Thing the first: I don't think I can teach in a very low level class. I lack the ability to break things down beyond what I feel are their most basic components. There are only so many ways I can explain a thing and if you can't get it after that, I can't help you. This is tricky for me because, for many things, I pick them up without great difficulty. I can't make parts of speech any simpler than "types or categories of words." Just not gonna happen. My master teacher says that it's good to know this about oneself. This is why I'm not in elementary schools. I should probably teach AP classes.
Related to this is the matter of vocabulary. I have spent a great amount of time cultivating my English vocabulary. I enjoy having just the right word for just the right situation. When working with ELD and low performing students, I can't use my full range of language because no one will know what the hell I'm talking about. In my first period, I was reading an essay about poetry slams to them and it had a bit that was the main point of poetry slam. I was describing this and the only words I could think of were "manifesto" and "creed." That's great except those words have zero meaning to these kids. It's frustrating.
Thing the second: I am extremely hard on myself/I lack self-confidence. Also, I'm really stressed out about everything. Unfortunately, being aware of one's issues is not the equivalent of fixing or not having issues. Even my student teaching supervisor, who I've talked to all of four times, said that I'm being too hard on myself. Well, if I knew how to be easy, or just regular, on myself, I would do it. I'm pretty sure I'm suffering from Impostor Syndrome. Uhm, yay? I wish I had any idea how to deal with this. It's kind of fucking me up because I'm so unwilling to talk myself up that I'm botching employment opportunities. But I feel like I'm lying when I say I'm good at things, so it's really hard to know what to do.
Thing the third: my master teacher has a 7 year old daughter who is really smart and I am kind of the adult version of her kid so we're kind of giving each other insights about that. My master teacher pointed out to me today that part of what messes me up is what when I'm faced with a choice, I see 400 options or courses of action, whereas a normal person sees maybe two. So I get overwhelmed, can't decide and sometimes go in a completely different direction. I do really well when someone narrows it down for me a little bit. I mentioned to her that I had no idea what I was doing in resume and cover letter writing, and she pointed me in the right direction and I was able to fix it immediately. But when there's too much choice, I am ruined.
Otherwise I am really enjoying student teaching. I am feeling a bit less shy about it now so I am being more normal/goofy. I think I have a pretty good rapport with the kids, which is great. I've realized that my favorite teaching game is password (put a word on the board, a student in front of the board, and the other students have to get the first student to figure out the word). I also like putting the "confetti" text effects from MS Word on things because it amuses me (and also the students).
I've been busting my ass to get a job. I think I've applied for like 70+ positions now. I hope I get something. I've also started applying for some non-teaching jobs. I want to work with information, either as a teacher, librarian or archivist of some sort. So, I've been looking up major university libraries and applying to some jobs there. Something will work out.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
More on student teaching experiences
I've now done a month of student teaching. I am not sure I have ever been this exhausted before. Student teaching on its own wouldn't be so bad, but then I have my student teaching seminar once a week, and circus every day. Essentially, I have no down time. I'm looking forward to spring break, even though I'm going to be working during it.
It's interesting working with the lowest level ELD class. In that class, most of them are Spanish speakers, there's one guy who speaks Arabic and one guy who speaks Vietnamese. So I can communicate with everyone, except this Vietnamese kid. I keep saying things like "This weekend I'm going to start learning Vietnamese!" because it's frustrating for me not not be able to speak the other person's language when I'm trying to teach. I guess this is how my master teacher feels pretty much every day; I don't know how she does it. This Vietnamese kid came to class late in the year, so he knows even less English than the other guys in the class. This week, I brought in a really good picture dictionary that has English and Arabic words with each picture. I let him flip through it and point things out to me that he wanted to learn. From this, I learned that he likes chess, motorcross and boxing. The problem came in when he pointed to the Arabic transliteration listed with each picture, asked "what's this?" and then proceeded to try to pronounce the Arabic words of things. Which is dandy, except he barely knows any English, so the last thing he needs right now is Arabic vocabulary. I'm going to be so mad if that kid learns Arabic.
One of my classes is for "long term" ELD students and this particular class is mostly for kids who need accommodations. About one-third of them have IEPs so the class is basically one big accommodation. This is interesting for me to teach, since I am not really familiar with the low end of the academic spectrum. There's one girl, in particular, who I keep noticing. I can tell she's trying, but she just can't quite make it happen. She gets this look on her face that's so sad when she gets things wrong. Normally, if you wanted to be smarter, my advice would be, "read everything all the time," but you can't say that to someone who has a 3rd-grade reading level (well, you can say it, but that would make you the asshole in this case).
We started doing a whole-class SSR for this period. So, either my master teacher or I reads outloud for 10ish minutes, and then we ask the students to draw a picture of what they understood. They're actually pretty interested in the story, which I was surprised about. They all stay quiet. I've only heard one or two people complain that it's "stupid." Traditionally for SSR, students read on their own, but with this class that would be a total disaster. Probably none of them would bring something to read, so we would have to provide it, and then I'm sure they wouldn't get as much out of it as when we read outloud. This is something I want to incorporate into my class, when I start teaching on my own. Even if I'm teaching a first year language class, I think it would be beneficial. Students would be exposed to more vocabulary than just what they get from their textbook, they would see the language in action, in context sooner, and it would make reading in the target language accessible. My master teacher pointed out that the only problem with that plan is that I'd have to provide all the books myself. I pretty much collect books anyway, so I don't see that as much of a detriment.
In other topics, I am finally going to go to Mexico! Despite spending most of my life in reasonable proximity to Mexico, I have never been there. In fact, I've never been to any Spanish-speaking country, which simply offends my sense of decency. Once student teaching is over, I'm going to Mexico City to sightsee and, as I put it to one friend, "look at museums and buy handicrafts." I'm super excited about it. Both my parents have told me that they will not stop worrying the whole time, since I'm going by myself. I told them too bad, since I'd already booked my tickets. It ends up being like a birthday present to myself and a celebration for being done with my credential, which is nice.
It's interesting working with the lowest level ELD class. In that class, most of them are Spanish speakers, there's one guy who speaks Arabic and one guy who speaks Vietnamese. So I can communicate with everyone, except this Vietnamese kid. I keep saying things like "This weekend I'm going to start learning Vietnamese!" because it's frustrating for me not not be able to speak the other person's language when I'm trying to teach. I guess this is how my master teacher feels pretty much every day; I don't know how she does it. This Vietnamese kid came to class late in the year, so he knows even less English than the other guys in the class. This week, I brought in a really good picture dictionary that has English and Arabic words with each picture. I let him flip through it and point things out to me that he wanted to learn. From this, I learned that he likes chess, motorcross and boxing. The problem came in when he pointed to the Arabic transliteration listed with each picture, asked "what's this?" and then proceeded to try to pronounce the Arabic words of things. Which is dandy, except he barely knows any English, so the last thing he needs right now is Arabic vocabulary. I'm going to be so mad if that kid learns Arabic.
One of my classes is for "long term" ELD students and this particular class is mostly for kids who need accommodations. About one-third of them have IEPs so the class is basically one big accommodation. This is interesting for me to teach, since I am not really familiar with the low end of the academic spectrum. There's one girl, in particular, who I keep noticing. I can tell she's trying, but she just can't quite make it happen. She gets this look on her face that's so sad when she gets things wrong. Normally, if you wanted to be smarter, my advice would be, "read everything all the time," but you can't say that to someone who has a 3rd-grade reading level (well, you can say it, but that would make you the asshole in this case).
We started doing a whole-class SSR for this period. So, either my master teacher or I reads outloud for 10ish minutes, and then we ask the students to draw a picture of what they understood. They're actually pretty interested in the story, which I was surprised about. They all stay quiet. I've only heard one or two people complain that it's "stupid." Traditionally for SSR, students read on their own, but with this class that would be a total disaster. Probably none of them would bring something to read, so we would have to provide it, and then I'm sure they wouldn't get as much out of it as when we read outloud. This is something I want to incorporate into my class, when I start teaching on my own. Even if I'm teaching a first year language class, I think it would be beneficial. Students would be exposed to more vocabulary than just what they get from their textbook, they would see the language in action, in context sooner, and it would make reading in the target language accessible. My master teacher pointed out that the only problem with that plan is that I'd have to provide all the books myself. I pretty much collect books anyway, so I don't see that as much of a detriment.
In other topics, I am finally going to go to Mexico! Despite spending most of my life in reasonable proximity to Mexico, I have never been there. In fact, I've never been to any Spanish-speaking country, which simply offends my sense of decency. Once student teaching is over, I'm going to Mexico City to sightsee and, as I put it to one friend, "look at museums and buy handicrafts." I'm super excited about it. Both my parents have told me that they will not stop worrying the whole time, since I'm going by myself. I told them too bad, since I'd already booked my tickets. It ends up being like a birthday present to myself and a celebration for being done with my credential, which is nice.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
On Assessment; An Open Letter
Last weekend, I wrote up lesson plans for my intermediate ELD class for the week and I sent them to my master teacher to review. I was kind of disappointed when she sent them back with a ton of corrections, but I was also really happy that she took the time to help me improve, too. Apparently a lot of master teachers are less helpful.
I realized a couple things both about what I thought I knew and about how little I've learned from this credential program. Let's talk credential program first. This program taught me a lot of "strategies" for things to do in class. Graphic organizers! Pre-reading activities! Group work! but it really failed to link all of those concepts together into a cogent way. So, I was planning my lessons in terms of "we are going to do an activity. Then there will be another activity." It was all activities for their own sake. Activities are not an end in themselves, rather a means to an end. In the notes from my master teacher, she told me that I have to have measurable objectives and I have to measure them to make sure that the students actually learned something that day. I wish the credential classes had made this point more clearly. After thinking it over for a bit, it dawned on me that that's what all that crap we did at school was for. Activities are not just for the students to learn, but for you as the teacher to assess how they're doing at it.
Today then, for example, they were learning vocabulary about natural disasters and how to identify and use foreshadowing. To assess if they learned anything, I had everyone write a two paragraph beginning of a story where they were supposed to foreshadow for the rest of the story. Then we played a game called "password," wherein one person doesn't know what the word is and the rest of the class has to describe it to them. From watching them play the game and from reading their essays, I have a pretty fair idea of what they understood today. They knew what all the disaster words were (floods, earthquakes, tornadoes), but they had a hard time describing it. The writing proved more interesting. I provided a model for them to go off of, but I did not realize how much they were going to take from the model. I wanted them to write about a time when either they experienced a disaster (my model was about trying to get home when it snowed and the buses stopped running) or just any story. Now that I think about it, there is absolutely nothing surprising about them adhering strongly to the model, but I didn't expect it at all.
My lesson today went a lot better than the ones I did last week and I'm sure that it's because I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted the students to know at the end of class, rather than just "We are doing this chapter because we need to get through this book," which is a silly way to run class (I knew it was a silly way to run class, but I hadn't yet figured out an alternative). The frustrating part is that as soon as I improve one part, I realize that there were still other things that need improving. Unfortunately, this process is one of slow calibration to figure out what all needs to happen on any given day.
And now, an open letter to everyone who uses juggling in metaphors and similes while talk to me:
Dear everyone who uses juggling metaphors and similes while talking to me,
I know you're trying to pick a topic that you think I will relate to. In a way, I appreciate that. It's a little better than the constant comparisons I hear between teaching and parenting at school. So, good effort. However, since I actually juggle and teach juggling, even, on a regular basis, it is difficult for me to consider juggling on the level of figurative language. Also, juggling does not work the way you imagine it does. Yes, I know that to you, juggling represents a lot of things going on at once, but it does not represent that for me. I can juggle and do other things at the same time. It doesn't take too much of my focus to juggle. Teaching is much scarier. And children are too heavy to juggle anyway.
Best,
Lindsey
I realized a couple things both about what I thought I knew and about how little I've learned from this credential program. Let's talk credential program first. This program taught me a lot of "strategies" for things to do in class. Graphic organizers! Pre-reading activities! Group work! but it really failed to link all of those concepts together into a cogent way. So, I was planning my lessons in terms of "we are going to do an activity. Then there will be another activity." It was all activities for their own sake. Activities are not an end in themselves, rather a means to an end. In the notes from my master teacher, she told me that I have to have measurable objectives and I have to measure them to make sure that the students actually learned something that day. I wish the credential classes had made this point more clearly. After thinking it over for a bit, it dawned on me that that's what all that crap we did at school was for. Activities are not just for the students to learn, but for you as the teacher to assess how they're doing at it.
Today then, for example, they were learning vocabulary about natural disasters and how to identify and use foreshadowing. To assess if they learned anything, I had everyone write a two paragraph beginning of a story where they were supposed to foreshadow for the rest of the story. Then we played a game called "password," wherein one person doesn't know what the word is and the rest of the class has to describe it to them. From watching them play the game and from reading their essays, I have a pretty fair idea of what they understood today. They knew what all the disaster words were (floods, earthquakes, tornadoes), but they had a hard time describing it. The writing proved more interesting. I provided a model for them to go off of, but I did not realize how much they were going to take from the model. I wanted them to write about a time when either they experienced a disaster (my model was about trying to get home when it snowed and the buses stopped running) or just any story. Now that I think about it, there is absolutely nothing surprising about them adhering strongly to the model, but I didn't expect it at all.
My lesson today went a lot better than the ones I did last week and I'm sure that it's because I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted the students to know at the end of class, rather than just "We are doing this chapter because we need to get through this book," which is a silly way to run class (I knew it was a silly way to run class, but I hadn't yet figured out an alternative). The frustrating part is that as soon as I improve one part, I realize that there were still other things that need improving. Unfortunately, this process is one of slow calibration to figure out what all needs to happen on any given day.
And now, an open letter to everyone who uses juggling in metaphors and similes while talk to me:
Dear everyone who uses juggling metaphors and similes while talking to me,
I know you're trying to pick a topic that you think I will relate to. In a way, I appreciate that. It's a little better than the constant comparisons I hear between teaching and parenting at school. So, good effort. However, since I actually juggle and teach juggling, even, on a regular basis, it is difficult for me to consider juggling on the level of figurative language. Also, juggling does not work the way you imagine it does. Yes, I know that to you, juggling represents a lot of things going on at once, but it does not represent that for me. I can juggle and do other things at the same time. It doesn't take too much of my focus to juggle. Teaching is much scarier. And children are too heavy to juggle anyway.
Best,
Lindsey
Sunday, February 13, 2011
In which student teaching begins
As those of you on the facebook know, it has been a really good week; I started student teaching, I received passing scores on my Spanish CSETs and I got accepted to the APLE grant, which is a loan assumption program for up to $11,000 if I agree to teach foreign language classes in California for four years.
Student teaching has been good so far. I think I'm really going to enjoy working with my master teacher because we have fairly similar attitudes and approaches to teaching. She's a really awesome teacher and I hope I can learn a lot from her. The classes I'm in are ELD (English Language Development, also known as ESL or English as a Second Language). I probably would have been student teaching for Spanish, but I didn't pass my CSETs early enough, but I did pass the English CSETs in November. It's actually pretty lucky to be teaching in ELD, something I'm actually interested in, rather than in a regular old English class. I'm pretty sure I would hate teaching regular English.
I love working with the kids in the ELD classes, but it is hard. The hardest part right now is figuring out what proportion of foreign language to English to use (legally, 100% English, but whatever). Obviously, I don't speak every language, so this really applies only to our Spanish and Arabic speakers in my case. But considering that the lowest level class is more than half native Spanish speakers, this is coming up a lot for me. It's also difficult because different kids need or want different amounts of Spanish. I had one kid tell me, "I speak English, you know." Kid, I know you speak English, but you need to respond when I speak to you in English. Also, I really like to speak Spanish, so that makes it hard as well.
It's also kind of weird student teaching at the high school that I graduated from because I'm working with a totally different class of kids. When I was in high school, I was in all AP/honors classes and I basically only interacted with the same. The ELD students are basically disenfranchised from most school things. The only AP classes any of them are allowed to take is AP Spanish or AP math classes. Technically, it's illegal to not even let ELD students try the tests, but the unfortunate part is that none of their parents are going to do anything about it since they're immigrants who don't speak much English themselves and they aren't familiar with the system. That's really depressing for me. The other thing I noticed during this week's rally is that the "big" organizations like student government and cheerleading are overwhelmingly blond. There were a couple of students from the ELD classes who performed in the rally; they were in the hip hop dance club. Again, super depressing to see these kids not being able to/not being welcome to participate in a lot of the other aspects of school life. The good news is that the ELD students really have a tight community. My master teacher leaves her class open at lunch and there are always 30 or more kids in there everyday and they're all really nice to each other.
I'm still not sure if I will want to be an ELD teacher myself. I wouldn't be opposed to it necessarily, but rather I think it is just a huge time and emotional investment and I don't know that I could/would want to do that. Teaching Spanish or something seems a lot easier (not that I've ever taught a Spanish class). But I do think I'm really going to enjoy teaching ELD for student teaching.
The other depressing aspect of ELD teaching is that my master teacher is, in theory supposed to keep to the same scope and sequence schedule as all the regular English classes. That is insane. Luckily, the principal at the school is sympathetic to the cause, since she is familiar with ELD teaching, so we aren't really expected to do it, but the idea is to keep along as much as possible. Essentially, the state expects magic from ELD teachers.
In other things: I rode my bike to school four days this week. It doesn't even take that long: about 10 minutes including traffic lights, etc. It takes about 15 to get home since I have to ride uphill (wah womp). I've been trying to keep up on my Arabic studying (CSETs in May, ugh), but I think it's going to be difficult to maintain it what with circus and lesson planing and what I call my social life. I got a book of Nizar Qabbani poems, which is pretty awesome. They're short poems so it's basically like bite-sized pieces of Arabic that I can look at for a few minutes when I have some downtime. Whereas when I read a book or something, I need to know I have at least an hour or so to do it, otherwise I won't even get started. Apropos of nothing, my new favorite phrase is "Japanese bondage festive." The combination of the words (and I suppose surrounding context that will remain secret) just makes me chuckle.
I think I'm going to try to blog at least once a week, in part so I can think about/share my thoughts on student teaching and because I don't think I have more time to blog than that.
Student teaching has been good so far. I think I'm really going to enjoy working with my master teacher because we have fairly similar attitudes and approaches to teaching. She's a really awesome teacher and I hope I can learn a lot from her. The classes I'm in are ELD (English Language Development, also known as ESL or English as a Second Language). I probably would have been student teaching for Spanish, but I didn't pass my CSETs early enough, but I did pass the English CSETs in November. It's actually pretty lucky to be teaching in ELD, something I'm actually interested in, rather than in a regular old English class. I'm pretty sure I would hate teaching regular English.
I love working with the kids in the ELD classes, but it is hard. The hardest part right now is figuring out what proportion of foreign language to English to use (legally, 100% English, but whatever). Obviously, I don't speak every language, so this really applies only to our Spanish and Arabic speakers in my case. But considering that the lowest level class is more than half native Spanish speakers, this is coming up a lot for me. It's also difficult because different kids need or want different amounts of Spanish. I had one kid tell me, "I speak English, you know." Kid, I know you speak English, but you need to respond when I speak to you in English. Also, I really like to speak Spanish, so that makes it hard as well.
It's also kind of weird student teaching at the high school that I graduated from because I'm working with a totally different class of kids. When I was in high school, I was in all AP/honors classes and I basically only interacted with the same. The ELD students are basically disenfranchised from most school things. The only AP classes any of them are allowed to take is AP Spanish or AP math classes. Technically, it's illegal to not even let ELD students try the tests, but the unfortunate part is that none of their parents are going to do anything about it since they're immigrants who don't speak much English themselves and they aren't familiar with the system. That's really depressing for me. The other thing I noticed during this week's rally is that the "big" organizations like student government and cheerleading are overwhelmingly blond. There were a couple of students from the ELD classes who performed in the rally; they were in the hip hop dance club. Again, super depressing to see these kids not being able to/not being welcome to participate in a lot of the other aspects of school life. The good news is that the ELD students really have a tight community. My master teacher leaves her class open at lunch and there are always 30 or more kids in there everyday and they're all really nice to each other.
I'm still not sure if I will want to be an ELD teacher myself. I wouldn't be opposed to it necessarily, but rather I think it is just a huge time and emotional investment and I don't know that I could/would want to do that. Teaching Spanish or something seems a lot easier (not that I've ever taught a Spanish class). But I do think I'm really going to enjoy teaching ELD for student teaching.
The other depressing aspect of ELD teaching is that my master teacher is, in theory supposed to keep to the same scope and sequence schedule as all the regular English classes. That is insane. Luckily, the principal at the school is sympathetic to the cause, since she is familiar with ELD teaching, so we aren't really expected to do it, but the idea is to keep along as much as possible. Essentially, the state expects magic from ELD teachers.
In other things: I rode my bike to school four days this week. It doesn't even take that long: about 10 minutes including traffic lights, etc. It takes about 15 to get home since I have to ride uphill (wah womp). I've been trying to keep up on my Arabic studying (CSETs in May, ugh), but I think it's going to be difficult to maintain it what with circus and lesson planing and what I call my social life. I got a book of Nizar Qabbani poems, which is pretty awesome. They're short poems so it's basically like bite-sized pieces of Arabic that I can look at for a few minutes when I have some downtime. Whereas when I read a book or something, I need to know I have at least an hour or so to do it, otherwise I won't even get started. Apropos of nothing, my new favorite phrase is "Japanese bondage festive." The combination of the words (and I suppose surrounding context that will remain secret) just makes me chuckle.
I think I'm going to try to blog at least once a week, in part so I can think about/share my thoughts on student teaching and because I don't think I have more time to blog than that.
Friday, January 28, 2011
A long rant on education classes and other things
Having just about finished my "education" classes for my teaching credential, I feel qualified to say that it is no wonder that education in this country is so fucked up.
Of the five classes I took, I felt that two of the teachers we had were well qualified and motivated, one was middling, and one--who we had for two of the five classes--was just awful.What the hell? Are there not enough teachers out there who are motivated and skilled teachers who are willing to pass on their methods to the next generation of teachers, or did I just get extra unlucky? Of the good teachers, one ended class halfway early every time, which is great one the one hand (yay, going home early!), but on the other hand, we could have actually learned something from that guy, so that's fairly disappointing.
We have had a number of textbooks, maybe one of which was really useful. The rest seem to create some pedagogical echo chamber reiterating the importance of vocabulary acquisition and the use of graphic organizers. As a whole, they had very little to do with my field: applied linguistics/language acquisition. The only good thing about having such mediocre texts is that it did inspire me to go off on my own and find things that I think are useful. But you know, the majority of people don't think that way. Most people, when presented with this situation just say, "This is easier than I thought it was going to be!" and move on. And I get that attitude, I do. Everyone is busy, you have a job, some of the people in my class have kids. But if you're going to be there, spending the time and money to start a new career, don't you want to start it with as much knowledge as possible? Nothing is going to be as good as classroom experience, but don't you want to at least know what is happening in your field? I think that teachers have a personal responsibility to keep current with the research of their discipline, even if only a little bit. My master teacher was telling me that a lot of the teachers at her school with masters degrees have them from education programs. I'm assuming that's because it's so easy. I wonder if they are better teachers for it? I wonder if teachers who have a masters/Ph.D. in their field of teaching are better teachers than those with a masters in education? Granted, there are a lot of people who are highly educated and terrible instructors (just look at any college campus), but I'd be interested to know if there are any statistics on that.
I was talking about this with my dad and it was his view that having high standards is great because it makes you want to be good at things, but shitty because it mostly just makes you go insane since you can't do much about it. He also gave me a few "that's just how the world works," which is extremely depressing. People have low/zero motivation--even about the things that they are most interested in--and there is nothing you can do about it so just roll with it and pick your battles. That was his message. I told him that this message was "the most depressing thing ever," but he just came back with "that's reality." I'm far from an optimist, but damn. I haven't even started yet and he's already telling me that no one can accomplish anything. Apparently, the only way to get things done is to be in it for the long game. My dad also told me that when he was working as an electrician 25 years ago at the same hospital he is now the facilities manager of, he would see things that need fixing and his boss would just tell him no, that it was someone else's problem. Now, he is the boss and he says he is fixing some of the things that were problems 25 years ago. Holy shit! Conclusion: my dad's version of reality is pretty sad.
Since classes have been so understimulating, I feel like I've been way more of an obnoxious asshole than I typically am. It's expensive and I have to sit there for long classes and we have basically nothing to do, so I mostly heckle the professor. That's something I kind of hate about myself, but I think goes back to the high expectations. I have high expectations for myself and the people around me. I expect to learn something from going to classes designed to make me into an educator. I expect to do something other than jigsaws every day. And honestly, I expect to have to do work once in a while. And not bullshit work that is just because someone said that we should all do it, but work that actually teaches me something. Here are some examples of total bullshit work.
Of the five classes I took, I felt that two of the teachers we had were well qualified and motivated, one was middling, and one--who we had for two of the five classes--was just awful.What the hell? Are there not enough teachers out there who are motivated and skilled teachers who are willing to pass on their methods to the next generation of teachers, or did I just get extra unlucky? Of the good teachers, one ended class halfway early every time, which is great one the one hand (yay, going home early!), but on the other hand, we could have actually learned something from that guy, so that's fairly disappointing.
We have had a number of textbooks, maybe one of which was really useful. The rest seem to create some pedagogical echo chamber reiterating the importance of vocabulary acquisition and the use of graphic organizers. As a whole, they had very little to do with my field: applied linguistics/language acquisition. The only good thing about having such mediocre texts is that it did inspire me to go off on my own and find things that I think are useful. But you know, the majority of people don't think that way. Most people, when presented with this situation just say, "This is easier than I thought it was going to be!" and move on. And I get that attitude, I do. Everyone is busy, you have a job, some of the people in my class have kids. But if you're going to be there, spending the time and money to start a new career, don't you want to start it with as much knowledge as possible? Nothing is going to be as good as classroom experience, but don't you want to at least know what is happening in your field? I think that teachers have a personal responsibility to keep current with the research of their discipline, even if only a little bit. My master teacher was telling me that a lot of the teachers at her school with masters degrees have them from education programs. I'm assuming that's because it's so easy. I wonder if they are better teachers for it? I wonder if teachers who have a masters/Ph.D. in their field of teaching are better teachers than those with a masters in education? Granted, there are a lot of people who are highly educated and terrible instructors (just look at any college campus), but I'd be interested to know if there are any statistics on that.
I was talking about this with my dad and it was his view that having high standards is great because it makes you want to be good at things, but shitty because it mostly just makes you go insane since you can't do much about it. He also gave me a few "that's just how the world works," which is extremely depressing. People have low/zero motivation--even about the things that they are most interested in--and there is nothing you can do about it so just roll with it and pick your battles. That was his message. I told him that this message was "the most depressing thing ever," but he just came back with "that's reality." I'm far from an optimist, but damn. I haven't even started yet and he's already telling me that no one can accomplish anything. Apparently, the only way to get things done is to be in it for the long game. My dad also told me that when he was working as an electrician 25 years ago at the same hospital he is now the facilities manager of, he would see things that need fixing and his boss would just tell him no, that it was someone else's problem. Now, he is the boss and he says he is fixing some of the things that were problems 25 years ago. Holy shit! Conclusion: my dad's version of reality is pretty sad.
Since classes have been so understimulating, I feel like I've been way more of an obnoxious asshole than I typically am. It's expensive and I have to sit there for long classes and we have basically nothing to do, so I mostly heckle the professor. That's something I kind of hate about myself, but I think goes back to the high expectations. I have high expectations for myself and the people around me. I expect to learn something from going to classes designed to make me into an educator. I expect to do something other than jigsaws every day. And honestly, I expect to have to do work once in a while. And not bullshit work that is just because someone said that we should all do it, but work that actually teaches me something. Here are some examples of total bullshit work.
- TPAs. I totally forget what this stands for, but we have to do four of them throughout the credential program. They are long, repetitive case-study assignments wherein one must select teaching strategies for hypothetical students and justify their use. It's completely pointless. It takes me around six hours to do, so I know it's taking other people even longer than that. You know what would actually be useful instead? Selecting teaching strategies, perhaps writing a brief justification for their use, actually using them in the classroom, and then thinking about how it went and what one could do better or differently next time. Bam, done! I just made the education world better.
- This fucking presentation that we have to do for class next week. We have group presentation, the content of which is so prescribed, it reads like an assignment for fifth graders. The syllabus lays out the assignment stating how many slides to do of each topic and provides links for where to find this information. Everyone in the class has already read these and submitted the compulsory notes on the topics. Now, every group is going to give the same presentation. In a graduate level class? Are you fucking kidding me? I told my professor that I would be going "off book" in my presentation regarding the topics of content area literacy and language acquisition. Why? Because I have something more useful to add. My professor keeps chiding me for not making the material relevant to my teaching practice, but at least he's been cool when I say "I think this is stupid and I'm going to do something I find useful."
I am just so sick of laziness and mediocrity. Laziness is the new normal. My classmates keep calling me an overachiever, but I've mostly been retorting to that with "I just achieved ahead of the deadline," but you know, I'd rather be an overachiever if regular achieving doesn't do anything. It makes me think of the conversations I have with people when I say that I am a language person and I speak a few languages. People always say "oh, you must just have a natural (or god-given, if they're really trying to irritate me) talent for languages!" And I say, "No, I am good at languages because I have made the effort and spent a huge amount of time on it. Anyone who spent as much time as I did on this would be at least pretty decent as well," but no one wants to hear that because it is easier to believe that some people are just good at things. People, you are good at the things that you make an effort in! So make an effort once in a while! Ultimately, I think that's what our teaching system is lacking: effort.
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