Life In Notes

After viewing "Build A School In The Cloud", the Ted Talk from Sugata Mitra, I had many thoughts rush over me.  Why are teachers even in a classroom?  Is what we do meaningless?  Can a computer teach students?  I had A LOT of questions.  But as I began to think about the questions some more, I inherently knew the answers to all of these questions. Schools were created over three hundred years ago by the British Empire.  The technology back then, as mentioned by Mitra was the bureaucratic machine.  It was technology built by people.  If you were able to read and write, had neat handwriting and were able to add, subtract, multiply and divide...you could be a part of something bigger than yourself. Technology has changed throughout the years as have the ways that we use technology.  My technology growing up in the late 70's and early 80's was vastly different than the technology that is used today.  That said, people find a way to adapt wi...

After spending time listening to the Ted Talk of Sherry Turkle called "Connected, but alone?" and reading the article " Anti-Teaching: Confronting The Crisis Of Significance " by Michael Wesch, my initial thoughts were that there wasn't much of a connection between the two theories.  Turkle discusses how we have an entire society of people that are immersed in whatever is on their phones.  We live our lives on screens.  Wesch meanwhile questions the significance of teaching vs. learning and whether students in college consider anything taught in a huge lecture hall important to actually learn. As I thought about it more, I started to understand how these two pieces were interconnected.  My youngest son Aidan is thirteen years old.  He suffers from ADHD with some anxiety and depression thrown in.  We knew there was something different with the way his brain process things from a very young age, but we weren't able to get a true diagnosis (he was always too ...

I have two children, Jackson and Aidan.  Both boys.  One is 15 (Jackson) and one is 13 (Aidan).  Part of the reason I wanted to start to teach was because I saw the excitement that they had for learning.  When they were younger, " Why? " was one of their favorite questions.  They always wanted to know why the world worked the way that it does.  They also used it as an opportunity to drive me crazy, asking "Why?" at almost every turn. As they continued with their education (Jackson enters his sophomore year of high school, while Aidan enters eighth grade, his last in middle school) the "Why?" questions stopped and the conversations about school turned to answers of, " Fine " and questions about learning in school had answers of, "Nothing."  The two boys began to lose their spark for education at the beginning of middle school. Why?  Why do they not have the same love for learning as they used to.  Why is school something that is boring a...

  Mark Prensky believes that there are two types of people in the digital age.  Digital natives are young people that are born into a world of technology and immersed in it.  Due to the fact that they are immersed in technology, digital natives have an easier time with technology.  Digital immigrants are older people that, due to the fact that they were not born into the current technological age, have a more difficult time with technology.   Danah Boyd believes that it is not as clear cut as using blanket terms for how people respond to technology.  Boyd believes that "The notion of digital native, whether constructed positively or negatively, has serious unintended consequences.  Not only is it fraught, but it obscures the uneven distribution of technological skills and media literacy across the youth population, presenting an inaccurate portrait of young people as uniformly prepared for the digital era and ignoring the assumed level of pri...

I am a 4th grade teacher.  I have been happily married for over twenty years and have two teenage boys and a dog named Jagger (he is a rescue).  I came to teaching after over twenty years in the field of marketing, so I still hang onto a few side-hustles that I enjoy doing for some extra money.  I enjoy music, sports, horror movies, tons of television binges, talk radio and craft beer. Summertime for a teacher...  The summer is always nice and long, but never long enough.  This summer will be a busy one.  My main summer job, which is working for Live Nation at Xfinity Center as a VIP Supervisor takes up a lot of time.  With 40+ shows this summer, there are many nights that are accounted for.  Spending time with my two boys, Jackson and Aidan, is the true centerpiece of the next couple of months, but I expect at 15 and 13, they won't want to spend quite as much time with me as they used to.  I also have a job with the Providence Public School...