The Relevant Classroom
Mamacita says: How updated and relevant do you want your doctor’s skills to be? Would you be content with a dentist who graduated in 1985 and hasn’t updated a single skill since then? Could you trust your children to a pediatrician who used mercury-filled thermometers and leeches? Hey, those methods worked in the past. Good enough then. Etc.
Just as the best medical professionals continually update their skills and knowledge, so must our educators. One thing that helps educators keep current is. . . . . . . . .. .
Technology. Specifically, the social networking sites. Yes, in school. Yes, for education. Social networking is a hands-on approach to learning, and if our students can put their hands on something, they’re likely to remember it. It works for science, and it will work for everything else, too.
Using a Twitterwall in my classroom has made an amazing difference. When we discuss a reading, for example, I hashtag it and project the conversation on the wall. Anyone following our hashtag can follow our conversation, and participate. Students sitting in the back of the room who would never in a million years contribute or participate, will join a Twitterwall conversation; with the wall, they can maintain their shyness or privacy and yet still speak out, without drawing attention to themselves. Students at home can still participate, as can their parents. Administration can participate. Authors can participate. Scientists can participate. Astronauts. Farmers. Lawyers. 
Grandparents. A savvy educator can Skype lectures, and combine classes with an educator in China, real-time. To see people who aren’t even members of the class participate in a lesson can turn a lesson from ordinary to awesome. And that’s just one aspect of social networking in education!
Tech will not make a mediocre teacher better – nothing will. Mediocrity is a personal choice, and today’s standardization obsession is a blessing only to the mediocre or worse. But a good teacher can become great if he/she understands that we must keep ourselves updated, relevant, and as cutting edge as possible if we are to keep our students motivated, engaged, and interested.
A doctor who chooses to maintain the status quo and not keep updated is dangerous. A teacher who chooses to maintain the status quo and not keep updated is equally dangerous. One can kill the body, and one can kill the spirit.
Sweet old Miz Jones, who hasn’t updated her skills since she graduated years ago, and who loves each kid as if it were her very own, isn’t always the best teacher. Mean ol’ Miz Jones, who expects and requires each kid to do his/her best, behave properly, and utilizes any and every means possible to engage her students, might not be, either, but at least she’s trying harder. A great teacher can accomplish great things with a stick and a patch of dirt, but this same teacher can accomplish even greater things if he/she is connected.
Perhaps it also depends on the context of the classroom, too – the age of the students, etc. I was never comfortable with a sweet, motherly teacher even as a small child; I wanted someone who challenged me and exposed me to the wonders of the universe and then stepped back, left me alone, and let me explore. Then again, I was an avid reader, and that makes a world of difference.
All of education is about connections, and the social networking sites are (as of today) the ultimate connectors. Not to utilize them is to deny yourself and your students an awesome opportunity to connect the dots from one topic to another with amazing rapidity. In the old days it took a village to raise a child; in our time, the village has become a universe, and the child raised by the universe has far more advantages than a child raised by a lowly village.
Yes, there are good teachers who don’t use tech, but think how much better they might become if they would open their eyes and use the technology their students are already using.
Oh, educators, let’s all try our best to help our students understand that the electronics they use to connect themselves with others socially are also excellent means to connect themselves with learning opportunities. To do this, we as educators must learn to use these means ourselves.
Not to move forward is to move backwards. Or to stand still, which is much the same thing.
And we’ve all had Mr. Ditto, at least once in our school years:
Odors, Aromas, Fragrances, Stinks, and Stenches
Mamacita: I am really sensitive to odors. From pleasant aromas to soul-destroying stenches. . . I just can’t deal with strong odors. I’m a mom, so I do, but I don’t like it. However, I also deal with lots of people every day – classrooms full of students of all ages and from all kinds of backgrounds, and sensitivity to strong odors is something I have had to suppress for many years. How many? Ooh, look over there!
Okay, I’ll get to the point. Farts.
I am not a fan of the public fart. And by “public,” I mean doing it when others are present. An awful lot of people seem to think farts are hilarious and that the resulting stenches are laughable. I don’t, and I can’t.
I wish it were socially acceptable to wear one of these on my nose, especially on really hot days.
I don’t mind a light fragrance. I love flowers in the house. I wear a light cologne, myself.
But getting into the elevator with women who are wearing the entire stock of Dollar Tree cologne all at once is killing me. Equally stinky are the people wearing too many spritzes of Chanel Grant Extrait. It doesn’t matter how much you paid for your artificial scent – you stink.
Cheap or expensive: Equally stinky.
Even worse? People who spray themselves with scent to cover up the sad fact that they haven’t showered for a while. The combination of cheap strong cologne and dirty, sweaty bodies is a killer for me.
When you add the distinctive stench of the nicotine-addicted body to this equation, we have a time bomb, because guess what – the professor is close to jumping out of the window to get away from the smell.
However, that is a problem that isn’t on my top ten list, so I just breathe shallowly, grin, and bear it.
Whenever a lot of people are in a room, there will be odors. It’s really the way people are dealing with the odors that is the difference between class and classless.
But I digress. The topic is farts. Stinky, smelly farts. And people who think it’s okay, and even funny, to smell up a room with other people in it. Adults, even, who lift a leg and let it rip and laugh and expect others to laugh, too, and who mock anyone who doesn’t like it.
Inside my head every time someone farts where I am located.
Let me illustrate.
Differences between middle school students and college students, part 8,999:
One of my classrooms this semester has several chairs that make farty noises whenever someone shifts in the seat. The teacher’s chair is loudest of all. When I get up or sit down, the chair sounds like a drunk in a state park port-a-potty. When the students are writing, the room is silent except for the sounds of shuffling papers, scratching pencils or pens, and keyboard clicks.
And the occasional little ‘farty’ sounds when someone moves even the slightest little bit.
Fart sounds in the classroom, and not one student turns a hair about it. Imagine the reaction if my middle school students heard a farty sound, even one mild farty sound. Yeah, that. But at the college level? Meh.
I’m sure they do their fair share of belching and farting and otherwise gassing up the universe, but they don’t do it in the classroom, where others are also present. They don’t do these things in the presence of others. I compare the classroom to the workplace, where it is also not cool to let your body produce anything that negatively affects anyone else, however hilarious you might think it is. You leave and do it elsewhere, in an appropriate environment.
Coughcoughcoughrestroomcoughcough.
Here is where we do the stinky things our bodies need to do.
My college students understand this concept that seems to be so very difficult for others to comprehend.
I love my job.
But people who love to fart in public and expect everybody in the room to laugh? Not so much. Go ahead. Laugh. My family does.
My college students? In the classroom, at least, they gots class.
“It’s The Equinoctial Storm,” said Ma.
Mamacita says: This year, there was no equinoctial storm. In fact, this year, we haven’t had enough rain for quite a while, but last year at this time, the rains poured down as though they would never stop.
Whenever we have a lot of rain in the fall, the words “equinoctial storm” cross my mind, and I think about Caroline Ingalls – she was Laura’s Ma, you know – because the rains came down hard and steady. Torrential rain. No thunder or lightning, just rain, but still. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, Chapter 3, page 27 (hardbound), she tells us that
For three days and nights the rain fell steadily, slow, weepy rain, running down the windowpanes and pattering on the roof.
“Well, we must expect it,” Ma said. “It’s the equinoctial storm.”
“Yes,” Pa agreed, but uneasily. “There’s a weather change, all right. A fellow can feel it in his bones.”
Now, an equinoctial storm is a storm of violent winds and rain, occurring at or near the time of an equinox, either spring or fall. The 2016 Fall Equinox was on September 22, but, you know, close enough.
Laura’s storm occurred just before the Long Winter blizzards began, and if you remember (and of course you do!) that those blizzards that began in October didn’t let up until May, you’ll understand why severe autumnal storms of pretty much any kind really creep me out.
The forecast for the coming winter is harsh, according to all the woodland creatures and persimmon seeds, and those things know.
Persimmons. In Indiana, they’re everywhere.
I love the chapter, still in The Long Winter, where Pa explains to Laura about the wild things knowing what kind of weather is coming, and why humans don’t have the same instincts about such things as animals do. It’s in Chapter One, if you’re curious, and on pages. 12 and 13 if you want to turn right to it.
Here in southern Indiana, we like to predict our winters with persimmon seeds. Cut the seed of a ripe persimmon in half and look at the image on the inside: If the image is spoon-shaped, expect a lot of heavy snow; if the image inside the seed is fork-shaped, expect a mild winter; if the image is knife-shaped, expect icy, cutting winds.
So far, most reports have been spoons.
Uh oh . . I’m pretty sure that’s a spoon.
Persimmons are good for pudding, too. If you’ve never had persimmon pudding, you’re missing out big time.
But I digress, which is something I’m very good at.
I’m expecting a cold, snowy winter. Or, as I prefer to think of it, a white Christmas. read more…
