Future Teacher, Forever Student

One of my favorite things about studying education is the opportunity to read, watch, or even hear another educator speak about their views on learning theories, teaching strategies, content delivery, and best practice. While I tend to read more about general teaching strategies and the major learning theories that form the foundation of education–based philosophy and thought, I recently took the opportunity in one of my education courses to read a book about teaching the humanities! Written by James W. Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me , I’ve spent the past few weeks reading Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History. Stuffed full of criticisms for the modern U.S. social studies curriculums and textbooks, Loewen’s Teaching What Really Happened had me cheering at many points, questioning my own experiences at others, and respectfully disagreeing at his remaining arguments. With a central focus on teach

Fall is again in the air here at Saint Michael's College, where flannels, a St. Mike's sweatshirt, and anything Patagonia or L.L. Bean tend to be the staples of low fifties to about seventy-degree weather. Yesterday morning, after I convinced myself that I would be more productive out of my bed than I would be under my warm blankets, I tugged on my own L.L. Bean jacket before heading to a short workshop run by a St. Mike's professor on teaching college students with disabilities. Showered by the falling of October's colorful leaves and enjoying the sun's warm light while I still can, my mind wandered to an incident from a few weeks ago that I have been thinking about ever since it happened, and as I arrived at the workshop, I was determined to learn as much as I could about adopting teaching practices that keep student disabilities in mind. After all, I would not want to put my own students into a situation similar to the one I recently encountered as a student in

Hello! It has been a long summer and a rapid start to my last year as an undergraduate at Saint Michael’s College, but I am excited to be back in the classroom (both at St. Mike’s for my senior Education and American Studies courses, and Essex Middle School for my final placement and student teaching)! Before the student teaching semester begins, most secondary education students at St. Mike’s wrap up their studies with two courses focused on classroom particulars: teaching in an inclusive classroom, and approaches to teaching in your specific content area (which, for me, is humanities). As the title of this blog post suggests, I would like to reflect on some recent conversations and learning from my Teaching in an Inclusive Middle/High School Classroom course, namely those regarding the history and development of inclusive law. The idea that all students, no matter their race, ethnicity, religion, intellectual or physical ability, etc. should have access to free, public, app

Out of any word in the English language, I think I am most intimidated by “power.” It is full of contradictions: Power provokes a sense of accomplishment while implying the achievement and maintenance of power requires competition, hierarchy, and domination. Power is given and taken easily, and it yields to external factors beyond its control. Some people fear power, others are generous with it, and still more meet their doom when pride becomes its companion. Power allows for advancement. It provides a sense of order and control, but it can also create and fuel chaos. Individuals, groups, small islands, and large nations all possess a certain degree of power. As a future educator, the environment of my classroom will depend entirely on how I and my students handle the power we are given in our teacher-student relationships. More importantly, my power as a potential change-maker in their lives— through traditional lessons, personal relationships, worldly guidance, and honest compassion

Before there were formalized schools, there were living rooms, church halls, back steps, battlefields, and the great outdoors. Education came in all shapes and sizes, from the modern understanding of “traditional” study through the analysis of past writings and artifacts to the natural signals one learned to recognize on the farm before an approaching storm. Students were not just young people hunched over a book shielded from the world behind brick walls. They were citizens learning how to manage a family business, reading and printing newspapers, planting seeds, plowing land, and striving to better prepare themselves for the future, whatever it held for them. Today’s students aim to do the same. Yet their education seems to have restricted itself to the boundaries of school property, or perhaps it occasionally wanders beyond county lines. What happened to learning about your environment— and all the life that lived and lives within it— by experiencing everything it has to offer fir