Alien Pedagogy

Today a teacher asked me about my policy of allowing students to redo of their assignments. She’d heard about it from students.

I’d like to believe that the students presented a polite and educated argument on how this policy invites them to treat their assignments as learning opportunities. Perhaps they stood up, cleared their throat, and said something like “In ENG, our assignments don’t end with an F, but might begin there.”

With some reservation, I’d even accept it if they used an educational cliche like “learning’s a journey.”

I’d like to believe this because I spend more time in my classroom than in the faculty room. I can’t help thinking that amongst my colleagues, my reputation as an educator is largely created by what students say about my class.

Though I teach English, I read perhaps twenty feeds from the IT department, a few from social studies, a couple math teachers, and even some administrators and scientists.

I have only two English department feeds. Don’t they write?

If you read the blog of a high school English teacher, send it my way.

I recommended Dy/Dan’s blog to another teacher today.

What was odd about this is that I usually discuss Dy/Dan with teachers from social studies, IT, and English. I suppose that reflects the circle I run in.

But I’ve finally been given an opportunity to recommend him to someone who teaches math.

During our semester review, the Debate Team had a lot to say.

Over two weeks, we categorized three made main categories and then broke into groups designed to work towards meeting those goals. I assigned each group a leader and the other students volunteered to join a category group, which worked very smoothly. Two students volunteered to monitor our Moodle site. After that, we had a team for: Background Knowledge/ Resolutions, Competition, and for Skills.

I asked each group to follow this process:

• Create a Vision / Mission (5 minutes)
• Brainstorm Potential Actions (5 minutes)
• Consider Logistics and Reality as well as how this would happen using Moodle (10 minutes)

On the whole, the groups made solid plans that are realistic.

Still, I was a little disappointed to see myself so rapidly becoming obsolete in their development.

I played basketball yesterday against students and my knee survived. I will try to run again this week.

Thank goodness.