Tackle Your Expectations

Sometimes, we like to live up to other people’s expectations. It becomes difficult when you feel like you let someone down. 

Imagine you were football player and your father, the biggest football fan you ever met, told you that he wanted you to win him a superbowl ring. Year after year, you pushed yourself, through doubles and practice year round and you gave it your all. Yet after a few years, your coach saw that you weren't going anywhere and told you to give it up. 

How do you think you would feel about yourself knowing someone else gave up on you well before you did? How would it feel to have someone who is supposed to push you, tell you that you aren't good enough? The same is true for your students. If you constantly give up on them, how are they ever going to reach their dreams? By letting down your students you start to let yourself down too. 

What are some ways to avoid letting your students and yourself down?

What Are You Giving Your Giving Tree?

Take care of your school

We like knowing we took part in something important. We want to see the fruits of our labor. Just like a gardener, you can take care of your relationships and help them reach greatness. Are you doing everything in your power to help it reach that greatness?

Here are some questions to guide your thoughts:

Nurture

• How do you show you care for your school?
• How can you show that you care about your coworkers?
• How can you show that you care for your parents?
• How can you show that you care for your students?

Protect

• What does success look like for your school?
• How are you keeping it healthy?
• What new goals are you making?
• What are you doing to make sure you remain at the top once you get there?

Growth

• What ways are you encouraging consistent success? 
• How can you adapt failure into a newfound success?
• How can you constantly strive down new paths to make success easier?

Help your school reach success, just like you would help that seed become a tree.

I do not take credit for this picture or any on my blog

I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate||Spoken Word

This will sure make you think. It is definitely a much watch! Maybe even a much watch 10 times! I love this video.

Swimming in The Have To Do's-- A Teacher's Perspective

As a teacher, sometimes overwhelming is an understatement. We always have pre-tests to make, progress tests to take, post tests to grade, lesson plans to create, team meetings to attend, IEP Meetings to structure and everything in between. Most of us get lost, we get swamped on the "To-Do" lists of our lives. And it seems like we will be swimming under the papers until the day we die.

And sometimes the sigh of relief that is supposed to follow the victory of completing an aspect of the to-do list is replaced with 10 more items on your list. In fact, in my classroom, that's how it feels every time. But we need to remember to take the victories for what they are and celebrate every accomplishment (just as much, if not more than, how much we dread every new task). Take a second to focus on the fact you are still chipping away at that mountain of papers you have in front of you. And that it is in fact making you a better teacher, better student, better leader in this crazy world around you. Don't let the avalanche of the "Haven't happened yets" fall all around you to the point where you drown in the monotony.

How can you celebrate every time you complete another obstacle on your list?

This is a picture off of Google Images and I take no credit for it or any others on my site.

Dystoian Connections

I have learned a lot about reading this past week about how broken our world is, how hard it is to find a solution when a solution may work for an instance but not forever. I believe there is no system that will work forever and there is no savior that will save this world. But I do believe people need to learn to be their best, to push themselves their hardest and to find something that makes them better.

I read Ender's Game and I am going to need to read all the rest, they sucked me in and left me asking more questions than answering.
Could you imagine a life so structured that the only escape is leaving the planet. At 6 years old is anyone wise enough to give up their life for the greater good of the world?
Did anyone realize the number of propoganda in the book, that forced people to make ill-informed decisions? Yet a set of preteens were able to bring it all down.

This book challenged me because I did not connect with the characters, they were too far removed from me and I couldn't find one I could throw myself into, and yet I studied them, as if I were them, what choices they would make and if I could do the same. I would fail, but if I was them and if I could pass I would feel how they felt and I would feel like a tool, another propoganda lie for the government.

I am so sick of the government. I am so sick of the control they have over everyone.


Next: I read The Divergent series and it made me think and question.
There are 5 factions:
The Dauntless: The Brave
The Abnegation: The Selfless
The Amity: The Peaceful
The Erudite: The Intelligent
The Candor: The Honest

And in the beginning I asked which one I would join and it seems like the only answer would be the Erudite but a part of me would fit in all of them. I try to be strong and strength to me is being brave, I try to be selfless by putting others ahead of myself, I try to keep peace and crave knowledge and I try to hold myself to honesty.

But there is a lot in this world that I question and a lot I want to fix. Our world is as broken as theirs even if it isn't as obvious. Our world is full of needless propoganda and that people buy into as if they had no other choice.

I want a world that cares for one another, that may not be perfect but gives you the ability to fight for what you believe in. I want a world that gives you an option to be a hero. That forces you to learn about yourself.

And if I can't live in that world, one day, I am going to have to create it and write a book with as much emotion, with as much pull and with as much strength as my being possesses. Because the world we are in, is not the one that I was meant for. 

Teaching Tip: Lose the Textbook.

I truly believe something I don't know if anyone has said before. I think the textbook should just be for the teacher.

The pictures--we could share, the stories--we could read allowed, but the boring words are to give us a resource. Students learn best from being involved. Get the information and give it them them in a new way. Don't expect them to learn from reading the words on a page.

Lose the book, we don't need it. It doesn't make us smarter. Give us points, support ideas, make us think with higher order questions. And stop making us regurgitate what was an idea somewhere.

Instead make us challenge our own ideas, make us grow as students, make us become better learners. And lose the book. Find relevant data, find important information, use UP TO DATE information and Lose the book.

This day and age the world is at our fingertips. Share it with our community, bring it to the world we live in and make the students in our classes, engaged, inspired, motivated and passionate. Challenge them to step away from the books and into their brains.

Turn the light switch on inside their brain and close the book.

College: Online is all wrong.

This semester my family has done something remarkable. Every single person in my family is in college. I never thought I would see this day where everyone is pushing to learn more and make themselves smarter, more educated and better. Yet all 5 of us including:
-The newbie freshman at a state college who is pushing herself farther in college then she did most of her educational experience.
-My soon to be college graduate sister who is in her "victory lap" 4.5 year plan who has a passion for her private school that I haven't seen before.
-My full-time working mother who commutes 3-4 hours to work everyday plus works full-time (sometimes more) and is taking 2 fast-paced 8 week online classes through a pretty well known online private school that her company is supporting her with.
-My "senior" father at a local community college (who gets a discount woohoo!) looking to keep his sanity as well as push himself to learn new things and do something while he hunts for another job is taking an online business class.
-Myself, a full-time teacher who lives in another country and taking 2 graduate education classes both online at a private college.

There is no cookie cutter class where all the students learn the same way, all follow the same lessons, all have the same amount of time. Here we are a quite diverse group of individuals all going to college and 3 out of 5 of us are doing online classes and not one of us is satisfied.

Did you hear the record stop? That fact should throw you off a bit. Those of us paying the "big bucks" for college are actually not getting the education we are paying for.

As a teacher, I study HOW the teachers teach just as much as I study what is being taught. And I can tell you from the stories of my parents and from what I have "seen" in my classes. Most teachers do online classes wrong. We have seen the busy work, the dragged out lessons, the mind numbing copy and paste from the book, the dragged out readings, the pointless assignments, the stressful breakdown of the class, the professors that don't respond to our questions, the ones that don't get involved in the class, the classes that don't feel like people are in them, the ones that couldn't be more wrong.

Now, I won't say every experience we had this semester was a negative one. One of my ESL classes does everything almost perfect for keeping students interested, engaged and really keeping us involved and anxiety free. This made this semester an excellent, nerve-racking chance for me to understand what students need in an online class.

I am not a professor, I don't have a PhD and I don't need to know anything about the content to explain HOW to teach an online class.

10 Tips for Teaching Online from a Student AND Teacher Perspective:

1) Involve your students: They are in your class to learn. They chose this topic because it is one they hope to become better at. Let them enhance their lessons by adding in their experiences, by teaching them what matters to them. Ask questions they are interested in, let them answer their own questions. Let them explore something they could use.

2) Give feedback regularly: Show your students that you are on their side. That you support them, that you are there to help them, solve problems with them, and challenge them to look at it a different way. Don't put them down but lift them up. Make them better students.

3) Be available: The internet is everywhere. In this day and age, you need to be able to respond to emails, questions and ideas in a timely matter. Not everyone has every waking day to work on their class work and when they do have the time, they may have questions. You need to answer at the max within 2 days of the email.

4) Make your students better students: Tell your students how to get a better grade, don't just deduct points. Give your students resources if they are unclear about something. Google is just as powerful for the teacher as it is for the student. For example: if they don't know how to write a paper because they haven't had to in the last x years find an easy way to get them corrected. It will make both of you a little more confident and a little more sane.

5) Create a community: Teachers are not dictators. They don't get to parade around the class like nuns back in old Catholic classrooms. Classroom environments have changed since then and in online classes, students have the WORLD at their fingertips. Give them encouragement, give them praise, learn about who they are and support them. Allow them to talk to, vent to, complain to, and share with their fellow students.

6) Don't create learning robots: All my life education has been about regurgitating the information from a book. College shouldn't be that. College should be about higher order thinking questions, analysis, evaluation, experimentation. It shouldn't be about answering questions from the book but finding a way of making them useful.

7) Don't use hard books: Online classes are so heavy with reading it discourages every student. 65% of learners are visual. Use that to your advantage. Make the same powerpoints you would in a classroom and share them with your students. Ask higher order questions in them. Use resources that they can relate to. Find videos, draw pictures, do something hands on. And if you can't find the perfect resource: Create it. Youtube can be your friend.

8) Explain BEFORE assigning: New lessons should start slow, use scaffolding to your advantage. Explain the reason, show an example, walk us through it. Then let us practice and expand on our own. Don't just dump something on us that will lead us to a million questions. Be thorough with your work so when we are ready to work, we can do so without the stress.

9) Assign less: A couple higher order thinking questions a week is good enough. Give us the ability to expand what we learn. Challenge us but don't over burden us. You don't know what your students' home life is like and you want to make their lives better, not worse.

10) Allow students to help one another: The first discussion board in your class should be a question board. Let the students swap ideas, support each other, complain, vent, and most importantly grow.

As a student and a teacher, I shouldn't feel like without knowing the content. I could do a better job teaching the class then you. Students shouldn't feel like they are sinking, they should feel like they have floaties on the first few weeks and by the end they may not be masters but they learned how to take them off and dive in without a fear of sinking.

The students, my sisters, my mother, my father and myself, and the countless others in your class should NOT be punished or turned off by education. We shouldn't miss out on the education, the connections of classmates and teachers, the resources of the internet world and the methods of teaching ourselves. We pay way too much money to not get the best education that life has to offer.

(If you don't like that I am speaking from experiences and would like to hear it from the professionals here is another article at your disposal. http://www.designingforlearning.info/services/writing/ecoach/tenbest.html)