Dog Latin

An important concept I picked up from reading what Alsup and Bush have to say about technology in the classroom is that we must always be critical of our using technology and ensure there is a reason for it.  It is certainly something different and new for students to work with, but then again so is free or creative writing or other activities that could actually get students to make connections with the text over looking at something flashy and new that I whipped up on a computer.  I have to keep in mind that if I am choosing to use technology in a lesson, I need to have thought critically about my reasons for doing so and cannot settle for the fact that it makes things fun.  Fun doesn’t equal learning, and learning should be the primary objective of every teacher who wants to use technology in the classroom.

Before my practicum experience began a week ago, I was quite content to read along in the professional books I’ve studied and read that good, solid, well-planned lessons are the best way to avoid classroom misbehavior. Having never faced a classroom full of adolescents, this seemed to make sense to me and that was all I really spent on the subject. Life, you could say, was spent in ignorant bliss.

Now, in my second week of practicum, I feel I am more intellectually and pedagogically challenged by classroom management than any other aspect of English Education that I’ve studied. This wouldn’t bother me so much if the credo I mentioned earlier held true, but it would appear that I am now paying in full what I had let my textbooks avoid for so long. My question, then, is, “Why didn’t anybody warn me about this?” My answer so far is muddy and generally confused, but I’ll roll with it in hopes that your responses will lead me somewhere more sound. From what I can gather, it is much easier and cleaner looking to avoid the issue of management when presenting pedagogical directives, particularly in the somewhat-removed-from-practice world of Graduate school, than to basically confront the one issue that stands to dismantle even the most pristine piece of theory. I’ve observed my mentor teacher give lessons that on paper looked to be sound but later crumbled at the hands of an angry adolescent. I don’t mean to sound so puritanical, but it truly seems as if the issue of classroom management is one that drives book writers and theorists to omit potential pitfalls in order to present a more academically credible argument. Even my textbook, “But will it work with REAL students?” Scenarios for Teaching Secondary English Language Arts by Alsup and Bush, skirts the issue. A book for teachers about making theory work that doesn’t at least spend 20 pages on classroom management is a troubling indicator that people don’t want to deal with it. And in the meantime, I feel stuck between what I’d love to see work and what I know will require some major classroom behavior improvement before I’d try it with a room full of 6th graders. Perhaps searching within writings on teaching is misguided, and I’m better off checking The Art of War out from the library, but it would be nice if book writers would give us another alternative and spend that extra time addressing how kids could slant their lesson plans or theories to create trouble.

After all, you can only wrangle so many 6th graders before a few slip through, and what becomes of them? Aren’t we toying with children’s futures by ignoring such a vital part of classroom life?

Marxism, and to a lesser extent Feminist theory, doesn’t fly too well with most people in the United States in my experience. Decades of cold war and government propaganda have made it difficult to separate Marxism the theory from Marxist or communist forms of political dictatorship. What results from this unstable cocktail of half-knowledge and staid political stance? Well, I can at least say that I’m just the slightest bit scared to mention Marx in the classroom when it doesn’t pertain to a historical or dead vision of Marxist thought. Even feminism, with its primary message of gender equality, goes against the grain of organizations such as Focus On the Family, or the Southern Baptist Convention, two groups who hold no small amount of sway in my Marietta, GA bible belt environment. Now I’m not one to back from a challenge or hold off on my beliefs, but as teachers we are held to the fact that we are teaching people’s children and that many of these people aren’t going to be too hot about their child coming home and proclaiming that Hamlet is a bourgeois mouthpiece. Call me crazy, but I’d be the slightest bit relieved to see something about the ethics and law behind teaching Marxism in these books on Marxist theory in the classroom. Before any discussion of Marxism begins in the classroom, don’t we need to come to terms with its implications and divorce it from its status in our culture as an enemy? More importantly, how do we even begin to do that?

The more I read Rex Gibson’s work about teaching Shakespeare, the more I reconsider the fear that my peers and I relate about teaching the Bard.  It seems that what Gibson relates is an interesting, vivid, and engaging way of approaching Shakespeare, one that is fundamentally different than the experiences I had with Bill S. in high school.  It got me thinking, could it be that our fear of teaching this great writer is connected to our memories of dull, lifeless Shakespeare instruction in our past?  Maybe what the Bard needs, now more than ever, is a new breed of teacher that makes the connections Gibson talks about and engages students with the Shakespeare of the past and the evolving Shakespeare of the future.  It could be that this appoach will replace our fear with something much better: excitement.

Before college, my idea of literary theory was about as fully realized as my idea of quantum theory. That is, I don’t think I ever did anything remotely close to literary theory analysis in my high school courses. This is troubling to me because I attribute a great deal of my motivation to become an English Language Arts student to my initial experiences in an American Lit: 1945-Present course that was based in using theory to analyze literature. The course was a tough one for me to get used to, but it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my college career. Using theory to explore texts gave them a relevance and vibrancy that I had never experienced, and it pains me to think that there are students in high schools right now that aren’t benefitting from the experience of actually interpreting a text and breaking down its meanings and themes. Using literary theory gives a modern context for any text being read because the theories used are still relevant and active within the intellectual sphere. Using literary theory in the high school English classroom can give students a taste of the larger world of literary analysis while still giving them something relevant that they can use to shape their own thoughts, theories, and visions of their world. Ever since that fateful American lit. class, I’ve used theory to make reading more interactive, and this is a lesson that I want to bring to my future students.

Hello. You have stumbled upon my very first educational blog. I am hoping that I can mold this blog into a place where, as a Master’s student of English Education, I can peg down certain ideas, methodologies, experiences, and theories into something that speaks to a greater purpose: my growth and development as a teacher and student of Language Arts. Throughout this blog, you should find that I enjoy affixing the critical gaze on just about everything, entertaining myself for hours with little more than an assigned writing prompt and a handful of strong opinions. This will certainly color my interpretations and musings in this blog, and you’ll probably find that it carries a strong connection to my love of literary theory and western philosophy. As a future educator, it is my job to keep learning about learning, and I expect this blog to continue to evolve and rotate about itself as I grow in my knowledge of English Education.