Sage on the Side

Well, I’ve outdone myself for blog neglect, but I have certainly thought about it a lot.  There are many things I want to write about, but I just seem unable to find the time to get it done.  Maybe, I should just start and not worry that I don’t have time to write the entire post in one sitting and get back to it when I can.  I will try that this fall to try to get better at this.

One thing that has kept me busy is that three of my doctoral students finished their programs and graduated this year.  Two in May and one in July.  I am proud of all of them and particularly proud of Dr. Mary Ritzdorf, whose dissertation, Women in STEM: Attaining and Retaining Leadership Positions
Under Stereotype Threat, received the outstanding dissertation of the year award from the university.

Exciting news this fall is that I have a new cohort starting the Master of Science in Education Program, which I direct, and in which I teach many courses.  All of the teachers are involved in urban education which is where my teaching heart is, so we are able to focus on the needs of urban children as we proceed through the program.  They are all very dedicated and professional women who work hard and truly want what is best for each child in their classrooms.  I expect to learn a lot from them.

The original reason for starting this blog was to share teaching ideas and strategies that would not fit into regular class time.  A project I am working on right now with three colleagues might be interesting and useful to readers.  In October, with the three colleagues, who include professors in occupational therapy, theology, and nursing, I will present at the Teaching Professor Technology Conference in New Orleans on Pinterest and Pedagogy.  It is an exciting project that includes a very unusual mix of young and older, proficient and novice technology users, and personal and educational users of Pinterest, as well as one who did not know anything about it a year ago.

My daughters put me onto Pinterest in its early days when one had to receive an invitation to start an account.  I used it, now and then, to collect pins of personal interest, but then came to realize that teachers had discovered Pinterest!  It rocked my world (and Pinterest’s I think).  Educators have always been good sharers and eager borrowers. Talk about professional development!  Teachers really use the lesson ideas, teaching strategies, classroom management and organization, and anything else teachers want to know that they find on Pinterest.  There are not geographical boundaries to what they can access as they are exposed to ideas from everywhere in the world and there are no time constraints, as it is available all of the time.  Teachers can also communicate through the messaging features in Pinterest to seek additional information or clarification about pins, this creating a global community of collaborating education professionals.

Two years ago, when teaching a Children’s Literature course, I decided to revise the traditionally required record of books for each genre, which consisted of an annotated bibliography of children’s books, into a pinboard assignment where students collected books on Pinterest.  Students were required to pin an image of the book cover, write a short summary of each book, and describe how they would use the book in teaching in their future professional practice.  The assignment was well received and well done by students and I added Pinterest assignments to other classes.  At Faculty Inservice in August 2014, I shared my projects with other faculty.  The three professors mentioned above embraced the notion of using Pinterest in their teaching and group was born.  All of us have used Pinterest in different ways and learned from each other.  We have made use of both private boards and public boards, combined other technologies with our lessons, and experimented with various methods for sharing the boards.

When I started the Children’s Literature project two years ago, I found few academic users on Pinterest.  In that short time, the numbers of academic users has grown exponentially.  There is not a subject that cannot be found on Pinterest.  Two years ago, nearly half of the students in my class did not have Pinterest accounts and had to start them for class.  This fall, all of the students came to class as active users.  I am excited to see where the use of Pinterest will take my students.  I hope to hear from them after graduation to learn if and how they continue to use the pinboards they started in college.  My Pinterest account can be viewed at https://www.pinterest.com/drmts/ .  I would love to hear from other educators who have found professional uses for Pinterest.

I am obviously not very good at blogging.  I want to share thoughts and ideas, but get so busy, I don’t find time to post.  Since, my last post in August, (good grief!), there has been a lot of water under the bridge.  I taught five classes last term, which is a lot of the reason that I did not post to this blog.  I moved to a different house after living in the same house for 35 years, joined a new church after the church building I attended for 39 years was sold and the congregation merged with the new church.  These and other personal events have taken their toll, but never affected my enthusiasm for teaching and learning.

There are a lot of good things going on with my teaching and mentoring.  One of my doctoral students completed her dissertation in August and I proudly hooded her at graduation in December.  Four other doctoral students are at very important stages in their programs right now and I spend a lot of time with them.  Mentoring doctoral students is an intense pleasure for me.  I develop close relationships with the students and guide them through the unique journey of earning doctoral degrees.  I learn more about research and life with every one of them.

I also teach technology, literature, and research to undergraduate students.  Sometimes, it seems that universities consider actually teaching students, especially undergraduates, to be less important or prestigious than other activities that engage faculty.  I find this notion disturbing. In the first place, there would be no universities or colleges without undergraduate students, and secondly, helping students discover new concepts and ideas and make connections among those concepts and ideas is very fulfilling.  The intellectual and personal growth achieved by students from year one to year four is amazing.  These days, many, many undergraduates work nearly full time while attending college, some have children, and most have more stress in their lives than students did just ten or twenty years ago.  It is rewarding to watch them overcome the obstacles to reach their goals of graduation and jobs that help them change the their lives for the better.

Technology is one factor that contributes to the ability of students to juggle so much while they are in college.  They are able to communicate with faculty and advisers without always having to come to campus for appointments, they are able to view recordings of lectures outside of class time, they can submit work online and not have to deliver printed copies of work to campus.  Information is much more accessible with technology as students conduct searches for research 24 hours a day, through online databases, eliminating trips to the library, during library hours.  They can complete collaborative lessons and activities through electronic media and present their learning in myriad electronic formats. In my classes students are encouraged to bring their phones, tablets, and/or laptops and to use them to collaborate and for just-in-time learning.

My next post will describe some of the activities we do with technology in my classes.  I will also, eventually, discuss the many technologies that I just do not have time to teach my students.  Here’s hoping I become better and more regular in posting.

Incredibly, the new school year begins next week for public schools in Omaha.  I simply do not understand the rush to start when the weather is at its hottest and there are so many outside activities that children and families can enjoy.  I’m not the curmudgeon that believes school should begin the day after Labor Day and end the Friday before Memorial Day, as it supposedly did in the past.  The reality for me, as a student and a teacher, was that we began slightly before Labor Day and finished in the first or second week of June.  I actually graduated from high school on the ninth of June a long time ago.  Some of my grandchildren attend school in Washington State.  They begin the last week of August and finish the second week of June.  Washington is in line with most states on the east and west coasts in regard to school start dates.

It seems like it has become a kind of contest among local school districts to be the first to begin the school year.  There has long been discussion that a longer school year might be beneficial to student learning.  However, the schools that begin early also end early.  Summer began for local public school students on May 23^rd for the 2013-2014 school year.  So, more instructional time does not seem to be a reason for the early start.  Many of the local Catholic schools begin the last week of August or the first week of September and end in late May.   I am coming to the conclusion that, like just about everything else that is wrong with education these days, that the early start is a result of the pressure of high stakes testing.  Districts might hold the position that cramming as much learning as possible into students before the Christmas break will result in higher test scores in the second school term.  It would be interesting to conduct a study to determine if this is actually true.  If this is the case, it confirms the notion that  schools orient everything around testing and that school time after testing is not as highly valued.  That would be unfortunate as every teacher plans for student learning every day and school policy makers should respect and value that.

Going back to my concerns about the summer activities that are compromised or eliminated by the early start of school, I think about those outside of the school business who are affected by such scheduling.  Tourism is an important source of revenue for cities and states. Many vacations center around water and/or mountain activities, which are most enjoyable in warm weather.  The warmest weather often occurs in August.   Eliminating the month of August from the traveling schedules of families must certainly be detrimental to the tourism industry.   Many high school and college students work in the tourism industry to provide tuition and spending money needed during the coming school year.  Their jobs end and they have to attend school, so their opportunity to earn is diminished by the early starts.  Likewise, the earning power of entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, and others associated with the tourism industry must also suffer.  Those last days of May and the first two weeks of June are often cool and rainy, especially in areas that are popular for summer water and mountain vacations.  It seems to me that it would be better to remain in school during that time, and free up late summer for vacation travel.

Many parents that I know have expressed dissatisfaction with the early school start, but do not believe that they can do anything about it. In actuality, I imagine that the only way this situation will be reversed will be when parents protest and do not comply with the current schedules.  That said, I do wish everyone a happy start to the new school year!

Well, I’m off to a pretty inauspicious start as a blogger.  It has been over two months since I posted.  However, I have been exceptionally busy.  In that time, I have completed a semester with all of the grading, events, graduation, etc., that is entailed; taken a two week trip to China with my colleague and students from the ELA class we co-taught in the spring semester; planned and coordinated the academic part of the 13^th annual Latina Summer Academy at the college; taught 3 classes of technology at LSA every day for a week; traveled constantly between my house and that of my daughter, seven miles away, since she is incapacitated from major knee surgery that she had in May (she has five sons, aged 2 to 12); attended many baseball games of three of the boys; fixed a traditional fried chicken to cherry pie 4^th of July dinner for 14 family members; worked with doctoral students in various stages of their programs; and am planning and coordinating the academics for the new African American Academy the college is offering at the end of this month.  In addition to this, I have been involved in the transition of my church of 38 years to close and merge with another church a few miles away. During this time, I was living in computer Limbo because my main desktop computer died a painful death, I limped along on a laptop hooked up to keyboard and large monitor with external hard drives attached and finally got a new one two weeks ago.  I’m not really exhausted, but think I could be after reading this list.  Though I believe my excuses for not posting are legitimate, I sincerely want to do a better job and maintain a blog that will be useful to my current and former students and anyone else who might be interested.

Topics I plan to cover in the next few weeks include: reflection on my trip to China, changes made to Weebly that make it even more user friendly, new applications and technologies I have encountered, embracing change, and some observations about the teaching profession.  I most likely will throw in some personal experiences, observations and reminiscences.  I will get on it as soon as I have some time….

I am not one to post to blogs of others much, because I don’t have much time, but this week, I did post a comment in response to an article in The Chronicle of  Higher Education on the federal government’s intention to “improve teacher preparation.”   The article,Education Dept. to Move Forward With Plans for Improving Teacher Preparation,  and the  comments that followed it illustrate the unrealistic notions of officials and scholars who do not work in and do not understand P-12 education.  This is the response I posted:

“This conversation is terribly frustrating to this longtime teacher educator. While continually working to improve, we endeavor to educate teachers who are scholars and practitioners focused on meeting the needs of every student. We teach and model many wonderful ways to integrate technology into instruction, and how to plan and deliver meaningful lessons that meet academic standards, while engaging all students in critical thinking and inquiry. However, when we send candidates into the schools for practicum experiences and student teaching, they are often confronted by classrooms where teachers are forced to teach whole class, scripted
lessons delivered, verbatim , to raise test scores. Teachers are even monitored for demonstration of “fidelity” to the lockstep scripted lessons, down to the timing and voice with which they deliver them. They are not allowed to integrate technology, because “there is not enough time for that. As for the concern about retention of new teachers in schools, many leave because they are so frustrated by their inability to actually use the research based, good practices that we teach them.”

Another teacher educator responded that I had uncovered “dirty little” secrets about teaching and teacher education by revealing the situation with scripted curriculum, which was designed for struggling learners, but is now forced on many and that there is an assumption that educator preparation programs can choose the cooperating teachers for their student teachers.

I begin my adventure in blogging with the topic of teacher guilt, because it is the reason for the blog.  As stated on the page, “About this Blog,” at the end of every term, I feel that time has run out before I was able to teach my students all they need to learn on the subject of the class and that I have more stories to tell.  This semester, as we near the end of the term, I mentioned it to a class one night when teaching educational technology.  My students named my sentiment, teacher guilt, and suggested that I continue to relate information and stories to them through a blog.  I have never been particularly good at keeping diaries and journals or participating in social media on a regular basis.  However, teacher guilt might just be the impetus I need to improve this situation.  The fact that I am a tech queen might also be helpful.  I have some kind of device with me at all times, and I enjoy, immensely, hearing from previous students who send me email messages with stories about their teaching.  This blog might provide a forum for me to remain in contact with them as well as current students to share thoughts and ideas beyond what we can accomplish within the confines of the academic semester.

Teachers can manage to feel guilt about many things. Lesson planning, timely grading and feedback; connecting with every student everyday; paperwork deadlines; student performance; and personal work/life balance can all be sources of anxiety for teachers.  There never seems to be enough time to get to everything, and like laundry, it is never done.  When one thing has been taught, it is time to move on to something else.  Teachers feel guilty when they stay home from school due to illness and they feel guilty if they go to school and spread the illness to students and staff.  They can experience guilty feelings if they take time for physical fitness and they can feel guilty if they do not.  I think you get the picture.  We plant the seeds of guilt all by ourselves with out the help of others.

Though I have been in the teaching business a long time, I still do not have a “cure” for teacher guilt.  However, I have come to realize that I DO get a lot done each term and that my students learn much of what they need to know to become good teachers.  It is important for the students and for me to look back at the beginning of the semester and reflect on what they know and can do now that they did not know and could not do then.   At this time I think about what I have learned from working with this group of students, as I always learn from teaching.  Based on my experiences with the students I have had this term, I will make adjustments in the my courses in the future.  Maybe that is a positive result of teacher guilt. Some of what I didn’t get to this year, will be included next time I teach these courses, because of lessons learned this year.  This should diminish the amount of guilt I impose upon myself at the end of each term.  I’m going to give it a try this spring.

I look forward to hearing from any readers who read this blog and relate to the conversations presented here.  Please join in with no feelings of guilt for taking time to think and write about your own feelings.