Humility

The prompt for this blog was "when was the last time you were wrong"... to be perfectly honest, I am wrong a lot of the time. When you have three brothers, your life work is to, genially, one up each other. At times this means you have a competition of strength or athleticism, which I always lost, and in fact never seriously competed in. More often than not however, my family is engaged in a never ending game of trivial pursuit, an off-the-cuff, stump-the-chump, knowledge bowl. Keep in mind that in my family I would be competing against a PhD, an oncology research nurse, a physics/chemistry teacher who has a talent for numbers, a history/religion/political science major who can remember nearly every date/event he has ever studied, a musical genius who has a large vocabulary and a talent for fixing things. In addition, my friends were nearly all in the top 10% of the our class academically, and many of them participated in varsity sports and the highest caliber music programs our school had to offer. I am not a stranger to being wrong.

For me however, the difficulty is NOT admitting when I am wrong, it is learning to deal with unintentional embarrassment. I do not mind being embarrassed as long as it is on my own terms. I can do ridiculous things, like sing or dance or yawp in pubic, I can wear strange clothing and do stupid things as long as it is on my terms. If I walk into a situation knowing that I will make a fool out of my self I am usually ok with it. However, when I am trying to make a point, or prove that I know what I am talking about, and I make a mistake, then I feel like I am three inches tall. I will need to work on that if I am going to be an effective teacher.

Collaborativeness

I was talking to my Uncle Tony yesterday (no he is not an Italian mobster) about the differences he sees in my generation and he felt the most prominent difference is our level of independence. When I asked what he meant, he explained that my generation is one of the most solitary and independent he has ever seen. With our ipods, laptops, gaming systems and blackberries, we rarely feel the need for face to face interactions. We stay out later, we get jobs younger, we go away from home sooner and stay away longer... It soon became clear that when Uncle Tony used the word "independent" he did not mean it as a compliment. He was not saying that we have become more self-reliant, but that we have become more self-serving. The sentiments are echoed every time that Jim Langholz says that we are the generation of instant gratification. Both men are saying that we do not know how to wait for things, even if they are more than worth the wait. We are constantly thinking about ourselves. It is ME! ME! ME! all the time.

Collaboration and cooperation sometimes feel like dying arts. In school, while cooperation is touted as being one of the building blocks to success, all of our group projects were designed with pairs of poorly matched students. The highly effective students were paired with struggling students which more often than not hurt both students perceptions of healthy collaboration. The effective student will quickly grow frustrated and end up doing the majority of the work themselves and the struggling student, who may not be able to keep up, gets frustrated and ends up contributing next to nothing, either by choice or by default because their partner (and I use that term loosely) did all the work.

As teachers we need to rethink how we work with others and in turn how we teach our students to work together. We need to teach them group problem solving skills and we certainly need to work on our level of patience. We need to show them that it is ok to take there time to find an answer, and when a friend or partner does not get the answer as quickly we DO NOT simply tell the the right answer, we help the find it for themselves. Positive team work is something that is missing in every aspect of our lives as adults. We need it in all of our relationships, for our jobs, and we need it now more than ever in the political arena. If we can successfully work positive cooperation into our classrooms than the relationships of the future will be more successfully founded on peaceful collaboration and compromise than on power dynamics.

Reflectiveness

In Ed 221, every class period we take what Dr. Pillsbury likes to call "Think time". She poses a question to the class and then gives us time to reflect before we respond. Then we share our thoughts with a partner, and use them as a sounding board of sorts to bounce ideas off of in an attempt to deepen/broaden our own understanding. Finally, we come together as a whole class to share what we have discovered. In the first few classes we did not really know what to do during these discussions/reflections and we spent a good portion of the think time just sitting there awkwardly, but by the end of the term it felt like we never had enough think time because there were always other things to think/talk deeper about.

I think that part of the problem is that as students we were never really taught to reflect. We are rarely given time or effective prompts to reflect upon. In junior high we were given EXTENSIVE amounts of time to "reflect" but we were not given interesting prompts that were worthy of our time and consideration nor were we ever lead through the process of reflecting in a meaningful way. We would run out of things to say and think about in the first couple minutes and then we would goof off for the rest of the time. In high school, many of the questions were interesting enough but we were not given enough time to think beyond the sallowest level of understanding.

One of the brilliant parts of Dr. Pillsbury's think time is that she started out with very short periods of time so that we would not get off topic or goof off when we felt we were "done" reflecting. She also walked us through some important though provoking questions and let us discuss our thoughts with a partner to help deepen our understanding and provide us with an opinion other than our own. As the term went on, she continued extending our alloted think time, and by the end of the term, even with the extended think time we would usually have to stop our discussion before we were done talking.

I hope to be able to incorporate Dr. Pillsbury's think time techniques into my own classroom. Reflection is a way of growing in your own mind, of knowing yourself and feeling comfortable in your own skin. We should constantly be asking ourselves, and each other, questions that are thought provoking and make us reconsider our preconceived notions and perceptions.

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” -Peter F. Drucker

"Seeing within changes one's outer vision." -Joseph Chilton Pearce

Inventiveness/Creativity

I realize that i should probably be commenting on my ability to incorporate creativity as a future teacher, however, this is one of my weaker dispositions. As I was growing up, I appreciated teachers who incorporated unique and creative ideas/techniques in their lesson plans but they were unnecessary for me to learn; they made class more interesting but I was able to learn just fine in the typical, boring, straight-out-of-the-book way. For this reason, it is sometimes difficult for me to think of new and interesting ways to present information that will be effective. It is one of the areas that I need to work on most in the future, and that I hope increased exposure to classroom settings and lesson plan writing will help correct.

However, what I want to talk about is creativity in students. While creativity is very important as a teacher, it is more important that we encourage it in our students. In the book that I had to read for our final project, To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension, by Elin Oliver Keene,the author talks extensively about the need for a renaissance of understanding. What she meant is that as adults we praise people who are unique, we value minds that can think outside the box and we applaud individuals who continually forge their own paths. Yet Keene feels that historically, educators have done everything they can to turn their pupils into little robotic copies of themselves. Teachers wanted their students to fit into a neat little mold. Education was more like a production line of sorts where we fill each person with the same information and we try to fix all of their "flaws" so that the end product looks the same, a bunch of perfectly-shaped, beige squares. She contends that we are setting our students up for failure if we kill their creativity when they are young and then punish them for not having it as adults. Keene likens her students to Michelangelo's unfinished "slave awakening" sculptures:

"I think back to the moment when i first saw, in Michelangels's sculpture, the outline of a person straining to break free of the stone, and I can't help but relate that to our lives in teaching. Can we commit to liberating our children from the route and routine, the drill and kill, the mind numbing repetition that characterizes too many classrooms? Can we agree at least in part with the humanists of the Renaissance and proclaim that all of us have nearly unlimited capacity to produce original thought?"

Keene is calling us to help break our students out of the marble confines of modern education, and in so doing free ourselves as wells. She wants us to encourage creativity and curiosity. To ask questions and not be afraid if we do not know the answer. To try new things that seem strange and adventurous. To live fully and to experience everything we can get our hands on. She says that only by living fully can we be free thinking, creative, inspiring individuals.

Passion

We have spent a lot of time recently talking about the best ways to motivate students. We have talked about creative lesson plans, interesting ways to use technology in the classroom, and how to differentiate your lesson plans to maximize each students growth. However, none of these measures, no matter how well planned out, will be effective teaching tools if the teach does not also demonstrate passion. Passion is the ultimate motivational technique. Every person that I talk to, has had at least one terrible classroom experience and every one of those experiences was due, at least in part, to the lack of interest and investment shown by the teacher. The reverse of that is also true; nearly ever one I talk to has had an inspiring classroom experience (or else they wouldn't want to be teachers). Each of the positive experiences, where the class was an unexpected revelation for the student, involved a passionate teacher who was eager to help their students grow, not just as academic entities, but also as unique individuals.

I have been lucky enough in my academic career to have had many passionate teachers. Teachers who were passionate not only for their subject, but for job and most importantly for their students. My high school biology teacher is a perfect example. My senior year I was enrolled in Advanced Honors Biology, which was a long and intimidating name for a class that turned out to be wonderfully laid back. It was rather like a playground for grown ups. There were expensive toys and pretty dyes at our disposal. This is not to say that we were not very careful with our equipment or that we did not learn a lot of important, technical information; because we did. We learned advanced staining techniques, statistical analysis, and the basics in current genetic research. But the atmosphere was reminiscent of elementary school, it was filled with unrestrained curiosity and the joy of new discoveries.

It was during the first trimester in Mr. Koepnick's class that I fell in love with science. We had been studying a bunch of new, and difficult, staining techniques. The first time that I finally got a negative stain correct, I jumped and squealed and made my best friend look at it so she would dance around with me. Mr. Koepnick came up behind us and put his arms around our shoulders. He leaned in close and asked us what all the commotion was about. Expecting some sort of reprimand for our excessive out burst, we explained about the successful stain. Mr. Koepnick frowned at us and asked, "Ladies, do you realize that you just squealed over a bacterial stain?..." Then suddenly he got a huge grin on his face, hugged us and said, "Welcome to the Science Nerds Club."

It was days like that, or the one when I got my financial aid package to Luther and he did a little dance with me, or when I was having a stress melt down and he had me go work in the green house and let the dirt cure my hurt, that made Mr. Koepnick such a wonderful teacher, person, and friend. I knew from that first moment with the negative stain that he was who I wanted to be when I grew up. I wanted to be the teacher, who after twenty odd years of teaching still had so much passion for his subject. I wanted to be the teacher that has taught thousands of students and seen millions of negative stains, and yet still congratulates, and celebrates with each of his students when they

first get it right and when they first fall in love with his favorite subject.