real... for a moment

When I was in school and we got a student teacher, we loathed the idea of some kid coming in and using all his/her fancy teaching techniques.

Yet lately in my blog, that's all I've been talking about. Silly fancy new teaching techniques. Coming up with these ideal classroom intricacies when I know deep down inside it won't be at all near that ideal.

You always vow to never become like your parents, but then you get older and find yourself doing just that. Real life scares you to death so you fall back on the only thing you know: your own upbringing. Which can't be all that bad, since it got you that far. And what if your harebrained alternate ideas don't work?

To bring it all together, in a way I did not want to become just another teacher like the dozens I had, yet finding myself thinking, even if the alternatives worked, would they be all that better? Reflecting (how many is this? 9?) back on my high school days, the best teachers weren't the ones who dressed up like Abraham Lincoln or danced around the classroom or paused and praised me, they were the ones who merely knew and loved their subject. In this class, it's almost like we talk about lecturing as the disease of teaching, yet a good lecture is worth much more than an activity.

I'm really long-winded, I'm sorry, but one last example: we learn strategies like selling your topic by making it sound important to the student's life. But do I remember any reasoning behind my high school geology teacher's subject? I couldn't tell you even today why it's important to study geology, but I remember being interested in it anyway because my teacher loved it so much, and my learning was important to him. Same with the football coach who taught US history. Yet, they say that not until you fully understand the rules are you allowed to break them. Bring it on, TEE 276.

reaching the outliers

I took a class at UVSC called Interactive Design, and the text was this book written by an ex-Microsoft employee about programmers vs. designers. One of the main points was that programmers think like programmers and therefore frustrate people who don't think the same way. The author worked as a consultant and demonstrated the fix. When designing an interactive product, he wouldn't focus on the people who would automatically understand, he focused on the people who would have the hardest time.

For example, when designing a movie selection system for an airplane, he created four (4) characters he wanted to reach. One character was an old man, who gets on the airplane, and suddenly has a choice of what movie to watch. The author designed the system to be easy to understand by this man, and that's how he was so successful.

Back to teaching, one of my biggest focuses at the moment is the same thing. I'm not worried about reaching the students who are already interested, I'm worried about reaching those that don't seem to get it, and feel like they never will.

As far as reflecting on the readings, I like how it somewhat objectively presents ideas and doesn't seem to say that one or another is IT, but it just seems to say, hey, here's something you can try. But at the same time it feels like a lot of these (at least the examples) are for elementary kids.