Just call me broadcasting student

I just finished creating my first broadcast using Audacity! I'm soooooooooooooooooooo excited!!!!!!!! I see soooooooooo many possibilities for this in the classroom...

Okay, I sound like a geek.

I'm off to go listen to it again!

Early morning thoughts

My previous blog entry was written a couple days ago, but I was hesitant to post it because I didn't want my blog to be a place of complaints and malaise, but I suppose my blog can be anything I want it to, and so I decided to post it today.

On that day I really felt frustrated with a particular class. They are challenging on so many levels! Many of them have literacy problems and quite a few of them appear to be the men and women of their households. I also sense that some of them have been severely hurt in their young lives, and the hurt is manifesting itself in gross disrespect and anger that is very close to their skins. Somehow I have to reach past that and find the talent and possibility that I know is there. Sometimes I feel like I'm reaching them. Sometimes I see something that looks like a spark of interest in their eyes, but I have to work like a beast to sustain it and then "poof" it vanishes.

I'm really hoping that something I do in Ed Tech class today will give me some ideas to reach this class. In the meantime I should be getting ready to make the trek to UWI.

Peace

An off day

I was once a very idealistic teacher. When I started ten years ago, I was bursting with youthful enthusiasm and was determined to make all my students love English. I specifically wanted to teach in a senior comprehensive school. At the time, I felt I had the knowledge and the ability to “make a difference” in the children’s lives.

My teaching career has been a meandering roller coaster ride thus far. There were times when I felt that what I was realizing my dream of “making a difference”, then there were times when I felt like I was repeatedly banging my head against a huge, unyielding wall. To be absolutely honest, today I feel like I have done many hours of penance at that wall. I feel as if I’ve been biting air. I feel like I have been spinning a collection of new tops in old mud. Hmmm…I’m also running out of melodramatic figures of speech.

I know I shouldn’t be feeling like this. I feel like I am betraying ideals of the younger, more enthusiastic me. I am supposed to be older, wiser and more equipped to face the challenges of the teaching profession. I’m supposed to be enthusiastically interacting with my students, appealing to their multiple intelligences and using constructivist methods to make learning more relevant to them. I’m supposed to be doing a lot of things. However, even though I would like to think that I have grown older and maybe even wiser, I face a whole new generation of students: a generation that apparently requires a great deal more of my blood, sweat and tears.

Trying to wade through the turbulent seas

Well, I'm new to blogger.com, and I thought I would give it a go. I'm also here because of an an Ed. Tech course I'm doing. It's been interesting learning about all the possibilities of technology in education. It's also been challenging trying to adapt the principles to my classroom, given the normal constraints.

We're presently learning how to create web pages. I'm excited about that because I've wanted to create my own web pages for a few years now. We'll see how it goes.

That's it, short and dryly sweet for now.

Laters.