Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The end of summer break...

It's been a while. Honestly, after school let out I just needed a break from anything and everything to do with education. I've had a great month of vacationing, visiting and being visited, et cetera, and now I'm hopefully refreshed enough for the next round.

When I was still a student, mid-July would still be early summer break. I would still feel like I had all the time in the world until I had to think about school again. Instead, my summer break is about to come to an end. On Monday, I start the first session of classes for my master's program. I'm excited!

In preparation, we have a variety of assignments. Right now I'm reading Critical Pedagogy by Joan Wink. I shan't bore you with my reading journal (half of it is scribbled in the book anyway) but I do have a couple of thoughts to share:

1) I like being a student! I was sitting on the couch, scribbling a note onto a sticky after highlighting a bit of text and I looked up and said "This is fun." I miss reading and engaging with texts on my level when I'm teaching, and I miss the feeling I get when I'm learning and making connections. It's still there, sometimes, but there's so much more going on.

2) How did I get to be so good at being a student? I've been trying to figure out where and when and how I learned all these skills that so many of my students still lack as 10th graders, partly so I can figure out how to help them be better students. The hardest things for me to teach are the ones I don't remember having to learn. I know I learned them at some point, but...?

2 comments:

Doc Brown said...

For starters, It's great to see you posting again.

I totally understand how you feel. For most of my life I was a poor student. I was middle of my class in high school and spent most of my college years on probation. I left school for a few years and then went back at 28. I was a great student the 2nd time through. I think it was because I knew how to do poorly, so I didn't do those things.
Most importantly, and this is what I try to instill in my students, I actually did the basics. I took notes, I read what I was supposed to read, and I actually studied for tests.
I graduated with a 3.6, not because I'm brilliant, but because I actually did the work without taking shortcuts. Our students want everything the easy way. They have to learn how to work.

By that I don't mean that have to learn how to do work(as in assignment). They need to learn how to do work, as in spending time working on a task from beginning to end without giving up and without shortcuts.
That's my take, for what it's worth.

Inspector Clouseau said...

Too bad that you have not written any recent posts. Nice work. I came across your blog while “blog surfing” using the Next Blog button on the blue Nav Bar located at the top of my blogger.com site. I frequently just travel around looking for other blogs which exist on the Internet, and the various, creative ways in which people express themselves. Thanks for sharing.