Well, I'm quite sure nobody is reading other people's blogs anymore except myself so I feel relatively safe responding to some other blog entries in here.
Honestly, not even half way through the semester I was extremely unhappy with the quality of work being produced by other students. Not just the work, but the entire attitude toward the class. Yes, I admit, I started out with a really bad attitude toward the class (Andrew and I have had this discussion), and I would like to apologize for how I came across the first few classes. However, to come out and say some of the things that have been said. Saying "I don't like kids" knocks me off my feet. Seriously? Even if you don't typically like being around children, you can surely find something good in each child or even just pick one student and find something you like. Isn't that what teachers have to do? Take even the worst students (and trust me, there are high school students who act like the elementary school kids) and find something good within the student. Without believing that the student can improve, there isn't much hope for improving the kid's life and education. Plus, besides that comment, the amount of late work turned in and homework with little effort put into it was unbelievable. Perhaps the "problem" with the class was not that the work wasn't hard or that the class wasn't demanding but more of the fact that as a class, the students didn't try to learn from it, we didn't take advantage of the class like we could have.
As for the templates for the lesson plans, that was great. Thank you so much for doing that. All lesson plans have some general things required and having a BS in Mathematics did not teach me those things. Without the lesson plan template, I would have been completely without ideas on how to create a good lesson plan. Furthermore, I used the template descriptions to help me create a lesson plan for the summer job I applied for (which I was not hired but only because of my lack of experience with minority high schoolers). As far as I know, all lesson plans are the same with the same standards and you did leave us all the appropriate blanks to fill in to allow for our own creativity in creating our lessons. Requiring us to put a title, our names, the grade level, etc did nothing to hurt our creativity.
As for the typing at the computer during presentations and discussions and such, I honestly don't know how to fix this. I think it completely depends on the class and whether the students are willing to give respect to both the teacher and other classmates. Typing is normally bad but there were cases where a student would say something (such as the graduation rate at Harmony being low) and I tried searching online so I could prove the student wrong. In most cases though, I saw lots of e-mailing, facebooking, and sports scores up on computers during class. Maybe asking students to turn off the monitors more or just plain asking them to be polite and stop the Internet browsing. Surely young adults are capable of being polite for a few hours a week.
As for the educational programs being put onto the computers in the school of education... that seems like a silly request to me. What are all the math programs? NON-educational programs? The math programs, the music programs, in fact, most of the software on the computers could be used for educational puposes if the instructor knows how. Plus there are plenty of educational things to be used on the Internet so why spend money on purchasing them for the computers? However, I personally would have liked to be introduced to a gradebook program of some sort. I am currently keeping track of grades using Excel which is functioning but time consuming.
One last comment is that I'm shocked at the number of times students real names were used in the blog entries. I felt guilty even using the school's name, but to actually use the student's real name with descriptions of problems with the student?! I particularly feel bad for these students because I know I would not want that to be me, with my name out there, even if it was just the first name. I thought the deal at the beginning of the semester was that we could not use the student's real names or take pictures of their faces. Well, the pictures taken never made it off my memory card (oops) but real names were frequently put online. That's not good, is it?
1 comment:
Hi Joanna,
I appreciate you honesty. You have an excellent awareness of higher education and K-12 education in general. MY teaching philosophy is often mastery learning. I want my students to take away learning objectives so by allowing them to turn in assignments late, this is never my real concern, as long as it doesn't take away from learning at that point (e.g., preparation of reading materials for a class discussion). That's why the procrastination was never an issue for me, but it still upsets me when students email me frantically trying to get a question answered when there is only two days left to finalize things, especially since we've usually discussed that already in class. I'm not sure how to take the professionalism up a notch, but if you have any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear about them.
As for the lesson plan templates, thank you! This was something that I thought was helpful and I wasn't sure how I was limiting creativity there, but your comments reassure me there.
As far as the Internet usage - this is always something that's difficult. Usually I like to think that if the classes are interesting enough, this will not happen. I'm planning on making an active effort to plan vigorously this summer to ensure the classes are interesting!
Your point about the various pieces of software being applicable to more than one content area is very true. One of my teachers said that she could use KidPix for every single topic and area of instruction.
Your point about the students names is a well-taken point. I will make sure to bring that up in class tonight.
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