I don’t know why I have so much trouble getting down to business. I love to think about my job – teaching – both with regard to pedagogy and content, and throughout the school year I yearn for the summer, when I will read, research and plan to better understand my subjects and my craft. HA! Hilarious. Not because it isn’t true but b/c that summer has NEVER happened after 8 years of teaching.
So, I’ve started reading 3 books in the last two weeks for two of the courses I teach (Down to Earth: Natures Role in American History, A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, and Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women) while wishing that I could read the other 27 or so that are piled on and around my desk, perused the blogs of my fellow “action team” members, reviewed the notes from our meetings as well as websites and articles we’ve discussed, scratched out numerous ideas in numerous places about what, how, when and why I want to teach certain things, and I’m finally sitting down to put it all together.
Here is our school goal:
Develop and integrate real world applications and assessments of contemporary literacy skills:
- across disciplines
- school-wide
- district-wide
- within the community
That allow students to:
- know where to find information
- synthesize and evaluate the information
- use appropriate information across disciplines to solve real-world problems
- work collaboratively
- use effective communication skills to present findings and persuade others
We, as a group, aim to implement this goal in our classrooms using a variety of tools and techniques, as well as each other. Clearly we can’t speak to the school and district-wide elements of the goal, but we hope to accomplish as much as possible with regard to creative problem solving, communication and purposeful metacognition in our respective realms.
The pitfalls.
- I think I have the desire and ability to accomplish quite a bit, but I have a terrible tendency to neglect things that are not “on fire” (fires = planning class, teaching, meeting with students about papers, writing college recommendations, grading, answering parent and guidance counselor phone calls and emails, going to the bathroom, eating). Ensuring that I make the time to reflect on my own goals and practices is critical to facilitating the same behaviors in my students. (Also, putting out fires is really tiring as is raising a family, which is why every time I open a book I read a page and fall asleep, which does not facilitate progress.)
- I am so scattered. I do not have a focused mind. I am constantly thinking of 6 things at once. This probably comes in handy with regard to certain issues, but overall it is a drawback in that I have a hard time completing a task. I don’t recall if I was like this before I had children. Their existence has erased/misplaced critical data from my database.
- perfectionism – I always want things to be awesome. I have grand designs for what I’d like to accomplish and they REALLY hold me back because if I fear that I can’t put everything into a task, I tend to avoid it (this is an enormous problem and has been for a long time).
The promise.
- I literally love this stuff. I love teaching both because of the practice and all that it requires, and I LOVE social studies and the academic environment. I want to constantly be improving my practice and intellectual life for my students and this “project” will enable me to reflect on many of the things that I already do, and improve upon and supplement them.
- A lot of the work that I already do in my classroom will be useful. I was lucky to walk into a job where a coworker and I were able to design our curricula entirely and she had a great deal of experience and a similar philosophy to me. It was tough at first, as its quite different from the traditional classroom, but much of it has to do with active learning, investment, creativity, accountability and technology.
- there will be time allotted to this work because it is near impossible to make the time. For years I have wanted to teach a multidisciplinary project with regard to Hurricane Katrina and its impact on the gulf coast and this country.....alas, no time.
Now, there are a variety of things that I’d like to address in future blogs:
- the usefulness of the sources and tools we’ve examined (e.g. The Ross school sr. projects, Richer Picture, Todaysmeet, EduBlog, etc.)
- creativity – the article in Newsweek, the urgency and timeliness of this issue; national implications on the failures of our education system to every layer of society
- the experiences that I could draw from to help accomplish our goal (from working at a charter school with portfolios and based on social justice to my attempts at blogging in honors, portfolios in honors and collab, our round tables and finals in Mideast)
- specific plans for my classes, starting with Honors, then ME, then Collab
- obviously, as the school year and our efforts march forward, the concrete goals, plans, and their executions (pun intended)
I’ve never blogged like this before. I don’t allow for disclaimers in my classroom when students share written work, so I will resist the temptation myself….but I do allow students to identify specific areas of weakness/that they’d like to work on. Mine are:
- being scattered; cohesion
- developing a tone
So, I’m going to resist the temptation to save this, tell myself I’ll come back to revise it and never post it. Perfectionism be damned!
