Facebook is Weird

I.

A month or so ago, I presented a session at the annual Day of Encouragement held here on our campus. The session was entitled "Ministering to 'Digital Natives'" and I was pleased that quite a few people showed up. As folks were coming in the room, I was surprised and amazed how many of them I knew: one of my best friends in the world, a couple of colleagues from here at the college, several of my former students (both from my days teaching middle school, and my current prof life), a young woman who used to babysit our kids when they were little, church friends, and even my former youth pastor from my high school days in southern California. It was a weird mash-up of different parts of my life, all in the same room. I joked that this was a little bit like Facebook.

Image by Jo Alcock [CC BY-SA-NC 2.0]

So I Was On a Podcast...

My friend and colleague in education, Erik Ellefsen, recently started a podcast, and he asked if I would be a guest. It took a little time for us to get our schedules in sync so we could actually have a chat, but we finally did, and the episode was just released this week.

Erik and I first met up on Twitter several years ago, mostly as a result of my original #nomorecrappyhomework blog post, which I posted back in 2015, and has had over 3500 views as of this writing. We've kept in touch regularly via Twitter since then, and when he gets to NW Iowa we've been been able to hang out. I always appreciate his thoughtfulness about the role of innovation in education, and the way he challenges other educators to be the best that they can possibly be. If you're on Twitter, give Erik a follow. You won't be sorry!

In this episode, he shares a bit of the story of how we met up, and then we visited about the impetus for my research into homework--including my own dissatisfaction with the crappy homework I used to assign as a middle school teacher. If you're interested, you can listen in here...

Teachers Defending Schools?

It's been a bit since my last post, but I have continued thinking a lot about school shootings, and gun control, and all of the craziness in the media from the left and the right on the topic.

In particular, I've been thinking about everything that teachers are expected to do. It's pretty amazing, really. When I was trained as a teacher...I was trained, well, to teach. I was trained to write lesson plans. I was trained to understand different pedagogical approaches, and how to choose appropriate methods for the content I was to teach. I was trained to assess my students' learning. In my student teaching experience, I had the opportunity to practice these skills, and to learn firsthand about connecting with students, about managing a classroom, and about all sorts of pragmatic requirements of being a teacher...like navigating the line at the copier in the morning, and how to ensure that the custodian remains your friend.

But the profession has definitely changed in the 20 years since I began teaching. And teachers today are expected to perform many, many more tasks than "just teaching." One of these tasks? Apparently, teachers are now also expected to be prepared to lay down their lives defending their schools. No, seriously.