At The Teacher's Desk

Mr. McClung explains his first year of teaching. Through self-reflection, he became a better teacher. He was so worried about his assessment that he forgot about his audience, the students. He would beat himself up over failed lesson plans. He stresses the importance of communication between you and fellow instructors. What I appreciated more was instructors setting the bar too high for students and then getting upset and punishing the students for not meeting those goals. Mr. McClung stated that technology is not a monster. It should be taken advantage of in the classroom. I also appreciated him emphasizing that instructors should listen to the students. It is important for instructors to know about the students in the classroom and if you shut them up all of the time you will never know who they are. Although you hold a bachelor's degree, you never stop learning as an instructor. You learn from professional workshops, from co-workers and students. Yes your students can teach you a thing or two especially about technology!

I am terrified about being a first time instructor once I graduate. I think, as Mr. McClung mentioned, that I will be so worried about impressing the principal and other superiors that I will lose sight of being a more effective instructor to my students. Trying to keep up with the No Child Left Behind guidelines and rules is another concern of mine. After speaking to teachers and other students who have spoken to teachers, the paperwork is very stressful. I do not want to be stressed out; I want to enjoy my first year of teaching stress free! Adding to the pressure is not being tenured and possibly losing my job. So if I do not live up to the standards of someone else or if I do not fit in, then I can lose my job. The lack of job security frightens me.

I believe communication is very important in the world period. Effective communication with faculty, parents and students is most important to be a better teacher. Drama at the work place happens but when your work place involves children then you have to be even more careful. Children are very impressionable and if they see their teachers arguing, then they will use that and run with it. The same is true for parents and students alike. I think the best thing is to remain calm.

Wikipedia Is Scandalous!!!

I am shocked to hear and read this information. I have been using Wikipedia for some research and now I question what I have found. It is very ironic that I noticed today, for the first time, that on Wikipedia it says that you can add information to the site. I was baffled because why would "an encyclopedia" allow you to add information to it? I would not think that an encyclopedia would be accurate if users were allowed to make additions so as I closed that tab I thought about it. Then I decided to do my blog entries for class and, low and behold, Wikipedia is the subject!

I read the NPR blog first. That is when I had my initial shock reaction. If you cannot trust Wikipedia then why is it the first site to come up when you Google a topic? So I was a bit apprehensive because I did not want it to be true because, like I stated previously, I have being using Wikipedia for research information. There is a small reference to Virgil Griffith and the Wikipedia Scanner so I am like, "Who is this guy?" The next thing I do is read the NPR article on Wikipedia which goes into a little more detail about Vigil Griffith and listen to the podcast which are on the same site. Now I feel my world crumbling down. It was not until the Wired story that I accepted it.

I do not believe that any information on Wikipedia can be trusted at all. If someone does choose to use this information, I would hope that he or she would have other sources to either corroborate or negate the information retrieved from Wikipedia. Maybe if you searched the definition of a circle or some other known definition then maybe you can accept it but who knows! I know now to NEVER use Wikipedia as a resource. I wondered why the pages were so long too. I guess they would be if someone was doctoring everything up. In my opinion, Wikipedia cannot be trusted. Thanks to Virgil Griffith, a lot of people are now aware of what is going on and his brilliance has exposed so many people that I hope they think twice before doing any editing of any sort.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

When I first read that this would be over an hour long video, I was disappointed. I did not really want to sit and hear someone lecture for over an hour about teaching. Well I quickly took my foot out of my mouth after I listened and watched this video. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture was astounding. His presentation was organized and far from boring. I can appreciate his drive and determination to develop a curriculum and have it being used arounf the country. Also, he took it a step further with is computer program, Alice. He made me realize that experimenting can lead to great things and achieving your childhood dream is even better.

Mr. Pausch had many dreams as a child and he was able to live out one of them as an imagineer. He took what he lesrned and asked himself, "How can I anable the childhood dreams of others?" Soon after he asked himself this question, he was approached by a student named Tommy who said that it was his childhood dream to work on the next Star Wars movie. Mr. Pausch created a course called Building Virtual Worlds. Initially, 50 students were selected from different departments at the university. The students were randomly put into teams of 4 which changed per project. There were a total of 15 projects per semester.

Randy Pausch allowed his students to do their first project on whatever because it was new to him too.

Teachers never stop learning and it may surprise some of you but teachers learn from their students as Mr. Pausch did. What his students produced amazed him mostly because the equipment was poor. Since his students made something out of nothing he did not know what to do. He was told to not set a bar because this will allow their imaginations to run wild. I liked this concept because when you praise your students so much as if they did the best they could, there is a chance that they could be hindered because they believe they did the best they could. Not setting a standard or a bar is a positive. However, I can see where this could be a bad idea also because some students may not produce the very best they can. It all depends on the students in my opinion.

I was blown away by the Hello World project. I think it was very creative and looked fun. His classes presented their work to the public. They were able to get other people excited about the projects. Parent participation in college?!!! It takes a pretty good professor to make that happen. In my opinion, if you get the students excited enough about what they are learning and what they are doing, then they will get their parents or guardians more excited and involved. You have parent participation and you also have the participation of the audience. I never knew there was technology out there that allowed the audience to be involved at a movie theater. That is awesome! He made a very good point about the class being a bonding experience. The face that you have to work with different people every two weeks gets even the shyest person to brighten up. Same should be done in public schools. Teachers should have activities where students bond with each other. They will not even know what is going on and by the time they figure it out, they will have made more friends than they would have on their own.

His course was project-based only. He did not find the need in having students purchase books because he felt they had read enough in their undergrad. I do not believe it is possible to go without books in elementary and secondary schools but it is possible to have more projects, mostly group projects, in the classroom. This teaches students how to work with other people because whether the y will want to or not, they will have to work with other people in the future at their job. I appreciated how he had students rate each other's "easiness to work with" individually in the group. People found out if they were a jerk to work with or a pleasure to work with. It helped his students "to become self-reflective." Those who cared, realized that they may need to change how the talk to other people.

"Kids having fun while learning something hard." This was his legacy and I can respect that. If we as instructors and future instructors can present the information to our students in a way that while they are learning, they are not bothered by the difficulty of the material because they are having fun. If they are having fun while doing the work, then they will hunger for more. Come on my fellow educators out there. We have to make the material more fun in order to keep our students focused and engaged in the classrooms.

Since then, Tommy, our student whose childhood dream was to work on the set of the next Star Wars, has worked on all three of the Star Wars films.

Michael Wesch: A Vision of Students Today

This video says it all!!! I have not had a class with over 100 students in a while, but when I had those classes I was lost in the crowd. The teacher cannot focus on you because, not only does he or she have your 100+ class, he or she also has two or three other classes the same size. The same can be said about elementary and secondary schools. A few of my classes in high school had so many students, that we had to borrow desks from neighboring classrooms. In high school, almost all of the teachers knew my name but that was on a smaller scale compared to college. At Auburn, none of my teachers knew my name except when I began taking my methods classes because I saw the same teachers for two years!!! Those classes were not large so it was easier to remember our names.

I have had plenty of classes where a classmate has been on roll the entire semester but never showed up; not for tests, mandatory classes or anything!!! That is money wasted because the student never showed up to class. That is one less student the teacher has to worry about and one less student hindering the teacher from remembering my name. Now for those who do show up, you have the few who have their laptops with them. Nine times out of ten, what is on the screen of their laptop is not related to what we are doing in class. The most famous thing to do when in class and you have your laptop is to search FACEBOOK!!! Just this past Saturday in my Health class, one of my fellow classmates spent his time on facebook while the professor was going over a chapter.

The section that really spoke to me was how a day in the life of a college student is spent and how many hours our day consists of. I am lucky if I get 7 hours of sleep each night because I have a 3 month old at home:) Things have not really peaked here at USA for me but when I was at Auburn I really thought that I had invented my own perception of time. There were not enough hours in the day for what I had to do. The icing on the cake is that when I graduate, with huge bags under my eyes, I am going to be in debt!!! I worked my tail off to be in debt. Really?!

Now to make this video really capture my overall college experience, I would add a Black student surrounded by White students but with empty seats around the Black student. Racism still exists and I have been treated like I was not even in the classroom by classmates. This is a major issue I faced in two or three classes while in college. I chose to go to a school with students who did not resemble me for a reason. I had gone to high school and middle school with Black students and thought that by going to a college with a low number of Black students compared to White students I would have a broader experience. But in doing so, I was treated like I did not exist.

Kelly Hines: "It's Not About the Technology"

In Mrs. Hines' post, the importance of technology in the classroom was discussed. Her opinion on how much emphasis should be placed on technology in the classroom is one that I share. I believe technology is important in the classroom but I am one who is eager to learn more about the software and websites that are readily available to me as a future mathematics teacher. I also believe that there is no use in a school system paying for expensive equipment and software when the teacher is not willing to learn more about it. I do think, however, that a teacher would do her class an injustice if he or she did not take the time to learn to be a better teacher. I am not saying that technology should be a sole means to teaching in the classroom but I do think that it is an added bonus.

Mrs. Hines also lists what a successful teacher is. I have listed a couple already but to elaborate on it I will say that a teacher has to be effective and successful before technology is introduced into the classroom. I can appreciate her saying that no matter how long you have been teaching a certain way and no matter how many students got it previously, if there is one student who is not learning, then your plan is ineffective and you have to do what is necessary to make sure that student and everyone else is learning what you are teaching. Just because you are the teacher does not mean you stop learning. The classroom teaches you everyday how to become a better teacher. Basically, technology cannot be implemented until you are able to reach your students without it.