Random Thoughts

In a comment on my earlier post about Orwell’s 1984, Lesley said she is reading Orwells’s diaries in blog form.  I think I might have heard about this before, but I had never checked it out until Lesley mentioned it.  And now I am reading the diaries, too.

There is an introductory post that talks about the diaries, the two basic types: personal and political.  In the personal entries he writes about the weather, plants, preserving fruit, and finding snakes.  These aren’t topics I would imagine Orwell writing about, and the very fact that the topics are so ordinary makes the posts interesting.    I look forward to continuing to read and learn more about Orwell through his diaries.  If you haven’t checked them out, I would recommend that you do.

Dzen over at Teacher Connections, Global Reflections had a post about getting to know our students.  It is always good to be reminded of that, isn’t it?  I got another reminder of that this week. A couple of them, actually.

I have small classes, and one class in particular only has 5 students.  We spend time talking, asking and answering questions and such, but the other day I realized that the class isn’t really much fun.  And it should be — at least some of the time!  So I decided to play Truth or Lie? with them.  I started by writing five “facts” about myself on the board. They had to decide which one was the lie.  I was amazed at how close they had listened to different things I had said over the last 6 weeks.  Most of them had no trouble finding the lie at all.  Then I asked for someone else to do the same.  This student was one who is quite outgoing, so we knew a lot about her, but it was still a little difficult to decide which statement was the lie.  We went around the room, each person taking her or his turn.  We had a very hard time deciding sometimes.  And with one student in particular, I realized that I knew almost nothing about her.  I didn’t have a clue which statement was false, and neither did the other students.

Before I knew it, the 50 minutes were over.  What I had thought would be a quick 10-15 minute activity before we got into the “real” work of the course, turned out to be a wonderful learning experience.  We had spent the entire time talking to each other in English.  But more importantly, we got to know each other a little better.  And I learned which students I needed to pay more attention to, to  learn even more about.

And today I had a student in the program come to my office.  He isn’t in any of my classes, but he had come to apologize to me for having missed several ESL classes lately.  Actually, he is a student an instructor had talked to me about.  She is worried about him and wanted to let me, as program director, know what has been going on.  How he ended up in my office today isn’t really clear, but I am really glad he came.  We talked about his classes, about his homesickness, about the fact that he doesn’t like to get up in the morning.  By the end of the time, he was actually smiling.  And I realized it was the first time I had ever really seen him smile like that.

While I think all teachers should really get to know their students as people, as ESL instructors, it is even more critical.  Our students are away from home, probably most of them alone and for the very first time in their lives.  They need someone they can trust, someone they can talk to.  I know even with my adult students last year, many would talk to me about their personal lives because they literally had no one else they felt they could turn to.  If we are to busy to listen, what will happen?  But they won’t talk to us if we haven’t set up a classroom environment where they feel comfortable and that they are getting to know us as people, too.  If the curriculum is the only thing that can go on in class, we all lose out.

So it is good to be reminded that we need to get to know our students as people

For those of us old enough to remember, 1984 was an interesting year.  We had grown up with George Orwell’s book, and there was a part of us that had a hard time accepting that 1984 had come and, eventually, gone.  1984 was almost synonymous with “the future”, and then it was the present and finally the past.  Many people read the book again then.  I wasn’t one of them.  But when Dan at Open Culture posted about a download of the book, I was right there.

As soon as the download ended, I opened the file and began to listen.  This is a professionally done audiobook.  The reading allows the force of Orwell’s writing to shine. It is definitely worth your time.

The opening portion of the book, to which I am listening as I write this, is truly amazing. I had forgotten how powerful the story is.  Orwell’s writing is wonderful.

What he talks about is important, too. There is, of course, the message of the book.  While it might now have meant much to us in 1984, it seems very appropriate in 2008.  But beyond that — or actually as part of that — he talks about the power of words and of writing.  He also talks about writing to think.  He talks about writing improving with practice.  It seems a much more contemporary book than it is.

I would encourage you to download the book and listen to it.  It can be streamed or downloaded in its entirety or in parts here.  Check it out.

Joao has an interesting post about online communities.  There is a link to some mind maps on the subject.  One I particularly liked, “A community is a group of individuals who…”, can be found here.

As I prepare to teach anothe semester of an online course on critical thinking, I am very interested in building community.  Last semester I had a group of isolated students.  They didn’t like learning online.  They were taking the course because it was a requirement, not because they wanted to.  Most of them never invested in the course or in each other.  This semester I really want it to be better.

According to Joao and his mind map,

A community is a group of individuals who:

• have a stronger sense of identity
• have common interests
• have frequent/regular interaction
• are able to transcend their differences
• share common characteristics
• share experiences
• share a sense of altruism
• share a sense of reciprocity
• share a sense of beneficence
• aim to achieve goals for their common good
• enjoy a successful shared experience
• work for the good of the group and each other

My students have have all of those qualities in a general sense in their physical lives.  They all live in the same country, under the same conditions.  They are almost all altruistic and believe in working for the good of others.They believe in the value of diversity. But in an online class, they have none of these characteristics.  This is something I have to spend some time thinking about and working on.  If I want my class to be a short-term online community, if I want students to invest in the class in that way, I hve to do the work to make it happen.  The question is how.

Didn’t I finish that last post by saying I wouldn’t mind being a little ahead of the game?  Well, I don’t think I meant it in this way, but I have just spent the last couple hours getting ahead of the game — and of myself, probably.

I decided it was time to update the CV on my portfolio, so I spent some time doing that.  Then I looked at the links to my wikis and WebQuests and such.  And from there, it was all down hill.  Wikidot, where I have the wiki I used for my WebQuests and such a couple years ago very innocently asked me if  wanted to start another wiki.  So I decided to set up a new wiki to use next semester and beyond with my students here at ENMU.  I took one of my Webquests from the old wiki and recycled it into the new wiki.  It was easy to do from a backup that wikidot let me make in about a minute.  So I guess I am on my way to using a lot more social media this next semester.

I have come to realize how narrow using WebCT has made the class.  Well, maybe narrow isn’t the right word.  Linear is a better description, I guess.  And I don’t think I want my class to be so linear.

But anyway, here I am on a Friday night working on a class that won’t start until late January.  That is seriously ahead of the game!

I have been stymied as I have tried to get some professional writing done recently.  It’s like there has been a block of some kind.  More accurately, I guess, I just haven’t been able to focus on any one topic.  Every time I would start writing in one direction, my mind would go off in another.  Finally I realized that I was not following what I know to be good advice:  Write to find out what it is you want to write about.  Once I did that, it became clear that one topic I wanted to write about (using writing in an oral skills class) wasn’t ready to be written about.  Instead, an idea that I hadn’t really considered before (how I am using VOA materials) became the obvious topic to discuss.  So I have started writing and am actually getting somewhere.

In our next weekly get together for the High Plains Writing Project teacher-consultants in the Portales area we are going to bring something to read to the group.  I guess I am going to read what I have written so far on this piece.  I am a little hesitant because no one else there teaches ESL.  No one else teaches at the college level.  No one else has to do professional writing.  I guess those aren’t the real reasons I am hesitant, though.  I am always hesitant to read to the group.  But I think professional pieces are harder because the listener can’t always relate.  But I have to trust the process.  Reader-response groups always give me good ideas. Somehow they see through to the writing.  Hopefully after sharing this piece with the group I will be able to see my way through to finish it.  While I don’t have to actually have something published by January, I am supposed to have something well underway and/or submitted.  I would love to be ahead of the game a little.  We’ll see what happens.

Jane had a link to Nasa eClips today, and I went to check it out.  I am really glad I did.  I am in the midst of  looking for ideas for next semester, and I think I have a good one! Thanks, Jane!

Over at Practical Theory, Chris has a post that I think is important.  He is talking about Citizenship, the Workforce and the Ethic of Care.  Referring to the work of Nel Noddings, he focuses on the idea of preparing students for the 21st Century workforce.  That is a very important issue.  Lehman argues, as I think we all should, that this is too narrow a definition of education.   He calls for education to prepare 21st century citizens who can find their place in the world.  He talk about this as being a way that we show students that we care about them.  On that question, he says, in part:

Noddings argues that so many students don’t think that teachers care about them and yet so many teachers do. What is the cause for this? One of the powerful arguments that Noddings makes is that the standards — and I would argue, standardization — movement has created an objectification of students. We search for the best way to teach some mythological “student” object and then attempt to craft systems where all students are taught that way. What we have done, in the service of worthy ideals, is create a distance between teacher and student and the distance between is a mandated curriculum where the “why” of what we teach is rarely questioned and the “what” is defined in such a way that students end up feeling that teachers care more about the subjects they teach than the students they teach.

Now, I don’t teach K-12.  I am spared the standardization issue that Lehman refers to.  I have no mandated curriculum.   And yet, I wonder if my students all know that I care about them.  Where does the emphasis in my class lie: on the material or on the students?   That is a question I want to think about as I start this week.

Well, today, three weeks after the first step in the installation of fiber optic internet to our house and exactly as promised them by the installer, we have internet.  I am so excited!

But actually, I have almost enjoyed this little break.  I don’t know that I accomplished a lot more, but it was a change.

Now, though, I am back.  So no excuses for not posting!

I absolutely love living in Portales.  As a college town, it has so much to offer.  There is literally something going on every night of the week!  Monday night my husband and I went to a Flamenco performance by Miguel Bernal. For free!  It was truly amazing. Friday two photography exhibits open in town, and we are going to go. There is more to see and do than we have time and energy to take advantage of.

On top of that, we have all the advantages of a small town.   I walk to work every day.  We know our neighbors.  When our dog got out, the  university student who lives across the street found a way to get him back in the yard and then cam later to apologize for not getting the fence back exactly the way it had been before.  (Which obviously hadn’t been too good, since the dog got out!)

There are drawbacks, of course.  Like the fact that our internet still hasn’t been hooked up.  Portales has fiber optic to the home, but our home had never had the service, so we are having to wait for all the different steps to be done.  It is supposed to happen this week, but…  I guess there has to be some downside to living here!