The Praxis of Pedagogy Day 30

Ok this is the title that I am going with. The Praxis of Pedagogy. The knowledge, action, and reflection of the art of teaching. It feels right. I love words. Symbols that encapsulate concepts that give our minds focus. To understand what schadenfreude means allows us to better recognize it when we experience it. This recognition allows us to better reflect on it...I'm thinking of the saying

Before understood Buddhism, a rock was a rock, a tree was just a tree. Then I learned about Buddhism and a rock wasn't just a rock and a tree wasn't just a tree. Now that I understand Buddhism, a rock is just a rock, a tree is just a tree.

So then perhaps what I am saying is wrong. Perhaps words are not the key to reflective consciousness. Perhaps, words get in the way. Perhaps, I don't need to know the word schadenfreude to recognize and reflect on my feelings and experience of it. Karmic thinking is karmic thinking. I love the irony of reading my written words to think about this. Life is a stage and blogs are a narrative.

I'm thinking about doing a reflective personal goals journal next year. Consistently have students start the week off reflecting on how they did the previous week week, what their goals are for this week, and how they plan to accomplish them. I'll do it along with them. It'll be good for both of us.

Anyways... today I started off paying money for a milk mocha. A student did a coffee run for us and I ordered a mocha but forgot to say soy mocha. It was totally stupid of me. I never order just a plain mocha. When the caffeine situation is bad in the morning...problems. So I couldn't just sit around grading today so I decided to work on the computer lab... oh yeah I fucking hate grading. It is the least inspiring part of the job. I'd prefer not to have grades. I understand why authentic assessment are so attractive. However, they are far more time consuming. I think that I want to have some aspects of it in my CTM though.

I grabbed the bolt cutters and went around cutting locks on the backs of computers so that we could move them to the computer lab and then get them shipped out. Cutting locks is fun. I wanted to cut the locks on everything. But the cheap ass cutters broke on my 7th or so lock. I was bummed. It totally burst my bubble. Mix that with the coffee and then I was going to have my meta class. I'll have to get new ones so that I can cut the locks on the rest. Yesterday I went to this computer exchange place in our city. The place sells refurbished P3s for $75. They are all about getting schools and students of our city access to the internet. They will pick up all the old computers and refurbish them. They also have this program which will give a student a P1 for word processing, spreadsheet, and excel through openoffice all the student has to do is go to a 3 hour class with their parent. Great project! Good people! So anyways, I hooked up money for procuring computers and my friend Jeremy and I decided that it would be best to have a few P4s in the computer lab and the rest P3s spread out throughout the classrooms. This would be the best use of the money we have. So now we just have to get an assessment done so that I can get a hard quote on P4s and then buy the computers and have them installed.

Meta class theme today was self esteem. We should have done this earlier and incorporated this into everyweek curriculum. We started off the class by having them fill out a self esteem worksheet. We did this one thing where we drew a box on the board. Then we wrote down all the good things people said about the students when they were young. Then we had them say all the bad things and we wrote it in the same box. Soon the bad just covered up the good. Metaphors. For a main project, we had the students make commericals selling all their great qualities. It is interesting how much resistance there was to this by some people. They couldn't think of good things to say about themselves. Painful. One student couldn't think of anything to write and when I quickly told her some nice things about herself and told her to write why her girlfriend likes her she kinda lit up. The girl wrote an entire page commercial. So many students had so much trouble saying nice things about themselves. Environment matters. They aren't used to saying and hearing nice things about themselves. It's really quite sad. For the last project we had them fill out a piece of paper with all the bad things that people say about them and a piece of paper with all the good things people say. The good paper we told them to keep with them. The bad paper we had them put into a pot and we set it on fire outside. Then we had them clean up the school and class was over. This was a better more manageable time. Self-esteem is already a problem for teenagers in general, but many of our kids deal with a much harsher reality than most and they feel alienated from school and the subjects taught in it.