All the news that isn't

Once again for TE407, I will be entering a citation for each work discussed before discussing it.

Nelson, J. L. (2001). Defining Social Studies. In Stanley, W. B. (Ed.), Critical Issues in Social Studies Research for the 21st Century (pp. 15-38). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

I found this chapter, or perhaps I should say this article to be very redundant both with itself and with other themes we've been covering so far in our seminar. I feel that the chapter could be summed up in a number of short statements, as follows:

1. Definitions are important in policymaking and academics.
2. The definition of "social studies" is contested.
3. Therefore, policymaking and academic work about social studies are contested.
4. Social studies in general and history in particular are subject to political control.
5. Democracy requires educating people to be able to reach conclusions different from those of their government.
6. Therefore, maintaining the contestation of the definition of social studies is democratic.
   

Maybe the above are shocking to some people, but seriously this is almost all stuff we've been talking about already. Does it seem to anyone else that this article was also a hearty exercise in self-promotion in the sense that it aggrandizes what the author apparently loves to do the most, namely define "social studies?"

(yawn)

TE407, ahoy!

Well it's happened again, you've squandered another perfectly good second summer semester not taking TE302 (because it's not offered then). We're heartily into the fall semester of 2008, and already I'm seeing a lot about TE407 that is very different from the prior courses.

For one thing, let's talk about the difference between seminar and lab.

In the TE407 seminar, the class investigates various issues by discussing them. We might be presented with a video clip or reading, and then we'll take time to pick that apart by talking about it. Fascinating, right? Sure, if everything goes well. I would say that the quality of your TE407 experience will vary greatly depending on who you have as an instructor and who you have as classmates. (Some would say that this is true in any class, but I'll make at least the suggestion that in some contexts the material covered and the design of the course by the department can play such a role.) Given a sample size of one in our instructor, I'll make the bad inference that TE407 seminar instructors tend to be more experienced than TE407 lab instructors. You may get the feeling that I am saying that TE407 seminar is a lot of talk and not a lot of hands-on. You are partly right: from my experience so far, there's a fair amount of wide-angle thinking and not as much "do this now, it represents teaching." Some have criticized this as "too theoretical" and not enough practical. I am not sure I agree, but just because I don't know if "theory" is the right word for what we're doing. I think we're talking and listening to each other as opposed to absorbing from a centralized source. I suspect that a statement the class might agree with if it were presented clearly to them is the following: when one attends a high-level specialized course on teaching and the instructor doesn't do a lot of direct instruction, one may receive the impression that the instructor doesn't know the material and that the students cannot learn it from each other. To me, this represents a bet of sorts that by year's end we can unlearn our automatic preferences for direct, teacher-centered instruction.

In contrast, TE407 lab as the word implies is more about getting hands dirty. We will be designing lessons, and we're asked to do more homework-y type assignments. More on this as time goes on - I think that I don't yet understand all of what's going on conceptually in lab.

Final thing I'll mention for the post: for those who don't know, TE407/TE408 are segregated by major area, so I'm in a section that is just for secondary social studies folks. There are two such sections, and the idea is that probably both sections will be staying together through both semesters (i.e., the people in one's 408 section are the same ones that were in one's 407 section).

Looking forward to a good year, and more things to say on this blog in 2008-2009!

Final Presentation Speech

This is the original draft of the speech that I gave today as my final presentation. Before the text, here's the YouTube version:



Debate is changing.

Ten years ago, the activity of policy debate was about speaking 300 words a minute, about using tools of reason and communication to talk about big ideas and big government initiatives. For decades now, this formula has worked well to get kids from suburban schools, rural schools and fancy private schools to come to tournaments every weekend. But it’s been hard to get kids from urban schools to succeed at the top levels of debating in the traditional manner: talk faster, research more, know everything about the far-away lands of policy and politics. Recently though, several urban schools have started a new approach: make it personal. Suddenly kids are showing up at tournaments and winning by asking new questions: how does debating affect me? How does its elitism exclude us? How can we use its tools to break it down and put it back together again as something that connects to our experience? We’ll get back to these questions in a bit.

Education is changing.

In America, it’s always fashionable to talk about the latest change and how we can grab onto it, how the old way of doing things is obsolete and should be replaced. Education has always been changing; lately it’s been changing in a way that attempts to put the experiences of students front and center. Think about the questions Adie asked of us for this final project. “How can we bring students’ backgrounds into our teaching?” Not whether, not why, those questions are assumed to already be answered. This narrative that MSU wants us to learn isn’t about progress, it isn’t about saving American jobs; it’s sort of about saving the American soul, about healing the wounds of divisiveness and hierarchy. It’s about making education relevant to students; in short, making it personal. A few weeks ago I had a conversation with Avner Segall, the professor in charge of secondary social studies for all of us going that route. One of the things Professor Segall said to me was that TE250 is the real social studies curriculum, which I thought was a very revealing statement.

I am changing.

I got into teaching to be an agent of debate within schools, to gain the power of a teacher so I could spread my message like some kind of missionary for competitive speech. And don’t get me wrong, I still believe that. But I’ve been slowly waking up to something else recently, too. Teaching as a craft, as a science, as an art is not abstract. Great teaching is personal, and to be a great teacher I will need to know a lot more than just a body of theory or a handbook of guidelines, I will need to find out how those play out in every single one of my students. I am not a particularly good social studies teacher, in any area save perhaps government and civics. Here’s a factoid for you history folks: I have taken exactly zero history courses thus far at MSU. So I’m nervous about my lack of content knowledge, but after TE302 I’m way more nervous that I won’t be able to connect with some students in my classroom. All I can hope for is that my skills at learning and communicating along with my habit of trying to think my way through life will help me to figure that out. Because after this class, I’m convinced that making connections is critical.

 Here’s the other big picture idea I got from this class: teaching is bloody difficult! I think of teaching as a conversation between a teacher and a group of students, and man there are a lot of things to pay attention to in the midst of that conversation. I plan on keeping conversation moving to get the class into a team spirit of working for a common goal, which I have my coaching background to thank for. I want to let kids’ voices be heard, and that means more than just making sure everybody talks. It means stepping back sometimes and letting their interests come out, trying to find points of connection between what they know, what they like and what we’re thinking about that day. I want to test them in ways that allow them to have perspectives and beliefs. And this all sounds nice but at the same time it’s terribly subjective and I don’t really know yet how I’m going to be fair about it.

Debate is changing, education is changing, I am changing; seems like there’s change everywhere I look. And with change in mind, I hereby announce my endorsement of Barack Obama for … oh wait, wrong speech.

In the introduction to this course I posed a question for everyone, namely what is the purpose of education? Well at the end of the class, I want to ask a different question out loud, namely what is the purpose of my education? After taking this class and working more with kids and thinking a lot, I think the answer is simple: make it personal. I am creating myself as a teacher using the tools I have available. After almost 15 years debate is woven through me like threads in a tapestry. I think philosophy is important so I want to understand what’s going on in the field of education and why. And I have a new appreciation for the challenges and rewards of teaching that I didn’t have before.

To finish up, here’s a one-sentence summary of the history of human thought. Every time a group of people comes up with thinking tools in pursuit of some goal, a different group of people will use those same tools to ask “why that goal, why not another one?” and wander off. In debate, urban kids are asking big questions about what debate is and why it exists. In education we’re looking at kids in new ways, with the big idea that maybe what kids think really matters. And for myself? I’m still wandering off but now I call that learning. And helping other people to do the same? I call that teaching. Thanks for being my classmates.

Ugh

I promise to limit the number of posts like this that I make in this blog. The last week has been a blur of one task to complete after another, and it's not done yet by any stretch. I can't write very much today because I actually have to write a paper in the next hour or so, before getting some work done for my job and facilitating a debate meeting and preparing to lead a debate session and preparing to lead a discussion in my TE302 class and ...

The only reflective thing that I figure I can say about the busybusybusy I've been experiencing lately is, "sounds like a teacher's life." Especially a first year teacher. Well, I suppose if I survive this it's a good indicator of the future. When you see another post from me when I surface for air again, you'll know that I didn't actually have that nervous breakdown I was contemplating at 4:30 AM this morning while writing my syllabus assignment for TE302.

((end of whine))

Lessons Learned

This last Thursday I finished up my final segment of tutoring at a local middle school for TE302. Before we started tutoring, as mentioned in a previous post we did an exercise trying to understand and remember middle school. We were first asked to describe our own middle school experiences, then asked for a word to predict what the middle school kids would be like. For the second question my word was "unpredictable," mostly because I hadn't worked with middle school kids in a long time and didn't know what to expect. To be honest, I also used that word because I was playing it safe by choosing an ambiguous word. The word unpredictable can have many different meanings that are either positive or negative in bent; sometimes many meanings will be true at the same time. So, I'm writing today with some disambiguation of today's post title.

1. Getting students motivated can be hard, hard work. Maybe it's fair to say that I knew this already, but only in the abstract. Also bring everything that you know about to every student encounter, because you never know what part of your experience will interface with the experiences or interests of each student. Both of these are lessons about how to teach that I learned.
   
2. It's never too early to start thinking of ways to teach specific content. I was tutoring in math, and had a great but challenging time coming up with ways to make the most abstract of subjects engaging for kids. I remember a panel discussion by new teachers that I attended, where many of them talked about the amount of time they spent just trying to innovate in lesson planning because of the relentless pace of their classes. This, some would say, is the meat and potatoes of teaching, so I'm glad that I learned at least a couple of specific lesson outlines for getting kids to understand math.
3. The more interactive a learning community, the more interesting the result. We have had to post a tutoring log each day of tutoring that answers the questions "what, so what, now what" about something we did each day. On top of that, we had to respond to at least two of the logs of our classmates. This was a lot of writing. That's for sure why I haven't posted a blog entry since the first day of tutoring, and it was sometimes hard to find time to write the log entry for each day because I wanted to make an honest effort to think through an aspect of the day each time. The quick pace of the tutoring in the summer session (four days a week for three weeks) was intense in a good way, and I really value the opportunity to not just do my own reflecting but to peek inside the heads of my classmates as they worked through their tutoring time. Many of the comments that people would post on each others' work were words of encouragement and praise, and while I liked that I especially liked the opportunity for us to really start short dialogues with each other, to prod our thinking in new directions. I am frankly awed by the obvious facility with teaching and ease of engagement that some of my classmates demonstrated. I dare say that we all learned lessons about each other these last three weeks even without a single class period together and I'm looking forward to getting to see my classmates again.
4. Empathy in teaching is challenging and good. The tutoring plan that I'd created before the first day of tutoring was sort of like a philosophy of teaching statement, now that I think about it. I wrote about teaching as building bridges from what students know to what you want them to understand, in a shared conversational space built by both the student and the teacher. In an effort to reflect on my own analogy I said one of the flaws was that it left out my own intellectual location, presuming that I could work with students no matter where they were at. I'm glad I thought a little bit about that problem beforehand, because I wound up thinking about it quite a bit in the last three weeks. I think I had to build a lot of bridges of my own just to get from what I know (and how I know it) to what the students know and how they're thinking about things.
5. Writing about your own teaching can be educational even before anyone looks at it. In some ways, this statement is just about the benefit of reflecting on one's experience. I have been collecting information about my own teaching in the context of debate coaching for some months now, but I think that writing about teaching really forced me to organize my thoughts more productively than just remembering or even reviewing it. I've never been one for journaling in general (this blog is not a natural behavior for me if you are wondering), but in the last three weeks I've very much dug it. I hope that I can find time to keep a learning journal to continuously improve my future teaching practice.
   

I might go on I suppose, but I'll stick with those for now. Our class also read two books in the last two weeks, and I've been trying to think about what to write about those as well. Onward to classtime!

Mr. Smith goes to middle school

I'd post a picture of me with my MSU Tutor name tag, but this sentence along with the title will serve as sufficient description. I am now a tutor in a math class at a local middle school, and wowzers is it - middle school. See, I've been working with high school kids for the past eight years or so and to suddenly jump to middle school kids was darned strange. Middle schoolers seem like high schoolers in some respects: they are very diverse in terms of intellectual development, some of them are forward-looking and others live only in the moment. Unlike many high schoolers though, all middle school kids seem to constantly be in a massive state of flux.

In our last TE302 class period before three weeks of tutoring started today, we did an exercise where everyone posted a word about their middle school experience on the wall of our classroom. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that our class didn't have the most sanguine of middle school experiences. Only one person used "fun" as his word and there was sure a lot of "awkward" and its ilk on our walls. I think that that was an excellent reminder of just what we're stepping into with these tutoring situations, on top of all the other contextual bits and pieces we're seeing firsthand.

We have to post tutoring logs every day that answer three questions: what (describe an event), so what (name its importance), and now what (reflect on future implications). I think the compressed summer class format will yield some really intense development inside these tutoring experiences and the resulting discussions, for two reasons. First I think that being in the same classroom four days a week will lend a magnificent continuity not otherwise possible; we will become vital and supportive elements of functioning classrooms and who can resist getting pumped about that? Second, the discursive layer of reading, writing and responding to tutoring logs will be continually fresh in everyone's memory and that feels like just the right set of conditions for an honest-to-goodness three week long conversation between all of us at once. Hooray for the educational possibilities of sustained, reflective, critical dialogue!

Last thought for the day and I'll stop. We had to create a tutoring plan before starting to tutor; I turned mine in this morning, just-in-time delivery as is my wont. I wrote it as a themed paper around my favorite analogy to individual teaching encounters, that of bridge building. So today I wrote this tutoring plan and also my discussion posts for the same class, and the two had radically different tones. When I get my paper groove on I use a very specific voice in my writing: dry, intellectual, wears-big-glasses language like "to form inferential conclusions about aspects of pedagogical practice." When I wrote tutoring logs on the other hand I used decidedly casual, bloggy English like "hats off to substitute teachers!" I think both are authorial in the sense that I really do talk like both of those characters at different times, but I'm fascinated by how naturally I slip into them when the parameters of the assignment demand it. At my first tutoring day today, I used my informal banter voice most of the time, blithely tossing in "y'know" and "c'mon" and even sillier forms like "wassup with you folks?" (To my friends reading this, go ahead and have heart attacks while you imagine Orion acting like he owns this type of language.) What about you, other preservice teachers of America? Do you have one voice or many? Is this something you are (self) conscious about? When you talk to kids do you change your use of English, and if so how much depends on the kid? And the sixty four thousand dollar question - is it good to have different voices for different audiences?

I can't resist just one more, call it the sixty five thousand dollar question. Which of your authorial or conversational voices, if any do you think in?

Kozol, Straw Spaceships and Romanticism

Note: from now on, when a post is about an article my class is reading I'll try to start the post with the citation of the article. To save mental energy I'm going to copy and paste directly from the syllabus instead of re-locating the article, so I do apologize if the citation isn't perfect.

Kozol, J. (2005). Confections of Apartheid: A Stick and Carrot Pedagogy for the Children of Our Inner City Poor. Phi Delta Kappan, 87(4).

I didn't really like this article. Rephrase: I really didn't like this article. Sure, the schools in question were mechanistic and seemed very devoid of soul. I thought during his descriptions of the efficiency/authoritarianism measures taking place in many urban schools that I now know what it might be like to go to school in the Death Star. Clearly not desirable.

Still, I think that Kozol is comparing those schools to a very unclear, very idealized vision of suburban school that feels almost mushy in its romanticism. For example, one of the pullquotes in the article rhetorically asks "How much injury to state-determined 'purpose' would it do to let a group of children have a pumpkin party once a year for no other reason than because it's something fun that other children get to do on autumn days in public schools across most of America?" Go ahead, sympathetically shake your head at the absurdity of disallowing pumpkin parties, you know you want to. I felt tempted, but seriously. This one quote is so rich with troubles I honestly wonder why it made pullquote status. Let's enumerate:

1. Straw person fallacy: actually, the teacher in question had a party, she just had to try to justify its educational value. Me, I probably would have tried to use the pumpkin to talk about the historical origins of Halloween and the agricultural significance of foods like pumpkins, maybe the differences between Halloween in cities vs. towns. What Kozol doesn't say is that the kids in this class didn't enjoy the "multimodal pumpkin unit" the teacher thought up for them; if I had to guess, it was still fun. I would have been more sympathetic if he'd actually tried to justify the argument that fun for its own sake promotes good education somehow. Instead we get to tsk, tsk at an imaginary possibility: what if (gasp) the pumpkin party had never happened at all?
   


2. Bandwagon fallacy: this one's really easy. Yessir, everyone sure does have pumpkin parties in America. Why, just last week I listened to the national radio address condemning all Americans who didn't dance around gourds as unpatriotic. Plus, TE 250 anyone? How is pumpkin worship culturally relevant to these kids, or even "urban?" Maybe that quality of non-germaneness is what makes it educational, but if that's true what's this fuss about fun for fun's sake?
   


3. Sweeping generalization fallacy: to get at this I do need to quote a related phrase. "In some districts, even the most pleasant and old-fashioned class activities of elementary schools have been overtaken..." I would be curious to see the research (or theory, if we are to disdain the "determined emphasis upon empirical precision") that suggests just how pleasant and especially old-fashioned the pumpkin party is.
   

Here's another example that demonstrates the kind of empty contrast I'm having problems with. Kozol describes at length how in mechanized urban schools the bulletin boards are rigidly controlled and only describe perfect work, unlike "the lovingly assembled postings of the work of children that most grownups who attended school in decades past are likely to recall." Well I'm glad that in the good ole' days bulletin boards were assembled with love; did that make them good for kids?

Look, I don't disagree that if urban schools operate the way Kozol describes them that they have lots of problems. Kids regularly and uncritically referring to each other as "Level Fours" is horrifying evidence of depersonalization. Circular-logic methodology appears to be woven into the program such that the system becomes its own undefeatable champion. But indulge me if you will when I suggest the big-picture fallacy Kozol has up his sleeve, that if urban schools are bad then everything that suburban schools do that urban schools don't do must be good.

Well, I was wrong (and right about being wrong)

From what I can tell thus far, TE 302 is definitely different from TE 301. For example, we're not going to be focusing on just one child at a time when we work with kids at our tutoring site. At least, not necessarily; the cooperating teachers are going to divvy us up depending on their needs. This is different from the "child study" concept I've been reading about in Transforming Teacher Education. Our exercises pre- and post- tutoring have to do with at least four different themes:

• School context: we're writing about the "urban"-ness of the school site in comparison with other school settings.
  


• Planning instruction: we have to create a tutoring plan and then see how it mostly falls apart. I predict a lot of falling apart, since we won't know just who we're working with or how once we get there. (Is it fair to call this "planning to fail" on the part of the course designer?)
  


• Working in teams: I suspect that a lot of what we do won't be purely individual; it'll certainly be done in conjunction with teachers and may well be done with each other. Plus, we have to engage in lively discussions on our course website each night.


• Meta-cognition: we're going to be analyzing our own teaching quite a bit of course, though I think this will be omnipresent in all the TE courses from here on out.

Also I was definitely wrong about implications of the book selections for this semester. My instructor is changing the books and we won't be reading the Ladson-Billings book this semester. I might still read it online. Instead we're reading two different books during our tutoring time; I'll try to find out more about those soon too.

Heads up: from now on I will also be posting some reflections on the course reading material. Which sounds really pedestrian, I know; my hope is that I can shed light on what kinds of things the MSU TE program considers important reading for teachers.

Summer Semester 2008 ahoy!

Ahh, what a wonderful week off it's been!

Like many students, I'm not granted the luxury of time free from all commitments after the spring classes finish up. I work in two roles pretty much all year round, and so I worked as usual in the week after finals. Still, I got a great chance to catch up on stuff I've been putting off to survive finals week. What about you? Are you enjoying a summer back home? Are you going somewhere interesting, maybe an internship or a job? Perhaps like me you are taking summer courses here at MSU.

This summer I'm taking TE 302, "Learners and Learning in Contexts" as described by the scheduling tool. While I'm at it, here's the full description of the course from that website.

Role of social context and sociocultural background in learning at the secondary level (7-12). Natural and socially constructed differences among learners. Relationship among subject-specific knowledge, teaching and learning that subject, and the institutional and communal context. Multiple literacies.

I'm definitely curious about what kind of course this will be. I've been reading a book called Transforming Teacher Education, which I would recommend that every MSU TE student pick up at some point. The book describes many of the processes and struggles of changing MSU's Teacher Preparation program in the last 15 years, and some of the lessons learnt by those changing it. Specifically though it refers to the efforts of Team One, one of the faculty/staff teams designed to assist a group of preservice elementary teachers. According to the MSU TE website, it looks like those teams have now been revised or streamlined such that maybe there's one elementary team for the Lansing area, a Detroit area elementary team, and the secondary team.

Anyway, the book describes TE 301 as a course for learning about individual learners and trying to get inside their heads; I figured TE 302 would be the same thing, but swapping in older kids. Well, perhaps that was a bad assumption. Yesterday I picked up the books for the course, and one of the two books I found on the shelf is The Dreamkeepers by Gloria Ladson-Billings. We read a few different things by Ladson-Billings in TE 250, and I had even bookmarked The Dreamkeepers on the fantastic NetLibrary service (login through MSU Library electronic resources) to take a look at at some point. The subtitle of the book is "Successful Teachers of African American Children." So maybe I'm wrong about this idea of the course that I had. From what I understand, Ladson-Billings argues for culturally relevant pedagogy, which situates high expectations in culturally-relative contexts. Perhaps, then, TE 302 will be in some ways an extension of TE 250. I'll try and report back, once I'm into the course a little. I do hope that the time I spent reading Dewey's The Child and the Curriculum essay today will be fruitful given the emphasis that the Transforming Teacher Education book places on it; in any case it was certainly an interesting read, and I am left wondering if in addition to Hegelian dialectic Dewey was fond of Aristotelian ethics. We shall see!

One last note before summer classes begin: the first assignment for TE 302 is a presentation on why I am en route to teaching, a subject I do return to now and then. As a debate coach of many years now I will be presenting in simple oral format. While searching for TE 302 information on Google prior to this post, I came across this ultra-charming video on YouTube that from the date seems to be an end-of-semester retrospective on the subject.

I hope to see you around this summer!

The introduction

Welcome to the MSU Teacher Education Students blog.

This blog is about the experiences, emotions, thoughts and hopes of students in MSU's Teacher Preparation program. Our intent is to promote a reasonably open discussion of what goes on inside this program. We hope that this will help students interested in applying, as well as help us understand what we're doing ourselves.

Who can join

All students currently in MSU's Teacher Preparation program are invited to blog on this site. If you are a graduate of the Teacher Preparation program you are welcome to leave comments, and in future this blog may be extended to include you as a blogger as well. Everyone else in the wide Internet is invited to comment on blog entries.

Who am I

My name is Orion Smith. I am a student at MSU, accepted into the Teacher Preparation program and shortly to begin TE 302 this summer (2008).

Why you should join, even if you are scared of the Internet

The following is an essay. Please read it if the above heading speaks to you, or if you are otherwise curious.

Teachers (and students) are lately told to be afraid of having a presence on the Internet through sites like MySpace and Facebook and even/especially blog sites like this one. Why? Because potential employers, parents or even students can find you. The Internet also has a perfect memory that may hold you accountable for those drunken hijinks five years ago, or that really over the top teenage rant about hating your friend after she did whatever. Fair enough - the sordid portion of your past is your affair. I think though that part of the message actually received by teachers is the danger of identity; many people prefer (Internet) anonymity as a shield to hide behind and even snipe from.

Can we look deeper into why we are told to be afraid of ourselves?

Let's start with the tool. The Internet is an immensely powerful medium for publishing, and despite its vastness it's quite easy to hunt down the traces we leave behind. The new digital age demands new digital answers to age-old questions of responsible citizenship. This is of course especially true for those who operate in the public eye, or even just in the public sphere.

We are entering a profession where who we are and who we were will be scrutinized because we will be dealing with other peoples' children. In many ways, to be a teacher is to be a politician. We are responsible for serving a diverse constituency, which may judge and sentence us in the court of public opinion should we step out of the mainstream enough to be dangerous. The almost ridiculous ease of digging up someone's past makes guilt by association and even guilt by proximity into potent weapons to discredit and devalue a life's work.

In the United States, institutionalized power such as that wielded by educational systems is a contested commodity. With diverse political forces always pulling and pushing education into new directions, a fragile détente between those forces is achieved by way of mutually-assured sacrifice. When a teacher steps out of line s/he may be given up for the sake of preserving the political truce. The "L" word - liability - controls school boards and school administrations. It is into this climate of fear that we will step someday; small wonder some think we're better off just keeping our heads down whenever we can.

"I didn't ask for this kind of attention - all I wanted to do is teach kids."

"I don't like being in the spotlight."

"When I graduate from college, I want a fresh start."

Yes, I am partially critiquing the system. Everyone should see problems with the way education happens around them, simply because education really is important. And yes, as practitioners we'll only have limited power to change that system. To begin my real case, let's start with a simple question.

Ask yourself something for me. Why do you want to become a teacher, right now at this very minute? Why did you apply to the program in the first place? If the answer is "to serve the beneficence of the almighty State" please stop reading right now because I will never convince you. (If the answer is "because it pays well" you can stop reading too, to go get a reality check.) I think many people go into teaching because of ideals and beliefs about the value of education and the nobility of the profession of teaching. Perhaps the belief that "those that can't do, teach" is shared by many but I doubt by many teachers. If I'm right, if there is something idealistic about the why that will struggle to survive in the day-to-day of the how then you owe it to yourself to become not just a teacher but a great teacher. MSU's TE program strongly suggests that we must do, we must get out there while we're still learning to make that learning effective. Teachers exist in the public sphere, like it or not; who realistically believes that we can suddenly burst forth into that sphere after just keeping our heads down?

Hold that thought while I take us on a quick detour, we'll be back.

This spring (2008) I took TE 250, and as part of that course I participated in service learning time at Bingham Elementary's after-school program. This past Friday was the last day of that program and I finally worked up the courage to talk with its organizer, a gentle and thoughtful man named Archie Lake. Mr. Lake worked for GM and EDS for over 30 years in management, and though he's now retired from that role he wants to give back to his community through its education system. He substitute teaches all around Lansing, and Bingham's after-school program is his newest project since January 2008. I've been writing all semester about how the program is flawed and educationally inadequate; for instance each Monday the kids all had to copy down a writing sample from an overhead and this was great fodder for my criticism about keeping poor urban kids academically and socially stagnant. I even started questioning the kids about why they thought the exercise was "stupid" and tried to motivate the frustrated ones to do alternative writing. I was a hero in my own mind, able to frame myself as such in my papers.

Perhaps you've heard what pride goes before. Spring 2008 was Mr. Lake's first time running the after-school program, but did I bother to ask about that before it was over? As it turns out, he'd been frustrated too all spring - frustrated that between himself and a bunch of eager young folk we'd not come up with a better after-school program. Oh, he was happy that the kids were getting socialization time and weren't getting into real trouble, he even mentioned that that socialization might be the greatest benefit of these programs. But as I went into detail about how TE 250 students were there to help kids out academically while trying to learn lessons about society, Mr. Lake was telling me that he felt intimidated by new educational environments and that he was sad that the program lacked focus but wasn't sure just how to reshape it. He's been reading about after school programs and has some ideas, but at the same time isn't sure it's worth continuing his involvement. I couldn't help wondering; where were the TE students when opportunity kept hitting us over the head all semester long? We're no experts but we're not supposed to be sheep either. This had been the perfect chance for us to take the initiative and step up, but none of us even bothered to ask until it was too late. I walked out of that discussion feeling a far cry from the kid who earned his Eagle Scout rank a decade ago by committing himself to community leadership.

I'm writing my last paper for TE 250 in the next few days, and you had better believe that the incident I relayed just now is what it's about. The lesson I find in the story of Bingham and Mr. Lake isn't that people need to be taken down a peg to learn. The lesson isn't even new, in fact it's ancient. To create change you need to take risks, and for teachers those risks mean sticking your neck out in public. I should have stuck my neck out despite the inconvenience, despite how easy it was to feel good about my pathetically tiny little acts of "resistance" with individual kids. I hope it's not too late to try, though. I won't make promises yet because I don't know enough about the future, but I am going to see what I can do to help make Bingham's after-school program better by talking to Mr. Lake and to the MSU Service Learning folk and to Bingham's principal and to other folks who can help.

I'm not a teacher, not yet. I haven't had all the formal training that allows the state to certify me, I'm sure I have a lot to learn in the Teacher Preparation program and there are probably many teaching activities I'm legitimately not ready for. But it is already past time for me to get involved, putting my face in front of people who can disapprove and pushing my words into the "real world." I could have been a lot more selective in the previous paragraphs to paint myself as a better person throughout this story but I didn't. Context matters; one way of understanding teaching is making context matter. So the Internet will record this post for posterity, and someday I hope that someone will even ask me about it. For what am I doing by providing the context and the story and my hope for the future, if not teaching.

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