Life is Now

"I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living."

Dewey, 1897

I wish I would have written this right after class rather than 2 days later.
I am grateful, however, that I wrote some notes so I could attempt to remember what I learned.

I was a bit nervous about the length of class on Friday -- what are we going to talk about for 5 HOURS. But, the time ended up passing rather quickly and I was engaged in each of our three locations.

The first part of class I spent with Kristin, and actually learned some pretty valuable things. Ctrl + F? What? That is incredible, how did I not know that.  Furthermore, how did I successfully make it through undergrad without it. (dramatic? maybe.) I also didnt know all of the features of Google - wonderwheel, timeline, etc. I think these new 'gems' will be valuable in my life from here on out. Plus, wonderwheel is just fun.

Time with Jeff I felt was  insightful, both from personal reflection and group dialogue.  I especially liked the Dewey quote above, and had noted it in my reading.  I mentioned in class that I resonated with this quote strongly because I have gone through this process for the past year; I came home from a summer internship (that changed my life in many ways, but had little to do with future career advancement) and thought to myself, "ok, once I get a job and a salary and health care, life can start." It was through the experiences of trial and error, taking minimum wage jobs that I didnt want, and struggling to rejoice in the successes/jobs of my friends while I continued to try and figure my plan out that I realized that life wasnt going to start when I landed a job -- life is NOW.

Something i noted from the discussion in Jeff's half of class was making a connection between life in the classroom and life outside of the classroom for students.  Is their real, authentic, most connected life maintained within the walls of the school, outside in the parameters of their community, or is there  a way to connect these two worlds? This I think is true for adults, as well (home life vs work life).  this is a dichotomy I wish wasnt as prevalent as I perceive it is -- that life could somehow be singular and made of different elements, but maintain the same personality and persona in both places.  I think, though, that it is more common for lives to be put on and taken off with a nametag or suit then to be kept on like skin. Kiwi's comment that in high school he was "assembling identity and figuring out who I was" was intriguing to me, because I have never really been able to articulate how I have understood who I was, or the path of getting there.  How do we progress toward realizing fully who we are -- and do we ever actually reach that point? I dont have an answer.

And then came the afternoon.  In our group (social studies) I think I pissed some people off because I kept asking throughout our lesson planning, "so what?'  While i felt the ideas that we were communicating on what we wanted students to take away, the practicality of it was a neceessary factor for me. It is extremely valuable for students to know how to differentiate between primary, secondary, etc documents, but the idea of asking them to identify examples of each with no future plan for what to DO with the results left me asking.... so what? That spurred some brainstorming that I felt was extremely fruitful and our end (...ish...) result was something I was proud of.  I think its a process taht I didnt realize was so time and thought consuming, and I am interested to see how my question "so what" takes on different importance and meaning in my various future lesson plans.  For this class, our result was a true colaboration of everyone's ideas, and something that I think could actually be used well in the classroom. It was enlightening for our content group, I think, to think of our subject in a practical way, and interesting to work on our first lesson plan AND our first wiki with 10 other people.  A challenge, but one that yielded a positive result.

grace&peace,
emily

PS I cant deprive you of a clip. In the spirit of looking to fix BP's epic flub, here is the second installment of Oscar Rogers, Financial Consultant (skip ahead to 5:02). I think the suggestion Oscar offers can transcend to the oil spill.