Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Nay, Most Stessful is more like it.

So we're into the holiday season. I'm also currently finishing the last week of trimester I and gearing up to start trimester II. Needless to say, I'm stressed.

As I was trying to relax the other night, I picked up my most recent copy of Glamour magazine and stumbled upon an article about the negative effects consistently high levels of stress can have on a person's health. The article described a variety of factors that contribute to high levels of stress, and one thing that was mentioned was people's reliance on, nay addiction to, technology. Women interviewed for the article told how they got antsy when they were forced to be away from the pinging chimes of their email inboxes and the dinging rings of their cellphones.

This got me thinking about an earlier blog post I wrote about everything being "better, faster, stronger" and wondering if that was a good thing. I'm coming back to that again. Is "better, faster, stronger" really that, or is it crazy, too fast, and stretching us beyond a point we can handle?

I have been emailing back and forth with a parent about her child's performance in my class. At one point, she suggested that a solution to her child's failing grade in my class would be that I should email her her child's upcoming assignments for my class every Friday. Fortunately, when we sat down face-to-face to conference, the counselor very tactfully suggested that that was an unrealistic expectation and the parent agreed. Do we assume that because a person has technology at their fingertips--email, an online Gradebook, whatever--that all of that person's work should/will get done faster? Because that forgets the most important part of the equation: the human doing the work. I may have tech tools, but I am still a human who has to do much of the data input, and I, like everyone else, only have 24 hours in a day.

I guess all I'm asking for is room to breathe. A little bit of let-up and a scaling down of the expectations of perfection and instant feedback. I am only human.

A thought and an exclamation...

The exclamation first:

I HATE WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER!

There. I said it. I'm done.

Thought: I just read a blog post on the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) website about teachers using social networking sites to connect with their colleagues and students. As a young teacher who has been worried about having a Facebook profile, that was a little reassuring. After reading the blog, I also went and joined the NCTE group on Facebook. :) More to the point, though, I'm using Facebook to keep in touch with students who have graduated. However, I don't accept students as "friends" until after they've graduated. Facebook, for me, is a personal space, separate from school. It is a representation of my life as NOT a teacher, as a free-wheeling, social person. It's not like I post pictures of myself naked in a group orgy-animal sacrifice-drug haven environment. Heck, I don't even do any of those things, much less would I be brazen enough to post pictures in a public forum of all that. My point is, I feel like the moment I begin allowing current students as friends is the moment that I begin censoring myself to a degree that I'm not comfortable with outside the classroom. I need to be me.

As I think about this, it raises interesting ideas about what exactly, in a personal sense, we expect from teachers. The possibility of everyone's lives and personal traits being available for public critique online throws into sharp relief our assumptions about how teachers are supposed to behave--inside AND OUTSIDE of the classroom.

Is it safe to say that there's a mostly unspoken assumption that teachers are supposed to be morally superior or morally correct all of the time? Where does this come from? Can this change? Would our entire concept and construction of "teacher" be required to change in order to accept the fact that teachers aren't always pillars of morality in the community?

I don't know, but I'd love to know what you think. :) And I still hate Movie Maker.

Till next time...

What's mine is yours and what's yours is... everyone's.

I really enjoyed that article! Jenkins brought up a lot of the ideas and problems that we have been discussing in class and explained in ways that I hadn't thought about.

I guess what stuck out to me most as something that could/should have an impact on my instruction is the skill of transmedia navigation, being able to follow and create stories and information across an array of modalities. To begin with, this sounds so much like my students. I especially identified with his description of the kids who struggle to understand why Spiderman doesn't appear the same in the comics, cartoons, films, and figurines. It goes to the idea, in a way, of judgment and being able to examine the perspectives and influences of the authors/creators of the varied images of Spidey. Using popular culture to help students begin the process of analyzing for perspective and purpose seems like it could be very powerful and could be a great scaffolding activity to get them into talking about identifying and analyzing images in advertising or news for perspective, bias, and purpose.

The bigger thing for me though, as an English teacher, was the concept of creating stories across modalities. Jenkins quotes Kress as "[advocating] moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as the basic expressive competency of the modern era" (Jenkins 47). As someone who is currently staring down a stack of 150 sophomore narrative essays that need grading, the idea of the students creating a story that's a combination of film, sound, and other mediums sounds very appealing. :) It certainly would appeal to the students' strengths and interests, and it seems very constructivist in nature. The students would really have to understand what they were trying to communicate in order to get the message across accurately and meaningfully through a variety of media. There is a concern though about what kinds of materials and images the students appropriate for their creations. And I'm not just talking about copyrights and plagiarism. What happens when a student uses an image or video or soundbite that enforces negative, harmful stereotypes or assumptions? How do we engage with them about it? How do we read that use of that image/video/soundbite in the first place?

Another idea that appealed to me was the idea of collective intelligence. I especially noted the quote about how schools teach kids to work as autonomous problem-solvers, not as a community of collaborators. Again, looking at this from the practical side, having students work collaboratively in groups to complete projects and tasks could cut my grading load in half. :) It would require a huge shift away from the idea that students have to produce individually to be successful. And there would certainly be concerns that some students will simply try to sail through on the coat tails of their more productive team mates. We've all been there and felt that and it's frustrating as all get out. Is there some way to measure individual involvement to guarantee that all group members are participating or does that go against the very principle of collaboration and collective intelligence in the first place?

I think that's about it for now. Until next week...