Colleen’s Blog

I just don’t know where I stand on integrating technology in the classroom. Just this week, I read an article (”Extending the Conversation: New Technologies, New Literacies, and English Education”) that says that, “Young people today live media-saturated lives, spending an average of nearly 6 1/2 hours a day with media,” (Swenson, et al., 360). I found myself shocked by this statistic. Six and a half hours is a lot of time to spend each day involved in media! I didn’t know what to do with this statistic. On one hand, I believe that teachers should meet their students where they are and try to incorporate familiar mediums into the classroom. On the other hand, I find it hard to justify adding more technology to a day that is already packed full of media.

Sometimes I think that as educators we feel like we need to add technology into our classrooms because we assume that it is the right thing to do, and we think little about whether or how the technology integration really adds value to the classroom. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for being progressive in the classroom. I just feel like we should think through these decisions to make sure that if and when we incorporate technology into our lessons that it is done so with the students’ best interest in mind.

Last week I started my first week of student teaching. I am in a 6th grade Language Arts classes and I have already come to realize that the classroom is much different that I expected it to be. Right off the bat, I noticed that classroom management is the number one issue that my mentor teacher deals with every day. Given the opportunity to to so, 6th graders will talk and act up and go crazy every day.

Later in the week, I was reading about a first year teacher who was trying to be funny and well-loved by his students and all the while having a very difficult time with classroom management. I suppose that one of my greatest fears when it comes to teaching is that I will worry so much about being well-loved among students that I won’t have control over my class. Janet Alsup and Jonathan Bush talk about this tension in their book “But Will It Work with Real Students?” They recommend finding a “happy medium between the natural tendency to want to run a ‘fun’ and a need to create a means where mutual respect becomes natural,” (146). They also suggest having an opening activity and having a set of rules and standards developed by the students that will keep students accountable in an academic atmosphere. I can see myself using both of these exercises in my own classroom next year, but I am looking for more suggestions to use. Any suggestions?

Dare I even pose the question? Although, something I read in Deborah Appleman’s book “Critical Encounters” made me think about this very question. She said:

“…some have been left to wonder whether the subject of English as we have known it is dead and shouldn’t rename our enterprise something like cultural studies.”

So, this quote got me thinking: what is it that I want my students to accomplish? It is a love for great literature or is it the ability to think critically? I am not saying that those two objectives are mutually exclusive, but this quote got me thinking about how I fee about incorporating other cultural mediums into the classroom. Is what we teach our students as important as how we teach them? Does it matter if my kids are reading William Shakespeare or Dr. Suess as long as they are thinking critically about the material?

I believe that the skills that we teach our students are far more important than the texts they read, but I fear that there are scholars out there who question if English is dead. I know that we live in the generation of the reality t.v. show and the text message, but isn’t there a way to still make literature relevant to our cultural studies?! Has anyone else encountered this dilemma before?

This week I have been thinking a lot about how different the high school classroom has become from that which it was 10 years ago when I first entered it. This generation of high school students has always been exposed to the Internet and computers, and as a result of this, our high school classrooms need to reflect the technological world that we live in.

This February I went to a teacher’s conference for the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. One of the sessions that I attended talked about this very situation, and talked about incorporating blogs into the classroom in order to provide what the speaker referred to as a collaborative community. I love this picture of students sharing their thoughts about a particular book, play, or a discussion in class on a class website. Classroom blogging allows students to practice forming opinions and articulating them in front of their peers. I think that this set up is especially helpful for students who are a little more apprehensive about speaking up in class.

One thing that I question about blogging as a class is grading my students. I would want my students to feel write whatever they would like on the blog, but I want their contributions to still be well thought out and valuable. Any ideas on grading classroom blogging?

One thing that I have been thinking a lot about is the conflict between treating classic literature as an artifact versus treating it as relevant material to understanding life.

I guess that I am having a hard time understanding why the two terms need to be mutually exclusive.  Certainly, there is a reason why these pieces of literature are so widely known, taught, and evaluated.  Certainly there is something within their volumes that says something a profound and meaningful way or no one would have ever heard about these books hundreds of years after they were written.  Why can’t something that was profound or controversial 200 years ago still be so?  Aren’t there relevant lessons to be learned in all great pieces of writing?

It is interesting that I was readin Appleman’s theories on this tension between the two ways of looking at literature this week.  A couple of days ago I was listening to a radio show that talked about a book that has just been written that talks about the importance of reading classic literature and releating to different stages of life.  The book, called The Things That Matter looks at seven pieces of classic British literature written fromthe 19th century and talks about valuable and practical lesson that can still be learned from classics today.  Has anyone read this book or heard about it?

Welcome to my blog!  This fall, I am working on my Masters in English Education and jumping into the world of teaching.  On this blog you will be able to find interesting quotes, concepts, and links that I learn along the way.  I have never blogged before, but I am excite to hear from you, my readers, along the way.  I believe that blogs are an exciting way to establish an online community where differnt opinions can be used to inspire.  My hope is that this blog will encourage you to try think outside of the box and try new techniques within the classroom.