Quasi Dictum

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Name:
Location: Vancouver, WA, United States

Teacher

Saturday, September 25, 2004

A post from Ben who is teaching in Lesotho:

My start of the year

A lot of the start of my year has involved settling in to the house on
campus, arranging for my work permit and residency permit, and getting
paper work in order.

The other part has been school.
I now see where unions got there start and why some people are so pro
union.

I have always seen them as a hinderance to "good" education. They made
it difficult to remove bad teachers and took away too much power from
administration.

When there is no union though and the administrator is an overbearnig
dictator you feel quite helpless.

At this school the "Head Teacher"/ Principal has complete control. He
rules by fear and can do so because this is the only show in town.
There is no where else to turn to and no one to turn to.

He is installing change in the school and is trying to promote
everything we believe in with teaching. Integrating subjects, emphasis
on learning not work, teaching what is important, less is more. I agree
with his educational philosophy but the implementation is Machievellian
(spelling ?) So therefore people are resistant and simply filling out
the paper work (which there is a ton of) so that it looks like they are
complying. This is a very different teaching situation. Having to be
planned a full week ahead and turn in my plans for approval is not
something I am used to. I also have to turn in my outline for the term.
All of this in theory is good. It is good to be planned and organized
and to be accountable for what you are doing in the class room. I agree
with everything. Something does not feel right though. I think it is
the fear that is in the atmosphere. It is not as though my colleagues
are planning ahead to make their lessons better but rather they are
planning ahead because they have to and do not want to be called in to
the office and or ran out of a job.

This will be a great learning experience for me. One I am looking
forward to finding out how it will change me.
How have your years started?

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Not an education article but a good read anyway:

Web logs catch fire as kindling for change

Bloggers, those crusading individuals ranting away on their keyboards to anyone with a live modem, have already influenced national political debates, including the firestorm over Dan Rather's reporting. Even in the relatively bland landscape of Seattle politics, they are starting to find a voice, too.


Monday, September 20, 2004

I'll post this e-mail from Travis.

Thomas Jefferson opened on time, but with much of the school partly finished
as Dan knows from my visit to use his computer and Riso. My room still has
bare walls since we cannot use staples and the special tape is not here. I
am missing shelves so things are in boxes. It is kind of a chaotic look that
is, hopefully, not too unsettling for the students and they can get the
sense that we are not running some small time operation.

A few days before school started, I learned that I have two reading
intervention classes. This is where much of my time and stress have been put
and come from. I was expecting 4 general ed LA and two intervention LA. I
include a lot of reading in my LA program, but to have a reading special
class is a whole other thing. Teaching reading is hard and I have not yet
done it so I do not have a groove for it. And that is my statement for the
first week of school: I just have not found the groove yet.

Perhaps it is because the school is new and there are many loose ends, or
the staff has not (in the new environment) found its family feel, or maybe
it is the two new reading classes.. I do not know. But what I do know is
that this was a rocky start. Two years ago, the second year with Dan, that
was the first time in my 7 years that I taught the same subject that I did
the year prior. That was a smooth year and my curriculum depth grew greatly
that year. I like that (see also creature of habit).

However, having said all that, I look forward to the change and challenge as
I know that I will be better for it by the year's end even if I cannot see
that now.

The building was built the way school's should be built. The clientle is
slightly better off than Gaiser's, but not so much so that I see what many
people warned me about. The parental involvement is greater (back to school
night was huge) and I look forward to what Curriculum Night (Tuesday) will
bring in numbers. I have not felt that any class or student or population is
any nicer or meaner than that that I expereinced at Gaiser. Kids are kids.
Perhaps the year will show me differently.

My new partner is cool. She has a personality that is easily with which to
work and I look forward to working more closely with her in the future. It
will take an initial year for us to get comfortable with each other, not to
mention the school-curriculum-grade, before we will really integrate. I
remember it being much the same way with Dan. She is new to 7th grade social
studies having come from 6th grade. She has taught for many years.

Saturday, September 18, 2004

The future is now:

With a point and a click of her computer mouse, Hudson High School senior Roxanne Mutti hands in a poetry assignment to a teacher 3,000 miles away, then scrolls through messages from 19 classmates at schools that span four time zones.


Mutti is among a surging number of high school students inhabiting two educational worlds. While sitting at computers in four-walled classrooms in their hometowns, they attend ''virtual" classes connected by fiber optics and Web-based bulletin boards.


Very Cool

Saturday, September 11, 2004

My post for the first week of school might seem "jockish" (is that a word?) but it's not. Read the article. We've discussed all of the issues before.

Seventeen Reasons Why Football Is Better Than High School

Don't let the title throw you off.

WE DEFINE SCHOOL as a place of learning. But as I visited classes in the high school in which I was an observer for a year, what I saw mostly -- and what the students told me about most frequently -- was not learning at all but boredom. I saw students talking in class, not listening to lectures, having conversations instead of working on their study guides, putting their heads on their desks, and tuning out. Teachers talked about what a struggle it was to get students to turn in their homework at all, much less on time. Students picked up enough information to pass the test, did their work well enough to get the grade, and then totally forgot whatever it can be said that they had learned.