June 22, 2006

• Topic: New York City Teaching Fellows, week #1

  OK…i’m back to write. And for a few reasons. One is, life has been wild and exciting this past week, second is that I began talking to people about the book again, third is I’ve had week full of education, which happens to be about education, fourth, I just had an interesting conversation with the principal of an alternative public school in nyc, and fifth, if I end up some of my classmates and colleagues here, I want to clean things up and get back to relevant postings, and i guess just cross my fingers that there’s nothing in this blog that will burn me in some way, but I don’t expect that to be the case.

  So, let me catch up on things. I’ve begun my masters in elementary special education at Brooklyn College. My first course is a crash course in educational psychology, only 7 days, from 9am to 4:30pm! After, from 4:30-6:30, we have teaching fellow advisory sessions, where we discuss things like what to expect as a first year teacher, how to structure our lessons, how to manage our classes, etc.

  My days have been crazy packed, and it’s been wonderful. Like waking up to go hiking all day, it’s long, exhausting, but fulfilling. I’ve actually been waking up at 5am to run, and then using my time on the train to keep up with reading. Much of the summer will involve long days like these, but with Friday off, I already feel anxious having free time, I’ve grown used to the adrenaline of filling my every moment and racing against the clock to fill my seconds before I turn in for the night.

  My class has been wonderful. The people I mean. 30 of them, from around the country, 6 guys, 6 African Americans, a Jamaican, people taking 50% paycuts, recent grads, mothers with grown children. It’s quite a mix, far different from an undergrad experience. Going through the intense days has already created a bond amongst classmates which has been great, and as I move into Park Slope, Brooklyn next weekend, I will have many colleagues in the neighborhood.

  So, that’s all been good. Learning some basic theories of psych development, Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget, who talk discuss how all learning is built upon prior expeiences, and are in the category of constructivist psychologists. Although much of it seems common sense, I’m enjoying the exposure to psych as I have no formal background in it. It has been helpful to think, however, about the varying levels of cognition/ability we will find in our students, and some of this basic theory will help me in the classroom as I work to identify the different levels my students are at, and try to vary my instruction to help each one.

  During lunch today, another student who recently graduated from Cornell, began discussing how he hated many students in his school because they were so grade obsessed. This made a nice segway for my views on education, and as I had hoped, I soon had several classmates in conversation about our overlapping views on what’s wrong w/ our culture of education. Notably, my friend from Cornell mentioned how he had visited China, and got a sense there of students who were extremely motivated and excited to be in school, a far cry from our culture of complaining. It got me excited to recognize that for at least the next two years, I’m going to be working with people whose first line of conversation is often going to revolve around education.

  Tonight, I spoke to the principal of a public school in the Bronx that is part of the Big Picture Company, a school whose model is to have students learn through internships. The conversation helped me come to a realization that might seem obvious to many, but as someone who has felt strongly about what education “should” be, it was important to discover. That discovery is that there is no ideal school, except for the school that works for the individual student and teacher. Philosophicaly, the internship based school makes sense in 100 ways, but a lot of my love for this type of school was based on philosophy, and ignored reality. In my eyes, it wasn’t an internship school, but that it was a “school that didn’t force kids to take classes they didn’t want to take,” that I saw.

  The principal said to me, “I’ve taught for 20 years, and have probably changed my educational philosophy about 8 times. I’ve seen great schools on the left, and great schools on the right…”

  That comment hit me on many levels, both for education and society. A hippy, democratic, happy school can be both liberating and wonderful, and also an unorganized confusing mess, just as a rigid teacher slapping kids with a ruler type school can create obedient and extremely bright young people as well as scarred ones.

  As it comes my turn to “teach,” I will be teaching with my personality as much as anything. My style will be traditional, as my job demands that I prepare students to meet certain academic standards, but what I say and how I say it are all to my own, and that I’m excited about.

  I know I’ll have many more postings to come, as I genuinely sense I have fallen into something that I can grow in.

  -dan

  • 10:50 pm
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