Before and After - July 9 class

Hi, Jeff --

Whew -- I don't know about you, but I was happily exhausted by 4:00 today. I really enjoyed our classroom conversations as well as watching students. The blog posts written before class showed a lot of thinking about Dewey and technology and Web resources that got me excited.  I really enjoy watching thinking unfold on the blogs. As your mentor Fred said -- we may not get paid much for teaching, but we get paid a lot for learning!

One thing we talked about at lunch was Dewey's "sentimentalism" statement in Article IV of his manifesto.

I believe that next to deadness and dullness, formalism and routine, our education is threatened with no greater evil than sentimentalism.

I believe that this sentimentalism is the necessary result of the attempt to divorce feeling from action.

We both pondered what this meant to us, and in a post-class conversation with someone, I think I got an idea.  He said that when people say teaching is a calling, we actually sell ourselves short because the emotional tug behind that statement starts to override the sense of teacher-as-professional. It's something I thought about the whole way home: the balance between the emotions and the professionalism of being a K-12 educator.

One other quote from the readings that hit me hard today was Dewey's quote that it would be "stupid" to just surround kids with materials and let them completely figure things out on their own.  Just give them a laptop/iPhone/iPad/Kindle/interactive white board and watch them go," has pervaded a lot of ed tech guru thinking. I rather like being able to quote Dewey as saying that it's "stupid" so we can move on and really think about how great technology integration can move students beyond their plateau.

I'm really looking forward to next week, when we'll talk about personal learning networks that sustain us once we're in practice, with Buffy (part of my network) and Susan talking about what it happens when technology is leveraged to really put students in the driver's seat for better learning. I learn something from Buffy each time we talk and can't wait to hear what our students take away from their presentation.  And I'm really eager to meet Susan!