But is being "just a teacher" enough? Is it what I want to be doing when I'm 50?

Honestly, the answer is, "I'm just not sure anymore," and that saddens me.

It's not that I'm "burned out," tired by the daily demands of meeting the needs of middle schoolers. In fact, I still thrive on my interactions with my students. It's also not that I feel "disrespected" by society as a whole. While the criticisms of public schooling can be trying, I know that I have been successful within my school and community.

What has me doubting my decision to finish my career in the classroom is that despite great successes, I've recognized that I am still "just a teacher" in the eyes of most people.

My day-to-day responsibilities haven't changed in 17 years, and are no different than the responsibilities of the first year teachers in my building. While I am currently working for an administrative team that believes in empowering teachers, I still find myself wanting more input in conversations related to education at all levels.

Teaching is truly a "flat profession."

There are no real opportunities for teachers to "advance" and remain classroom teachers at the same time. To get the additional influence that I want, I'm going to have to leave my classroom for a career in school administration or educational policy—and lose my connection with my students.

That is incredibly frustrating.

Bill Ferriter, "Still Tired of Education's Glass Ceiling." in The Tempered Radical. 9 Dec 2010.

Lesson planning is utterly ridiculous sometimes.

The principle of lesson planning, according to the framework laid down in the official EL syllabus, is such that you teach "behaviours", not knowledge. It defines teaching as the teaching of specific skills and its application, not the knowledge that governs text and artifact production. Want to teach something interesting but impractical? Out it goes; students won't be interested, planners and educators bemoan.

What about subjects such as geography and history? Is it even possible to choose realistic and authentic production skills in say, writing about the history of the bust of Stamford Raffles? How will students use their knowledge of the formation of rivers in real life?

The humanities will always suffer from the lack of relevance. I can see how EL planning principles are designed to overcome these typical complaints. Yet it gets me down to know that even if I can get students to be interested in something, planning principles will result in my lesson being marked down for irrelevance.

QCE 520: Idea for a Writing Game

I had an idea while I was walking through a sale display of board games. It would be pretty cool to use Jenga in the classroom as a stimulus. We could write a word on each Jenga cube, and mix them up in a pile. The student's task will be to construct the jenga tower, and draw ten words from the pile. Each of them will then have to use the words in an essay.

Just a thought.

QCE 520: Vocabulary Ideas

I have to admit, my readings for QCE are a mess, because I chose to file my readings by author alphabetically instead of simply binding the notes according to reading, writing and oral communication. This worked out well for the writing package, but it's turned out drastically because I can't find my reading package articles.

All the same, I appreciate being explicitly told the methods that we are to use to build vocabulary. I agree that teaching vocabulary is necessary, though I disagree with the methods used. I particularly hate the "word bank" method because it requires constant maintenance; though I can see how the artifact would be an excellent motivational tool, I have no doubt that such a methodology is tedious; given that reading in the current information age is quick and episodic, students cannot be expected to lug around a word bank exercise book everywhere they go. Personally, I have tried the word bank idea, but it didn't pan out as I expected; after a while, the freshness of the idea of maintaining a word bank wore thin.

This is a rather interesting point; it would be pointless to master words simply for the sake of showing off a thick, fleshy word bank exercise book to parade around. On the other hand, the idea of consistent vocabulary practice seems more appealing; it is less effort on the part of students, since most of the preparatory work is done by teachers. Students must be given a means to apply these new-found words. Vocabulary enhancement by productive skills would be more practical and effective.

QCR 520: Prose Package Woes

I believe very much in this concept of take-home, and I'm not sure how to elaborate on this, but the Prose package is very much pissing me off, so I shall try to elaborate here.

Lesson plans generally fall under two broad categories; the mainstay of all lessons is the "take-home" lesson. Lessons that are "take-home" lessons generally produce a result that is congruent to an assessment of learning, which means that the artifacts produced in the lesson will generally be useful to students for their revision of certain topics. For example, lessons which produce worksheets that explicitly state themes and ideas, quotations or technical explanations are lessons that produce a "take-home". The "take-home" artifact is thus more important, usually, than the lesson itself, which students tend to regard as a waste of time. Importantly, they would think that the teacher would have better spent the time giving students the material directly rather than going through the tedious process of getting students to take ownership over their creation of that material.

The less profligate teacher would often opt to have more "learning" lessons instead. Where "take-home" lessons produce artifacts, "learning" lessons present the specific act as the "take-home" itself. The student is expected to produce the artifacts of learning on his own, or decide which kinds of artifacts would best suit his learning needs. Which is blatantly silly, because human nature (if I'm reading Jonathan Swift right) dictates that people will always want to take the easier, less complicated way out. Reasons of economy, the more enlightened will say. Bullshit. People are lazy, period. You can't change that. If students are generally lazy to come up with their own artifacts of learning, then teachers needs must compel them to come up with it on their own, such as during lesson time. Hence to the more "enlightened" (I shudder to think that recognizing human laziness constitutes enlightenment) teacher, "take-home" lessons are surely more practically useful than "learning" lessons.

Which is what pisses me off, because literature lesson planning is currently centered around these two main obsessions. Every lesson, it would seem, must have a "take-home" and a "learning" point, which is impossible if every lesson is only an hour long at most. Personally, I would happily have my students read the text on their own during my lesson if that's what it takes to get them to read the text; human laziness is omnivorous, and it takes pleasure in devouring both sides of the food chain. But if I had a choice, I would simply choose boring "take-home" lessons, maybe spiced up by the occasional video/ extra-curricular activity. It would certainly make my life easier.

QCR 520: How to teach the short story?

Short stories are much easier to teach than unseen pieces. I remember an article that we read, which criticized the use of unseen passages in assessing literary knowledge, because it re-affirmed a "piecemeal" knowledge of the text (I remember the word "piecemeal" being used). Short stories are a veritable contrast, because they have a beginning and end; the criticism that we level at it will thus be more valid than the kind of ideas that we criticise in a text extract.

So far, the kinds of classroom techniques that we've gone through in class are all fine and dandy; they are easy to carry out, as long as the teacher is sound of mind and able to come to class with ideas and criticism all in hand before the lesson is carried out. It would be more interesting to come up with lessons that involved students creating their own artifacts, though such lessons would clearly require more time.

Short stories, for example, would be great for students to create short films. This could be done in upper secondary classes, where class sizes are smaller and hence more amenable to the kind of guidance that the teacher can provide in this sort of project. Lower secondary classes would be harder to manage.

QCE 520

It's interesting putting names to the methods of reading that we all use daily, but never think about.

For example, I'm more of a skimmer and scanner. Given my busy schedule, I seldom have time for reading comprehensively. Even in the mornings, when I pick up the newspaper, I have no more than 15 minutes to take a quick flip through the papers to scan for the headlines, following which, I take a quick skim through the articles that interest me.

Our reading habits are very much shaped by our lifestyle. When I was an undergrad, I would read every last word on the page, because if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to write critical pieces. That sharp contrast in methods clearly has taken its toll; I no longer have time to question and disagree, and I find myself simply reading quickly just to get to the ending.

It's hard to teach pleasurable reading if the only kind of reading I do is utterly boring and functional.