Virginity

I felt like today was the initiation rites into a large cult of education that may or may not be practiced in the real world. We have a week-long seminar in Responsive Classroom, which is a pretty package that is a lot of UbD, kitchy games to build community in a middle school, and some very odd "forms".

At first I was overwhelmed at all the new things to learn, and not a tiny bit resentful that I had been having my brains stuffed with differentiation and goal-setting and most of all reflective teaching for 2 years now, only to be handed a very thick book and a week of new learning and be told that everything I've learned until now is outdated.

But then, after talking to the other teachers, I saw that they were resentful for all the new "teacher language" and the things that they hadn't been able to pull off or take seriously last year, and was told that I was really ahead, since making lessons interesting and relevant is all we've talked about in ages, and most of the teachers are just learning now how to do that. They've replaced all the talk about differentiated process and product with talking about giving students options and letting them self-differentiate, Ubd lesson plans with "planning, work and reflection" charts, and, in the most radical change of all, gone from the stat of 40% of students being auditory, 40% visual, and 20% kinesthetic, to "most" students visual, "many" students kinesthetic, and "few" students auditory, thus making my own personal style of learning rare and mostly obsolete (focusing on written and modeled instructions and not speaking them at all to not add to the too-many words that teachers already say each day). I guess I don't mind. Learning new things every day is healthy, having my mind and world turned upside down will keep me humble about my new-teacher status, and having too many terms for the same ideas seems to be an important step in becoming self-authoring.

I'm going to be like Rashi and not give my mission statement for this blog until at least chapter 3 verse 8, even though responsive classroom says to "get skin in the game" the first day and make goals in the first ten minutes, but the most important thing I learned today is that teaching is supposed to keep you on your toes, never quite sliding into comfortable. Speaking of which, my favorite new form so far is having a "Take A Break" chair, where students (and occasionally the teacher) can go to regain self-control, while still sort of remaining part of the class. (It's a comfy place off to the side but still facing the class, where students can sit for 2 minutes, by teacher's or their own request, not talking, when they feel out of control.)

And the real last thing is that I wish Pardes would teach this, just like Delet, so I would not be swimming in a theory that they actually would have really liked us to have.

In other news, I have a classroom, all mine for just my classes, and I want to try out my crazy desk arrangement, provided my promised new trapezoidal tables show up sometime before the students do (2 weeks from today). I'll post pics of my bulletin boards once they're up, of course :-).

I think that's all for today, going to take the first of my regularly-scheduled before dinner naps now, but I'll write again tomorrow, of course.