Weekly Reading Reflection on Chapter 11 for the week of April 9

My goal: To read the news every day

My Objectives:
1. To become more educated on current events

My methods: I get CNN's top news stories on my homepage, and they're updated daily, so it was really a matter of not being lazy and clicking on the links and reading the news stories. The biggest reason I hadn't been doing it up until now is that I felt I didn't have time, but it turns out that clicking the links and reading all the top stories didn't take more than 10 or 15 minutes each day, and, even after a few days, I feel I am much more informed than I was at this time last week.

Assessment: Obviously, I learned more about current events this week, but I think this activity goes deeper than that. I learned that many times, the reasons we find for not doing things that are good for us, from reading the news to exercising to sleeping enough, are not often very good ones. "I don't have time" is really common, but I think that many times, that's just an excuse for us to not push ourselves to do something even though we know we should. Now that I know how little time and effort it takes to inform myself, I'm definitely going to continue.

Reflection: Learning more about current events has definitely been good for the future teacher in me. First (and I know this has nothing to do with the reading, but I thought it was great anyway), CNN.com has a section specifically on education, which is one of the most important things I should be up-to-date on. However, relating the news to creating learning environments was a little tougher than relating it to benefits for educators in general. However, there was one part of the reading that I feel this is quite relevant to. Woolfolk referred to it as "withitness." She talks about it specific to time in the classroom and portraying an air of "eyes in the back of your head" to the students, but I think a teacher's withitness extends beyond that. The more a teacher knows about current events, even beyond current events in education, the better he or she can make connections that may be helpful in classroom management.

Weekly Reading Reflection on Chapter 10 for the week of April 2

My goal: To foster my inner child by playing every day

My Objectives: (Attitudinally based)
a. To help understand children by learning how they learn
b. To break social norms
C. To relax

Methods:
I did this with Stacy this week, and each night we tried to do something fun and kid-like. Although we did have the break and we missed a few nights, I think we took a few things from the experience anyway. The first step was to think of kid things to do. One day, we played in the mud, and one day we colored. Like I mentioned in my entry last week, I learn best by doing, so getting down into the dirt, literally, was a good way for me to begin to understand the perspectives of children.

Assessment:
A lot of people didn't really understand how coloring and watching Beauty and the Beast counted as Ed Psych homework. In this way, I think we did a great job of breaking social norms, and the way people reacted to the mud on our jeans was a good indicator of how thoroughly broken they were. However, it's hard to tell how much better I really understand kids or how much I relaxed. I think this week has made me more creative and will help me come up with a variety of activities to teach the same thing. After all, flexibility is a very important quality of all good teachers. And, after spending an hour or so coloring and not stressing out about what I had to do the next day, I always felt better and less anxious.

Reflection:
This week's chapter in the Woolfolk book was on motivation, and it was interesting to think about what motivated me to do my project this week. Of course, I did it partly because it was a lot of fun. Intrinsic motivation. However, I also did the project, and completed my reading, for that matter, so I could write this blog entry. I wrote this blog entry so I could have my homework done and get a good grade in the class. All of these factors are extrinsic motivators. I think that everything a student does is motivated, at least to some degree, by both of these factors.

Weekly Reading Reflection on Chapter 9 for the week of March 26

My goal: To talk less and listen more.

My Objectives: (Attitudinally based)
a. To really listen to what the other person has to say
b. To make conversations less about me and more about them


My Methods:
I find that when I'm in a conversation with someone, I'm always thinking about how what they're saying relates to my life. This week, I tried to do a lot less of that. I tried to stop selfishly trying to make the conversation about me and make sure I was really listening to what the other person had to say. I tried to ask a lot of open-ended questions and pay close attention to the answer. This reflects my learning style because I learn best by practing how to do things. This week, I practiced how to listen.

Assessment:
I feel that by listening more to people this week, I learned a lot about the people I talked to. Most of the people I practiced listening to were people I felt I knew quite well, and I can think of several examples of friendships that grew stronger this week. Knowing this, I will continue to make a more conscious effort to listen more closely to people when they speak instead of trying to make a conversation more about me.

Reflection:
Woolfolk has a few things to say about keeping lines of communication open. First, on page 321, she gives the example of the student who comes in late to class. This student has many visible tattoos and piercings, and the teacher immediately forms an opinion of him and reacts cooly to his entrance. The student becomes resentful, thinking this school will be just like his last one. If the teacher had only kept an open mind despite the student's tardiness and appearance, perhaps he or she could have provided him with a valuable learning experience. Woolfolk also addresses the importance of teachers listening on page 329, while discussing inquiry and how it aids the learning process. In short, she says that teachers who lecture in their classroom tend to be much less effective than teachers who allow students to learn on their own by asking carefully selected questions and answering any questions the students may have on the subject. It makes sense. I know that I remember things a lot better when someone helps me figure them out than when someone just tells me.

What place does technology have in the classroom? I think that, whether we like it or not, in a world where technology is becoming more and more important, teaching technology should become more and more of a priority. When our kids get out into the real world, they need to be able to know how to use a computer or other basic skills that are becoming necessary for everyday life. And when it comes to using technology in the classroom as a tool for learning, I think it's a great idea. Technology can enhance the learning process in many ways. First, things like blogs and websites can enhance parent-teacher and student-teacher communication, something that is too often overlooked. Technology can be used to give kids examples to listen to at home for music classes. Interactive math drills can be found on the internet. The number of great resources on the internet is vast. My only hope is that kids don't get hooked on technology and start using it as a crutch. I hope kids can spell without spell-check and go to the library and look up a book for a research project, rather than just typing the subject into Google, although both these tools, when used right, are much more helpful than they are harmful.

Friday morning, I hopped on a bus and made the trek to Sioux Falls, SD for the 19th annual Nobel Peace Prize Forum at Augustana College. The forum as a whole, which centered on the great potential nuclear energy has for a cleaner way to run our lives and the dangers of nuclear energy if it falls into the wrong hands, was a fantastic experience, but I attended one session in particular that I felt had to do a lot with education. Presented by Yumiko Nogami of Luther College, the session was entitled The Role of Peace Education in Promoting Nuclear Disarmament: A Case Study of the Experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and it focused on how peace education and how we should begin intergraring it into the public schools, using the experiences from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nogami, whose father was an entry survivor after the bombings, discussed finding new ways to reach kids to teach them about peace, especially with government agencies trying to shush peace educators. A good activity for older students who have a concept of budgets would be to visually represent the United State's budget choices. Using lengths of ribbons or bowls of beans would create a powerful image that would stay with the student, and if a subject matters to a student, he or she is more likely to learn it. Also, something like this could very easily be integrated into a social studies class while the class is discussing the U.S. Government, or an economic class that is learning about budgets. She also discussed age-appropriate ways to teach kids about the horrors of war. For example, showing graphic movies to elementary schools is not appropriate, but maybe showing the film a few years later in the high school would be acceptable. A curriculum that would build on itself each year and teach students new things about peace each year would be ideal. According to Nogami, starting early and keeping consistent is the key for successful Peace Education, which is a very important thing in our warring world. History repeats itself when people forget the past.

This weekend, Luther College held its annual Ethnic Arts Festival, and I attended. I thought it was a great opportunity to increase cultural awareness and ultimately make me a more sensitive person. It's important to the future teacher in me because the festival, and especially the talent show, got me thinking about how I can incorporate multicultural activities into my classroom. Nearly all the acts in the show focused on ethnic music and dance, and I think it would be a fantastic thing for me to incorporate some of the things I heard and saw this weekend into my curriculum. The million-dollar question is: how? How can I teach my students about Indian classical singing and African dance? Just because I saw someone play the Chinese Zither doesn't mean I can play it well enough to demonstrate for my kids, or that I can play it at all. Also, who's to say I would be able to find a Zither to play? Maybe this is where technology comes in handy. But watching a video of someone playing an ethnic instrument is nothing like watching it live. Maybe some of the people I meet at Luther College will be willing to come into my classroom and help raise cultural awareness through music and dance. After all, I had several friends in the talent show last night. The next problem is where do I fit this into my schedule? As a middle school orchestra teacher, I will have so many other things to cover, and many teachers find that they do not have time for multicultural education. Can I let time be an excuse? And which things do I omit in order to include a unit on multicultural music? All these questions have been on my mind lately, and I hope that when I enter the education field, I will be able to answer them and put my answers into practice.

Last Saturday, a group of women who are also Luther students perform Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues in order to raise money and awareness for abused women. At first, I wasn't sure how this shocking and powerful performance of a rather risque work was related to education, and then I realized that education doesn't always have to do with music in the k-12 public school system. Sometimes, education can have to do with things that I learned, or things that people in general learned. I think both are true of the performance of the Vagina Monologues. Although I was shocked by some of the colorful things that were said, I learned a lot, especially about the shocking rate of abuse among women. I'm sure that no one in the audience went away thinking that they had known everything that had been presented. Education sometimes shows itself in situations like this that were educational in that they were meant to raise awareness. It really got me thinking about how broad education really is.

Over the weekend, I saw a great movie, Music of the Heart, that I thought was relevant to teachers in the public schools. It's particularly relevant to music teachers, which is great since that's why I'm at Luther in the first place. The plot focuses on Meryl Streep's character, Roberta, who decided to give up her dream to be a concert violinist and teach instead because she was told she wasn't good enough. Recently divorced and with two young children, Roberta literally has to beg for a job at an inner-city school teaching violin classes. Her first year was a little rough. The kids were hard to work with and Roberta's fellow faculty members weren't much better. The students, for the most part, came from rough home lives and many were a lot to handle for just one teacher. The other music teacher at Roberta's elementary school was only there to get his paycheck. He was not invested in his students and he was not invested in helping Roberta and seeing her program grow. It also seemed that none of the students' parents cared about what their children were learning. One mother in particular, whose son really did want to learn to play the violin, refused to let him continue in Roberta's class because she did not want him playing music by "dead white men." But despite having the odds stacked against her, Roberta continued to perservere, knowing that she wanted to teach these children to play the violin. She learned to adapt. During one class, when she discovered one of her students wasn't "standing strong" because she had weak ankles, she allowed Guadalupe to sit. In fact, Guadalupe always sat, and neither Roberta nor the other students in the class ever said anything about it. She adapted when it was necessary without making the young violinist feel out of place. When she recieved notice from the administration that she was being too harsh with her students, she tried to make the necessary adjustments in her classroom, although the students did ask her why she was acting so strangely and told her that they preferred the old Roberta better. As the school continues and Roberta becomes more and more involved in the program, she also becomes more and more involved in students' lives. One morning, she walks into school only to discover that one of her violinists was accidentally killed in a drive-by shooting. No one was expected to play that day. Instead, the students sat in a circle with their teacher and she asked if they wanted to talk about it. They agreed that they should play the violin instead. However, a few evenings later, Roberta went to the home of one boy who was particularly upset over the accident. She wanted to know if he was okay or if he needed to talk to her about it. It was this scene that made me realize that Roberta had become much more than a violin teacher, and these kids from the inner city had become much more than her students. A few weeks later, Roberta discovered that the school district's budget cuts would make it impossible for her to continue teaching her violin class, which, by this time, had become wildly popular. With the help of her students and such violinists as Ithak Perlman, Isaac Stern and Joshua Bell, a benefit concert to raise money to keep the program is prepared in only six short weeks. The concert at Carnegie Hall raised over four thousand dollars and helped the program stay alive. It was a feel-good movie and there were a lot of good themes presented. It would be worth the time of any music education major out there to see this movie.