Airship Ahoy! Student Teaching Dead Ahead!

Good news! The best of news, in fact.

I have received my student teaching placements for next semester! 

There are two of them, one in an area middle school and the other in a high school, and I am assured by people in the know that they are wonderful teachers who really know their business.

I was so overcome with joy at this prospect my productivity for the day imploded, and I ended up leaving my homework until my shift at work last night. Three hours of heavy productivity. It was great.

But after that I went home feeling a great deal like a failure. Here I am, a quarter of the way through senior year, practically swimming in homework and midterms, and all I want to do right now is work on a Halloween costume. Talk about trival.

Not just any Halloween costume, mind you. A steampunk airship officer, to be precise. I spent the better part of Wednesday Googling Do-It-Yourself steampunk accessories, including the obligatory round-rimmed goggles and making a shopping list for the local craft store, thrift shop, and bargain outlet. I realized I want to work on this, instead of writing the 5 mini-essays I have due next week, because I’m bored. A little burnt-out, too. I’m sick and tired of learning about how to teach kids, and it doesn’t help that in two of my classes we’re talking about exactly the same thing. I need a week, I think, to not do any schoolwork at all, and a week is a luxury I don’t have.

Steampunk is an interesting aesthetic. It tries to combine the power, creativity, and mechanical prowess that the Industrial era embodies while at the same time embracing the whimsy, romance and beauty of the Victorian age. Simultaneous creative periods, but very different ideas in terms of what form and function are. It’s like Gaskell’s North and South in a big way, the culture of the city meeting the machinery of the town. (Speaking of which, I got a massively awesome mashup idea involving Mr. Thornton and a bunch of robots that I think I might use for my final project in Contemporary Lit.)

Anyway, as I’m googling around I can’t help but be fascinated by what some of these people have built. These contraptions are beautiful – mahogany keyboards with repurposed typewriter keys, working blunderbuss guns that fire ping-pong balls. (That was another reason I was ashamed of myself – I’m not half that creative or talented to be in this genre) I realized that cosplay of any kind says something very interesting about our society in general. We have such creative, artisanal talent as human beings, and in our industrialized, buy-it-out-of-the-box world, that energy that in earlier periods would have been put to the purpose of making useful objects  is rerouted into making objects that could have been useful, but instead are used for this specialized kind of play. Steampunk’s fascinating to me because it tries to embody this past-present binary, the beauty of past design but also the desire to be futuristic and imaginative as well. (Also awesome - dieselpunk, the 'punk that started after WWI and the Age of Steam left off. Think Art Deco, Soviet Realism, film noir and really futuristic looking cars. Epic.)

I’ve realized, in between trying to finish the midterm exam due tonight and the final project due tomorrow, that this is an excellent conundrum for several reasons. First, I have to practice a good deal of self control in sticking to my time management options. Second, I’m realizing teachers cannot live on homework and grading alone. And third, if I’m getting burnt out thinking about the same thing all day and it’s only October, how must my students feel when they’re learning about five or six different subjects and they have to write a bunch of papers?

All of this is pointing me towards a conclusion we’ve discussed, both in Pedagogy and in Young Adult Lit-- students need to have a way to engage with the literature they’re reading beyond just writing about it. Involve an art project once in a while, something that uses a different part of the brain. This is why art and music and the humanities in schools is so very important! Kids need a creative break!

I know this teacher does, too.

Plagiarism (And Other Things In My Life I'm Not So Sure About)

Every time I wrote a paper for middle or high school, my teacher would remind me not to plagiarize. It's a staple for essay writing instruction -- Tell us where you got everything and don't copy anyone else's work word for word. If you don't, we'll come after you with a red pen and a vengeance.

Simple.

As a future writing teacher, it's important for me to remember this, and remember to teach it to my students. But what I've been having difficulty with lately is the idea that in order to teach someone about plagiarism, I have to plagiarize someone else's idea on how to teach.

Let me explain. In classes like my English Pedagogy we're given books written by prizewinning, veteran teachers that are full of strategies and observations on what works in the classroom and what doesn't. Our professor is filling us with tools from her own experience to help us when we get out into classrooms of our own. And this, to me, sounds an awful lot like plagiarizing, or copying off of someone else's paper on an exam. Aren't I supposed to just know all of this by myself? Aren't I supposed to be coming up with these mind-bogglingly good theories of pedagogy all on my own?

When we speak of sharing lesson plans or ideas on how to teach, isn't it technically intellectual plagiarism when I think Emily's lesson on how to wrap up a unit on critical theory lenses was so awesome I'd like to do exactly the same thing in my classroom because I thought it worked well? Are my roommate and I going to plagiarize each other when we discuss at the end of each school day and try to come up with a plan of attack for tomorrow using these textbooks and their ideas?

My good friend Ben recently linked me to the blog Teaching FTW, the one year labor of love of one Ross Trudeau, a teacher in a Boston charter school.  Trudeau describes a very prescriptive approach to his teacher training at said charter school, something that runs counter to most educator preparation programs in America today. I'll let Mr. Trudeau explain himself on this one:

"Program founder MG once likened traditional teacher prep to putting a pilot in a cockpit after teaching him about aerodynamics and meteorology... but not telling him what any of the buttons do. 'What? You crashed the plane into the mountain? It's cool! You get a whole new plane next September, and you probably learned SO much from that first plane crash! Go get 'em, tiger!'" -- Teaching FTW Feb 4 2010.

"This feels like the best way to learn how to teach. TELL me the moves. WATCH me practice them. CRITIQUE me on how good my presence is, or what my face looks like disciplining students, if my line of questioning is appropriate, yadda. It's like the total opposite of learning adolescent psychology and debating at length the place that ebonics has in a classroom. It's a common-friggin'-sense way to go about learning how to teach. " --Teaching FTW Jan 21, 2010

And while I am reading this blog, I am thinking several things. One: Ben was a genius to link me to this. Two: This is really funny. A little unreadable at times, but funny. Three: I wish my blog had 76 followers. Four: The prescriptive program sounds really awesome, but isn't that intellectual plagiarism too? Shouldn't you have to build your own classroom from scratch first and yes, crash a few planes? (I hate the idea of crashing a plane as much as anyone else, believe me, the idea that the parents of America will trust me with their children's futures is terrifying no matter how many people tell me I'll make a good teacher.)

I suppose at the bottom of this well of self doubt is the way I was taught to look at information and who it belongs to. I'm the girl who wouldn't ask a question in class unless I already knew the answer -- My idea about how knowledge should be handled is strange, to say the least. In my little world, this information on how a classroom works and how students work belongs to someone else. They did the research. They spent the time compiling it. If I were to use it in a paper, I would have to cite where it came from and I would have to paraphrase it. And yet here are all these people telling me that no, I should just use these ideas, lock, stock, and barrel, and maybe mix in a few of my own.

I think something's rotten in the state of educational training here, and I'm not sure if it's my training as a teacher, my own education prior to that, or something else entirely.