Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Participate Much?


 "The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires."-William Arthur Ward


Until June 2012 I did not want to be a teacher. If someone asked me “What are you going to do with a French and History double-major? Teach?” I would’ve said “No” so fast their head would’ve spun. I have always liked children and have babysat since I can remember; however, it was not until I worked in an Early Childhood Development environment that Education as a career was cemented in stone in my mind and in my future. Since June 3rd, my life has been a crazy whirlwind of ambiguity at its finest.

We had to take the GRE. We were told to take the MTTC, the OPIC; a test on BBP, and we have done CPR’s and CCA’s. And a bowl of alphabet soup’s worth of Learning Disability names and identifiers.  We have asked a thousand questions about the dress code and have made countless excel sheets.

I can say with confidence that I have never participated in any class I have ever taken as much as I participate in the MAC classes. If you ask my classmates, that may or may not be a good thing. BUT I am enjoying what we are doing so far. J Technology is a huge part of education these days but as I was drawing my “Ideal Classroom” I was thinking back to the last time I wrote a paper on my computer. It took me FOREVER. Writing a three-page paper took me an entire day because I was so distracted with everything but the paper, so in my classroom I did not have computers. I had typewriters. Mull that over will you? I’m really curious what other people think because no one really commented on it in class.

Have a good weekend everybody!


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Location: Grass Lake Charter Township, MI 49240, USA

2 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 7, 2013 at 8:41 PM

    I thought that your typewriter idea was very interesting! I have written a lot of paper on my computer and it has been distracting but for someone who is terrible at spelling and organizing my thoughts I am not sure I could give up my computer. But I will say that these last few weeks have been the first time that I have used my computer in a classroom and it has been VERY distracting for me. I have been thinking if I had had more practice with computers in the classroom would this still be an issue for me OR if there were no computers in the classroom would that be better? So I do not know if I had answered your question but maybe if I had used a typewriter in high school I would be better at spelling today!

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  2. AnonymousJuly 8, 2013 at 11:20 AM

    Destiney, I loved your classroom because I agree that there is a sense of finality when you press the typewriter key. You can't backspace and easily delete the letter or word you just wrote, even though there is such a thing as white out and corrector tape. Learning a new language does require that you learn how to spell all those vocabulary words and use correct punctuation without the computer constantly coming to your aid. I don't know, do we even care anymore if kids know how to spell every word correctly? It is still a focus in primary, but once kids start doing papers in middle and secondary school, unless they're doing some of the writing in class with paper and pen, no one will really know how well they can spell. You make me think of Ray Bradbury typing up Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter at ten cents an hour. He was the extreme anti-tech person, even mowing his lawn with an old fashioned push lawn mower long after the gasoline powered mowers were invented. He used little or no modern technology to make the point that he recognized grave dangers lying that way. Was he over exaggerating? I don't know - ear thimbles have come to exist, and separate us from the very person sitting next to us, our brother or sister as we ride down the road in the car together, a million miles away from each other because of something plugged into their ears. Not to get too carried away - technology does exist in my house - but it's interesting to think about what he imagined so many years ago, and how much of it has actually come to be. We'll see what we discover as the class and the program progress.

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