Posts

Dear Reading....

I wrote this for another class, but I wanted to share it here.  If you read it, please leave a comment or two! In a world that was about to undergo a trial that had not been experienced by human beings in living memory, the death of Kobe Bryant at the end of January was a harbinger of all that has come in the early days of the decade. His death showed the delicacy that surrounds life; everything is brief. Freedom is fleeting. Love is fleeting. Life, itself, is fleeting.   His death put his extraordinary achievements in life into sharp focus. One of those, his Oscar-Winning Short animation,  Dear Basketball , details his love affair with basketball using personification, and Kobe thanks to the sport for all it has done for him, before revealing his reasons for letting the game go at this stage in his life. So, I began to think, what entity in my life would be my Dear Basketball? What in this world has shaped who I am and who I would become as I journeyed through ...

To Ms. Rob's Students, Past and Present

To my Students, I taught myself to read at the age of three. It wasn’t something that I wanted to do; it just happened. And since this time, I have been a self-directed, self-guided learner, one that can find interest happily for hours in the most mundane types of learning tools – textbooks, newspapers, and even instruction manuals, if there is nothing else available. I am quite happy to sit and watch documentaries and learn.  When I wanted to redo the floors in my house, I talked to a bunch of people because I don’t think that YouTube was popular at the time; today, it would be a cinch for me to watch a video and get the answers. I know how to do this because my teachers taught me, not necessarily how to complete floors, but to learn how to find information.   So, if I had to take stock of the things that I want you to be as students, as current and future facilitators of learning, I have to take stock of my self as a teacher and facilitator of learning. What ...

Controversy in Education.... Is it Though?

All of my life, even as a small child, I have been no stranger to controversial topics.  In the third grade, after having received the book “Where Do Babies Come From” with explicit instructions NOT to take it to school. I couldn’t wait to sneak it to school. Because, I figured, this is good information that everyone needs to know.  Of course, I was caught and my mother was told.  I couldn’t understand what the problem was.  It was the truth, wasn’t it?  What is the problem with distilling factual information.   Throughout my teaching career then, I have constantly gotten into trouble discussing “controversial” topics. One of the first came from debunking the myth during student teaching about Catherine the Great dying from having sex with a horse.  I was reprimanded from even bringing it up because I was in the South and in the South, they believed that Social studies was wholesome and should be d...

Interlude - Who am I as a Teacher?

In my Spring classes at MSU, I have had to do more self-reflective work on my teaching and personal learning style than at any other time in my career.  So it was with surprise that I read the McNiff article on using narrative as a way to reflect on your personal educational theory since I feel that is all I have been doing this semester.  It has been a very personal semester and for some reason, that has made this journey seem “easier” to handle than previous semesters that were more theory heavy.  The reading is definitely important, but for me, I am not a spring chicken anymore and since I am black, there is a bit of redundancy in learning about how to properly engage African American boys and women.  Sit down, talk to them, learn their interests, teach to them.  It’s not hard.  We aren’t some foreign species, but that’s the way it seems that many literacy academics treat “urban youths.” It’s interesting how much of my upbringing is reflected in...

Video Games in the Classroom

I talk about my mother a lot and rightly I should, she is an enormous influence on and in my life.  As a young girl, she moonlit at Montgomery Wards and got insane deals on electronics, since she worked in the TV and Stereo department.  So, of course we had Atari and Colecovision and the like, and I was an early whiz at Pitfall and most definitely, Pong.   But, in the mid 1980’s, she came home with this really, really weird video game system. I mean I LOVED my Atari and Colecovision and the like, but this was different.  This was a computer.  It was a Commodore 64. My life has never been the same.  One of my favorite games of ALL TIME is Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego ?  My all-time favorite.  I didn’t need to watch the show, I had it on my C64 and could play it to my heart’s content and I learned SO much about the World from my 1987 World Book Almanac, including how to use an almanac.   That’s not all. I made Donald quack a...

Cycle Two Post...

I couldn’t help when I read the cycle to introductory post that I begin to think about the different trends of homeschooling, and the trend of allowing children to follow their passions. I think, this is almost what a natural curriculum would look like; the fostering of children within the home and allowing them to follow their dreams without the interference of the “State” - in this case the political forces that drive how and why we look at and experience education in the way that we do. I am going to talk about a colleague of mine that I work with in China. He is from the Soviet Union, rather the former Soviet Union, but he has an American passport so he has had the best of both schooling systems, and he homeschools his children because he does not want his children indoctrinated in the Chinese nationalistic system. But he lets his children do whatever the hell they want. One student is a budding Chessmaster while the other student is really interested in film and TV product...

Cycle One Post

First, I would like to talk about Donovan and empathy and then branch onto the crux of this cycle, the consolidation of curriculum with personal and professional views on education and what exactly education is in modern sensibilities.   As a high school student in the 1990’s, I was educated in the Lansing School District and went to Everett High School, then the only school in the District that had a program for the severely learning disabled. Students who were physically and severely learning disabled went to the Beekman Center, however.  But Everett was special.  These students would one day be able to maybe live independently.  So these students, while they didn’t learn the basic math and science classes, they did learn consumer math and home economics.  Further, the classrooms were outfitted like small apartments and in them, the students learned independent living skills.  How to wash dishes, go to work, how to be...