Archive for My education
15 April 2007
Posted in Me, My education, Student teaching at 2:43 pm by Miss Fox
So, if you read this entry, you already know a bit about my history.
And you’ll understand why I’ve caught every cold that’s come my way since I got back in the classroom – two years away from kids really does make a difference. I want my teacher immune system to pick up. I think it’s getting better, as I don’t have it nearly as bad as my boyfriend. I don’t even think this one came from my kids, but I am damned tired of getting sick.
I should check the mail… I don’t know if they’ve mailed the student teaching information, yet, but I’m dying to know where I’ll be next year. But, checking the mail requires going all the way to campus (15 minute bike ride, 5 minute drive), and I’m sick. And it’s raining. Tomorrow…
This semester is wrapping up, and I’m so excited to be that much closer to graduation. I just need to figure out where in North Carolina I want to teach. Anybody have any suggestions? I went to the education job fair on campus, and wasn’t really impressed with anywhere. I’m tempted to close my eyes and point. *sigh* Such a big decision and no real help to make it… guess I’d better spend the summer doing research so I can start sending résumés out.
I applied for a job working at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. Keep your fingers crossed for me – I’ve worked there before and it was a blast. Pay isn’t much, but I don’t care. I’d rather get paid a little less to do something I enjoy.
I do need the money, though. *sigh* When will I be salaried? I can’t wait to know how much money I’ll have month to month…
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10 April 2007
Posted in Journal-related, Me, My education, Student teaching at 6:50 pm by Miss Fox
It’s time for a little bio…
I knew I wanted to be a teacher in high school; the decision being a result of my own education, experiences with (good and bad) teachers, and many other things. Shortly after I made this decision, my high school offered a class for people like me that involved going to a local elementary school for an hour every day. I took this class for three semesters, working with 2nd, 3rd, and 5th graders – it was a great experience, and I’m fortunate that my school had the resources to offer it as an elective.
Teaching Fellows was introduced to me during high school, as well, and I applied for the highly competitive scholarship, not expecting to get it. Not only did I receive the award, which (at the time) provided $26,000 over four years to 400 recipients in North Carolina per year, but I got it for one of the most competitive schools, UNC Chapel Hill. Thus, when I graduated high school in 2001, I was kind of an elite member of the education community. I’m not saying this to make myself sound awesome – I’m often still surprised when I think about it. Mostly, I’m just giving some background.
In college, as part of the UNC Teaching Fellows program, I was in the classroom for an hour every week my freshman year, and about 3 hours a week sophomore year. Junior year, I entered the UNC School of Education, and began my professional coursework. Unfortunately, the strain of school and a job I’d taken on my sophomore year, in addition to my inner struggle with depression, anxiety disorder, and ADHD, caused me to falter toward the end of my junior year, and I dropped the semester and took two years off of school.
That two years, in many ways, would prove to be the least productive, and most boring and horrible years of my short life, to date. I did not work with children. At all. I worked two retail jobs at the mall, which sometimes meant back-to-back 12 hour days (with random 15-30 minute breaks) during Christmas. I was yelled at, broke, tired, and made to feel inferior for not being a sleazy salesperson. To put it simply, it sucked. A lot. Even when I got a better job, it still wasn’t what I wanted to do.
So I came back to school last fall, and am currently finishing up the previously dropped semester of my junior year. I’m happy to report that I’ve got, at the lowest, a B average this semester. And, while it was certainly strange to come back into the classroom (to the classes I was taking and the classes I was teaching), it felt like home. I felt like I knew what I was doing, that was where I was supposed to be. All the worries that I might not be able to do it, that I might fail, again, or not cut it in the classroom have melted away.
I find myself thinking like a teacher much more than I ever have – I dream about it, I jump out of bed in the middle of the night to jot down ideas that keep me awake, I think about teaching with (nearly) everything I do – I even blog about it.
I’m excited about teaching, again. Student teaching starts next year – I’ll have the same class all year, one full day a week in the fall and every day in the spring. I find myself anxious to find out in which grade and school I’ll be, so I can start thinking about what I’ll be teaching.
I find myself assuming the position.
And I like it.
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26 March 2007
Posted in Controversy, My education, Racism at 4:19 pm by Miss Fox
So, something got me thinking, today, about all the random things I did/said as a kid. Well, not all of them (as that would be a lot of things…), but some of the more strange ones. Take, for instance, Army dodge ball, a game that even my ex-Army friends don’t know about (which makes sense – I imagine soldiers don’t sit around playing dodge ball all day.). I grew up in Fayetteville, NC – a military town right outside of Fort Bragg, NC, so Army dodge ball was the only kind of dodge ball I ever played as a kid. It seems so strange to me that so many people have no idea it even exists.
But, I also thought of a couple phrases I used to say that were not only random, but also very wrong. For instance, I remember being told, as a child, to sit “Indian-style”.
Now, as a student teacher, I know that phrase is no longer used, and instead teachers say “criss cross applesauce” or just “cross-legged”. (I hate cutesy phrases, so I’ll be using the latter when the time comes.) It’s not a particularly hurtful phrase, but it’s not very descriptive and relies on stereotypes of cultures for its meaning.
I also used to use the phrase “Indian giver”,
which I didn’t understand at the time I used it. I’m still not entirely sure why it’s such a widely used term… weren’t we the ones who kept taking away things (land) from the Native American tribes after we had so graciously given them? (Because, you know, the Native American totally had no land before we came along, and we were so awesome to give them ours, even if we did take most of it back. We disgust me.)
There’s one more, though, that I tried to research, today, for which I couldn’t find a source. The phrase is “Chinese skipping”, which apparently references a jump rope game. When I was little, though, it had nothing to do with jumping rope – to “Chinese skip” somebody, was to skip them in line, in a rather clever and sneaky way. Say you’re standing in the lunch line. Mary is in front you. Joe comes up and tries to skip you in line. “NO! Joe, you can’t skip me,” you say, “go back to the end of the line.” So, he whispers to Mary for a second, and they snicker. Then Mary lets Joe skip her in line. Then, Joe lets Mary skip him, putting him in front of you. Thus, you have been “Chinese skipped”. It sounds like just another made up phrase, still racist even though it has nothing to do with any stereotypes of the Chinese culture (that I know of).
In my searching for that phrase, I did run across a whole bunch of “Chinese ____” phrases, such as “Chinese fire drill”.
According to the article, “Chinese here comes from British military tradition of using the word to mean clumsy, inept, or inferior. It is likely that this was not intended as a slur on the Chinese people, but rather a play on the phrase “one wing low” which referred to a clumsy pilot and was thought to sound Chinese.” Regardless, it is yet another insensitive, and stupid term.
Luckily (or not), I had no idea I was saying anything racist at the time. Hell, even now I’m not entirely sure why anyone even created those phrases. If you aren’t racist, it makes no sense. I don’t hold the belief that the Chinese are confused or chaotic… I don’t think all native people sit cross-legged… and I don’t think Chinese men pee in Coke bottles. I never did. Yet, I remember hearing and using these phrases, because that’s just what you did. I didn’t know why it was called “Chinese skipping”, it just was. I didn’t know why we sat “Indian-style” on the magic carpet for storytime, we just did.
I’m not a very P.C. person – I hate having the sidestep issues by using euphamisms and cutesy phrases to keep from offending people (what about apples, huh? Maybe they don’t like “criss cross applesauce” so much…), but I also don’t understand why we use such mindless phrases.
So, what’s going around the playground, these days? Are we making fun of Muslims and Iraqis, now? I don’t want to be surprised when one of my fourth graders blurts out some off-the-wall, seemingly random yet racist phrase.
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20 March 2007
Posted in My education, Student teaching, Violence at 11:59 am by Miss Fox
Me, either. But, apparently one of my fourth graders was opening boxes before he came to school this morning.
That’s why he had a knife on him.
Apparently.
Why he was showing it to classmates in the lunch line, I have no idea (since, you know, he accidentally stuck it in his pocket after opening that box, this morning, and didn’t mean to bring it to school). Luckily, the girl next to him in line had the sense to come tell me, and I had the sense to tell a real teacher (having no idea what the specific policy for “a kid in the cafeteria has a knife” is for my school). I was able to prevent mass hysteria by keeping the same girl from telling the rest of the cafeteria, and the other teacher was able to get the pocketknife (one of the foldable kinds with a 2″ blade) from him without a problem.
I remember when I decided to be a teacher. I got a lot of reactions from people when they heard the news, most commonly comments like, “But you’re so smart!” and “Oh, you’ll change your mind with your first paycheck, har har!” There were a few people, though, that remarked, “Well, I hope you don’t plan to teach high school, because those kids bring weapons to school – you’ll get shot or stabbed.”
Guess what! Elementary kids do it, too.
*sigh*
Remarkably, I didn’t really freak out. It helped that it (1) wasn’t really a threatening situation and (2) was caught pretty quickly. My biggest reaction was, “Poor Kevin*, I wish I knew what was going on with him…” You see, I only spend four hours a week in the classroom, and was actually getting ready to leave at the start of the knife incident. This kid has obvious issues (he’s mopey, depressed, negative – has apparently made comments about hurting himself), but I don’t know the specifics. There hasn’t been time to discuss it with my teacher.
There’s lots of reasons why it could have happened… to get attention is the most likely one I can think of… still, I can’t help but wonder how common the issue of weapons/depression/suicidal thoughts is in schools – particularly elementary schools. And, what’s the best way to handle it? (As an individual teacher, an entire school, and/or a community…)
*Kevin is, obviously, not his real name.
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7 March 2006
Posted in Journal-related, My education at 3:11 pm by Miss Fox
I need to get serious about this whole education thing – mine, and that of my future students. I have lots of ideas for things I want to do in my classroom, and I’ve seen things other teachers have done that I really like. I intend to post those things here, so that I will remember them and other teachers can find them.
I still have two years of school left before I finally get my own classroom, so for now this journal will be ideas I have for the future, peppered with education-related news (there’s no shortage of that, unfortunately it’s usually bad). There will probably be a fair amount of discussing my own education, too, but in the sense that it would relate to other teachers/education majors.
I would love contribution from other teachers, as well as comments from anyone… I want this to become sort of an education community. No one person has all the answers for how to teach every child – and as technology/communities/people change, teaching methods must evolve to keep up. Education is one of those fields in which everyone can and should be involved; if you aren’t a teacher, you are/were a student, or may possibly have children in school. And I believe that everyone should be concerned with the education of future generations of lawyers/teachers/doctors/politicians/parents/lawmakers/etc…
Something I will no doubt rant about in the future, repeatedly, is funding and the attitude some people without children have regarding funding local schools. So many times I have heard “well, I don’t have kids, so why should I be paying for schools/teachers I don’t need??” Because those kids will grow up to determine things that affect you – and if they’re uneducated and lack the resources to make informed decisions about the world around them, you will suffer. So, the point is, it doesn’t matter who you are, this stuff affects you, and your awareness of it and input to it affect you, as well.
So, please contribute/argue/rant/rave/etc… but keep it clean and respectful. Because I said so, and I’m in charge. 
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