Tag: learning

Don’t get me wrong.  If there were not winter breaks, I’d not have survived to be as old as I am.  I’ve spent the last month or so of every semester with my mind on its knees begging for rest.  But rest never happens.  It can’t.  I’m a teacher.

Being a teacher is a 24/7 thing.  One doesn’t turn one’s mind off when not in the classroom.  One eats, sleeps and dreams teaching.    At least I have always assumed other people are like me.

So when “rest time” comes, all that really happens is refocusing.  The time is meant to be used and the teacher in me will fill it with work.  

Originally posted at Teacher’s Lounge

One of the reasons I put such a high value on commentary is that there are times when a comment or two can snap things back into focus…or at least remind us of another time and another focus that perhaps needs to be revisited.

At the end of this semester, besides being 60 years old, I will have been a teacher for 32 years.  I have taken it as an article of faith that what I have been doing is trying to find more and better ways of expound upon Truth.  I have told the same stories over and over again in a myriad different ways, looking for the light bulbs and trying to measure their luminosity.

Outside the classroom the world becomes my classroom and Truth is no longer restricted to learning mathematics or computer languages, but rather about life in general.  In particular I have focused on what goes on in the human brain.  The only one I happen to be able to experiment upon is my own, so there is bound to be bias in my sample.  But I have concentrated on the possible, not on the probable, so I’ve not considered that too much of a flaw.

I turned in my grades at 3:45pm on Wednesday afternoon.  I had 45 minutes to spare.  Some years I have less than that.

The truth is I generally run out of motivation to grade prior to actually having to do the grading.  In some respects, the lack of interest some of my students display drains me of the motivation I think I should have.  As much as we would like to have students who think that they should give maximum effort in each of their classes, that’s very often not the case.

I gave three incompletes this past semester.  That’s three more than I usually do.  I will do just about anything to avoid giving an incomplete.  I think I’ve mentioned before my hatred of paperwork.

Originally posted as part of Teacher’s Lounge

At the end of a semester, I’m always of the opinion that I’d like to end it on some kind of up note.  I haven’t collected the data to see how often that is the case.  I suspect it is rare.  But that could just be a reflection of how I feel at this moment in time.

We had two meetings of import to the Faculty this week.  On Tuesday we met with the Vice President for Academic Affairs/Dean of Faculty to “clear the air.”  One of the major issues was shared governance.  On Thursday we had a union meeting (AAUP).  I suspected that at least one of those was going to result in pissing me off.  I was correct in that assumption.

We have a relatively new dean.  Since she has been here she has talked about the importance of faculty taking the responsibility for initiatives to improve the plight of the college.  Since she has been here, there have been faculty members complaining about how everything is decided at the top and heard about the faculty later.

The disconnect is overwhelming at times.

I am tired.  No, take that back.  That is too much of an understatement of the problem

I am exhausted.  I am so exhausted that I was halfway through writing an essay about the semester when I realized that for all intents and purposes, I’d written the essay before, two years ago.  So I’ll post that and go take a catnap while you read it and be back when you are done.

Originally posted as part of Teacher’s Lounge.

There are no numbers here.  There will be no links to research backing up my assertions.  Because this is not about data, it’s about people.  As one teacher out of many I will tell you my opinion.  As someone who teaches purely for altruistic and idealistic purposes and has done so for 31 years, I will tell you what I think.

What I do know is that drawing any connection between the performance of students on a high stakes test and the quality of the teacher is tenuous at best.  Some might say non-existent.  Even if there does exist such a connection, assumptions about what such a connection means really ought to be examined.

How does one tell the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher?  I hate that phrasing.  Bad Teacher?   Really?  People are dedicating their lives to doing public service, teaching our young people…and increasingly our older people as well…and other people think they have the right, even the duty, to call some of us Bad Teachers  Let’s get out the scarlet letters.  Lets burn them at the stake.  Bad Teacher?  

I have been vastly preoccupied lately about the removal of people like me from among those who are considered worthy of civil rights protections.  I wrote about that here:  If only you were gay….  It was one of those pieces I wish everyone at Daily Kos would have read in order to gain maybe just a smidgen of insight, but as usual, people had more important things to do, like bash the other candidates.  Issues get set aside at times like this.

But I did manage to read a few diaries on education during the week.  Some were very good.  Some were appalling, from my point of view.  But I don’t only link to the ones I agree with.

I am far from an expert on anything concerning elementary education (apart from the topic of gender as it relates to child development, which I will claim as a topic of study about a decade ago).  But I have some personal experiences.  And I try hard to exercise the part of my brain which deals with fairness issues whenever I think about….well…anything.

At the same time, the better students need to be challenged.  I grew up in the era of “gifted and talented” programs and think it was good for me to get to do things that the other students didn’t.  But I didn’t think it was fair, necessarily, that I got to go to places that they may never go to and be exposed to knowledge reserved for the few.

It has been my custom to post the essay portion of Teacher’s Lounge here at Docudharma an hour or so after posting Teacher’s Lounge at Daily Kos.  That’s about when the conversation slows down a bit.

I’m modifying this one a bit because it really is specifically about Daily Kos in many ways.  Or maybe it’s not.

I’ll let you decide…

Tuesday night I had a quiz scheduled for my Java I class.  At least I call them quizzes.  Everyone knows they are exams, but calling it a quiz is an attemtpt to lessen the pressure.  I count the overall grade on the quizzes as 25% of the total grade and count their best 5 out of 6, so each quiz is really 5% of the total grade, with one mulligan. 

Projects (aka homework: programs they have to create) counts 50% of the grade.  The final projects, which are individually created to be different for each student, counts 20% and the catch-all “classroom participation” is the other 5%.

Anyway, after letting them ask any question they wanted for the first 15 minutes, we started the quiz at 6:15pm.  At around 6:35 one of my students finished (she’s good!), asked when she should return and went to her car “to chill.”

At 6:40pm the alarms went off.