My journey through Graduate School to earn a Masters of Art in Education. I was on track to become a teacher, but now everything has changed, and I'm on the job hunt with a Bachelor's in Liberal Arts and a Master's in Education with no teaching certificate.

 

July 24- Thursday

It's getting harder to keep this going. I've got so much to do and I'm speding about an hour a day when I get home threading through a massive e-mail list that has exploded. I guess the other 300 people on the list aren't as busy as I am...

Seven days left. Five Literacy based lesson plans on Monday (I have three mostly completed), a two page reflection due Tuesday, and a ten page research paper due Thursday. Of course I have a final in Educational Psychology on Wednesday. This weekend I have a lunch appointment, an eight hour game to attend, and a BBQ party for my best friend. O cruel fate.

I am feeling the stress. In our Dimensions of Learning class we are covering Andy Hargreaves "Teaching in the Knowledge Society" and the conversation was great. It was fast, loud, respectful, crammed with ideas... I was taking notes rather frantically on two separate pieces of paper when the instructor, out of the blue, asked a student to leave. It was a misunderstanding and he apologized to her, but not to the class, which was clearly dampened by the outburst. I understand that the prof values the full participation of the class, but I also know why she wasn't participating fully and I can understand how it looked to the professor. I don't think I've recovered, and the massive amount of e-mail I had to go through was about religion, and that gets my dander up as much as anything. I may fall into a theology weekend and be just as bad on myself as I was last weekend when I was in programming mode most of the time.

So where am I? I am going, I think, slightly mad. Deep Breath. Okay. I have two more literacy based lessons to work out. I have a few fallback ideas but they aren't incredibly original, but I think I will fall back on them to call it done. The two page paper will wait until Monday. I did some prewriting in class today but the conflict made me loose my train of thought, and the clarifications about what the paper is supposed to be has made my prewriting less valuable. I have a bunch of note cards on my research subject, which has something to do with Plato's Republic, but I'm not sure exactly where I'm going to take it. It started with a suggested topic of Censorship in Education in the Republic, but I think I can link it to a more applicable and modern structure: Standardized assessment. That's a phrase that gets a lot of teachers very angry because it deprofessionalizes them and denies them the opportunity to be autonomous. Hell, that's one of the things that made me fall in love with the idea of being a teacher. A goal, a bunch of kids, and free reign to get there. I know I can do it, but I also know that I need to learn a lot more about how learning and Education works, which is why I'm in this program. I think I can make the link. I think I'm understanding Plato's theories well enough. I studied part of the Republic in a Western Civ class about ten years ago, and I studied Plato during my attempt at a Philosophy minor, but I forgot a lot of it. I like part of what I'm reading now: There must be a separation between economic power and political power to avoid corruption. I know the President's salary was intended to be low for this very reason. It doesn't apply anymore. I think the President get $400,000 a year, over ten times my highest annual salary ever.

So far I'm not worried about the Education Psych final. I have a list of topics that we will be tested on and we are covering those topics. We did a lot of work with Blooms Taxonomy and that was cool. It was very helpful to see it explained fully with good examples. I wonder why this class caused so much tension last week for the midterm and now it's not stressing us out? Probably a ten page research paper will do that to anyone.

I also had a long talk over lunch with someone who is struggling with the Literacy stuff more than I am: A band teacher. I thought I had it rough. He is understanding all of the concepts, but applying any of this to music is hard. We came up with a few ideas, but I don't know how well he can pull them off. I doubt I could pull it off, and he's the expert. So I have no reason to bitch about my difficulty with this class anymore.
posted by Josh English at 7/24/2003 09:30:00 PM