COMMENTS FOR TEACHERS

Here is the first post that I left for Tom Whitby on his blog: MY ISLAND VIEW; and my reflection on the last 2.

Tom,
My name is Meghan and I am a Junior at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. I am currently studying to be a high school science teacher, and in my Educational Media class I was assigned to follow your blog.
I liked how you compared public education to the industry business. They are very similar and probably did start out similarly to what you painted a picture of. I think that we could keep this idea of an ‘industry’ related education system if adopted to the new century like the industrial world has.
That would mean we need to adapt more technology into our classrooms, like today’s businesses have done.
Doing this would not only prepare our students for the outside world better, but it would also help them with the preparing for a job bit. Even though i would love for my students to just enjoy learning for learning sake, but the truth is most do not, and I plan to at least prepare the others as best I can.

Number 2: Lead Us Into Reform

At one point in this post about administration in the 34 years he had been teaching Mr. Whitby brought up this point:
That out of all the administrators he had worked under he had respect for: 2 out of the 8 Superintendents, 3 of the 9 promcipals, 2 of the 16 assistant principals, and 3 of the 10 Chairman members.
Wow, that seems to be a really bad statistic. He said the reason why he had respect for those he did, was because of their ability to understand and enable teachers on the staff to be successful. Maybe it was just the high school I went to, but from what I had heard from my teachers and from them since I have been studying to become one of them, all 4 Assistants and our principal were more than willing to help and encourage at any time. Maybe i have been delusional to think that all schools were one big happy family, and no matter where I went it would always be like that.
He also talked about the situation in Rhode Island where the faculty as a whole was fired due to not wanting to work longer hours and additional days without more pay. The reason for wanting this was because of the high dropout rate, and the superintendent thought that it would be a good idea if they were to just scrap them instead of trying to make things better with the faculty already in place. Mr. Whitby made an excellent point after this saying that why would the teaching methods work if they were to extend the hours and days if they hadn't been working in the first place?? Seems pretty obvious to me that they should have tried to improve the teaching methods first before chucking everyone.

ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM

This latin phrase sounds pretty cool, no? Well at the end of this post I will tell you what it truly means and you will laugh your pants off!! But for now, you need to hear the reason behind throwing latin out randomly. A professor was at a workshop that promoted integrating technology in the classrooms. At the end of the workshop the speaker called for questions, and said professor took to the mic and said roughly: that if anyone needed to get information to him they need not twitter, email, text, or message him. They should simply talk to him. He then stated 'It was good enough for him, its good enough for them." And then went on to state that what was the need for this tech stuff anyways? The worst part is yet to come......The audience applauded him!! What crazoes!!! These people are, as he put it, Ten-Percenters ad do not reflect the majority of the whole. But still, it said to think that these higher educators are so in the caveman ages that they can't let go of their ways and adopt new and better ones.

So in closing I will let you ini on the Latin phrase, if you haven't already googled what it means... Don't let the bastards grind you down!!