Letters

This week's blog post is rather personal. I have been trying out new writing strategies in the classroom and one of the strategies I have come across is letter writing. The idea is for you all to write a letter to me and let me know how you're doing. How are you doing in class? Are you struggling or excelling? Is everything going the way you expected? Have you learned some good stuff? Is there anything I can do to help you succeed in class? How can I help you do better? What are you struggling with outside of class? Is there anything positive or negative going on in your life that you'd like to get off your chest? How's life? Is John Edwards or Chris Angel for real?



Post a letter to me via blogger you can either post it for the world to see, or you can send me a comment/make it private/etc. if you'd rather the world not see. You can do this in the settings tab on your blogger site. You would have to make your blog private for one reading, invite me to read it, wait for me to comment on your letter, and then you could delete your post and make your blog public again. You could also just send me an email if that's easier.

Work with me on this. I'm trying it to see how it goes. It might fail, and I can live with that.

Outskies.

What Did I Learn?

Every day I try to learn something, some days I have to force it, and others it just so happens to fall into my lap. Last week I had this learning fall into my lap (it's kind of my favorite kind of learning). What I learned isn't anything concrete, it's not factual based - more like a philosophy or a musing. Here it is:

If you give students the opportunity to amaze you, they will. If you push students to work above their level by systematically planning to do so, they will. If you stop taking "No" or "I can't" as answers, they disappear. If you let your students explore on their own, they still will learn.

I know this sounds pretty "hippie-dippie" and unfortunately I agree, but I do believe this. For instance, if I gave you all a simple question for you to comment on in this blog post, it would be "What is the significance of the candle?" Will you answer? I bet you do...

Left Brain Right

I've already mentioned this book in class. I still find it a very useful, interesting, and enjoyable read. It has helped me shift my teaching style on occasion, and made me think about how to better serve my population. What I think I liked most about the book is that as a left brainer, the book gave me many different examples of how I could put my right brain to use at the end of each chapter.

Conversely I will admit that some of the information is quite cheesy, especially for myself. As a left brainer I thought about why certain things wouldn't necessarily work the way the author described, and I was skeptical of some of the findings the book had.

I do believe the future will look different. I do think that society will see a lag in this change until younger generations enter the workforce with differing ideas of what "work" should look like. I would like to take an extremely humanistic approach to the future and say that things will work out and our global society will work itself out for the better. Who knows?

Anyway, IF I haven't convinced you to read this book yet, maybe the author can:

Toodles.