Teach42

If you live in Chicago, you’re going to love this one. Adrian Holovaty has taken Google maps and figured out a way to lay the CTA (that’s Chicago Transit Authority to you tourists) over it! The CTA map isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty darn impressive. Find your location, click on CTA Map and voila, you can see where the closest bus stops and train stops are!

I know, I know, I keep going on and on about maps and traffic and satellites, but I think this stuff is cool as all heck. Maybe I should become a geography teacher.

Back in 1986, my father brought home our first computer. He’d probably say it was his first computer, but he’s wrong. He bought it for himself but by letting me play around with it he launched a hobby/passion of mine that has temporarily turned into a career. For those of you that are dying of curiosity, it was a Kaypro II. He also brought home a printer. To be honest, it was more like a typewriter than what we call printers today, but it certainly did the job.

I typed up my first paper on it and haven’t looked back once. I haven’t voluntarily hand written a paper ever since. I remember that it was a short story about a Neanderthal creating a cave drawing. I was proud of that story. I must have done a decent job because somebody once told me that my teacher hung on to that story and for years she used it as an example for how to do the assignment right. Yeah, I was very proud of that story. Nearly every assignment I’ve done since then was created and stored digitally.

Back then, those papers were stored on 5.25″ floppy disks. A few years later, I took all of those and moved them to 3.5″ floppies. Initially I was using Wordstar as my word processor, but soon I moved to Ami Pro. I remember how advanced that seemed at the time. As I moved from computer to computer, from CPM to DOS to Windows, I kept copying those disks. I figured, disks don’t take up much space, why get rid of all that work that I pored into those assignments? Eventually, they got put onto Zip disks, and then Sparq disks and then CDR’s.

I still have all those files. I have creative stories I wrote in middle school, poems I wrote in high school, essays I wrote in college, lessons from my student teaching, research papers I wrote while getting my masters degree, and every lesson plan and newsletter I have created. Not all of it is organized, and there’s more than a few files that I can’t even open anymore (anyone know how to open up WordPro documents?), but the fact is that I have it all. A few things have gotten lost throughout the decades, most notably that caveman story from sixth grade, but I have nearly every piece of work I’ve written since the late 80′s.

It’s really amazing to be able to journey back through my educational career and visit all the different sites along the way. There’s some work in there that I’m really proud of, that I spent a good chunk of my life creating. It seems ridiculous to just let it slip away when there’s really no need to get rid of it.

So why this trip down memory lane? Will has a great post about
how we should be sharing the work our students do.

…up until now, we haven’t had the means or the technologies to archive our students learning in meaningful ways for them to reflect upon and for others to learn from.

But now we do.

This is the big shift that the system is going to have to come to terms with. We have to stop seeing our kids as consumers and start supporting them as creators that can all contribute meaningfully to our collective body of knowledge. And we have to give every kid access to the tools to do so. I know there are many things that we have to make sure they know, and many literacies that we have to help them master. But any more, not to find 18 or 10 or even 5 quality things that each of our students creates in the course of a school year and not share them with the world does us all a disservice.

The paper I wrote about ancient Egypt in 8th grade may not have contained any new revelations, but perhaps it could have inspired other 8th graders, or even another 8th grade teacher. In college, I wrote some pretty profound things about My Name is Asher Lev, and even though I failed that paper (yes, I’m still bitter), other students might be able to learn a thing or two from it. I would love to be able to archive my entire body of work, from Kindergarten through this very morning, in one aniline portfolio. That way it could easily be sorted, categorized, summarized, highlighted, and displayed proudly for people to see. Imagine a third grade student being able to read his own teachers work from when she was in third grade.

It reminds me of something else Will posted about quite a while ago, the idea of a Lifetime Personal Webspace. Someplace where from birth through death, you could store your work, your ideas, your successes and your failures. A journal, portfolio, a trophy case and a soapbox all rolled up into one. A place to put videos of your school play, recordings of your own garage band, and everything you’ve ever written.

It almost seems like a crime that there are middle school students who don’t have copies of the work they created a few years ago. Especially considering it would almost certainly all fit on one DVD with room to spare.

How far back does your own personal archive go?

I love to write. I may not be the greatest or most eloquent writer in the world, but I always enjoy the act of writing. It’s one of many reasons that I personally enjoy blogging. I used to write poetry and songs, and way back when I even began a novel. I wrote a few chapters and then hung it up. When I’m writing for the blog, the words just flow. It really isn’t an effort because I’m just writing what’s on my mind.

Right now I’m really struggling though. I’m looking for a new job. I’ve decided that the Assistant Principal thing probably isn’t going to work out this year, and I’m alright with that. I’d be absolutely thrilled to go back to the classroom for a year or two. I can’t even put into words just how much I’ve missed the classroom over the last few years. I’m looking for teaching jobs and sending out resumes now. There are several openings and a few of them in particular look like great places to continue my career. However, about an hour ago I noticed a job that almost seems like destiny for me.

I grew up in Glencoe, Illinois. I lived in the same house my entire childhood. When it was time for me to do my student teaching, my old elementary school was the first place I sent an application to. They accepted me and I wound up student teaching in the same room I attended kindergarten in. It was a fantastic experience. One of my old teachers still worked there and even had pictures of me from when I was a student of hers. It felt home.

Fast forward a few years. I’ve taught Junior Kindergarten for four years and served as Director of Technology for three years. I’m ready to return to the classroom now. Unbelievably, that same school is looking for a kindergarten teacher. My school. I can’t imagine a more perfect situation than to return home again and teach in those same classrooms where I learned to love learning.

It’s a very desirable district, so I know that there will be a large number of applicants. It’s incredibly important to me that I represent myself well in the application. There are only two short answer questions involved, the same ones that most schools require. After re-reading the answers that I’ve been supplying to other schools, I decided to start them over from scratch.

They’re easy questions. “Describe the skills or attributes you believe are necessary to be an outstanding teacher” and ” How would you address a wide range of skills in your classroom?” Nothing too complicated, very straightforward. It should be a simple matter to answer them and considering how much I love writing, the words should just flow forth from my brain, through my fingers, to the keyboard and onto the screen.

As you might guess, I’m finding that it isn’t quite so easy. I want my answers to these questions to be perfect. They have to represent just how much I love teaching. I need them to reflect my total dedication to education, both inside and outside the school building. Somehow I have to put into words the fact that my life has revolved around working with kindergarten age children since I was a teenager and I spent 10 consecutive years working as a camp counselor. They have to reflect my passion for learning and my desire to work in a district that I can grow through, as a teacher, a principal and perhaps even as a superintendent one day.

I know I’m a good teacher. In fact, I know I’m a fantastic teacher. I could never believe that they paid me to do what I did in the classroom. It was never work. It was a pleasure, an honor, a privilege to be able to educate those students. I didn’t need my department head, co-teachers or my class’s parents to tell me what a wonderful teacher I was. I knew it because I loved it. It should be a simple matter to express something so obvious through the written word.

And yet I find myself unable to put more than two sentences together without deleting them. The words don’t sound genuine. They sound artificial and trite. They sound like they were written by a person desperately trying to convince someone that they’re a great teacher. I keep thinking to myself that this should be the easiest thing in the world. All I have to do is write down my thoughts and be honest. It needs to sound professional though. It also needs to have perfect grammar. It can’t sound childish, and has to hit all the major points. It has to be in line with the school’s mission and vision. Above all, it has to be good enough to get me an interview. Do I write what I really believe or do I write what I think would sound good to someone reviewing applications?

The result is that instead of writing responses to those incredibly simple topics, I’m blogging about my difficulties doing so. If only I could write, “Look at my blog, listen to my podcast. Then you’ll understand the type of educator that I am.” Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way. It’s ironic, how much more difficult it is to write for an audience of a few people, than an audience of hundreds.