End of Term

Time to dust off the cobwebs and post a new entry. We are at the end of the dead rush to Christmas break, all my grades are in and I have to brag about some the wonderful work that my students created this term. My computers in education class was a great group and their ends of term collections were wonderful. We worked with teaching through narrative and in the integration of animation in to illustrate the points in each lesson. The concept is to develop a story and to work the lesson objectives around that story. My students developed media narratives such as one that featured an alien who needed more oxygen on his planet (a lesson in photosynthesis), one where a young girl who met her brain which then explained the functions of her other organs, and another about a young girl who needed to budget to buy snacks (learning to count money) and so many other really wonderful ideas. A full collection creative approaches that were on target and anything but boring. I think Santa came early this year.

Crayons and the First Day of School

I was standing in line at an office supply store and looked down into a display filled with that faultless symbol of childhood, crayons. There they were all lined up in their neat little rows like little solders just waiting for orders from commanding little fingers. Perfect points and neat wrappers. Bright happy colors just waiting to work outside the lines.

I just had to hold a box to experience that instant memory of school days. Just one sniff and you can remember how important this was to you at the beginning of school. You always wanted a new box and the teacher always sent a long list of supplies that you followed your mother around to collect. There would be Big Chief tablets with the Indian drawing on front, Number 2 pencils, a ruler and maybe some glue or scissors. In the lower grades there would be jars of paste that the teacher would have to stop all the boys from eating. As the years progressed, these would be replaced by glue sticks that would get too hot and melt in your desk. A packet of construction paper that would never have enough blue sheets but way too many orange sheets would go in the cart and notepads with wide lines to practice handwriting.

There were always items in the stores that were not on the list that you secretly wanted your mother to buy but you knew better than to ask since the list was long and the store was too crowded and you were getting a lot of new things anyway. But the best purchase of all was that box of crayons.

I always wanted the box of 64 with the built-in sharpener. I could not imagine any possession more decadent than this. Sixty-four colors!! And the points would always be sharp! I would try to convince my mother of the necessity of this purchase and she would always point to the list and we would buy the 8 or 16 count box that was required. Of course on the first day of school there would always be one kid who would have that box, and the rest of us would watch with envy as he used his impossibly grand selection of colors and covered his desk with crayon shavings. It was the definition of wealth when you were five years old.

In later years, the teachers would collect all our crayons on the first day of school and dump them into a box for all of us to share. I always disliked this because I tried very hard not to break my crayons and this method insured that someone would decide to “share” by breaking one in half. No more neat little rows of possibilities, now you had to hunt for that leaf green and the point would always be broken and the wrapper reduced to dingy grey.

But today I was looking an army of unspoiled soldiers and as I was inhaling their wonderful aroma I could not help but notice the older man behind me in line looking at me as if I had lost my mind.

I looked at him and smiled.

“Pick one up and try it; it is the very essence of your childhood”

And to my surprise he did.

He sighed and then smiled a smile that had just been waiting to be rediscovered.

And then he put the box in his cart next to his printer cartridges.

So once again crayons had help color my world outside the lines. And it was the perfect way to begin another semester.

On Not Working

Most people when you tell them you work in education assume that they know exactly what that is all about since everyone went to school and so everyone is an expert on what teachers do. I am now in the middle of the famous “break”; you know the one that all professors enjoy where we lounge at home in our spacious private libraries, drink fine wines and sample French cheese with our colleagues while we devise new mental torments for students for next term.

Except I have no spacious library, cannot afford good wine and (heresy!) I do not like French cheese. All my colleagues have vanished from the live campus so that we can clean up the paperwork from the last term before the new term begins.

I have a nice little stack of paperwork of my very own; reports to write, records to update and some bookkeeping to catch up on for a professional society. I spent most of this past week out of town working on a new engineering graphics book and I did spend one day doing nothing really useful except for getting my hair done.

Now I suppose I could get to work on the mental torment bit . . . but then why would we need computer systems? I have just received a notice to change my password so that I do not lose system access and I love how this always seems arrive to when I am most likely to overlook this notice. I bet that most students are not even thinking about campus e-mail the first week after finals. Perfect timing.

Excellence Awaits- End of Term Grading

My room is now covered in neat stacks of end of term exams, papers and portfolios waiting for my review. I used to dread this end of the term flood but I have changed my opinion on this.

It is really pretty exiciting.

Those stacks contain the sum of what my students have learned this term. Each paper is a snapshot of where someone is in their life. Some are wonderful, some middling and some not-so- great. They reveal what is important to people, how they chose to spend their time, their best efforts and the I-hope-I-get-by prayers. They are little windows into people's hopes and priorities.

They also tell me how I did as a teacher. What I taught well and what was a crash and burn. What people valued in the class and what was a got-to-get-through moment. After I score everything, I will take stock of where I am and what I need to improve for next time. Then I will write these ideas down so I can make use of them the next time I teach that course.

Pretty good stuff - a chance to improve as a teacher and understand my students better. Not a bad way to end the term. It is worth a few extra pots of coffee.