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re-direct folks who don’t subscribe via RSS (already updated to reflect the new address) and who may come here through outdated links.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.

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.

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.

***

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.

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.

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:

1. What can we do to encourage, rather than discourage, student interest in reading?
2. 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)
3. 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.

Tracy Rosen tagged me in a piece entitled “By Any Means Human”, which asks teachers to consider the human element they bring to the classroom.  As anyone who has been to university taught for any period of time knows, content knowledge alone does not a good teacher make.

For my part, my students have always told me that my sense of humor not only helps make sometimes dry material more accessible, but helps them connect a little more to me (and to each other) personally.  In fact, I got a very nice thank-you card at the end of this past school year from a senior I had in my first quarter Shakespeare’s Comedy class.  In it, she informed me that my sense of humor not only helped her to understand the works we studied*, but also helped the class of to bond considerably.  There’s something about laughter that brings people together; I guess it’s the participation in a shared experience that does it.  As I’ve said before, I’m all for engendering that sense of community in my classes, through whatever means I have at my disposal, technological or not.

This isn’t to say that the jokes I make are GOOD, per se – in fact, I pride myself on the ability to craft a cringe-worthy pun out of almost any situation (although the one I made about Titania and Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had the entire class LOLing for a good while!).  Maybe it’s more that I can (and frequently do) laugh at myself, which the students may find rare in a teacher.  I take my job and my responsibilities very seriously, but myself much less so.

Instead of tagging individuals, I’ll leave the tag open to anyone who reads this – what special human element do YOU bring to your classroom?

* In a nine-week course, we study three of the greats (OK, two of the greats and Measure for Measure).

So why might I jump ship?

Identi.ca is the new microblogging kid on the block, and at first glance, it not only seems similar to Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, etc., it actually seems like it has less to offer.  No replies buttons or tabs, no search bar, just a steady stream of messages and the ability to ’subscribe’ to one another.

What entices me about Identi.ca is the fact that it’s open source.  While Twitter has been having trouble staying on its feet lately (it has been better of late, to be fair), I wonder how long it would take for Identi.ca users with some technical knowledge to diagnose and attack the underlying problems.  Seems like a good thing to have “more hands on deck.”  There’s more to be said about it, but Mike Bogle covered it in pretty good detail in his post and follow-up comment here.  With add-ons and other contributions from the Identi.ca community, I’m seeing the potential for Identi.ca to play Firefox to Twitter’s IE – highly customizable and community-based.

I also like Identi.ca’s commitment to the OpenMicroBlogging protocol.  Essentially, conversations could take place across services, so there’d be no need for a Twitter account, Plurk account, etc.  One protocol to rule them all, so to speak.  There is already a plethora of services for cross-posting to multiple services, but nothing to aggregate responses and facilitate discussion.

To me, the discussions and exchanges of ideas that take place on Twitter are by far its most important factor, and why I won’t be deleting my Twitter account anytime soon.  Identi.ca may evolve into something great, and I’ll definitely stick with it, unlike a lot of other microblogging services.  Without the people who make up my network, however, it won’t be of nearly as much value as Twitter, broken down and everything.  Ultimately, it’s the people, not the tools, that give the network its value.

In the meantime, I encourage folks to try out Identi.ca and see if it suits you.  I’m @damian613 on both Identi.ca and Twitter; feel free to subscribe, follow, or just read.

I’ve announced it through Twitter and Facebook, but not yet blogwise: I have been hired as a maternity leave school psychologist for next year.  I’ll be working at my current school as a psychologist from September through early February, at which point I’ll transition back into my teaching role for the remainder of the year (we’re on the 4×4 block schedule, so it won’t be as traumatic for the kids as it sounds).

In all honesty, a maternity leave position is not how I thought I’d be starting my career in school psychology, especially a position that isn’t even an entire year long.  I’m grateful for the opportunity to get some paid experience, though, and wondering if it’s not a blessing in disguise.  It’s a low-risk way of entering the field – I’m at the same school at which I’ve taught for eight years, I know the people and the culture, and I’m pretty well-versed in “how things work” around here.

I had my sights set on a full-time tenure-track position from the outset (not necessarily an unreasonable goal in K-12 education), but the more I think about it, the more I think this may be the right position at the right time for me.

–Damian,

who occasionally needs to be reminded he must learn to crawl before he can walk.

What was the “worst job” you ever had that ironically helped prepare you to one day become an educator?

I’ve been extremely fortunate in that I’ve never had any terrible jobs, but for the sake of the meme, I’ll say dorm security at The College of New Jersey during my undergrad years:

• Shifts lasting til 2am enabled me to work long into the night, like I had to during my first few years of teaching
• It was my first taste of working as an authority figure (to use the term loosely), which helped when I was 23 and faced with a class of 18-year-olds
• Conflict resolution (and avoidance!) skills came into play, especially when dealing with drunk freshmen. Similar scenarios have played out in my presence at school (presumably, minus the alcohol), and I learned to always keep the coolest head of the group.

Thanks for tagging me, Christian. I hereby tag some folks whose blogs I most sincerely wish I had more time on which to comment:

1. Jose Vilson
2. Ken Rodoff
3. Kyle Lichtenwald
4. Diane Cordell
5. Jeff Wasserman

Hope to get back to this sooner rather than later.