Believe in Education!

I just watched an extremely inspirational and powerful speech that Professor Langholz emailed us.  It was given by an extremely articulate young boy to a stadium full of people at a Dallas Independent School District conference.  Click on the following link to watch it http://www.dallasisd.org/keynote.htm .  This boy delivers a tremendously optimistic and moving speech about education.  Regardless of whether or not this student actually wrote this speech or just delivered it, the message is the same.  Teachers need to believe in their students.  Teachers need to believe in their fellow teachers and other school staff, faculty, and administration.  Students need to believe in their teachers.  All of these go hand in hand and I agree with this boy that every child is worth believing in and trying to help.  For many children, their only source of guidance and compassion is their teachers.  This is very sad and makes our job as teachers that much more powerful, important, and meaningful.

The Last Lecture by Dr. Randy Pausch

One guideline for this blog assignment was to attend 2 lectures and blog about them.  I may be slightly bending this rule by simply watching a lecture by Dr. Randy Pausch who a professor of computer science and known for his book  "The Last Lecture" on youtube.  This lecture and his book were written when he was diagnosed with cancer and was asked to give one last lecture to the students and faculty at Carnegie Melon.  Pausch is very optimistic and delivers quite the inspirational and uplifting lecture for someone who is going to die in not too long.  He discusses the importance of pursuing childhood dreams, having fun, and working hard.  One of the most ideas that he discusses is the idea that just because someone is tough on you or criticizes your shortcomings, this does not mean that they do not care about you.  In fact, it probably implies the opposite; that is, they do care about you and want you to improve and know that you are capable of more.  It is more problematic when someone gives up on you and does not get on your case to perform at your highest.  This idea is extremely pertinent to a career as a teacher.  I want to relay this message to my students so that they realize that my critiques and those of others, of their behavior, school work, and progress are a result of us caring rather than us getting mad or not liking our students.  This is an important distinction for people to understand.  You can see the lecture on youtube by searching "last lecture" or by clicking on the link here The Last Lecture.

Mission trips and Service Learning

Some of my best experiences in life have been the mission trips I have gone on with my church.  I have to been to inner city Philadelphia, rural Arkansas, and Indian reservations in Montana, Arizona, and North Dakota.  I have had so much fun and been so moved by the relationships I built and strengthened on these trips and the work we did to help others.  I am going on another mission trip this spring break to Mississippi and Louisiana through Luther and Habitat for Humanity.  I am quite excited for this trip.  In class on Friday, when Professor Langholz was eloquently delivering his "Dews and Doughnuts of Teaching" (his version of Do's and Don'ts that came with Mt Dew and doughnuts), I began to think about how I could implement these experiences into my work as a teacher.  He said that as teachers, we should be eager to pick up new hobbies, travel,  go on adventures, and take risks because teachers need to be interesting people.  My experiences on these mission trips give me a different insight into the way the world works and make me unique.  As a teacher, I would love to be able to use these experiences as a source of learning or inspiration for my students and encourage my students to also become involved in some sort of service.  I believe that this may be just as beneficial for those helping as for those who are being helped.  As a science teacher we could even do class activities that would include service type projects like cleaning up parks or picking up garbage around a lake or in a forest.  The students would be participating in stewardship, getting exercise, working as a group, and learning about the negative impact that humans can have on the environment.  All of these are beneficial consequences of this type of service learning. 

Snow Days

Many school children in the Upper Midwest had their days made today due to school closings and the resulting snow days.  As a child, like many other kids, I lived for snow days and I still would be more than happy to have classes cancelled due to a heavy snow storm.  Some kids may be more excited just to simply miss school and may not even be happy for all the wondrous activities that the snow provides.  For me, missing school was never really a negative, but I think the best part about snow days was the fact that there was a large amount of fresh snow and this meant that skiing, sledding, snowball fighting, and snow fort building was sure to occur.  The recent snow days got me thinking about snow days and how they can relate to education.  For one, snow days present some logistical problems for teachers and schools. Perhaps more important and more interesting to think about as a future teacher is the fact that more students are excited about snow days (or missing school in general) than school itself.  Is this is a problem of current schools or is it just a natural thing that kids would rather not have to go to school and just play all day.  The latter is probably the more agreed upon explanation.  I would say it is not necessarily a problem of the schools but the better schools or schools that have more enthusiastic teachers and stimulating curriculums will have more engaged students that may be more likely to enjoy school.  Thus, the students at these schools may not be as excited to miss school for a snow day as students in other schools. As a teacher, a cool goal to have, may be to have your students more excited to go to school than to miss school on a school day.  I would love it if my students were more excited to come to school and learn than to have a day off to lounge around.  This is probably an unrealistic goal but it would be awesome and I am sure it would make teaching quite fun and less frustrating than it could be under other circumstances.  On the other hand, these snow days may be a good way to allow for kids to relax, get some exercise, and just be kids.  There are many positive things that could result from this extra time off.  As a science teacher, it would be fun to have the kids come into school and do a snow or winter related science experiment or just take a hike in a nearby nature park or woods.  

Luther's Big Brother Big Sister Program

At the the beginning of the school year, the various clubs at Luther all gathered in the library lawn and had sign up tables.  I signed up for a few fun clubs including the outdoor club (BWP) and the PALS program which is like Luther's version of Big Brother Big Sister or other similar one on one mentoring programs.  Both groups have been fun but especially PALS.  I got paired up with an awesome 7 year old boy from a nearby town.  There has been only one organized PALS even so far this year and this was also where I first met my pal.  Right away we connected which was really cool.  We are both quite high energy and enjoy being active so we were to have a fun time and get to know each other fairly easily.  I had so much fun that I told my pal's parents that i would be willing to hang out with him more often than just the times that had been set up by the Luther students who organized PALS.  This past Sunday I went out to eat with my pal and his parents which was a fun way to get to know his family and a little more about him.  After this, my pal went for a little bike ride from campus to Dunning Springs and hiked around for a while.  He was quite intrigued by the size of the waterfall and the other natural features that make this environment so interesting.  We spotted birds and looked at big trees and dreamed about how cool it would to just put a couch in the stream and relax there on a hot summer day.  After this, we biked back to my dorm room and he showed me an awesome website where we were able to create our own super hero.  I thought this was pretty cool even though I am almost 20 years old (which is really weird to think about because in many ways I still feel like a kid or at least a teenager).  My pal is a perfect example of what there is to learn from and admire about children.  They have an intense joy for life, a natural curiosity, excess energy, and pure enthusiasm.  I feel like all of these are extremely positive attributes that all of us should strive for and hope that by hanging out with my pal more some of this will rub off on me and increase my already energetic, jovial, and curious personality.  I am supposed to be a role model for my pal but he may be a better role model for me.  I encourage everyone to seek opportunities like this PALS program and get involved because they can be extremely rewarding for all who are involved.

Filling Buckets or Lighting Fires?

I recently came across a very interesting and, I believe, powerful quote by WB Yeats who was an Irish poet.  He stated, "education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire."  This quote provides an interesting approach to and perspective on education.  To me, "filling a bucket" sounds mundane and not fulfilling or enriching but "lighting a fire" seems more vivid and inspirational.  This quote seems to be saying that as an educator, your job is not to just simply fill your students brains ("buckets") with knowledge and facts but to inspire ("light a fire") your students to have a hunger for learning and a natural curiosity about life.  On top of this, it is vital as a teacher that you encourage students, applaud their strengths, and motivate them to improve their weakness.  A dream for me as a teacher is to inspire my students by "lighting a fire" in them to be true world citizens that want to bring about positive change to the world and approach life with a sympathetic, thoughtful, logical, helpful, caring, happy, and educated view of the natural and social world.  Lighting fires also just sounds more fun than filling buckets.

time management, organization, and procrastination

As is evident by the lack of blogs for the past few weeks, procrastination and time management are not my best friends. This is fairly typical of humans but seems more prevalent in younger people. As a student, and teacher I imagine, procrastination can cause many problems whereas time management can lead to great success and just less stress for that matter. My goal as both a student and teacher in the future would be too decrease my procrastination and improve my time management skills. This seems to be a fairly obvious goal that most people would like to accomplish but I would also like to be able to help my students learn strategies to better their time management skills and lessen their urges tom procrastinate. I do not how exactly to accomplish this but I feel that the expert teacher would be more gifted at enabling their students to have effective time management and ways to combat the motives to procrastinate.

A Tough Balancing Act

In class on Wednesday we discussed the importance of being an effective parent. A parent should be involved in their child's social and academic lives. The extent to which a parent is involved may vary and depends on numerous factors including age and maturity of the child to name a few. It is a tough balancing act for a parent because you do not want to be too involved in either your child's academic and social lives but a lack of involvement in either of these areas may be problematic as well. I feel blessed to have the type of parents that I have because I think you were involved at just the right intensity level. We were able to bond as friends but I respected them as the authority in my house. I felt comfortable talking them about profound or taboo topics and they felt comfortable discussing these topics with me as well. On top of this, my parents were a positive motivating influence in my academic life and were also more than willing (my dad may have been too willing) to lend a helping hand with studying or homework or even just advice on life in general. I hope my students have similar parents to mine because I feel this would make the classroom a more productive environment and thus make my job easier. This may be a selfish way of looking at things but good parents like mine I feel will lead to the greater well-being and success and happiness of my students which would be great! This balancing act that parents have the privilege of playing is one that I feel teachers may also be able to play. A teacher may have to balance the level of homework they give in a class to compromise for the different types of students in a class. A teacher may also have to balance their role as an authoritarian and as an almost "friend-like" companion or role model. I look forward to juggling this complex balancing-act and I hope that as a teacher I will be able to master this skill and perhaps even juggle while on a unicycle. In fact, this is my dream for all teachers, parents, and students: that they can learn to balance all that life throws at everyone and succeed in their role as a teacher, student, or parent, and human in general.

LEGOS!

In class we had the wonderful opportunity to play with one of my most missed aspects of childhood-Legos! Legos are always fun to play with but we were also able to use them in a productive way. We used the Legos to pretend we were teaching different concepts or ideas to imaginary children at different stages in development. We applied Piaget's concepts to this experience. I enjoyed this experience, not only because we were able to play with legos but because it forced us to think creatively in order to teach or explain a concept. Unfortunately for me, being a high school bio teacher, I will not be able to simply "play" with legos as often as would a kindergarten tecaher. However, there still may be ways in which I could use legos or other more hands-on and atypical methods of teaching or learning both in and outside of the classroom.

Lions for Lambs

We just watched Lions for Lambs starring Tom Cruise and Robert Redford. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and the fact that Robert Redford's character was an effective professor made this movie quite pertinent to our class. I feel that Robert Redford did a great job at connecting with his students especially the unmotivated but gifted student that he met with in his office. I think that Redford succeeded in being a "salesman" which he stated was the real job of the teacher. By the end of the movie it seems obvious that he made a sale to this underachieving student. This student finally seems to realize that he is talented and his skills could accomplish big things. The idea that he will finally engage himself in what he has learned and start to apply it to current world issues is portrayed when he is so interested in the news about the war in the movie's last scene.

FRESH BLOG

I am officially a blogger. Kinda cool. I am excited to start blogging on my own and reading other blogs both for educational and entertainment purposes.