go home!? home.
current thinks being thunk:
I’m scared of this whole starting thing. I like to sit in the rain, lemme find go and find that quote that my professor introduced to me:
“...educational practice should [not] be viewed as some kind of awning under which people wait for the rain to let up: Waiting out a rainstorm under an awning requires no preparation or training…Indispensable to teachers’ struggles is the knowledge, which they must forge within themselves and which we must forge within ourselves, of the dignity and importance of their task” (Freire, 2005)
I begin to conceptualize my lessons or my classes and I get overwhelmed and scared. I want my students to learn and enjoy and their lives to be transformed. I whipped together a lesson plan for a customer service training my boss asked me to lead and it didn’t even take me an hour to create an amazing lesson plan. I knew exactly what line of ideology learners needed to take and the essential questions critical to learning the concept! Its like the content didn’t even matter but it was the philosophy, line of questions and ideas, and the conversation topics that just came to me. I know this wasn’t an epiphany or some sort of luck, it reinforces a small feeling inside of me that I am a good teacher and that I have learned something from my program (haha) and that I can make good lesson in a timely manner for my future students that is interesting and challenging! Its like I was confident in the material that helped, that I wasn’t super worried about the product over several days but just processing what are the small things that are important and then thought of how we would get there! I even identified the routines necessary to accomplish the lesson too, like creating partners before and having a shared mechanism for quieting down and listening. It felt mystical, like a wizard conjuring a long-practiced but little-used spell.
There are things I read and understand that are essential and fundamental to my teaching values and philosophy, but they are difficult for me to process in concepts of a theoretical classroom or in someone else’s experienced words: social-emotional learning, equity, high expectations, daily practices, compassion, authenticity, transparency, autonomous, independent learners, advocacy, funds of knowledge, meaningful conversations and ideas, applicable to real life expression and feelings, participatory culture; its as if I need to process these values through my own vision and ideologies. How hard it is to accomplish these ideas in my mind and in my lesson and in my larger classroom sphere! It is so easy to identify conceptual frameworks and think the good thoughts that will help me become a stronger educator, but starting is so hard. How do I initiate these ideas or integrate these concepts into an actual lesson?
Annotating: I just thought about my Tyler, the Creator lesson and I thought how do I make that lesson better? Well, I think there needs to be some meaningful use out of the practice of annotation (and a continued and reinforced use out of the practice); so we could practice annotating for basic content, reasons, motivations, references, ideas or questions that come up, connections to own experiences or knowledge (all fundamental forms of annotating), and do a silent discussion of annotating (and it being a text that students will find interesting and challenging, relevant? - video game one and a fashion one and a technology one and a nature one; then create a product out of the ideas, like maybe a reflection on the original article or the concept of using annotating, or even hopefully if there is an application of annotations on a familiar concept. Check boxes feels like a rocky-region to begin planting trail markers for students.I guess that didn’t take that long...!
How do I apply the concept of digital gardening into my life in a way that reflects how it could look in my classroom:
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