Having Fun Substituting

Hello All,

As a few of you know, I have recently begun substituting for the Ithaca City School District. Today I had my third job since receiving Board approval. I must say that this experience has only solidified my belief that I do want to become a teacher. (HUGE sigh of relief!)

My first day I subbed for a music teacher at Dewitt Middle School and worked with 6th-8th graders and I had a blast. Everyone was very well-behaved and were more than helpful and receptive to the assignment that I was instructed to complete with the class. It was a journal assignment requiring the students to reflect on a Navajo Indian performance that they had seen earlier in the week. I was very impressed with their willingness/excitement to do the assignment. And it was writing! I know that many of us, myself included, have become a little jaded with the amount of actual work being done in the classrooms, but this music teacher has her stuff together! They are even working when a sub is there. When I first started thinking about becoming a sub, I thought that all I would ever do was be a study hall monitor type of person in the classroom, but to date, I have had actual lesson plans to follow (which is a heck of a lot less boring)! YAY!

My second day was not as great. I took a chance and accepted a job to sub for a high school physical education teacher. It was horrible. There were no plans left for me to follow if the weather was bad (it was raining all day) so I had to impose on other gym teacher's classes and sort of piggyback. Everything seemed chaotic. By the end of the day, I had my own gym space and had the students play indoor soccer one period and handball the next. The class that played handball was crazy! It was a bunch of upper class students and they were so aggressive and into the game that there was actually some blood shed (this totally reminded me of the aggressive behavior in Raising Cain). A kid had his finger nail ripped back! He was very calm, got a band aide and came back to play with even more ferocity! It was unbelievable!

Today was the best! I subbed for a 6th grade math teacher who also has one reading class (?). The plans were great and everything went soooo smoothly. The kids were funny, cooperative and all-around-great. And, plus having worked a few days (and survived) I felt more confident and I think that the kids could pick up on this. They did their classwork (review in a workbook for a test in a few days) and didn't do anything crazy or deviant. It was wonderful. The reading class was pretty fun. We did some vocab (definitely not Masselink style, but from a traditional workbook), and then they read aloud. At the end, they were to write in their journals about their reactions to the chapter we read. After they had written everything down, I asked them to talk to me about what they had written. They were very excited to have the chance to talk about it and were incredibly vocal. So overall, the best classroom day yet!

I would strongly suggest that, if possible, everyone try subbing. It has helped me gain confidence as a teacher and it is just fun to be in a classroom again. Here's to many more great classroom experiences!

Reflections on Podcast

Thinking back about my podcast and its creation, I am quite proud. I was able to successfully learn (at least the basics) about a program (Garageband) which I had never even heard of or used before. This in itself was a great accomplishment. At first I was a little reluctant about having to use a Mac, mainly for convenience issues, but now I am at peace with travelling early to class or even an extra day to work on the Macs. They have proved to be much more user-friendly than I anticipated and would love to own one of my own someday.

The actual creation of the podcast was a learning experience as well. I had never used a mic to record myself with a computer and had definitely never used Audacity or LAME. Luckily, after a little frustration, I actually read the Help instructions at the LAME website and was able to convert my audio file to an MP3. A down side to using LAME was that it automatically compacted the separate audio files I had created when recording into one larger, contiguous file. If I were to revise my podcast, I would definitely like to figure out how to keep some of my audio files separate during the conversion process. I wish that I had had little chunks of audio interspersed with music, instead of music only at the beginning and the end.

I loved finding pictures to use to enhance my podcast and its content. I found so many pictures that it was at times difficult to choose which ones to use. For this reason, I ended up with quite a lot of photos (around 50), way exceeding the minimum requirement. While the pictures were probably the most fun part of the process, they were also a little bit frustrating. Each time I put a picture in the queue, Garageband would automatically stretch it out to fit the entire length of the podcast. So each time a picture was added it needed to be shrunk down to the appropriate size. Not a big deal, just annoying. The many pictures were well worth the hassle of repeatedly shrinking down, because I believe that the visual aspects of the podcast greatly supported what my audio was saying. Being such a lover of print media, I had never really taken much time to think about how images can enhance any topic all the while making it more interesting and pleasurable to study.

Now after seeing James and Larissa's iMovies, I wish that I had been able to use this application instead. At least I will be making a snazzy movie soon. The transitions available in iMovie are far superior to those (or lack of) in Garageband.

I am very pleased that each of us were able to chose a topic that was important to us and relate it to the changes that are happening in the 'Flat World.' Parental involvement in children's education has recently came to the forefront of my mind since the birth of my niece. The connection that technology is allowing parents to have in their children's education is amazing and hugely beneficial to both parties.

The copyright issues that have arisen are quite surprising to me. I cannot believe that you cannot use an entire song when there is obviously no intention to sell the product or make a profit. But then again, I am a person who believes that everything should be open source. I miss the days of Napster and free legal downloads. I can say for myself, that I did not purchase any fewer actual CD's, but simply found more music that I would be interested in purchasing the whole album after browsing through a few of the artist's songs. I probably bought more CD's! Anyway, I am curious to find out what sort of repercussions might come of many of us infringing on copyright.

In summation, I believe that the podcast assignment was effective in learning a new technology and applying what we have learned in Friedman and Richardson while exploring an interest that is important to each one of us.

My Own Experience with Passionate Contracts

I know that many of my experiences may be similar to yours out there (you know who you are).

In the MAT program, for the most part, we are being taught very progressive ideas where we, as teachers, work to foster an environment where every student can learn what he or she is genuinely interested in. Through supporting and encouraging personal interests to promote learning we also strive to prepare our students to function in society as literate adults who can listen, speak, read, and write effectively (hopefully in many medias). So, I would say that the majority of our classes endorse a Constructivist classroom learning environment.

When I first entered a classroom, as an observer, I discovered that I was entering a different world that what I was expecting or preparing to enter. My first observation was definitely a 'teacher-centric' universe. The teacher I was observing taught 11th grade honors and AP English courses. She taught them...and they listened. There was no room or time for discovery or personal interest because the teacher was very focused on the tests that each student would be taking (either Regents or AP). Many days were literally spent doing old exams. Many assignments were old essay questions from said exams. Not only was there little discussion, there was no room for revision or growth. Everything was a one-time, here's your grade, now let's move onto the next question type of assignment. When classroom discussion did occur, it was incredibly structured, and I could tell that these incredibly intelligent students had learned how to play the game. They had the right answers and never pushed the boundaries of what a text could mean or what they felt about the text.

This teacher was in fact the teacher who taught me for 11th grade honors English and AP English the next year. I did well in the class, since I too was a student who knew how to play the game. Incredibly, it was the texts that we diligently read in AP English that I believe directed my life path of wanting to be an English teacher. Looking back after observing her teaching style, I am surprised that I do not shrink away from literature but in fact love and embrace it. I guess it goes to show that if you love something, you will love it no matter how it is packaged and delivered.

Now, onto my next placement. Last semester, I observed a teacher who graduated from Cortland with her MAT but for K-6. She was teaching 7th grade (how does that work with NCLB supposedly working so hard to ensure that each teacher is certified to teach the grade level and subject they are teaching?). Again, in this classroom, I saw little of what we were learning here in our program. Grammar-a-Day exercises were done to 'teach' grammar (literally correcting ONE grammatically incorrect sentence a day, completely going against everything we learned in Masselink's class). Few students, during my 50 hours, seemed to make any progress in this arena. The majority of the time I listened to the students stumble through Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. They did no reading at home...everything was read in class. This was so interactive that my host teacher even had time to knit while they read! I am sure this was because, like me, she was bored out of her mind after hearing the same scenes read that we had already heard three times before in the first three classes. If she was bored, how could she think that the students were not bored also? I cannot even begin to address how awful it is to read an entire text aloud in class. Time could be spent so much more wisely - possibly incorporating technology and personal interest/abilities, i.e. Shade's approach to Hamlet.

To her support, when I first began observing in her class she was finishing a unit on YA lit about the Revolutionary War and the culminating project for the unit was to create an iMovie. Sadly, it was little more than synopsis and a little author bio. The kids were able to add a little touch of themselves to what would have normally been a quite boring task. They loved it and were so proud to share their productions (reinforcing the need for an authentic audience). Thought this as the only example of technology being incorporated, at least she tried.

So after encountering these two environments and teaching styles that contrasted so greatly, I was naturally torn, and confused...and depressed. How was I going to negotiate what I thought English was supposed to be and what it appears, was the status quo? I am still working on this. How to you know what you can 'get away' with and what may cause too many waves? During my best, most confident moments, I know that all this requires is being able to prove the worth of what I am doing. And hopefully others will follow suit.

Suggested Podcast Criteria

Hello All,

Here are some ideas Joy and I had for a rubric for grading the podcasts:

1. Personal interest in subject
2. Addresses SOME aspect of the Flat World
3. Creative
4. Flows between mediums
5. Exhibits knowledge of iMovie/GarageBand

Talk to you later!
:)

Passionate Contracts by Ursula Kelly

This is a provocative article that many of us beginning teachers will be able to relate to. It discusses the pedagogies we are taught in our program and the conflicts we will (or already have) discovered in current secondary classrooms.

Some major points to think about and interesting excerpts:

• Education and change are political.
• "This chapter focuses on the contentious and deeply sedimented relationships of power, knowledge, desire, and identity, as they are constituted within beginning teachers themselves, as a means to examine how - and in what ways - change might be possible" (Kelly 57).
• "The dynamics of knowledge, power, desire, and identity [are] embodied relations" (58)
• Two current approaches to teacher education:
• A portfolio - "A technicist base and is developed to provide beginning teachers an array of 'methods' by which to implement the current curriculum" (58-59).
• An ideal - "Ignores the existence of curricular direction and professional practices, proceeding with advances in English as if the status quo did not exist" (59).
• Romanticized English:
• "How are such romanticized notions or 'impossible dreams' of English become ; dreams of the possible' within English" (60)?
• "We fall in and out of love with knowledge" (60).
• Geography of English
• The reasons we teach wanted to teach English - "rhetorical-functional, aesthetic-cultural, ethical-progressive, and political-critical" (61).
• "English is not a construct, not a given or an essence' and the construct of English is not monolithic" (62).
• "Contradiction is the fertile seedbed of change" (62).
• "These competing versions of English are deeply political; they are about relations of power and the extent to which they are sanctioned reiterated, and challenged through subject English" (63).
• Reconstituted English
• "Effectively sidelined by such foci, however, is a concern for what education is about and how its normative preoccupations and daily enactments, to the exclusion of other concerns, can be obstacles to visions and versions of change" (65).
• "Without the support to become the teachers they are learning they want to be, these beginning teachers of English may learn that there is little space in which to negotiate the differences such insights accrue for the classroom. In this lesson, desire begets vexation, and vexation erodes hope and curtains the spirit. No number of exciting new techniques for maintaining the very old status quo are of solace here" (65).
  

Finally, "Teacher education based on exploration, experimentation, and critical inquiry cannot flourish in such compromised circumstance - nor can the well-informed dreams of beginning teachers" (66).

I hope this article spoke to you and you could connect with the content of the article. How can we change our program (or simply our approach to the program) to brace us for the conflicting messages we will all encounter when we begin student teaching.