Ze passion, it iz gone...

When you were little, did you ever imagine yourself as a doctor? How about a lawyer? An astronaut? A pro athlete? Why did you imagine yourself as those things? When I was about five years old, I told my mother that I wanted to be a mitten maker. In my five-year-old head, cutting out mitten shapes from pieces of paper and taping them together (come on, I was five! Do you really my mother would have even let me near knitting needles to make real mittens?) seemed like a the perfect career for me. After all, I loved making paper mittens, and shouldn’t your job be something that you love to do, in an area of study about which you love to learn?

Flash forward eighteen years. I have both a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree under my belt in areas not even remotely related to making mittens, and I teach at a learning center. I ask a class of sixth graders to discuss their future goals with me, and the responses I receive are more than a bit startling.

“I want to be a doctor because my parents told me it’s the only respectable job there is.”

“I want to go into science because that’s what all of my friends are doing.”

“I want to someday go to a school in the Ivy League because that’s what my parents say that my friend’s parents are making him do. I’m smarter than him, so if he can do it, I can do it.”

“I want to be an engineer because I want to show people that I’m smart enough to be successful.”

Excuse me, what? Why are these students’ career goals so strongly influenced by parent and peer pressure? Initially, I figured that maybe some of these answers came about by the fact that these kids are probably a little too young to have thought much about their career goals. Instead of actually thinking about what they wanted to do, they settled for the jobs that either their parents had or that their parents were perhaps encouraging them to do. Then, however, I made a very startling connection.

I have many friends from high school and college who are currently in either medical school, law school, or another doctorate program. The rigor of these programs is brutal, and it takes a certain strong work ethic and self discipline to get through them. Certainly, I once assumed, any person who opts to enroll in such a program must be very passionate about what he is doing. Upon talking to many of my friends in these programs, however, I’m noticing a very scary trend.

“I don’t want to do this. My parents pushed me into it.”

“I’m not really interested in this; I’m just doing it so my friends, peers, and family will view me as successful.”

“I want to live in a big house some day, so I’m going to get through this program.”

Okay, really? You are in these programs that eat up years of your life so that you can impress others? So you can create a certain "image" for yourself that may not be true to who you really are? So that you can live in a big house? Why do these responses, given to me by people with about thirteen more years of life experience, so closely parallel those given to me by the sixth graders?

What happened to learning for the sake of learning? To going outside and asking questions about why the leaves are changing color, just to satisfy your curiosity? To asking your father where the sun goes at night time because you want to understand why the world turns so dark? To figuring out why the tiny snowman you brought in the house a few minutes ago is now a puddle of water? What happened to being a doctor or a lawyer so you can help people? Why not be an engineer for the love of creating and operating things? Where's the heart in your job? Why are students – who eventually become adults with a similar mindset – so greatly motivated by pressure from others or the desire to show other people up that they forget that learning can be enjoyable? Most importantly for me, what can I do as a teacher to bring a passion for learning, the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of simply understanding more about our world, back into my classroom?

Through the Eyes of the Tiny

First of all, this is my first education-related blog post since before my student teaching experience began. I recently reread this blog of mine and realized how much I miss sharing my ridiculous thoughts and opinions about education-related topics with others who can relate. I also miss creating cartoons to entertain the masses. Now that I’ve had one year of student teaching, several months of co-teaching at a privately-owned learning center, and a couple months of substitute teaching under my belt, I think now would be as good of a time as any to return to the edublogging world because there is just so much that can be discussed with regards to teaching.

The Issue at Hand
Today, I’d like to discuss a pet peeve of mine that has made a surprisingly large impact on how I am perceived in the professional world: my size. I have always been a very short, thin, light-weight person – it’s genetic. For years, those who don’t know me – and even many people who do – have been mistaking me for somebody much younger in age. When I was a child, their guesses were only mildly off.

But as time progressed, this problem got worse and worse.

One of my biggest pet peeves is people telling me that when I’m older, I’ll appreciate looking younger. As of right now, how I’m going to feel about this situation in the future does not matter to me – I have to learn how to deal with all the problems it’s causing me now because something tells me these problems are going to impact my professional life for a while.

Now, when I was growing up and going through school, I was always on the smaller side of my classmates. With the exception of middle school, when I had a sudden, six-inch growth spurt and was actually taller than most of my classmates for a couple years, I’ve always had to look way up to talk to most people my age. This was never something that bothered me, and nobody treated me any differently because I was a little bit shorter than most, so it’s not something I often thought about; therefore, I was not prepared for the enormous impact my size would have on my professional life.

So how, specifically, has my size affected my teaching experiences so far? Let’s just put it this way: while I was at my student teaching placement last year, I was mistaken for a student at least once a day. Yes, and these mistakes lasted the entire school year. Even in May, teachers would confront me about why I was parking in the teacher lot. The vice principal yelled at me for taking food out of the cafeteria, insisting that students were not permitted to do that. The cafeteria lady was hesitant to let me cut in line because she wasn’t convinced that I was actually a student teacher (the school at which I did my student teaching did not issue IDs to student teachers, so there was really no way of proving that I was.) The librarian would ask me where my pass was every time I entered the library. I would often hear students in the hallway whispering about me when I walked by, thinking I didn’t hear them, and talking about how tiny I am and how they thought I was a student. Although my year of student teaching was an overall positive experience in my professional growth, these particular episodes made me realize that if I wanted to be a high school teacher, there would be so many complications.

But it didn’t stop there. Every time I am called to be a substitute in a high school class, there are always a few kids who give me strange looks when they first walk in. I’ve had a few ask me whether or not I was a student. I’m always thankful when I see one of the kids I taught last year walk in any room I am the sub for because then at least one person in that class knows better!

The first time I ever did a substitute teaching job, I was assigned to an art class at the school at which I student taught last year. When the ladies in the office saw me trying to pick up a sub folder, one of them asked me, “Weren’t you a student here last year?”

AHHHHHHHHHHH!!

An Unlikely Solution

The best part about substitute teaching is that you can be called to teach any subject area at any type of public school in the districts that you choose. It was just recently that I was called to sub at a place that was familiar to me, but a place to which I never thought I would willingly return, a place of locker jams and lip gloss…a place of awkward height differences and changing voices…a place where “dances” consist of the boys standing on one side of the room and the girls standing on the other…a place where most people can claim that they spent the most awkward years of their lives…MIDDLE SCHOOL!!!

If I could go back in time and tell my middle school self that in the future, I would be thankful to go back there, my middle school self would most definitely question my sanity. She would probably ask me what would make me so inclined to return to middle school after earning a Master’s degree from a topnotch institution. I would like to think that perhaps my middle school self would be smart enough to put two and two together to figure out that my 23-year-old self is a teacher, but it’s been so long that I forgot exactly how strong my logical thinking skills were in middle school.

Anyway, middle schoolers. Interacting with them is entirely different from interacting with high schoolers. For one, I actually look like an adult compared to them. Because of this, I have noticed that when I sub for middle school classes, the students tend to treat me with more respect (ie: they quiet down when I ask them, they follow my directions, they are more likely to follow the usual classroom rules and not try to trick me into doing things their normal teacher would not let them do.)

I remember being in middle school and viewing many of my classmates as self-centered, outspoken brats. While I doubt that a whole lot has changed there, from the perspective of the students, as a teacher, I do notice a certain intimidation that middle schoolers have around authority figures that seems to wear off by the time they hit high school. It really makes my job a lot easier. There are definitely advantages and disadvantages to teaching the middle and high school age groups, but now that I am aware of the enormous difference in my teaching experiences based upon something as mundane as my physical size, I am leaning more towards applying to jobs at middle schools…at least until I am old enough for people to mistake me for a college student!

Now I extend my hand to the education community by posing this question: What were some challenges you faced when you started teaching that you did not foresee prior to the experience?

Shamelessly Promoting Myself

...I guess it's a way of selling out, isn't it? Especially after neglecting to update this blog for almost a year. Oh well.

Hello, followers in the EduBlogosphere! I have returned from my long hibernation (read: intense year of a master's program) to bring you a special announcement:

I have started a new blog specifically for my cartoons. On this blog, I will hopefully post a new MS Paint cartoon daily. If you are interested, please follow this link: http://baboonmuffin.blogspot.com/

Never fear, however; I will return to this blog occasionally to post thoughts on education-related topics whenever I feel the need to be (or "be") an intellectual.

Until we meet again, good friend, goodbye!

It's August 15th!

Ahh, where has my precious August gone?


Today I responded to a blog post by Shelly Blake-Plock on edutopia.org. In this post, Blake-Plock proposes the idea of getting rid of textbooks in the classrooms. On the whole, I would agree with his logic. Textbooks generally do not inspire motivation or imagination in students, because, quoting Blake-Plock, if they were, "they'd be at the top of the New York Times' best seller list." While textbooks do make life easier for teachers, as they organize material well and help those teaching different sections of the same class stay on the same page, they do not allow students to engage in active learning. Students are force-fed the text and don't always engage in the same higher-order thinking about the material as they would if they had the option of interacting with the material in another way, like responding to a relevant blog post by the teacher or finding their own, reliable, up-to-date texts about the material on the Internet.

Here's my take on the matter (I'm sorry if I'm basically reiterating what I wrote in my comment): textbooks are BULKY. Textbooks are EXPENSIVE. Textbooks need to be REPLACED every few years. Textbooks place too much emphasis on MEMORIZATION. Now let's explore everything I just said in a little more detail:

Textbooks are BULKY

Once upon a 2002, I was in eighth grade. I was short, thin, and not that much different looking than I am now (which I guess would mean more to you if you actually know me in person. Additionally, if you don't: hi! ) At the time, I weighed about 90 lbs. Like most kids, I had a textbook for every academic class, and I brought home every book with me every night for the sake of doing my homework.

Stephanie the camel has one hump...

I tell friends, foes, and acquaintances that I was a camel at that point in my life. Why? Because that heavy backpack of mine weighed me down tremendously. I remember my mom plopping my backpack down on a scale once that year. That darn backpack weighed almost 30 lbs., which was one third of my body weight at the time. Can you imagine what life for these poor students with heavy backpacks is like? Pre-teens have enough to worry about without being a camel thrown into the mix! But alas, with textbooks in the picture, this is a situation that can't be avoided.

Textbooks are EXPENSIVE and need to be REPLACED

You know what's great about the human race? We're always doing silly things. We can never just sit still and do nothing. The silly things we do have a name: history. Yes, the subject of history is basically the study of all our silly and never-ending shenanigans. Never-ending shenanigans, as the name implies, never end. The problem with textbooks is that the only way to add the most current information to them is to buy new ones. In a subject like history, there is always a need for updated textbooks. And English? People are always writing new and brilliant pieces of literature. Is it right to leave somebody's great work out of a curriculum because their piece wasn't published before the literature book went into print? What about science? Pluto was suddenly stripped of its planet status in 2006; too bad all those textbooks in the classrooms still had Pluto listed as a planet. It must have cost a lot of money for the schools to replace all those outdated textbooks...




Textbooks place too much emphasis on MEMORIZATION

This one is from my personal experience. I remember in fourth grade, my dad used to stress the importance of memorizing material to me, so when I studied for science quizzes, he made sure that I had every definition of every bold word in the book memorized. During a conference with my fourth grade teacher, I proudly demonstrated my knowledge of the material by spewing out definitions of every key word in the chapter. She gave me a look of great concern and asked me if I truly understood what I had just said. It was then that I first learned the difference between knowing material and understanding it.

Textbooks, in my opinion, are set up to encourage learning by memorization. Most of them have key words and concepts in bold. It is easy, then, to extract the definition of these words. A simple definition goes very well on a notecard, which can then be memorized in a short period of time. Sure, I can know that a cat is a small, furry mammal with pointy ears, a tail and whiskers, but does that mean I can point one out on the street? Sure, I know the method I am supposed to use to solve this math problem, but does that mean I can apply it to another problem? How about a real-world situation?

Textbooks are AFTER YOUR BLOOD

Okay, this one is a lie. I just wanted to see if you were still paying attention.

So...
Most of these issues can be resolved by replacing textbooks with either the Internet or some other form of technology (iBooks, anyone?) With technology, the schools don't have to throw away a lot of money to buy the most up-to-date textbooks; the Internet is constantly updated with new information for free! Also, students wouldn't have to lug textbooks around to and from school, which reduces the camel population. Plus, utilizing these new mediums encourages students to engage in a different kind of thinking with the material, especially if the teacher decides to set up a class blog or Twitter page or somewhere that allows students to engage in the material in ways other than simply reading it from a book.

This assumes, of course, that acquiring this technology is within the school's budget, but that's an issue entirely of its own.

Anyway, I'm off to move my stuff out of my current apartment. Now there's a situation in which being a camel would be useful...

It's August 1st!

This entry is brought to you by crows.

You know, I feel pretty great right now. Not just because I've been out of classes for two days, but because a real, live edublogger responded to a comment that I wrote! I'm usually very nervous about posting comments on weblogs, especially if they belong to people I don't know in my life outside the Internet (notice how I am refraining from referring to said life as "real" life. Internet life is "real" life, too.)

Basically, the Cool Cat Teacher encouraged me to start my own blog so I have it to look back upon later in my teaching career. While it's too late for me to take her advice about starting my own weblog (thanks, Jeff and Kristen!), it does encourage me to keep updating this lovely weblog of mine in the future. I'm going to try to keep it strictly related to education, which may be hard at times, knowing how much I love to go on tangents. I'll just try to make sure that the starting point of the tangents will be related to education.

I really enjoyed having former MACers as guest speakers on Friday. Each of them had interesting stories to tell about their use of technology in the classroom. The most memorable part of the presentation for me, though, was when the second speaker mentioned that when he was in school, he was a special education student. I wonder if his students know that. I feel that if they did, he would be a great encouragement to the special ed students, as he is a living example of a special education student who has grown up and accomplished many great things. What a great role model.

This particular speaker also talked about how he makes technology wish lists. Oh man, that sounds so exciting. I hope I get to do that when I'm a teacher! It sounds a lot like writing Christmas wish lists for Santa back in the day, only instead of asking for a pony or an Easy Bake Oven, I can ask for computer programs that can help me create electronic ponies and bake electronic food for my students. These things can totally help me enhance my teaching, if I use them correctly, by which I mean creatively. I wonder if writing these technology wish lists in crayon and delivering them to the technology person at my school with a cup of hot chocolate and a plate of cookies will increase the likelihood of me getting the pieces of technology I desire. I mean, it worked on Santa all of those years... Also, do technology people have elves that slave away all year making electronics? If yes, where are they hiding? Also, can I keep one as a pet? Man, I am going to have so many questions to ask the technology person at my school in the fall. I think I'm going to need to start making a list.

This concludes my reflection of Friday's class. Now run to freedom; the whole month of August lies ahead of you.

Also, on your way out, please enjoy my angry crow wallpaper inspired by the lovely piece of art at the beginning of this entry (one of my friends is actually using this as his desktop background):

Enjoy your time off, everybody! I'll update this blog periodically when inspiration strikes, so check back from time to time.

All the Lonely People...

...where do they all come from? Well, Beatles, not from Generation M!

Before I start with my thoughts about this week's reading, I feel the need to express that I am slightly nervous right now. You know, since my audience this week has increased exponentially due to an email Pat sent to the entire program. (Thanks, Monte!) If you're here for the first time, welcome. Feel free to stay awhile. I won't charge for restroom usage, and I also won't criticize your horrid choice of music. Moving on...

As one of the younger SMACers, I went to middle, high school, and undergrad with fellow Generation M'ers. My classmates built relationships both in person and via IM, email, text messages, social networking sites, and all those other gizmos and gadgets that were popular between 1999 and May 2010 (which I guess could be simplified to "now." Or "now enough.") While I rarely used my cell phone (to this day, I hate text messaging with a passion), I did utilize IM programs and social networking sites. While I see their value in maintaining relationships, since they allow me to keep in frequent contact with friends I may not get to see on a daily basis, I honestly much prefer to talk to people face-to-face. I love voices. I love facial expressions. I love the third dimension!

I never understood how some people prefer to IM friends who are only across the street or make small talk with friends for hours via text messaging when a phone call would have made that conversation move at a much faster pace. To me, IMing and texting makes friends seem almost mechanical. These forms of communication rob them of their voice, their facial expressions, and their third dimension! My friends are people, not machines! (Note: I have yet to pour buckets of water on my friends to test this theory.)

I also feel that the overuse of modern technology makes people in this generation unfriendly. Gone are the days when people randomly initiated conversations with strangers, as these days, everybody is too occupied with their iPods/phones/personal gaming systems/laptops to give strangers a second glance. It's sad; that was one of my favorite parts about summer camp back in middle school. Or how about when you're talking to somebody in person and they are simultaneously texting somebody else? Although the article says that most people in Generation M would not find such a behavior rude, most of the people around my age that I know, including me, would say otherwise. The odd thing is that, to me, such a behavior is perfectly fine when I'm sitting in the same room as somebody else and both of us have laptops and are supposedly doing homework. Hmm...

Can you imagine how this abundance of technology will carry over into the next generation? Fifteen-year-old girls will be writing in their public weblogs about their first kiss that took place via a webcam with a boy 800 miles away and texting her eight best friends about it immediately afterward. I don't know about you, but that just doesn't sound romantic to me. Especially the thought of cleaning the spit off of the camera afterward.

What about the abundance of personal information that members of Generation M choose to share online? It's true, we do have a lot of resources at our disposal that make the sharing of this information easy. Just about anybody can have access to the Internet and therefore social networking sites. Most people have a digital camera for taking pictures, which frequently end up shared on social networking sites, and recording movies, which can easily be uploaded to public video-sharing sites like YouTube. Most computers even come with a movie-editing program of some sort, which makes creating movies easy and fun. (Not that I've had experiences making silly movies with friends and putting them on YouTube...)

I agree with Klapperstuck and Kearns that most teens post these things on the Internet because they believe that only their friends will see them. I mean, there are so many movies on YouTube and so many blogs and personal profiles on the Internet, why would a stranger be specifically interested in yours? To these teens, I say this: there are some very bored and very perverted strangers out there. And also consider the possibility of other people you know seeing this information. Would you want your parents seeing what you're posting on the Internet? What about your teachers (if you think they don't Google their names to find out what students are saying about them, you are sadly mistaken)? If your answer to either of these questions is "no," that information probably shouldn't be on a public site.

I'm sorry that I have no cartoon for you today. I know my entry from last time and Pat's email probably got your hopes up, but I feel that a cartoon does not suit this entry as well as it did last week. Never fear! You can write out your frustrations in an email and send it to me. Maybe Shari will let that count as your reform project.

Hello, Children...

Hopefully at least one of these works...

Stephanie Blog Voice.egg on Aviary.

Or, if that doesn't work:
http://aviary.com/artists/smigglezz/creations/stephanie_blog_voice