I want to attend this conference

So this post is specifically addressed to those MAC-ers that are social studies majors (or any of the sub-specialties like economics, history, political science, and geography). I was surfing around some websites and blogs this afternoon and I ventured onto the National Council for the Social Studies site. They are the largest association of social studies educators in the country and they are having their annual conference in Atlanta, November 13-15, 2009. I asked our faculty members if it would be feasible to attend and I got the green light from Charlie. So I'm seriously thinking of going. If you think you'd be interested too, let me know and maybe we can coordinate a group rate. This could be a great opportunity to get to know the movers and shakers in the field and to get a head start on professional development. Plus, it could serve as an excellent complement to our methods class and help us as we transition into full-time student teaching in January.

Follow this link to find information about the Conference and if it sounds like something you would like to consider, find me in class!

I like the teacher incentive fund

So does the Center for American Progress.

I should have been homeschooled

Guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf links to a post by Alan Jacobs at The American Scene in which Jacobs ponders his homeschooled son's literature curriculum. Money quote:

He’s headed into the eleventh grade, and while his education so far has given him a sound overview of Western cultural history, we’re concerned that he hasn’t had enough experience digging deeply into particular issues, doing wide-ranging research and coming up with sophisticated theses based on what he has learned. So we’ve decided to organize the coming school year around particular topics with interdisciplinary facets to them, starting in each case with one or two books that will in different ways orient him to the issues. Our focus will be on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West, though any non-Western topics could reach back farther.

Friedersdorf marvels at the quality of the young scholar's education and laments his own. His comments are worth quoting in full:

I say that as someone who attended a well-regarded Catholic high school that offered numerous AP classes, better than average teachers and a reputation among elite colleges for turning out exceptionally well prepared students. Even so, I cannot help but assess its curriculum with a Paul Simon line: "When I look back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." Despite hard work that resulted in a 4.0+ GPA, I spent four years studying Spanish without becoming anything near fluent, passed an AP Physics class knowing embarrassingly little about the subject, and endured a biology class that basically amounted to memorizing terms long enough to pass successive unit exams (and no longer), conceptual understanding be damned. The only classes that afforded real learning were senior year English, modern art, geometry, and an ethics course, classes I remain grateful for having taken -- they've afforded more intellectual fulfillment in subsequent years than anything in my upbringing save the fact that my parents read to me endlessly as a little kid.

What strikes me, all these years later, about my lousy but better-than-average high school education is how useful it proved in preparing me for college and the job market. Absent exceptional teachers, an academically competitive high school basically teaches the young how to game the system lots of people call the American meritocracy. It is difficult to describe this skill set precisely, though it certainly includes things like earning good grades in classes you know little if anything about, learning to game standardized tests and exams, employing writerly tricks to obscure the fact that you know nothing of substance about the topic of your five page paper, and understanding which teachers aren't desirous of substance insomuch as they want an ability to fake it on pages where the margins and font are diligently set to their specifications.

Oh to have those youthful years back. As an adult, I understand the preciousness of time, and I sorely regret having wasted any of it simulating rather than gaining knowledge. The experience does inform a suspicion that if we stopped making the overlap between academic skills and life skills a self-fulfilling prophecy, they might overlap less than we imagine. Were that the case, perhaps high schools would rejigger their curriculum to more closely resemble what Alan is attempting: knowledge as something more than a metric to be measured by standardized tests, a means of admission to a selective college or a prerequisite for strategic advancement in the American job market.

He could not have described my experience any better. I too went to an above average high school (although mine was public), populated by high quality teachers, ample resources and plenty of AP courses. I too spent four years studying Spanish only to achieve mild proficiency, managed to earn a G.P.A. of 3.9, and stumbled my way to A's in chemistry and physics without retaining much of anything. With the exception of AP English, an excellent Vietnam War class, an Introduction to Journalism course, and a fantastic AP Calculus teacher, my high school experience would have been utterly forgettable in terms of content literacy. But I definitely learned the art of B.S.ing on papers, rote memorization without any long term memory retention, and the importance of presentation over substance.

And yet, I was one of the lucky ones. Transitioning to college was challenging but not overwhelmingly so and I adjusted to the increased workload and higher expectations rather seamlessly. I can hardly imagine the difficulty less advantaged students faced, if they had the opportunity to go to college at all.

One of the first friends I made freshmen year was homeschooled and I remember wondering how she could have possibly been prepared for college without attending an actual high school. But she had a depth of knowledge that made my educational background look mediocre at best and I realized pretty quickly that the conventional wisdom was wrong. The one-on-one instruction of the homeschooling environment, free from the restrictions of standardized tests, allows for the kind of meaningful learning that Wes Jacobs has access to and even the best high school in America cannot compete with that. It makes me wonder just what we as educators can do to provide an environment that does encourage genuine exploration and critical thinking, even as we plan for the next round of assessments.

I am a cartoon

My great friend Donna told me about this cool website FaceYourManga that will help you create an anime avatar. I wasn't thrilled with my screen photo and I wanted something interesting but that was still clearly me. Well, voila! It (kinda) looks like me, right? Right? This is why I love the web, you can find all sorts of interesting applications and tools that can make your blog or twitter account more than just a repository of information. It becomes a total reflection of your way of looking at the world. I think you can tell a lot about a person by they way they design their web pages. What are their priorities? What functionality matters to them? How do they want to communicate with the rest of us? Even though this stuff is not exactly new to the world, so much of it is new to me and I'm having the best time exploring cool and innovative ways of expressing myself. I used to be really creative as a child. I painted, drew pictures, used clay and collage. I love performing as an actor but there is something unique about creating something with your hands. Yes, typing on a screen doesn't get my hands dirty. But I still feel like I'm sharing elements of myself everytime I publish a blog post or post a video or reply on twitter. It's pretty cool!

I think I love twitter

Yes, you read that correctly. As I said in class, I was the biggest Twitter skeptic and a committed resistor of the social networking thing generally. But the Iranian election and aftermath totally changed my mind and although I haven't personally invested a lot of time yet, I think that the whole phenomenon is worthy of a second look. Because the mainstream media outlets, particularly cable news, were completely AWOL on the story until it was well underway, I relied completely on some of my favorite political bloggers to keep me aprised of the situation in Iran. CNN failed big time and I'm not sure that I will ever trust that network to cover important stories again. People like Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, Nico Pitney at Huffington Post, the New York Time's The Lede blog, Tehran Bureau and the BBC provided the kind of comprehensive coverage that I was looking for. Not only could they link to official reports and interviews, they also uploaded photos and video from Iranians that offered a real-time glimpse into the on-the-ground narrative that was unfolding. Watching a cell phone video that recorded Iranians at night on their rooftops chanting "Allah-o Akbar" (God is Great) in open defiance of their leadership was awe-inspiring.



So many of these reports came through Twitter and Facebook that I signed up for both services just so I could follow the news. Endless refreshes on twitter made for riveting viewing. As Jeff mentioned, the State Department actually asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance because the tool was so vital to the protesters. Amazing stuff.

So, now I am a twitter convert. But what of facebook? Well, not two days after I signed up I received a really sweet email from a friend that I had fallen out with years ago. We have reestablished contact and I have Facebook to thank! Although I still haven't spent the time fixing up my page that I would like, I finaly understand what all the fuss is about.

I dream of a technology wonderland

Thinking about how to incorporate technology into my classroom reminded me of a rather mundane experience I had a couple of years ago. After my husband and I adopted a border collie, I suddenly found myself taking at least one LONG walk every day and I needed something to listen to on my iPod. Music wasn’t cutting it (lacks a beginning and end) so I started to explore podcasting, discovered an entire universe of fascinating conversations and I became a bona fide podcast addict. Not only did podcasts provide information on current events, history, politics, economics, and the arts, but it also taught me auditory learning skills and revealed to me that the nature of learning is about listening and exchanging ideas, asking questions and exploring controversial issues. In addition to standards from NPR (The Diane Rehm Show, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, On the Media, and This American Life), I devour episodes of Stuff You Should Know, Open Source, The Moth, Radio Lab, and Democracy Now. Okay, so what is my point? Well, one afternoon while listening to Diane Rehm a caller identified herself as a high school student and said that her entire class was listening to the show that day. They had voted on a question to ask and she was elected to make the call. I was completely delighted by this and thought that it was an inspired idea by the instructor. Since then I have heard teachers and students call into various shows to make comments or ask questions and I always imagined that if I ever went into teaching, I would try to incorporate podcasts into my lesson plans somehow.

Obviously, I went into teaching! Or else I wandered into the wrong classroom on June 22… Anyway, when faced with the possibility of designing my ideal classroom, I immediately thought of how to encourage engagement with the content material in untraditional ways. I want my students to read texts, no doubt, but I am determined to avoid an overreliance on one textbook or even a handful of books. I want them to have access to many points of view and many different types of resources and media. I approached this activity imagining that I have millions of dollars to fund my wildest fantasies and I know that most of my initiatives are pipe dreams. But I can think big and experiment with cheaper or more accessible paths to those goals. Having my students subscribe to and follow one podcast for the length of one term, with frequent assignments that require them to engage in deep learning, is one example. Most podcasts are free and even if students do not have access to a computer or iPod, there are ways to provide these resources. I want them to think about how geography, history, economics and political science are relevant to their lives and using technology to expand their understanding of real world implications might inspire them to, well, pay closer attention!

After filling my drawing and wish list with high tech computers, multimedia stations, kindles, advanced mapping software and editing equipment, I had a sudden suspicion that the whole exercise was a trick. Did Jeff and Liz anticipate that we would create these wildly idealistic laundry lists of gadgets and devices only to crush our souls with the reality we will face in our schools? I think that it would be easy to get swamped by technology, to constantly have to confront the rapid rate of technological advancements, and to always be consumed with the innovations that you don’t have access to. When I was a theatre practitioner, I learned an important lesson about technology and I think it applies very well to teaching. While it would be awesome to have a limitless budget, a gigantic stage with the latest lighting and sound equipment, and access to video and computer technology, ultimately, theatre is about actors communicating with audiences using written texts. The best directors can create incredible theatre with a ten-dollar budget and a million-dollar budget. Teachers should approach the classroom with the same attitude; having access to technology can be helpful but not necessary to create a rich learning environment. In decades and centuries past, teachers did not have the same resources that we have today but they still managed to teach and their students still managed to learn. Technology can enhance learning but it should not be used as a crutch or an excuse for teachers to abdicate their responsibilities as communicators.

I blog, therefore I am.

This is it! My first real blog post. I think I am much cooler than I actually am right now. So, down to business after two weeks of SMAC goodness. It's been quite an adventure so far and I only hope that I'm retaining at least some of the information they are throwing at us on a daily basis. My dreams are filled with concept maps, knowledge continua (plural of continuum!), literacy objectives, philosophical theories and covariates. Is anyone else exhausted?