To be fairly honest, I have never really thought about the details that go into teaching a class before this year. I always just assumed that teachers showed up and taught a subject. I never thought about the goals that teachers had and the amount of planning that went into that class. Yet, as we have delved into the education sector of digital media literacy in the last couple of weeks, I have began noticing the material that my professors bring to class and imagine them preparing for that lecture days before. I have started to imagine my political science professor rehearsing his seemingly non-stop hour-long lectures. It’s almost artful.

Teaching at the Middlebury Union Middle School forced me to reflect on America’s current education dilemma.

Mrs. SantaMaria’s class was very exemplary of the modern American educational experience. It has clearly made strives as far as the introduction of technology goes (providing students with netbooks), but still has some flaws that alienate students from the full experience. The path to creating a more successful education system in America is making early pathways for students who seem disinterested in learning. Primary education teachers need to create more engaging material from a young age in order to develop a mindset in which students of all backgrounds are able to enjoy school. I believe that we have the resources to pull this off. We simply need to be able to create a structure that effectively funds and incentivizes education programs with a multitude of entry points. Overall, the experience was exciting and made me reflect on my primary educational experience greatly.

– Murph

I can’t recall a time when I have been more nervous than when I walked into classroom 212 on Monday morning. It was like being back in middle school, seeing those small kids, feeling the barely-formed social dynamics like humidity in the air. I was terrified. Our lesson, however, seemed to work out. Despite a few technical glitches that came out of miscommunication and our lack of ability to prepare our lesson in the actual classroom, by the end of thirty minutes we had reached the point we wanted to reach. Almost all the students had a working knowledge of Google Docs, and some were even able to form well thought out ideas about what its potential virtues and vices might be.

It occurred to me, about half-way through the lesson, that one of the key components of teaching is knowing how the classroom dynamic works. This is something that can only be understood through spending time with any given class. As a visiting teacher I had no idea what these kids knew or were capable of, and I felt I wasn’t really able to provide a quality lesson without this information. In a broader sense we weren’t quite sure exactly where our lesson fit into the continuity of the class content-wise. No amount of correspondence with the teacher (and believe me, there was no lack in that respect) would have provided enough context to yield a completely fulfilling and seamless lesson. We just had to do the best we could with the situation, which was a valuable experience. It also increased my awareness of the importance of telos in teaching pedagogy: a skilled teacher can move toward a distinct set of end-of-term goals with each lesson, while an unskilled teacher provides decontextualized lessons that don’t fit into a larger teleological model of learning. I thought our lesson fit well enough into the current of the class to be useful, but it didn’t feel unified with the rest of the curriculum.

-epn

At my high school, it felt like every other week a speaker came to talk to us about the dangers of technology. We heard horror stories of people not getting into college because of their Facebook profiles, of people being sued for sending out suggestive photos of others, and of stalkers pursuing people through information found on the internet. Cyber security is vastly important, and that’s what my partner and I are trying to get across to our middle schoolers tomorrow. Firstly, choosing what you put online is key for maintaining a private life. Secondly, choosing privacy settings greatly affects cyber security.

Tomorrow, Sebastian and I are going in to a middle school math class. We plan to talk specifically about Facebook and its privacy settings. Using math, we will try to get the students to calculate their audiences for different posts. How many people can see your posts to “Friends?” Well, that depends on how many friends are on your friend list. But, how many people can see posts to “Friends of Friends?” My calculations amounted to some 827,000 people. “Public?” That could be any one of 1.15 billion Facebook users.

The thing I love about math is that it puts concrete measurements – numbers – on concepts. When math is applied to something like Facebook audience, it really sets in the reality of who can see my posts! I planned and created this lesson, and I was still affected when I calculated that almost a million people could see my photo albums that are set to “Friends of Friends.”