After writing my teaching career a Dear John letter, as Jackie Audrey pointed out, I suppose it’s only fitting that I do the same for the blogging service where I blogged, more or less, about teaching.
I’ve moved this blog to a privately hosted Wordpress blog, with a spanking new domain name and everything: http://www.apaceofchange.com. This will be my last post on this Edublogs blog, and comments are closed. I will leave this up for a little while to re-direct folks who don’t subscribe via RSS (already updated to reflect the new address) and who may come here through outdated links.
I’ll still blog about education, but as I’ve said before, I’m moving my focus away from the classroom perspective and more toward my new career role, school psychology and special education. That said, I’ll try to touch upon a range of topics that you’ll hopefully find relevant.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll come with me to my new blogging home.
I just logged into Feedburner for the first time in months to see that I actually have more subscribers now than when I was blogging regularly. So first off, thanks for sticking with me, even when life circumstances have more or less forced me to mothball this place for quite a while.
At any rate, that new job I mentioned in my last post – I start it January 5. As much as I detest New Year’s resolutions, I’ve been thinking about making a concerted effort to get back into blogging at that time. When I started here, I was sometimes posting 3-4 times a week. That frequency dropped off after a while, and now in the last third of this year I think I’ve only managed two or three posts, including this one.
My unofficial New Year’s resolution (let’s call it a New Job resolution instead) is going to be a semi-regular blogging schedule of 2-4 times per month. If I can set aside time once a week to write a relevant post (as well as a return to form in commenting on your blogs), I’ll be grateful.
I’ve also got a few things I’ve been working on for a while that I’ll be rolling out around that time. If you’re still with me after the holiday blitzkrieg, I’d like to share as I simultaneously transition between school buildings and career roles.
If I don’t post again til then, have a peaceful and blessed holiday season, and enjoy whatever time you get with your loved ones.
Hey, I need to talk to you about something. Something that’s been on my mind lately.
Oh, I don’t know, a year or two now. Just let me explain…
Look, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately, and… well, I just don’t know if this is meant to be. I know we’ve been together for years, and we’ve had our share of great times and hard times. Things were really tough in the beginning, but once I better understood what this relationship was going to require of me, I adjusted and adapted, and then things were much, much better. I was able to commit more of myself to what you needed and deserved. I stayed up late, long hours for you, devoted entire weekends to making plans, and constantly assessed where we stood, just like you wanted me to do. But you had to know that I couldn’t keep up that intensity forever, right?
It’s just that, I dunno… Have you ever arrived at a place where you wondered if this… us… we would be together forever or just for now? I mean, the last eight years have been a lot of work and a lot of fun, but do you really see us together forever?
I have to be honest – I don’t. You’re great, really, but I’m just at a place in my life where I need something… different. I’m not the same guy I was eight years ago.
It’s not you. It’s me.
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I officially resigned my teaching position today, and accepted a full-time, tenure track school psychologist position at another school, to begin in 2009. Chapter Two begins now.
Tommy Belsky is a first-grade student from Hopewell, NJ, who has been battling acute myelogenous leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. Were it not for the fact that Tommy’s aunt and uncle are friends and colleagues of mine, I’d probably never even know this condition existed.
As you can imagine, fighting this disease has taken an indescribable toll on the family in many ways, one of them financial. To that end, Tommy’s friends and family have organized the Trails for Tommy 5K and Children’s Races, to be held on Sunday, October 19, 2008 in Hopewell, NJ.
If you live anywhere near the Hunterdon/Mercer/Bucks counties area and would like to do your body and Tommy’s family some good, come out and have a crack at the course (download a PDF form from the site or sign up online here). If you can’t make the run but would like to donate time, gifts, or money, or even just read more about Tommy’s story, you can do all that at TeamTommy.net.
Last Sunday’s Washington Post ran an article I’m surprised more bloggers haven’t jumped on yet. In her piece, “We’re Teaching Books That Don’t Stack Up”, English teacher Nancy Schnog laments the disconnect between her students and the classics of Western literature she is required to teach. She cites a recent NEA survey that indicates that the percentage of 17-year-olds “who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled” since 1988, and offers some anecdotal evidence about how that disregard for reading has translated into a complete disinterest in the “decidedly internal rewards of classical literature”.
Although she does ring the “digital natives” alarm as one contributing factor (meh), she also admits that:
…it’s time to acknowledge that the lure of visual media isn’t the only thing pushing our kids away from the page and toward the screen. We’ve shied away from discussing a most unfortunate culprit in the saga of diminishing teen reading: the high-school English classroom. As much as I hate to admit it, all too often it’s English teachers like me — as able and well-intentioned as we may be — who close down teen interest in reading.
The apathy runs both ways, though, and this bit struck pretty close to home for me:
When students have to produce an essay on a book they care nothing for, it becomes a nightmare for both the student (think “all-nighter”) and the teacher, who’ll spend precious weekend hours reading papers devoid of content. The upshot of this empty drill: teens increasingly resistant to great books.
So what’s happening in our secondary English classrooms? Certainly, we want students reading material that they find engaging, but most schools, I imagine, also want to push the well-roundedness that a liberal arts education professes to provide, so it can’t be all “Miley Cyrus and Brittany [sic] Spears biographies”, as one particularly hyperbolic commenter wrote at another source.
After reading Dr. Schnog’s article, these are the essential questions I took away:
- What can we do to encourage, rather than discourage, student interest in reading?
- How can we “teach the classics” without “transform[ing] them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection”? (the words of a parent quoted in Schnog’s article)
- How important is the literary analysis essay to teaching secondary English? (OK, maybe not an essential question, but one I’ve been wrestling with for a few years now, and this is just as good a time as any to bring it up)
This one’s approaching TL;DR territory already; I’ll continue in a day or two. Just wanted to clear my mental clipboard and float this out there… I have some thoughts of my own, but I’d appreciate yours as well, particularly on any other key takeaways from the article.
In the meantime, Dr. Schnog held a WaPo-sponsored Q&A session the day after the article was published; here’s the transcript.
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