Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Cry for the Indians
Oh, that Tribe. After starting the season a ho-hum 5-5, the Tribe has gone on the following stretches: 3-8, then 18-5, and now 4-16. During those stretches, it's been all or nothing. Lackluster hitting and erratic pitching, then stellar pitching and a prolific offense, then mediocre pitching and an offense more anemic than the Olson twins. It's that time of year again. Time to cry for the Indians.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Oldie but... well, you decide
Was looking around my drive in search of a photo, and found this essay I wrote back in my undergraduate days. Does it hold up well?
Place Assignment: The Commute
He always takes Chester Avenue on the way to work. He doesn’t particularly like Chester. In fact, he dislikes it intensely. There’s a traffic signal every other block or so. If the timing is just right – or rather, just wrong – he has to stop and start twenty-three times between the moment he turns onto Chester until he finally hops on I-71. He’s counted. His personal best thus far is ten stops. He’s tried to duplicate this feat, but the signals don’t seem to have a particular pattern. Chester is bleak, and it epitomizes the seediness of East Cleveland. During the wintertime, it seems as though every derelict in the city gathers there to huddle around makeshift bonfires. There are several abandoned homes along Chester, and all have been vandalized. In one particularly crazy week, someone or ones torched several of the empty homes. The police suspected an insurance arson scam, but could never prove it. Still, he takes Chester on the way to work because the traffic on Carnegie Avenue is brutal, even at eight in the evening.
He dreads the commute to work. Work itself is fine. Proofreading checks is dull and not the least bit challenging, but it leaves him alone with his thoughts, and that suits his brooding, introspective nature. He takes pride in his accuracy – sometimes, he goes months without making a mistake – and he likes most of his co-workers. His supervisor Katherine is beautiful, and he finds her irresistible. Even though she’s married and some ten years older than him, she can tell he has a crush on her, and flirts with him shamelessly. When no one else is within earshot, he calls her “Kitty” and they both constantly find excuses to touch one another – a little pat on the shoulder here, a friendly hand on her waist when he walks past her there. These little interactions set him aflame, and he often daydreams of making love to her while she purrs in his ear. Nothing will come of this flirtation, but even though he can’t conceive of sleeping with a married woman, the way he covets Kitty is the beginning of a disturbing trend of becoming attracted to, and eventually sleeping with, married women.
On the way back from work, he takes Carnegie. The oppressively claustrophobic sea of cars that clog the traffic during normal hours is non-existent at four in the morning. He’s a creature of obsessive-compulsive routine, and he always times himself to see how consistent his driving is. Now that he’s been on the job for a few months, he has perfected his routine so that it takes him exactly twenty minutes to go from work to the corner of Carnegie and Prospect. He uses this intersection as a landmark because it’s exactly thirteen minutes from his apartment. There’s a large digital clock and thermometer display on the northwest corner, and he always checks it as he drives past. On this particular night, he’s fifteen minutes later than usual, but this is because it’s brutally cold, even for Cleveland, and he helped jump-start two of his co-workers’ cars when their engines refused to turn over.
He’s absurdly proud of the fact that his car not only started right up, but also had enough juice to jump-start two others, almost as though he were personally responsible for his car’s superior tolerance for extremely cold weather. Kitty winked at him when she saw him jump-start one of the pressmen’s beat-up Mustang. He can’t remember the pressman’s name – Bob? Rob? – but he’s so exhilarated during the drive back that for a second, what he sees on the corner of Carnegie and Prospect doesn’t quite register. He slows down to a near-stop as he waits for the digital display to cycle through the time and display the temperature. Minus twenty-six degrees! This is easily the coldest temperature he’s ever seen. He pulls over to the side of the road and gets out of the car. It feels cold, but not extremely so. Then a frigid gust of wind comes through and shocks him with its iciness. His eyes well up, and the hair in his nose crimps. He spits on the road and watches the saliva freeze solid in less than a minute. Minus twenty-six – a multiple of lucky thirteen, to boot! For one of the few times of his life, he experiences true happiness. He smiles and gets back in his car. Exactly thirteen minutes later, he’s home.
Place Assignment: The Commute
He always takes Chester Avenue on the way to work. He doesn’t particularly like Chester. In fact, he dislikes it intensely. There’s a traffic signal every other block or so. If the timing is just right – or rather, just wrong – he has to stop and start twenty-three times between the moment he turns onto Chester until he finally hops on I-71. He’s counted. His personal best thus far is ten stops. He’s tried to duplicate this feat, but the signals don’t seem to have a particular pattern. Chester is bleak, and it epitomizes the seediness of East Cleveland. During the wintertime, it seems as though every derelict in the city gathers there to huddle around makeshift bonfires. There are several abandoned homes along Chester, and all have been vandalized. In one particularly crazy week, someone or ones torched several of the empty homes. The police suspected an insurance arson scam, but could never prove it. Still, he takes Chester on the way to work because the traffic on Carnegie Avenue is brutal, even at eight in the evening.
He dreads the commute to work. Work itself is fine. Proofreading checks is dull and not the least bit challenging, but it leaves him alone with his thoughts, and that suits his brooding, introspective nature. He takes pride in his accuracy – sometimes, he goes months without making a mistake – and he likes most of his co-workers. His supervisor Katherine is beautiful, and he finds her irresistible. Even though she’s married and some ten years older than him, she can tell he has a crush on her, and flirts with him shamelessly. When no one else is within earshot, he calls her “Kitty” and they both constantly find excuses to touch one another – a little pat on the shoulder here, a friendly hand on her waist when he walks past her there. These little interactions set him aflame, and he often daydreams of making love to her while she purrs in his ear. Nothing will come of this flirtation, but even though he can’t conceive of sleeping with a married woman, the way he covets Kitty is the beginning of a disturbing trend of becoming attracted to, and eventually sleeping with, married women.
On the way back from work, he takes Carnegie. The oppressively claustrophobic sea of cars that clog the traffic during normal hours is non-existent at four in the morning. He’s a creature of obsessive-compulsive routine, and he always times himself to see how consistent his driving is. Now that he’s been on the job for a few months, he has perfected his routine so that it takes him exactly twenty minutes to go from work to the corner of Carnegie and Prospect. He uses this intersection as a landmark because it’s exactly thirteen minutes from his apartment. There’s a large digital clock and thermometer display on the northwest corner, and he always checks it as he drives past. On this particular night, he’s fifteen minutes later than usual, but this is because it’s brutally cold, even for Cleveland, and he helped jump-start two of his co-workers’ cars when their engines refused to turn over.
He’s absurdly proud of the fact that his car not only started right up, but also had enough juice to jump-start two others, almost as though he were personally responsible for his car’s superior tolerance for extremely cold weather. Kitty winked at him when she saw him jump-start one of the pressmen’s beat-up Mustang. He can’t remember the pressman’s name – Bob? Rob? – but he’s so exhilarated during the drive back that for a second, what he sees on the corner of Carnegie and Prospect doesn’t quite register. He slows down to a near-stop as he waits for the digital display to cycle through the time and display the temperature. Minus twenty-six degrees! This is easily the coldest temperature he’s ever seen. He pulls over to the side of the road and gets out of the car. It feels cold, but not extremely so. Then a frigid gust of wind comes through and shocks him with its iciness. His eyes well up, and the hair in his nose crimps. He spits on the road and watches the saliva freeze solid in less than a minute. Minus twenty-six – a multiple of lucky thirteen, to boot! For one of the few times of his life, he experiences true happiness. He smiles and gets back in his car. Exactly thirteen minutes later, he’s home.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Twice bitten, ...
... thrice shy? Four times shy? Two times the square root of five times shy? Four times the square root of two times shy? The possibilities are literally endless. Whatever the next number in the bitten-shy sequence may be, color me that number. Had my routine dental check-up / cleaning last week. Felt a little pain around my gums, bottom left-hand side. No biggie. Pain persisted into the next day. Annoyed, not worried. Hygienist must have scraped my gum. Pain worsened the next day, and the area became very sensitive to hot and cold substances. Pain worsened again the next day, stopped chewing / drinking on the left side. That same evening, the area started throbbing. By the time I went to bed, the pain was almost unbearable. When I woke up yesterday morning, the area was swollen, red, and hurt like a motherfucker. Infection. Called the dentist, she couldn’t see me right away, gave me a prescription for Amoxicillin. The last time this happened, the progression was identical. I ended up needing oral surgery. What the fucking fuck? Cleanings are supposed to be beneficial. I would sue if I wasn’t so lazy / in such miserable pain.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
On accuracy and the suspension of disbelief
Science teachers are a weird bunch, to be sure. But there
has to be a method to our so-called madness. A couple of months ago, a fellow Physics teacher came under severe parent fire for assigning the following word problem:
“A
northbound car with a velocity of 100 m/s ran over a baby with a momentum of
800 kg m/s, what is the mass of the car?”
I’m
sorry, but that problem is an absolute ignominy. For one thing, it should have
been broken up into two sentences. For another, the solution is 8 kg. Eight
kilograms!!! That’s 17.6 lbs. A seventeen/eighteen-pound car??? This guy is a disgrace
to the profession.
A
word problem has to be realistic. Here, for example, are a couple of the momentum
problems I assigned during midterms:
“Cyclops” is a one-eyed cat with a mass of 6.8 kg. Cyclops’
owner is tired of looking into Cyclops’ sad little eye, and throws it out the
door, where it strikes a stationary three-legged cat, “Stumpy,” that has a mass
of 1.6 kg. Stumpy flies forward with a
velocity of 6.8 m/s, and Cyclops continues forward at 4.5 m/s. What was Cyclops’ initial velocity?
An astronaut with a mass of 81 kg is outside a space capsule
when the tether line breaks. Luckily, said astronaut has his pet cat “Litter”
with him. To return to the capsule, the astronaut throws the 2.5 kg cat away
from the capsule at a speed of 16 m/s, thus being able to return to the capsule
safely. As for Litter... well, better luck in the next of its nine lives. At
what speed does the astronaut move toward the capsule?
If I may quote the President: “If we want America to lead in the 21st century, nothing is more important than giving everyone the best education possible.”
An 8-kg car simply won’t do.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Spare me
The unfathomable horror that took place in Sandy Hook Elementary last week has, as of late, sparked an apparent paradigm shift in the general public's perception of teachers. Where just a scant ten days ago we teachers were scum-sucking, lazy leeches that greedily lived off the public teat and had the gall to have their Hoffaesque union strong-arm poor downtrodden taxpayers into giving them undeserved raises and pension plans when in reality they are glorified babysitters and have only work nine months per year, we are now being lauded as heroes who are willing to sacrifice our time, resources, and even lives for the well-being of our students. Although devastated and heartbroken by the incomprehensible madness of last week's tragedy, several of my fellow teachers are comforted by this seeming outpouring of sympathy and recognition for all that we do, and are quick to share links to open letters to teachers, blogs, articles, etc., that all of a sudden portray us as hard-working, misunderstood martyrs.
Not *this* teacher.
I gave up the prospect of a career in research to become a teacher, but did not do so out of a sense of martyrdom, selflessness, or civic duty. I became a teacher because during my second year in graduate school, I taught an introductory science course as an adjunct, and fell in love with the profession immediately and irrevocably. Once I completed my master's thesis, I did not look for work as a scientist. I stayed at my typesetting job, took a plethora of subject-area examinations to give myself the best possible chance at landing a teaching job, and after a couple of unsuccessful interviews, was rewarded with a job at the local high school.
I live in Florida, a right-to-work state. I am not a member of the union. This is not out of some sense of heroism or lack of solidarity. I am neither pro- nor anti-union, and find the "if you're not with us you're against us" rhetoric to be mind-numbingly stupid. I am not member of the union for the very simple reason that I live on a pretty tight budget and would rather spend the union dues money on other things.
I came into the teaching profession at a time where the state government decided to reduce spending by freezing teacher wages and eliminating tenure. As such, even though I'm well into my fourth year as a teacher, I'm still making roughly $40K a year and working on a year-by-year contract that can be terminated at any time. What's more, these conditions are not likely to change anytime soon, if ever. In case the reader is curious, other teachers who came into the profession at the same time I did and joined the union are in the exact same predicament as yours truly.
In the short time I have been a teacher, I have had to take several graduate classes in education in order to earn a professional teacher certification. The fact that I had two college degrees at the time I was hired is irrelevant, because neither my bachelor nor master's degree is in education. I am now not only professionally certified, but am also one week away from earning a second master's degree, in education this time.
Owing to the vagaries of inclusion policies and the pathetic weakness of so-called class size amendments, I teach classes of as many as 36 students, ranging from "arrived in the U.S. yesterday and therefore speaks no English" to gifted students.
Because a few of my students are gifted, I have had to pick up an endorsement in Gifted Education, a process that required I take five additional classes -- no piggy-backing on the graduate education courses, I'm afraid -- and pay yet another certification fee.
Sound tough? It isn't. Why? Because it's a GREAT job!!!
Like everyone other 47-percenter, I worry about money. After all, I have a mortgage and an elderly dependent to worry about. Be that as it may, I want for nothing. I eat out whenever I feel like it, and go to several concerts and sporting events. If I decide I want to teach myself astrophysics, I can afford to go online and purchase a textbook without an ounce of fiscal regret. If I decide to over-tip the gorgeous and voluptuous red-haired siren who cuts my hair because she caters to my obsessive-compulsive "wash my hair *after* you cut it, and rub my scalp clean with your awesome fingernails" needs, I do so. When I told my students that I had picked up professional certification in various subject areas, they asked me if that would earn me a raise. I laughed. When my students saw my Gifted endorsement certificate, they asked me if I would earn more money for being highly qualified. I laughed and thanked them for making my day. When my students found out that I was in the process of picking up a second master's degree, they asked me if it would mean a higher salary. I laughed, thanked them for making my day, and told them to always stay positive and innocent. "But don't you care, mister? Why don't you demand more money?" My answer: "Of course I'd like more money. But I spent the majority of my childhood living in abject poverty. A salary that allows me to pay all of my bills and still have enough money left over to go see Slayer practically every year is a good salary. No one in their right mind goes into teaching for the money." And I meant it.
Like every other teacher, I work a ton of hours after school and/or at home preparing lessons, labs, and assessments, grading work, and staying current in both my subject areas and classroom technology. This is hardly a sacrifice on my part! I love writing word problems that include my students in outrageously funny, physics-related scenarios. I love playing around with equipment while evaluating demonstrations and lab activities. I love reading my students' oftentimes hilarious reading journals in which they try to come up with equally outrageous scenarios to demonstrate their mastery of a given concept.
Like every other teacher, I find myself constantly "parenting" my students, listening to their problems, settling their occasional disputes, keeping them on task, encouraging them when things get tough, and supporting them unconditionally. This is hardly a sacrifice on my part! I love my students -- in a non-creepy way, of course. I love teasing them good-naturedly. I love telling them absurd autobiographical stories that always have a moral just to give them a short mental break, all the while letting them think they've somehow managed to steer me off the subject. I love their groans when I come up with a particularly cheesy pun that they enjoy in spite of themselves. I love ad-libbing nonsensical tall tales to help them remember concepts, such as the time I convinced my chemistry students that wolfram had been renamed tungsten because it had originally been named after the scientist who discovered it, John L. Ram, and that the element's original name came about because Ram had gone mad and became convinced he was a werewolf, before finally cracking up and explaining that tungsten is Swedish for "heavy stone," a good description for an element so strong it has the highest melting point of any transition metal, which is why it is used in high-temperature applications such as light bulb filaments and in high-impact applications such as mining drill bits. I love my students' sense of humor. I love the fact that I have an enormity of cat lovers in my Physics classes, that the Physics midterm I administered last week included several problems in which cats were catapulted, pushed and pulled, dropped off cliffs, and launched into outer space, to name but a few feline ignominies, that my students enjoyed the problems so much that they lamented that I hadn't written more, and that when I told my students that I had written exactly as many flying cat problems as there should be, they immediately knew that the number of problems was Lucky 13. I love cheering them up when they're down. And I especially love that they have the inexplicable ability to cheer me up when I'm down, something that came in very handy last year when I was in the throes of the most brutal depression imaginable, and my only respite from abject misery was my job.
I freaking LOVE my job. It pays enough, it's a ton of fun, and it keeps me sane. So please spare me the current surge in sympathy, because it is undoubtedly going to revert to ignorant antagonism as soon as the passage of time dulls the shrieking brutality of the Sandy Hook tragedy to a faint whisper. If others are envious of my job, I challenge them to pick up a fistful of college degrees. I challenge them to become certified in Earth and Space Science, Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. I challenge them to convince my supervisors that they can do my job better than me. I flat-out challenge them to come get my job. No, I fucking double-dog dare them to come get my awesome, cushy job. Until then, they can shut their fucking cake-holes and worry about *their* shitty jobs.
Not *this* teacher.
I gave up the prospect of a career in research to become a teacher, but did not do so out of a sense of martyrdom, selflessness, or civic duty. I became a teacher because during my second year in graduate school, I taught an introductory science course as an adjunct, and fell in love with the profession immediately and irrevocably. Once I completed my master's thesis, I did not look for work as a scientist. I stayed at my typesetting job, took a plethora of subject-area examinations to give myself the best possible chance at landing a teaching job, and after a couple of unsuccessful interviews, was rewarded with a job at the local high school.
I live in Florida, a right-to-work state. I am not a member of the union. This is not out of some sense of heroism or lack of solidarity. I am neither pro- nor anti-union, and find the "if you're not with us you're against us" rhetoric to be mind-numbingly stupid. I am not member of the union for the very simple reason that I live on a pretty tight budget and would rather spend the union dues money on other things.
I came into the teaching profession at a time where the state government decided to reduce spending by freezing teacher wages and eliminating tenure. As such, even though I'm well into my fourth year as a teacher, I'm still making roughly $40K a year and working on a year-by-year contract that can be terminated at any time. What's more, these conditions are not likely to change anytime soon, if ever. In case the reader is curious, other teachers who came into the profession at the same time I did and joined the union are in the exact same predicament as yours truly.
In the short time I have been a teacher, I have had to take several graduate classes in education in order to earn a professional teacher certification. The fact that I had two college degrees at the time I was hired is irrelevant, because neither my bachelor nor master's degree is in education. I am now not only professionally certified, but am also one week away from earning a second master's degree, in education this time.
Owing to the vagaries of inclusion policies and the pathetic weakness of so-called class size amendments, I teach classes of as many as 36 students, ranging from "arrived in the U.S. yesterday and therefore speaks no English" to gifted students.
Because a few of my students are gifted, I have had to pick up an endorsement in Gifted Education, a process that required I take five additional classes -- no piggy-backing on the graduate education courses, I'm afraid -- and pay yet another certification fee.
Sound tough? It isn't. Why? Because it's a GREAT job!!!
Like everyone other 47-percenter, I worry about money. After all, I have a mortgage and an elderly dependent to worry about. Be that as it may, I want for nothing. I eat out whenever I feel like it, and go to several concerts and sporting events. If I decide I want to teach myself astrophysics, I can afford to go online and purchase a textbook without an ounce of fiscal regret. If I decide to over-tip the gorgeous and voluptuous red-haired siren who cuts my hair because she caters to my obsessive-compulsive "wash my hair *after* you cut it, and rub my scalp clean with your awesome fingernails" needs, I do so. When I told my students that I had picked up professional certification in various subject areas, they asked me if that would earn me a raise. I laughed. When my students saw my Gifted endorsement certificate, they asked me if I would earn more money for being highly qualified. I laughed and thanked them for making my day. When my students found out that I was in the process of picking up a second master's degree, they asked me if it would mean a higher salary. I laughed, thanked them for making my day, and told them to always stay positive and innocent. "But don't you care, mister? Why don't you demand more money?" My answer: "Of course I'd like more money. But I spent the majority of my childhood living in abject poverty. A salary that allows me to pay all of my bills and still have enough money left over to go see Slayer practically every year is a good salary. No one in their right mind goes into teaching for the money." And I meant it.
Like every other teacher, I work a ton of hours after school and/or at home preparing lessons, labs, and assessments, grading work, and staying current in both my subject areas and classroom technology. This is hardly a sacrifice on my part! I love writing word problems that include my students in outrageously funny, physics-related scenarios. I love playing around with equipment while evaluating demonstrations and lab activities. I love reading my students' oftentimes hilarious reading journals in which they try to come up with equally outrageous scenarios to demonstrate their mastery of a given concept.
Like every other teacher, I find myself constantly "parenting" my students, listening to their problems, settling their occasional disputes, keeping them on task, encouraging them when things get tough, and supporting them unconditionally. This is hardly a sacrifice on my part! I love my students -- in a non-creepy way, of course. I love teasing them good-naturedly. I love telling them absurd autobiographical stories that always have a moral just to give them a short mental break, all the while letting them think they've somehow managed to steer me off the subject. I love their groans when I come up with a particularly cheesy pun that they enjoy in spite of themselves. I love ad-libbing nonsensical tall tales to help them remember concepts, such as the time I convinced my chemistry students that wolfram had been renamed tungsten because it had originally been named after the scientist who discovered it, John L. Ram, and that the element's original name came about because Ram had gone mad and became convinced he was a werewolf, before finally cracking up and explaining that tungsten is Swedish for "heavy stone," a good description for an element so strong it has the highest melting point of any transition metal, which is why it is used in high-temperature applications such as light bulb filaments and in high-impact applications such as mining drill bits. I love my students' sense of humor. I love the fact that I have an enormity of cat lovers in my Physics classes, that the Physics midterm I administered last week included several problems in which cats were catapulted, pushed and pulled, dropped off cliffs, and launched into outer space, to name but a few feline ignominies, that my students enjoyed the problems so much that they lamented that I hadn't written more, and that when I told my students that I had written exactly as many flying cat problems as there should be, they immediately knew that the number of problems was Lucky 13. I love cheering them up when they're down. And I especially love that they have the inexplicable ability to cheer me up when I'm down, something that came in very handy last year when I was in the throes of the most brutal depression imaginable, and my only respite from abject misery was my job.
I freaking LOVE my job. It pays enough, it's a ton of fun, and it keeps me sane. So please spare me the current surge in sympathy, because it is undoubtedly going to revert to ignorant antagonism as soon as the passage of time dulls the shrieking brutality of the Sandy Hook tragedy to a faint whisper. If others are envious of my job, I challenge them to pick up a fistful of college degrees. I challenge them to become certified in Earth and Space Science, Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. I challenge them to convince my supervisors that they can do my job better than me. I flat-out challenge them to come get my job. No, I fucking double-dog dare them to come get my awesome, cushy job. Until then, they can shut their fucking cake-holes and worry about *their* shitty jobs.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Hey, teacher... give the kids their phones!
Let me apologize in advance for having the cojones to mark my return to blogging with a post that I pretty much copied and pasted from the discussion board of my last M.Ed course, but I thought it might be a nice change from my not-so-recent run of despondent entries.
The class in question deals with integrating technology into the classroom, and included a webinar intro that tried to start off with a bang by stating: “The greatest impedance to instructors not using technology in the classroom is the instructor’s unwillingness to actually use the tech item. It is an instructor’s unwillingness to give up control to a generation of youth that may be more electronically sophisticated than the instructors themselves.” This point might be valid were it not for the fact that it is unconscionably facile. My experience, limited though it may be, is that the greatest impedance to instructors not using technology in the classroom is the atrocious way in which technology use in the classroom is approached. The notion that occasionally using a PowerPoint presentation or playing a YouTube clip will somehow engage or even pacify today’s technology-driven students is ludicrous, yet is viewed by teachers, administrators, and even the educational research community as being compliant with the mandate to implement technology in the classroom.
At our school, this problem is exacerbated by the seemingly contradictory way in which we are asked to implement the use of technology while simultaneously adhering to our acceptable use policies. Students are forbidden from using their electronic devices during class time, as explicitly stated by our “off and away during the day” rule. Be that as it may, during just about every professional development session, we are subjected to watching presentations or webinars from education experts who exhort us to engage our students by making the instructional content accessible to them in a “teen-friendly” context. Last year, for example, one such presentation involved the use of cell phones as polling devices, calculators, and the like, an approach that has become increasingly popular recently because there is a notion that class participation increases significantly when cell phones are used in the classroom. The facilitator asked why so many of us insisted on using calculators in class instead of cell phones, and I gladly raised my hand and pointed out that the few times I allowed students to use their phones in class to purportedly calculate values, I caught several students trying to use search engines to find the answers to word problems, instead of simply learning the curriculum. No such problems arise when I provide them with calculators.
The presumption that teachers are reticent to use technology, preferring to stick to a board and dry-erase markers, or even chalk, because this enables them to somehow remain as the sage-on-stage, is utterly ludicrous. Several of us love computers, ANGEL, Data Warehouse, interactive board technology, clickers, iPads, and any other technology-driven strategies that not only engage the students but streamline the teaching and learning processes. As a science teacher, I find the use of lab probeware for the acquisition and analysis of data to be invaluable. My students find the interfaces intuitive, and I find that, once I have taught my students the mathematics behind graphs and statistics, the amount of time that is saved by having these processes automated is infinitely better spent teaching them more content.
The class in question deals with integrating technology into the classroom, and included a webinar intro that tried to start off with a bang by stating: “The greatest impedance to instructors not using technology in the classroom is the instructor’s unwillingness to actually use the tech item. It is an instructor’s unwillingness to give up control to a generation of youth that may be more electronically sophisticated than the instructors themselves.” This point might be valid were it not for the fact that it is unconscionably facile. My experience, limited though it may be, is that the greatest impedance to instructors not using technology in the classroom is the atrocious way in which technology use in the classroom is approached. The notion that occasionally using a PowerPoint presentation or playing a YouTube clip will somehow engage or even pacify today’s technology-driven students is ludicrous, yet is viewed by teachers, administrators, and even the educational research community as being compliant with the mandate to implement technology in the classroom.
At our school, this problem is exacerbated by the seemingly contradictory way in which we are asked to implement the use of technology while simultaneously adhering to our acceptable use policies. Students are forbidden from using their electronic devices during class time, as explicitly stated by our “off and away during the day” rule. Be that as it may, during just about every professional development session, we are subjected to watching presentations or webinars from education experts who exhort us to engage our students by making the instructional content accessible to them in a “teen-friendly” context. Last year, for example, one such presentation involved the use of cell phones as polling devices, calculators, and the like, an approach that has become increasingly popular recently because there is a notion that class participation increases significantly when cell phones are used in the classroom. The facilitator asked why so many of us insisted on using calculators in class instead of cell phones, and I gladly raised my hand and pointed out that the few times I allowed students to use their phones in class to purportedly calculate values, I caught several students trying to use search engines to find the answers to word problems, instead of simply learning the curriculum. No such problems arise when I provide them with calculators.
The presumption that teachers are reticent to use technology, preferring to stick to a board and dry-erase markers, or even chalk, because this enables them to somehow remain as the sage-on-stage, is utterly ludicrous. Several of us love computers, ANGEL, Data Warehouse, interactive board technology, clickers, iPads, and any other technology-driven strategies that not only engage the students but streamline the teaching and learning processes. As a science teacher, I find the use of lab probeware for the acquisition and analysis of data to be invaluable. My students find the interfaces intuitive, and I find that, once I have taught my students the mathematics behind graphs and statistics, the amount of time that is saved by having these processes automated is infinitely better spent teaching them more content.
Monday, November 7, 2011
To be or not to be?
When it comes to existential angst, that is the ultimate question, isn't it? Continue drifting aimlessly or end the pretense? At this point, I'm not particularly bothered by what dreams may come, because I think that, with apologies to both Shakespeare and Raymond Chandler, the end is not really a big sleep but more like sweet oblivion. That notion goes against everything I've been taught and believed until now. Is this what it's like to lose one's sanity / lucidity / faith / whatever? Discuss.
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