What kind of teacher do I want to be? Part II

One of the sections of Milner that resonated most strongly with me was Building Public Trust. 

One reason I was so interested in this section is because I am shocked by how often pre-service teachers are reminded to behave professionally. I don't know whether this is common to all teaching programs, but the folks in charge of my program apparently believe that we are all strippers with anger issues who are just one spring break party away from posting photos of ourselves shooting up on Facebook. It's insulting and disappointing and it makes me doubt that they actually do view us as professionals. Which makes me wonder whether they really see themselves as part of a noble and respectable profession, either. 

What kind of teacher do I want to be? Part I

I was surprised by how many thoughts and emotions Milner's Becoming a Complete Teacher churned up inside me. Each individual component of being a teacher feels do-able, but taken together, it feels like an impossible task. 


I am not a calm person. Or a patient person. I get angry and lose my temper. I am often cynical. I hate hard work and I cry when I feel overwhelmed. 

How can I possibly be a good teacher?

The Products of our Process

I've been thinking about the issue of student engagement a lot lately, in part because of the work we've been doing in my methods class and in part because of the work we've been doing in my New Literacies and Media Class.

Being a Composer

I participate in a writing group, and it's one of the highlights of my week. The group has fluctuated in size and focus since it began a couple of years ago, but over the past year it has really gelled. In addition to reading and critiquing each others' work, we have also started a collaborative writing project that's a lot of fun.

Judging good exercises

I've read bits and pieces of Atwell's In the Middle before, but reading the first two chapters for my methods class this semester, I was struck by her observation that oftentimes teachers rely on "exercises" rather than giving students autonomy over their own writing process. I've been mulling this over for a while, now, because I'm one of those people who almost always hates participating in writing exercises. Or, rather, I hate participating in too many writing exercises.

21st Century Skillz

My MAT classes emphasize 21st century skills, by which the professors often seem to mean using computers and/or the Internet. But my non-MAT classes (linguistics and film studies) focus on traditional texts. I guess you could call these classes old-fashioned. But I find myself thinking more critically about, engaging more rigorously with, and feeling more challenged by the materials in those classes.

Having "The Talk"

Yesterday, my methods class talked about how to teach difficult texts to students. It really got me thinking about how many potential landmines there are in an English classroom. Students are old enough to engage with challenging material - everything from bad language and drugs to rape and racism - but they are not all at the same maturity level. They also have different life experiences, so what might be acceptable for one student might feel very upsetting for others.

Teaching Poetry

I don't remember liking poetry when I was a teenager. I loved Shel Silverstein when I was a kid, and I wrote some witty, rhyming verse of my own in homage to his genius. But by the time I got to high school, poetry seemed old-fashioned and dense.


In contrast, prose was fun. It told stories! With characters and a plot and dialogue. Some of the other kids in my class wrote poetry. I thought they were insufferable literary posers. I wrote short stories. My writing was real fiction; their writing was basically a glorified diary entry.


Yeah, I was a pill.

The Execution of All Things

What's the difference between interconnectedness and repetitiveness? How come sometimes revisiting a topic feels like a thematic exploration, but other times it feels deadly dull?

Education in the First Person

After several weeks without Internet, I am posting a whole bunch of stuff at the same time. Here is post #1:


Reading Kozol's essay "First Person," followed by Baxter's short story "Gryphon" reminded me how abstract education can feel. Far too often, there is school and there is real life. There are books we read for pleasure and assignments we read because the teacher tells us to. There emails and notes and poems we write because something within us compels us to communicate our thoughts and dreams and opinions and needs. And there are papers we write because a syllabus tells us they are due.

Somehow, we all learned to read...

It's true. We learned how to read. But how that happened is a mystery to me. And, as far as I can tell, it's a mystery to the "experts" too. We know that kids learn how to read. (Unless they don't, which is another story. But for the most part...they do.) We know that learning to read correlates with certain stages of human development. In other words, when a person reaches the right mental/emotional stage...poof! Reading! We also know that learning to read is related to exposure and/or access to texts. In other words, if kids are exposed to books and if other people read books to them...poof! Reading!

Another semester; another blog

This is my last semester before student teaching, and I'm taking a class called Strategies for Teaching English Language Arts. I think this might be the class about which I am most excited, because it feels the most relevant to me as a future educator. It might also be exciting because I finally feel like I "get" how this MAT program works and what is expected of me. But I also responded really enthusiastically to the readings, especially one by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner titled "What's Worth Knowing?"