As we learned during the first few weeks of school, a symbol is simply any image that has added significance associated with it. In literature, two of the ways that we interpret and analyze literature are through the tracing of imagery and the interpretation of the symbolism attached to this imagery. Although we are never sure what the author intended to say (unless we are somehow able to bring the authors to our classroom and interview them about choices they made during the writing of their books), we are able to infer a great deal about their intended messages by exploring and analyzing the use of imagery and symbolism in their works. In fact, the intended message becomes quite unimportant once a piece of writing, art, music or theater hits the public realm; the most important factor then becomes the public's interpretation of this message.
If the intended message and the perceived message happen to differ, there is very little that the author or artist can do to bring the public back to his line of thinking. When art or literature is released to the public, it becomes public property in a very real sense. Think of a politician who delivers a controversial speech that is not well-received. She may have intended to wow a group of potential voters with her wit and intelligence, but the intended message got lost in the delivery. Instead of being impressed with her command of the election issues, the public now views her as elitist and out of touch with the common man. In the end, her intended message matters little; the only thing that matters in the wake of her speech is how the public has received the message.
The public display outside of the library in our school is a prime example where the message intended differs from the message delivered. The title of the display, "Homosexuals in the Holocaust," suggests that the creators of the exhibit intended to deliver some sort of message about the persecution of homosexuals in the Holocaust, but their misguided use of the Nazi swastika rendered their intended message moot. The swastika was originally a symbol in Hindu derived from the word for lucky, but its intimate association with the Nazi movement and the extermination of 11 million innocent victims (5,000 to 15,000 of whom were targeted homosexuals, according to website Non-jewish [sic] Victims of the Holocaust, http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/fivmil.htm), has rendered it a powerful symbol of hatred, fear and the incredible depths to which humanity can potentially sink. It is precisely for this reason that modern-day Germany has outlawed the display of this symbol in association with Nazism, and it is also for this reason that such a symbol has no place in our school, regardless of the intended message.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Excuses
So here it is, Sunday afternoon, and I am just now sitting down to write my blog. As you all know, the blogs are due on Friday, so I am late in submitting this post. I do not have a good excuse, and I am willing to take the late grade on this blog post- minus five points. As long as I don't make it a habit to post my blogs late, this will not make too much of a difference in my final grade for the term. If, however, this is the beginning of a new trend of getting my blogs in late or failing to do them at all, there might be a problem.
Late work is not acceptable. But have you ever sat down to think about why teachers give you due dates on assignments? The first reason is convenience for them. No, not convenience; necessity. If teachers started allowing each student to pass assignments in whenever it was convenient for the student, there would be complete chaos. An important part of a teacher's job is to use student performance on individual, "small stakes" tasks to gauge how much each student is learning and which areas the class might need a bit more instruction on. If the class is not completing all of the same assignments at the same time, the teacher is going to have an extremely difficult time deciding which concepts or lessons might need a bit more attention: the choice to review certain topics would be based completely on guesswork, not on trends of student achievement based on quiz or test performance. The teacher would invariably end up reviewing topics that most students in the class had already mastered, and would miss out on reviewing critical topics that the class was struggling with.
The second reason for imposing strict due dates for assignments has much more to do with the educational mission of schooling: when you are an adult working at a job and you are expected to complete a task by a certain date, your boss and supervisors will not be pleased if you have not completed the task on time. They will care very little about what the excuse is, even if the excuse is entirely legitimate. Their main thought will be, "so and so did not get the project completed on time, and this is not the first time that he or she has been late getting tasks completed." Since an important role of schooling is to prepare young people to be productive members of a democratic society, it is important that many of the rules commonly found in school are relevant to what is commonly found in the real world. Assignment deadlines are among the most important of these rules.
Your professional deadlines will not be arbitrarily chosen; they will usually correspond with other people's deadlines. Here are a couple of scenarios to illustrate this point. In the first scenario, you are expected to complete a PowerPoint presentation for a meeting that will be attended by everyone in the company, and if you are not able to get it done on time, the meeting will not be productive and everyone will feel that their time has been wasted. Your supervisors will have to make a host of choices at this point: run the meeting without a PowerPoint presentation (the information in the meeting will therefore not be presented in the most organized and visually appealing manner), ask somebody else who has more time than you do to complete the PowerPoint (making it necessary for that person to neglect other essential tasks that they were responsible for completing), or pushing the meeting back a day or two so that you can finish the PowerPoint (several people will not be able to attend the next meeting because they have already scheduled other obligations for that time slot). None of these choices are going to be attractive to your bosses, and they might be inclined to find a different person who will be able to get things done on time, and you will be out of a job.
Here's another scenario: you are expected to write an important product report in advance of a crucial decision by the bosses in the company to invest in (buy) a certain product. If your report is not finished or is not completed well, the decision makers of the company might make poor choices and invest in inferior products or technologies, the company might lose money, and the blame will be placed squarely on the person who failed to complete the product report on time. They will not care that you had a true emergency you had to deal with, which was the real reason why you were not able to complete the task. The only thing that they are likely to remember long after the missed deadline is that one person's inability to get a task completed on time cost them millions of dollars in wasted money. This would not bode well for your future job prospects within that company. You might have to find a new company to work for.
So here's the message: get used to completing assignments on time. Make sure that excuses are kept to a minimum, and realize that even the most legitimate of excuses do not excuse you from having to submit assignments. And finally, although firm deadlines often dictate that handing something in late is not worth handing it in at all (see the two scenarios spelled out above), if there is a choice between turning something in late for partial credit and not turning something in at all, it is always better to get partial credit. The caveat to that statement is that partial credit will not always be available.
So here is my excuse for submitting my blog in late: my dog ate my homework. No wait...My computer crashed...
Late work is not acceptable. But have you ever sat down to think about why teachers give you due dates on assignments? The first reason is convenience for them. No, not convenience; necessity. If teachers started allowing each student to pass assignments in whenever it was convenient for the student, there would be complete chaos. An important part of a teacher's job is to use student performance on individual, "small stakes" tasks to gauge how much each student is learning and which areas the class might need a bit more instruction on. If the class is not completing all of the same assignments at the same time, the teacher is going to have an extremely difficult time deciding which concepts or lessons might need a bit more attention: the choice to review certain topics would be based completely on guesswork, not on trends of student achievement based on quiz or test performance. The teacher would invariably end up reviewing topics that most students in the class had already mastered, and would miss out on reviewing critical topics that the class was struggling with.
The second reason for imposing strict due dates for assignments has much more to do with the educational mission of schooling: when you are an adult working at a job and you are expected to complete a task by a certain date, your boss and supervisors will not be pleased if you have not completed the task on time. They will care very little about what the excuse is, even if the excuse is entirely legitimate. Their main thought will be, "so and so did not get the project completed on time, and this is not the first time that he or she has been late getting tasks completed." Since an important role of schooling is to prepare young people to be productive members of a democratic society, it is important that many of the rules commonly found in school are relevant to what is commonly found in the real world. Assignment deadlines are among the most important of these rules.
Your professional deadlines will not be arbitrarily chosen; they will usually correspond with other people's deadlines. Here are a couple of scenarios to illustrate this point. In the first scenario, you are expected to complete a PowerPoint presentation for a meeting that will be attended by everyone in the company, and if you are not able to get it done on time, the meeting will not be productive and everyone will feel that their time has been wasted. Your supervisors will have to make a host of choices at this point: run the meeting without a PowerPoint presentation (the information in the meeting will therefore not be presented in the most organized and visually appealing manner), ask somebody else who has more time than you do to complete the PowerPoint (making it necessary for that person to neglect other essential tasks that they were responsible for completing), or pushing the meeting back a day or two so that you can finish the PowerPoint (several people will not be able to attend the next meeting because they have already scheduled other obligations for that time slot). None of these choices are going to be attractive to your bosses, and they might be inclined to find a different person who will be able to get things done on time, and you will be out of a job.
Here's another scenario: you are expected to write an important product report in advance of a crucial decision by the bosses in the company to invest in (buy) a certain product. If your report is not finished or is not completed well, the decision makers of the company might make poor choices and invest in inferior products or technologies, the company might lose money, and the blame will be placed squarely on the person who failed to complete the product report on time. They will not care that you had a true emergency you had to deal with, which was the real reason why you were not able to complete the task. The only thing that they are likely to remember long after the missed deadline is that one person's inability to get a task completed on time cost them millions of dollars in wasted money. This would not bode well for your future job prospects within that company. You might have to find a new company to work for.
So here's the message: get used to completing assignments on time. Make sure that excuses are kept to a minimum, and realize that even the most legitimate of excuses do not excuse you from having to submit assignments. And finally, although firm deadlines often dictate that handing something in late is not worth handing it in at all (see the two scenarios spelled out above), if there is a choice between turning something in late for partial credit and not turning something in at all, it is always better to get partial credit. The caveat to that statement is that partial credit will not always be available.
So here is my excuse for submitting my blog in late: my dog ate my homework. No wait...My computer crashed...
Friday, September 24, 2010
The Red Scare
Fear is a powerful motivator. Personal fears can lead individuals to do some unsavory things. Look at Bernie Madoff, the headgefund manager who misled people out of billions of dollars by running a Ponzi scheme. Sure, greed was the overlying motivation for this tragic criminal series of acts, which left thousands of individuals, not to mention institutions like Brandeis University, teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Madoff violated the trust of his clients in the worst possible way, doing so in a heartless, cowardly manner with no remorse or regard for the devastation that his scheme would cause. He willfully ruined lives, stuffing away billions of dollars in the process. Investigators still have very little idea where that money has been hidden. What Madoff did was arguably more destructive than murder; he should be sentenced to death.
But what would cause a person to lie and cheat innocent people out of their life savings to line his own pockets? I believe it was fear: a misguided and perverse fear by a sick man believing that he could never amass enough wealth to eliminate the fear that he might not have enough. He feared being poor in the way that an individual with severe anorexia fears being obese, even when they are teetering on the brink of starvation. He squirreled away money like an opiate addict who stores a cache of pills in the medicine cabinet that could last a non-addict an entire lifetime. He let his fear rule his judgment like a paranoid dictator who executes his entire staff based on the belief that his closest advisors are conspiring to poison his food in order to gain power. To say cite greed as the primary motivation for Madoff's actions is to grossly underestimate the power of fear as a prime motivator for human behavior. There have been many dispicable acts committed by human beings throughout history: human sacrifices by the Mayas and the Aztecs, the mass genocide of Native Americans by European settlers, the extermination of 11 million people during the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, the massacres in Rwanda, the genocide in Darfur, the institution of slavery...and the list goes on. Examine each of these and I have no doubt that you would find that fear is the prime motivation behind all of these dispicable acts.
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and the Red Scare of the 1950's are both examples of the evil that can emerge from fear gone rampant. The Witch Trials, which led to the execution of twenty innocent individuals, was a mockery of institutional justice; the sanctity of the judicial process cloaked the ugliest of human motivations like a cheap Halloween costume. The judges who presided over the Trials brought their own fears and personal feelings into the courtroom. Personal vendettas caused neighbors to baselessly accuse other neighbors of witchcraft. And when all was said and done, the judges had painted themselves into a corner: even after it became clear that the entire process was a mockery of justice, they were unwilling to stop the executions for fear that their historical legacies would be tainted if they admitted mistakenly condemning innocent people to death.
The Red Scare took place at the early height of the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union each feared nuclear annihilation by the other. There were rumors of covert communist spy rings convening in secret with members who masqueraded by day as regular Americans. A United States Senator, Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, led a public campaign to root out the secret communist spies that were assumed to be living in America. People were interviewed to testify about suspicious, "un-American" behaviors and attitudes exhibited by their friends, neighbors, family members and colleagues. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) search for anti-American sentiment amongst the arts and entertainment community, leading to a "Black List" of writers, actors and producers whose names were connected with Communism. A friend of Miller's was forced to testify before the HUAC and subsequently accuse several other people from the theater community of being communists. This modern-day witch hunt was the inspiration for Miller's writing The Crucible. Arthur Miller was later considered to be a person of interest by the HUAC, which ultimately revoked Miller's passport and prevented him from travelling to London to see the opening of The Crucible.
But what would cause a person to lie and cheat innocent people out of their life savings to line his own pockets? I believe it was fear: a misguided and perverse fear by a sick man believing that he could never amass enough wealth to eliminate the fear that he might not have enough. He feared being poor in the way that an individual with severe anorexia fears being obese, even when they are teetering on the brink of starvation. He squirreled away money like an opiate addict who stores a cache of pills in the medicine cabinet that could last a non-addict an entire lifetime. He let his fear rule his judgment like a paranoid dictator who executes his entire staff based on the belief that his closest advisors are conspiring to poison his food in order to gain power. To say cite greed as the primary motivation for Madoff's actions is to grossly underestimate the power of fear as a prime motivator for human behavior. There have been many dispicable acts committed by human beings throughout history: human sacrifices by the Mayas and the Aztecs, the mass genocide of Native Americans by European settlers, the extermination of 11 million people during the Holocaust, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, the massacres in Rwanda, the genocide in Darfur, the institution of slavery...and the list goes on. Examine each of these and I have no doubt that you would find that fear is the prime motivation behind all of these dispicable acts.
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and the Red Scare of the 1950's are both examples of the evil that can emerge from fear gone rampant. The Witch Trials, which led to the execution of twenty innocent individuals, was a mockery of institutional justice; the sanctity of the judicial process cloaked the ugliest of human motivations like a cheap Halloween costume. The judges who presided over the Trials brought their own fears and personal feelings into the courtroom. Personal vendettas caused neighbors to baselessly accuse other neighbors of witchcraft. And when all was said and done, the judges had painted themselves into a corner: even after it became clear that the entire process was a mockery of justice, they were unwilling to stop the executions for fear that their historical legacies would be tainted if they admitted mistakenly condemning innocent people to death.
The Red Scare took place at the early height of the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union each feared nuclear annihilation by the other. There were rumors of covert communist spy rings convening in secret with members who masqueraded by day as regular Americans. A United States Senator, Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin, led a public campaign to root out the secret communist spies that were assumed to be living in America. People were interviewed to testify about suspicious, "un-American" behaviors and attitudes exhibited by their friends, neighbors, family members and colleagues. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) search for anti-American sentiment amongst the arts and entertainment community, leading to a "Black List" of writers, actors and producers whose names were connected with Communism. A friend of Miller's was forced to testify before the HUAC and subsequently accuse several other people from the theater community of being communists. This modern-day witch hunt was the inspiration for Miller's writing The Crucible. Arthur Miller was later considered to be a person of interest by the HUAC, which ultimately revoked Miller's passport and prevented him from travelling to London to see the opening of The Crucible.
Friday, September 17, 2010
College?
The pursuit of the American Dream places a great deal of emphasis on a person's job or profession. In some cases, someone's entire dream can consist of attaining a certain title or position. How many of us have ever dreamed of becoming a doctor? A professional athlete? An actress? A musician? We tend to think of our jobs as defining large chunks of our identities. What you do for work, in large part, defines who you are in America. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. You may know an auto mechanic with only a high school diploma who happens to be far more intelligent and interesting than many people you know who might have fancy graduate degrees from prestigious colleges and universities.
My father-in-law is such a person. He emigrated to the United States from Israel at the age of 12 and graduated from high school the mid-1960's. By that time, the Vietnam War was on and he volunteered to serve in the United States Marine Corp when many young men of that time were either drafted involuntarily into the service, or found loop holes to get out of serving in the war. Although he would never say this, I believe that his incredible sense of duty and honor compelled him to sign up for the Marines in the 1960s. Also, he grew up in Israel for the first 12 years of his life, a country where all men and women are required by law to serve in the military for a set number of years. Regardless of the reason, he proudly and bravely served in the military, and in doing so, he acquired a sought-after skillset in learning how to fix and maintain vehicles. When he returned from the war, he began working in an auto garage in Dorchester, and since he was making enough money to provide for his family, he did not end up going to college. He didn't need to. To this day, he still works at the same garage he began working at forty years ago. And he is not only one of the smartest people I know, he is also someone for whom I have the utmost respect. But there are many in America who might automatically look down their noses at anybody who has not finished college. After all, we are programmed in America to believe that going to college is always better than not going to college, and that somebody who attends college is necessarily better off than somebody who has not.
But we should perhaps conduct a cost/benefit analysis of going to college; after all, eduation is not cheap. In fact, it is highly expensive and, according to some, not worth the money. First of all, there are student loans to think about. Survey a random selection of adult professionals (people who work in jobs that required them to complete some sort of graduate or professional degree- doctors, lawyers, accountants, scientists, nurses, teachers, among others), and you will most likely talk to many people who carry around a certain amount of student loan debt. Student loans are funds provided to individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for all or some of their college expenses, and with private college tuition often approaching or even exceeding $50,000 per year nowadays, there are many people who must borrow money to attend college. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 65% of all undergraduates require some sort of financial support in order to achieve the goal of attending college. And while student loans are free while you attend college, you soon find out that they are quite costly in the long run. You had better hope that the extra money your college degree entitles you to earn is enough to offset the monthly payment of several hundred dollars.
So why do we teachers (and your parents) harp so much on the importance of going to college, especially when college is expensive, and often prohibitively so? The answer lies in one of the fundamental tenets of the American Dream: the notion of upward mobility. The Puritans viewed themselves as being upwardly mobile; in their eyes, they were building a new society free from corruption and excess fat. They set the trend for upward mobility in America, paving the way for countless rags-to-riches stories of poor imigrants like Andrew Carnegie who arrived from Scotland with little more than the shirt on his back, and who eventually became one of the wealthiest men in the history of our country. No matter where one starts out, the expectation in America is that a person will be able to rise up (usually in the economic sense) through hard work and determination. And while it is possible for a person to become wildly successful without the completion of a college degree (look at Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Lebron James and Will Smith), the amount of raw talent required to achieve such success without higher education is extremely rare.
Education allows us to fill in the gaps in the areas where our raw talent might be lacking, and it allows us to hone and perfect the skills that we might naturally possess. Education makes a person whole, and provides the foundation for personal growth. Without the options that education opens up, it becomes much more difficult to achieve the upward mobility that is part of every American Dream.
My father-in-law is such a person. He emigrated to the United States from Israel at the age of 12 and graduated from high school the mid-1960's. By that time, the Vietnam War was on and he volunteered to serve in the United States Marine Corp when many young men of that time were either drafted involuntarily into the service, or found loop holes to get out of serving in the war. Although he would never say this, I believe that his incredible sense of duty and honor compelled him to sign up for the Marines in the 1960s. Also, he grew up in Israel for the first 12 years of his life, a country where all men and women are required by law to serve in the military for a set number of years. Regardless of the reason, he proudly and bravely served in the military, and in doing so, he acquired a sought-after skillset in learning how to fix and maintain vehicles. When he returned from the war, he began working in an auto garage in Dorchester, and since he was making enough money to provide for his family, he did not end up going to college. He didn't need to. To this day, he still works at the same garage he began working at forty years ago. And he is not only one of the smartest people I know, he is also someone for whom I have the utmost respect. But there are many in America who might automatically look down their noses at anybody who has not finished college. After all, we are programmed in America to believe that going to college is always better than not going to college, and that somebody who attends college is necessarily better off than somebody who has not.
But we should perhaps conduct a cost/benefit analysis of going to college; after all, eduation is not cheap. In fact, it is highly expensive and, according to some, not worth the money. First of all, there are student loans to think about. Survey a random selection of adult professionals (people who work in jobs that required them to complete some sort of graduate or professional degree- doctors, lawyers, accountants, scientists, nurses, teachers, among others), and you will most likely talk to many people who carry around a certain amount of student loan debt. Student loans are funds provided to individuals who would otherwise be unable to pay for all or some of their college expenses, and with private college tuition often approaching or even exceeding $50,000 per year nowadays, there are many people who must borrow money to attend college. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 65% of all undergraduates require some sort of financial support in order to achieve the goal of attending college. And while student loans are free while you attend college, you soon find out that they are quite costly in the long run. You had better hope that the extra money your college degree entitles you to earn is enough to offset the monthly payment of several hundred dollars.
So why do we teachers (and your parents) harp so much on the importance of going to college, especially when college is expensive, and often prohibitively so? The answer lies in one of the fundamental tenets of the American Dream: the notion of upward mobility. The Puritans viewed themselves as being upwardly mobile; in their eyes, they were building a new society free from corruption and excess fat. They set the trend for upward mobility in America, paving the way for countless rags-to-riches stories of poor imigrants like Andrew Carnegie who arrived from Scotland with little more than the shirt on his back, and who eventually became one of the wealthiest men in the history of our country. No matter where one starts out, the expectation in America is that a person will be able to rise up (usually in the economic sense) through hard work and determination. And while it is possible for a person to become wildly successful without the completion of a college degree (look at Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Lebron James and Will Smith), the amount of raw talent required to achieve such success without higher education is extremely rare.
Education allows us to fill in the gaps in the areas where our raw talent might be lacking, and it allows us to hone and perfect the skills that we might naturally possess. Education makes a person whole, and provides the foundation for personal growth. Without the options that education opens up, it becomes much more difficult to achieve the upward mobility that is part of every American Dream.
Friday, September 3, 2010
The American Dream, Part 1
For the past few years, I have been teaching American Literature and asking students to view the works of literature through the lens of the American Dream. Cullen, in the article that we read, describes the American Dream as "a kind of lingua franca, an idiom that everyone- from corporate exectuives to hip-hop artists- can presumably understand" (6), and I fully agree with this assessment. For proof that the idea of the American Dream is as much alive today as it has been at any point throughout history, we need only look to the fact that, when I asked both of my American Literature Honors classes to discuss the American Dream, every student in the class seemed to know immediately and instinctively what was meant by such an idea.
That being said, as we explore the American Dream in greater depth, I expect that it will become very clear that this idea is certainly one that is not easy to define- at least on any simple level. It seems to be an idea that is different for each individual, and that one of the central elements of this complex and elusive abstraction is that each person is free to identify his or her own version of the American Dream. Your American Dream might be different from mine, at least in terms of the specific details, and if you brought a thousand individuals into a room, each one might have his or her own ideas of what the American Dream means to them. For this reason, defining the American Dream is no simple task: Cullen even suggests that "the American Dream would have no drama or mystique if it were a self-evident falsehood or a scientifically demonstrable principle" (7). In other words, perhaps the most powerful aspect of the American Dream is its elusive nature and lack of simple definition.
As we read our literature this year, I expect that we will meet a fascinating cast of characters in each work, each with his or her own version of the dream. Each character will have his or her own ideas about whether or not the Dream is achievable, which begs us to question the veracity of the Dream. As we interact with John Proctor, Hester Prynne, Nick Carroway, Jay Gatsby, Tim O'Brien, Janie Starks, Walter Lee Younger, Willy Loman, and a host of other unforgettable characters, we will constantly be assessing our own ideas of the Dream and bouncing the ideas we hold sacred about the American Dream off of them. Expect your ideas of the meaning of success, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be placed into question and redefined many times this year. It should be fun.
That being said, as we explore the American Dream in greater depth, I expect that it will become very clear that this idea is certainly one that is not easy to define- at least on any simple level. It seems to be an idea that is different for each individual, and that one of the central elements of this complex and elusive abstraction is that each person is free to identify his or her own version of the American Dream. Your American Dream might be different from mine, at least in terms of the specific details, and if you brought a thousand individuals into a room, each one might have his or her own ideas of what the American Dream means to them. For this reason, defining the American Dream is no simple task: Cullen even suggests that "the American Dream would have no drama or mystique if it were a self-evident falsehood or a scientifically demonstrable principle" (7). In other words, perhaps the most powerful aspect of the American Dream is its elusive nature and lack of simple definition.
As we read our literature this year, I expect that we will meet a fascinating cast of characters in each work, each with his or her own version of the dream. Each character will have his or her own ideas about whether or not the Dream is achievable, which begs us to question the veracity of the Dream. As we interact with John Proctor, Hester Prynne, Nick Carroway, Jay Gatsby, Tim O'Brien, Janie Starks, Walter Lee Younger, Willy Loman, and a host of other unforgettable characters, we will constantly be assessing our own ideas of the Dream and bouncing the ideas we hold sacred about the American Dream off of them. Expect your ideas of the meaning of success, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be placed into question and redefined many times this year. It should be fun.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Beginning of the School Year
The beginning of the school year is always filled with vastly mixed emotions, and this has been the case since as far back as I can remember. After all, I was a student long before I became a teacher. In fact, I remain a student to this day, completing a certificate of advanced graduate studies (CAGS) through Northeastern University's School of Professional Studies (more on that later). However, my primary role has shifted to that of classroom manager, content developer and appropriator, book group leader, academic coach, proofreader and editor, and now, professional blogger. Oh, the many hats that a teacher wears at any one time. And this is not even close to constituting an exhaustive list.
Summer was filled with some amazing times and provided some well-needed rest and relaxation. I exited the school year in June with the intention of using the gift of free time to tinker with new ideas, read voraciously, catch up with old friends, spend time with family, enjoy the outdoors, exercise, cook and eat delicious food. I am happy to report that all of these objectives were met with varying degrees of success. And while I am sad that the summer is done and the rat race must begin again, the feeling is tempered by the excitement and anticipation of new beginnings and new opportunities for growth. After all, no school year is like any other, and each one is special in its own way. And it is true what they say about teaching: it does get easier with each new year of experience. I am about to start year six (year five at Framingham High School).
So what does this year have in store? I am hoping to use Google Groups extensively with my classes to create a vibrant, exciting and transparent educational community online to supplement the classroom face-to-face learning sessions. There are those who look at new technology and say, "this is AWESOME!" and jump into using it without first considering whether it adds anything to the educational experience. I am not one of those people. I believe that a lot of the educational technology tools are nothing more than bells and whistles that school districts buy from salivating salespeople as a way to stay on the cutting edge. This is unfortunate, and Neil Postman writes an excellent chapter about the dangers of "bowing to the technology gods" in his classic non-fiction work, The End of Education. Needless to say, I do not believe that technology is the be-all-end-all panacea to all that ails public education.
However, there are a ton of useful ways that implementing technology will change education permanently and for the better. Online communities are invaluable- we are all on Facebook (*although most teachers will never accept a friend request from a current student- just a horrible idea), Myspace, gmail, Twitter (I still don't get its appeal), ebay, Craigslist, and a million other online communities that allow us to customize profiles, post ideas and pictures and other media, collaborate with people around the world, discuss issues big and small, experience common cultural phenomena, test out ideas, create (and sell) beautiful and useful thngs, and a million other exciting applications. It is an exciting and scary time to be alive, and it is essential that, as we dive headfirst into this new realm, we are conscious of both the manner and the amount we use technology. Online communities should be used as a way to connect with others in new ways, and not serve to isolate us from the real world behind a virtual wall. We must always be mindful of what we post and how we state things; the internet NEVER forgets.
I am really excited to enter this year-long discussion with all of you. Make sure to bring your A-Game to the table; we all want to know what you think.
Summer was filled with some amazing times and provided some well-needed rest and relaxation. I exited the school year in June with the intention of using the gift of free time to tinker with new ideas, read voraciously, catch up with old friends, spend time with family, enjoy the outdoors, exercise, cook and eat delicious food. I am happy to report that all of these objectives were met with varying degrees of success. And while I am sad that the summer is done and the rat race must begin again, the feeling is tempered by the excitement and anticipation of new beginnings and new opportunities for growth. After all, no school year is like any other, and each one is special in its own way. And it is true what they say about teaching: it does get easier with each new year of experience. I am about to start year six (year five at Framingham High School).
So what does this year have in store? I am hoping to use Google Groups extensively with my classes to create a vibrant, exciting and transparent educational community online to supplement the classroom face-to-face learning sessions. There are those who look at new technology and say, "this is AWESOME!" and jump into using it without first considering whether it adds anything to the educational experience. I am not one of those people. I believe that a lot of the educational technology tools are nothing more than bells and whistles that school districts buy from salivating salespeople as a way to stay on the cutting edge. This is unfortunate, and Neil Postman writes an excellent chapter about the dangers of "bowing to the technology gods" in his classic non-fiction work, The End of Education. Needless to say, I do not believe that technology is the be-all-end-all panacea to all that ails public education.
However, there are a ton of useful ways that implementing technology will change education permanently and for the better. Online communities are invaluable- we are all on Facebook (*although most teachers will never accept a friend request from a current student- just a horrible idea), Myspace, gmail, Twitter (I still don't get its appeal), ebay, Craigslist, and a million other online communities that allow us to customize profiles, post ideas and pictures and other media, collaborate with people around the world, discuss issues big and small, experience common cultural phenomena, test out ideas, create (and sell) beautiful and useful thngs, and a million other exciting applications. It is an exciting and scary time to be alive, and it is essential that, as we dive headfirst into this new realm, we are conscious of both the manner and the amount we use technology. Online communities should be used as a way to connect with others in new ways, and not serve to isolate us from the real world behind a virtual wall. We must always be mindful of what we post and how we state things; the internet NEVER forgets.
I am really excited to enter this year-long discussion with all of you. Make sure to bring your A-Game to the table; we all want to know what you think.
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