Learning as a Way of Teaching

There is a great book called Men are Waffles, Women are Spaghetti.  Men compartmentalize their thinking and can block stuff out.  Women’s thoughts are all connected and they have no control over what might pop into their minds.  That is the idea of the book in a nutshell.  Hard to explain in just a couple of sentences, but I bring it up for a reason.

At the end of the school year, I tend to reflect on the past year.  What went wrong, what went right, what needs to change, what needs to stay the same.  As part of the reflecting process, I think out loud with a couple of colleagues to get their input.  I am going to try something new and think out loud in the bloggesphere - just to see what happens.  These reflections have no connection to each other, or maybe they do.  Time to think like pasta.

• Too many clerical mistakes this year.  I need to buckle down and do a better job of documentation.  Too many times I did not have what I needed to make an informed, data supported decision.  That’s gotta change.
• How can I engage students better?  They do not care about making good grades.  Learning is no longer fun for them.  You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.  Salt his oats and he will drink anything you present.  What can I do as a Special Education coordinator to bring in 21st century tools and salt their oats? 
• Our campus will be acquiring a new mobile wireless lab.  Where do I begin?  Class blogs? Wikis? Podcasting?  Someone stop me before I explode.
• Kids hate math.  When do kids starting hating school?  How can we make them love learning again?

Something else just occurred to me.  I have a blog, I am a member of Classroom 2.0 (Ning), I have used Twitter, Skype, Delicious, Technorati, and who knows what else.  I have made a couple of podcasts, vodcasts, etc.  But the newness is wearing off and I wonder what’s the point of all the connectedness.  And it hit me:  I don’t care about what I am reading.  I have read enough about tech ed.  I understand that we need more of it in the classroom.  I know that our students are being taught in 19th century classrooms.

It is time to find different reading material.

I need Special Education blogs to put in my reader.  I need to connect with teachers who are changing their pedagogies as far as special education goes.

Can anyone offer me some help?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.