The Male Teacher

This is a fairly new blog for male teachers. They discuss issues that might not be normally discussed in a normal education blog. In one blog entry they discuss respect in the classroom. Apparently here is a misguided notion that being a male teacher in a younger classroom will automatically give you respect. This blog post wants to dispel that notion, and offer advice how to receive that respect. A lot of the advice I agree with. One piece of advice I find especially important, and that is to be honest. Many teachers think since they are in the position of authority that they can lie to their students. I do not think that is appropriate. Many times, students are smarter than teachers give them credit for and they can see through some transparent lies. This is especially true when they ask a question that you do not know the answer to. I think it is very important to say "I don't know" rather than making something up. Often times a made up answer will be remembered and they will carry that false info for a long time.

Gaining students' respect

@TheJLV 2

This blog post is about the twitter user @TheJLV. I posted about him a couple of times, but today was an interesting day to follow him, mostly because of what happened last night in Ferguson. He has not been shy to speak his opinions on race in America before, so today was a good vessel to get his message across. However, one interesting topic came up in that how do you talk to your students about what is happening. Unfortunately, to me anyway, many teachers will shy away from the topic. @TheJLV was direct with his students and gave them a place to vent and discuss. I think this is important for the students. A lot of their time they are in their own echo chamber, if they get to hear other points of view it can be good for getting a better understanding of a topic. This will be how I handle my classroom if ever an important event happens like it did yesterday.

If this keeps happening...

My blog post for this week comes from the blog of one of the people I follow on Twitter Jose Vilson. He posts a response to critics of the article he was featured in about what makes a great teacher. He explains that he foolishly looked into the comments section of his article and found many people complaining. Mostly these people were complaining about teaching being a thankless job and they complain that the teachers being interviewed often leave the profession and become advocates or administrators. He is right that he made a mistake looking into the comment section of the article. 99% of the time the comments section will be full of people who want to complain, rarely do people comment to say anything good. However, I don't agree with the main idea of his article. That is, he is lumping all these people as having one hivemind. The complaints given by these commentors make sense alone, but not when they are lumped together, which is what he has done. I can understand his instruction, he should avoid the malcontents next time.

If this keeps happening...

Dan Brown

This post is about the newest twitterer I am following, Dan Brown. He is the Executive Director of Future Educators Association, an organization for high school students who plan to become teachers. Mr. Brown is a certified teacher as well. He often tweets about standardized testing and new technologies to use in the classroom. On the 15th he retweeted an interesting article from the Washington Post by Valerie Sheets titled "Teacher to parents: About THAT kid (the one who hits, disrupts and influences YOUR kid)" It is written by a teacher to parents about a disrupting student. The article is about how the teacher can not tell parents what is wrong with another disruptive child that isn't their own, but that she is doing her best. This article is heartbreaking. It is a window into the life of a teacher dealing with a child that might have a rough background. I can see why Mr. Brown retweeted it. It is useful to not only teachers but also parents who might worry a disruptive child might be getting in the way of their child's education. I agree with everything she writes and highly recommend reading the article.

What I Wish I'd Known as a Teacher

This is a blog post from Edutopia from contributor Elena Aguilar. This is an extremely insightful article about Mrs. Aguilar's first year of teaching and what she wished she knew. This is not the first article I have read that explains how extremely stressful the first year of teaching is or can be. Because this seems to be common knowledge, I try to seek out as much information as possible to prepare myself for that year. At the very least, if I do get extremely stressed out that year, I will know it is normal. This article doesn't give any concrete strategies or classroom management ideas, it is just an article about managing stress. She makes sure that you know that if what you do comes from the heart that you can rarely be wrong. One thing she mentions that I find a very important piece of advice is to find a mentor. This will be the first thing I try to do when I get into a classroom. I can see the value of someone with an unbiased view telling you what you should do or not do. She says finding a mentor is so important that if one is not available to you, you should change schools. I agree with her that finding one is that important.

What I Wish I knew...

@TheJLV

This post is about the Twitter user Jose Vilson. He is a teacher from New York that posts about education and social inequality. He often posts about the inequality of "bad" schools and "good" schools. He emphasizes that this divide in quality of schools comes down to funding. He offers some solutions to problem such as fundraising, but recognizes that the solution will probably come from a higher source. What Mr. Vilson posts about is an area I have a lot of passion about. The fact that income inequality gets worse every year is maybe the most difficult problem America faces. Mr. Vilson also recently was featured on a NPR article about what makes a great teacher. NPR Article This article is great for aspiring teachers preparing to go into education. I learned a lot about what to expect and what to emulate when I get my first classroom.

Twitter post

I am following a Twitter-er-er-er named Lyn Hilt (@lynhilt). She is a former K-6 principal who now works as an instructional technology integrator for her district. She has over 16k followers on Twitter and she posts fairly regularly. As her job title suggests, she posts often about technology and its uses in the classroom, but she also branches out and talks about general education as well. Many of her posts involve retweeting various articles relating to education.

One cause that she has retweeted and is now supporting is #internet4schools. This is a movement about getting better internet access to our schools. They make the case that schools have the same internet access as a everyday home. If 200+ people tried to connect to your wifi all at once there would be problems, which is the case in many schools. I know from experience observing in Atlantic City when they take out the chromebooks, that the internet goes incredibly slow for the students. This causes frustration, and they do not get as excited to use the chromebooks because of it. In a few weeks the FCC will be voting on whether to expand broadband services to all schools.  So this hashtag trend is trying to force the FCC's hand and vote yes on the issue.

Connected Learning

I agree with the author that there has been an overreaction to the negative effects of social media. I agree that there is value in face-to-face interaction, but I don't think it is going away. I am in my mid-20's and rarely use social media (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr) for communicating to my friends. I still do the majority of communicating face-to-face or through texting. Now I know this may be anecdotal evidence, but I would not be surprised if that's how it was for the majority of the populating that is my age.  I agree with their sentiment that social media does not take away from talking face-to-face, but instead takes away from alone time.

I enjoyed this article because it does not look down on change. It takes a step back and realizes just because the way people use information is changing, it doesn't mean that it is for the worse. I especially liked the part about how the way people read has changed. The author points out that scanning passages may have overtaken close reading as the preferred way to read. Now normally that idea would be painted in a negative light, but here the author just says what is happening. Because there is so much more information out there, and it is all readily accessible the way people consume information had to adapt. From a video in class we heard that all of human knowledge is rapidly multiplying. It shouldn't be looked down upon to try and skim information to find the relevant bits that interest you.

The change in how people consume information should be noticed and used by teachers. It is important to know that their students take in information much differently than they did at that age. Teachers need to be adaptable to this changing landscape and try to turn it in their favor.