Reflecting and beginning

So my great problem with electronic media, particularly blogs in general, is that because of how easy it has become to post, many people will post anything. All too often they are writing about "I'm sorry for not writing more," or "I wish I had more to say."

I too often feel that way, and so my response has been to not get a blog. I find them too easy to either forget about or to reach such a minutia level of navel-gazing that it is no longer really helpful to anyone but the writer. At which point, why not create a private journal? I digress however, as you can no doubt see I am actively doing a blog right now, so I must have something more worthy to say than the hypocritical statement "blogs are silly yet I'm doing one anyway."

I am a graduate student, currently working on teaching licensure in Vermont and a Masters of Education degree. I have begun my student teaching and so now am required to create a reflective journal. Now this, I thought, is something worth actually blogging about. Creating a system where I could keep an active record, I can share my thoughts and also make communication between myself, my teachers and my professors much easier. Now there might seem to be some inherent problems with that - after all, if I want to say mean-nasty-terrible-awful things about my professors or school or program or anyone, then I'll either censure myself or simply not say them. However, I think that I go through life self-censoring far too often. And so in this regard, I'm going to try and keep things honest, open and while I may say something critiquing, it won't be the type of mean-nasty-etc. thing that could get me into trouble.

And so yesterday I began my grand voyage into the heart of academia. It began with a faculty meeting where I learned the most maddening fact ever. Not only is "sex-ting," still a craze amongst students (and unlikely to end anytime soon, unfortunately) but if a teacher should open the phone after taking it from a student, they are in possession of child pornography. (For those not in the know, sex-ting is when you use a phone's camera to take inappropriate pictures and then send them out over the phone. Discreet and more than a little creepy, it is apparently becoming a huge problem in schools due to the proliferation of cell phones and well, hormones.)

...wait, what? Looking at a student's cellphone, which they have been misusing, immediately makes you the pervert and the danger to the school system? The very thought of this boggles my mind.

I then attended my department meeting with my cooperating teacher. I am going to strive to not use names overmuch (certainly not without permission) in this blog, and so I'll mostly be using job titles and the sort.

This is unfortunately complicated by the fact that I have two cooperating teachers. And so, having now removed any specific traces of where I am teaching, I will cleverly refer to them as Mrs. N and Mrs. C. I remain ever astounded by my own cleverness.

...anyways. Mrs. N and I will be working on two courses, each about 84 minutes long (If I'm remembering right). We will first be doing AP Literature and Composition and then Journalism. I'm feeling good about the first, particularly because we've elected to work on my all-time favorite book: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I could go on and on about that book for months, so I don't doubt that I'll have plenty of material there. Journalism has left me a bit more uncertain, since it's a subject I'd never taken. However, Mrs. N suggested I help the students work with new media, and I also wanted to add a piece on media literacy and awareness (two topics I feel very strongly about). So things are definitely looking stronger there.

Finally, I have only one class with Mrs. C, where I will be working with freshmen. After looking over the schedule, I hesitantly asked if I could solo-teach The Odyssey. To backtrack for a moment, I was a half-step away from becoming a Classics student in college, save for the fact I knew I couldn't apply that beyond, well, college. However I love the stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey and the latter is the source of the best paper I've ever written (my thesis not withstanding). So when Mrs. C gave a happy laugh and told me she hates The Odyssey and would be happy if I taught it, I couldn't have been more thrilled.

And of course then needed to find out how anyone could hate The Odyssey.

So presently, I am trying to catch up with the books I haven't yet read, refresh my brain on the books I have, prepare to meet the freshmen on Monday and begin tying together curriculums and lesson plans and ideas about these books such that they can really catch people.

I've got six years of theory, three months to go and a positive outlook. So, let's see what I can do.