Winter Reflection

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As I find myself at the end of winter quarter, I find myself once again faced with a reflective post on growing as a reflective blogger and teacher. I feel that yet again, I have indeed grown as a blogger, but more importantly, a reflective teacher. Although I shy away from talking about specific examples of students in my class (I feel those reflections are more suited for my own, less public, brain), I do feel that many of my posts are reflective of how I am beginning to be contemplative of what my practice is starting out as and where it can go. I feel that I have also began blogging about things that I am trying to enter in to a conversation about rather than spew rhetorical nonsense from my head.

An example that I would like to point out is my post on Reaching All Students. I think This demonstrates my desire to deepen my perspective on my practice in two ways. One -- I am always looking for insight from others into their teaching practices. And two -- I am continuing to generate more questions from that information rather than saying "oh, that post was nice." and moving on.

I feel that I am also growing as a commenter in that I am questioning more rather than, again, spewing rhetorical praise. I feel a comment that demonstrates this growth was on this post on Goal Setting. Rather than saying, "Oh goal setting is so inspiring and lovely and great job -- keep it up." I took an antagonistic approach to this bloggers' thinking. I spoke of my own personal dread of goal setting, and challenged her to think about what she would do if a student shared my sentiment and refused to participate in goal setting. I realize goal setting can be a beneficial motivator for many people, and I'm not trying to convince her or others not to use it in their classrooms; I was just trying to get some thinking started about the true use of goal setting and what about those who don't find goal setting helpful.

I think I'll keep this one short and to-the-point and finish it off here. I hope those who have been reading my posts have also seen my growth, and I hope to see you on the other side of the new quarter.

Free Education for All

Having grown up a sheltered, middle class, white girl who has done little traveling in other countries. Now, I'm going to admit now to my ignorance when it comes to third world countries and the realities of the lives of the people who live there. I'm well aware that I should already know of these realities, and it blows my mind when I see things like this post about a free school in India. This "school" is located under a bridge and lets children from the nearby slums attend and get an education for free.

Now for the questions showing my ignorance:

I commented on the actual post saying "Wow. This is amazing. It's great to see the children so eager to learn and try to make a better life from what they were given. How did this get started? Is there no other free education available? Are there other schools like this?"

I am also wondering, why is it that this is the only education that these children have access to? Does India not have any free education other than "schools" under bridges from those willing to teach them? Why can't more people realize that without education, the problems of poverty and children living in slums will repeat generation after generation? What would need to happen for more countries to realize this AND be able to do something about it?

Furthermore, these children are so involved and engaged with their education and are proactively trying to learn. It's so wrong that these children who so want to learn are being so under served, and many kids in our country only go to school because they are forced to. How can we instill this kind of need and purpose for education in our own sheltered, middle class, children?

Reaching all students

As I was monitoring my Facebook feed the other day, a friend of mine shared a blog post written by a parent about what one teacher does to monitor her students' feelings of belonging and inclusion. The mother talks about how the teacher has the students anonymously list three students who they would like to sit by the next week, and how she studies those requests to see which students are not being requested to sit by who may be lonely and may need some intervention. The author artfully threw in that this teacher had been doing this with her class (I think 4th or 5th grade) every Friday since Columbine in an attempt to prevent something similar from happening again by helping lonely students before it reaches a critical point. Although the blog post provided an impressive and insightful way of information gathering, it didn't go in to much detail about how the teacher actually goes about using the information she finds.

After I read the post, I tried to comment to try to get more information, but the site continually said it wouldn't post my comment because there was some sort of error (and now, as I try to go back to the post, the host says that page doesn't exist). So, I turn to you, my cohort and other small pocket of readers, to help me think about how to answer what I would have asked the original author.

Here is what I would have commented had I been able to:
"Wow. As a preservice teacher, I found great ideas in this post. I would be very interested in hearing what she does next with those students next. How does she arrange her room to try to make those who are outcasts more involved? How does she approach those who seem to be lonely? How does she actually go about using those lists to actually help the children in need?"

So what do you think? Once we discover which students are lonely, what can we do about it as teachers?

Growing a blogger

 I feel that this quarter I have made great strides in becoming a real blogger. Rather than hemming and hawing about the most perfect topic to blog, I have been learning to just sit down and write about what's on my mind or what most recently caught my eye. If it ends up being a topic no one is interested in, no big deal. I get to think through my thoughts on "paper" and then talk about something else in my next post. I don't think any one post in particular can show my growth as a blogger because my style seems to grow and change with every post, and I think I still have a ways to go before I can consider myself a top-notch blogger with great ideas that everyone should read.


One resource that has particular launched great part of my growth as a blogger was the mathtwitterblogosphere introduced as a class resource. I've started following many of the math teachers' blogs, and I'm learning quite a bit about successful math classrooms as well as effective blogging.

I've also learned this quarter that shorter is generally better in terms of blog posts. Looking at other people's posts has made me realize that unless it's about a topic I am really interested in, it better be short and to the point. If not, I just most on to the next post to spend my time more wisely.

In regards to commenting on other people's blogs, I feel I've also grown in that aspect as well. I've started actually remembering that it should be a conversation rather than monologues on the same topic. I've started asking questions rather than only stating my opinion, and I've started commenting on things that I may know nothing about and am simply curious about. By trying to interact through a blog, I feel my posts and comments have been somewhat more interesting (or at least I hope so.)

I commented on this blog post a while ago, and was excited to have a thoughtful reply to my comment and questions. It was also interesting to hear her further thoughts about the building and her different perspective on what the building was about. In this post, I felt that there was a great dialogue between all the commenters and the original author. I feel like all of us contributed to each others learning and thinking in a way that wouldn't have been possible not that long ago. Finally, I hope that my comment on this post helped the author go from only seeing trying to reteach in the same manor as insanity to thinking more deeply of ways in which we can still reteach students but structure it in different ways.

I can see that I still have a ways to go in my blogging growth, but at least I can see some improvement from my past posts. Maybe I'll reach a point where I don't have to ask myself this question when I have a post idea...

Taken from this blog about "why to blog"