... aiming for the stars...

As I was not able to post in my blog last week, I decided to add some reflections to this week’s posting. There were some things that seemed very interesting for me about last week readings, and I cannot avoid making reference to them.


First of all, I just loved the text Teaching Naked: Why Removing Technology from Your Classroom Will Improve Student Learning (http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/postings/786.html). It may sound controversial to have an e-course on webskills and say that I am fan of a text which title says to remove internet from the classroom. At first that sounded weird to me too. But after reading the text, I saw that the point the author want to state is that the good management of our class time includes using only what is necessary in class, leaving things that can be done by the students individually, as a preparation or complement of the lesson, like using the net, for example. That leads to our topic this week, which is autonomy. I am also very fan of it, keep telling my colleagues, we must teach our students how to learn, then they will learn by themselves. If we do not give them the tools they need, we cannot ask results from them. For example, if our students have never been taught how to search words in the dictionary and find the best definition or synonym for a word, how can we give them an exercise that requires this and expect them to do it?

I wrote in my application for this course that I “strongly believe that the key to work with many students in class is to motivate and teach them to work alone, so that they become independent, and responsible for their learning”. We have to want them to become active, keeping in mind that this does not make us totally passive, but in a different acting position.

Now, I would like to address here a comment Sandra Jeffs did when commenting on a colleague’s posting this week: “We must have good classroom management, motivate students, teach our curriculum, and notice all the subtlies happening with and between our students, etc. Teachers are blamed for a great deal of perceived deficiencies in education. So, are we teachers "super people?"If we think we are "super people" are we setting ourself up for problems when things don't go "perfectly?"

Well, I don’t think we are super people. What I have seen in my teaching life is that we want this label when things are great, but we deny it totally when things don’t work well. And I totally agree with Sandra, since she herself gave an extraordinary answer, saying that “we teachers need to keep our feet on the ground, while at the same time aim for the stars”.

I am surely aiming for the stars, as well as this group and all the other unique teachers I was lucky enough to meet in my life.

Special regards for Roland, for sharing his project with me and for his great words about mine. Thanks!

Marcia