they will be interviewed by their future student’s parents via video cam. Teachers will of course be required to renew their teaching licenses and will be subject to monthly check ups by some authority. This is scary to some future teachers knowing that they will have to persuade parents to in a sense “hire them” to teach their kids. This provides a less stable source of income that is why it would frighten many upcoming teachers. Being a teacher would be more like being a business man. Having to convince a possible buyer, i.e. the parents, to pay for a service you offer, that is teaching their children.

We’ve all had that one awful teacher who nobody liked and who couldn’t wait till Friday to get their check and they could get away from “us.” Remember that teacher? I do, but no matter what you or your parents said or did could change that or get rid of that teacher. With this business-like run school that could change. It worries future teachers for the above reasons and for the reasons I don’t have time to mention but this puts their student’s education in the parents hands. Parents would have more say on their child’s education; that also includes these future teacher’s own children. This could also give the power of the parent and the teacher to negotiate payment. This could help weed out those teachers that only go into teaching for a steady paycheck. It would require teachers to stay on their game and master their content of teaching and present it masterfully to the students. To the teacher that goes into this job with a passion in their heart to help their students learn and that want to ignite that spark in the minds of their students; this change just might help not only their careers but future generations.

Just Another Day In Paradise

Well here we are again only five days into our classes and I’m starting to feel the pressure of all my class requirements. Last Friday I felt like an atomic bomb went off and I was caught in the blast radius. That day we went to a three hour meeting about what we have to get done this semester. We got a free diner for coming which was good especially the chips; I’m sure that was everyone’s favorite. We then proceeded to go through all the requirements for this semester and next. There was form after form to be filled out and sent in and the multiple tests that I will have to cough up five hundred dollars for, give or take. Not to mention the blogs, like this one, the essays, tests, quizzes, study guides, teaching a class, and so on. I felt like I was about to lose my mind about how much I had on my plate. So what does a guy do to get all this off his mind? He watches violent action movies with giant explosions while drinking sweet tea and eating Slim Jims of course.

This week we were given an assignment to make an infomercial about the teaching philosophy we were assigned. I got the Realist philosophy. It was founded by Aristotle, so I’m gonna have to read and research his writings. In order to understand him you have to understand his teacher Plato. This is great though since I’m covering Aristotle and Plato in my history class. My roommate loves philosophy, especially Plato, so if I ever get confused I know I have someone who can help me make sense of it. I’m actually looking forward to this project but I’m gonna need to work on my tech skills since this project revolves around my teammates and I being able to use some new tech we’re never used before. Besides the tech challenge I’m feeling optimistic about this assignment.