Revolving doors

For Sunday, August 24, 2008


The first week of school has come and gone. It wasn’t so bad. Funny how during the summer I can wake up at 5:30 a.m. and jump out of bed like a swarm of jiggled bees, rush down the stairs to perk my Peets and pull in the newspapers off the front porch, and while the Cuisinart is dripping my honey brew, I can be in the garage yanking on my work shirt and preparing for a day in the yard, or on deck duty.
Now the alarm blares at 6 a.m. and I barely have the strength to clamber from my slumber and slap the snoozer. Now I stand in the kitchen rubbing my bare belly, bleary eyed, trying to remember what comes first, grinding the beans or filling the carafe with water.
It will prove to be an interesting year for me as I’m experiencing four significant job changes. On the dark side, I’ve been relieved of all my technology curriculum support duties around the campus “because it’s a bad model” I’m told, so I’m back teaching English full time. We have no technology curriculum support at our campus currently.
I’ve been relieved of teaching digital photography and digital filmmaking after building up the course for five years “because I’m not qualified” I’m told by No Child Left Behind auditors. It seems the course is an art course and I’ve got only an English credential and a masters in educational multimedia technology.
Odd thing that NCLB. If I were a world-class photographer in my spare time with published books and a couple of Pulitzer prizes, and maybe an Emmy, I still would not be qualified to teach photography and film making because I have an English credential only. Apparently local administrators have zero flexibility to allow teachers to instruct electives outside their credential.
It plays hardball with our electives. It implies teachers are one dimensional and can only be competent in one field. They call it educational reform, a term I’ve been hearing for the last 25 years.
Next thing you know they’ll have us all teaching exactly the same lessons on the same days, like robots, assuming we cannot even construct the content of our own areas of expertise.
On the bright side, Touro University has come to town. They have hired me to bring a Masters in Educational Technology Program to Benicia, open to all Benicia teachers with a 25-percent discount in tuition, and the courses will be taught right on campus one night a week, so there’s no extra commute. I will facilitate the program and teach the courses. So far we have a healthy enrollment of about 16 teachers.
I’m extremely excited about this program. It gives me an outlet for sharing my 25 years of tech-curriculum expertise with educators. As they say, when one door closes, another door opens.
I’ve also been asked by Chapman University to teach an additional fall tech-curriculum course in addition to the spring course I’ve taught for five years. I just returned from an all-day workshop where we practiced tying core lesson plans to state content and state technology standards. Sonoma State’s office of Extended Education has also invited me back next summer to teach digital photography and digital film making in their summer Excel program. Go figure.
I took my sophomore English students to the computer lab for the first time today. Our plan was to each create a personality profile with PowerPoint so we could all get to know each other – favorite books, movies, songs, hobbies, and so on.
We’re off to a rocky start. The first step was for each student to create three folders in their private drives and name them sophomore, junior, and senior. Then they were to go inside their sophomore folder and make sub-folders for each of their six classes. This way students will have an organized approach to file management for their next three years. Then we were to open PowerPoint and begin our personality profile.
We didn’t get that far. It took the entire hour just to make three folders and six sub-folders. Sorry to say more than half of my sophomores did not know how to create folders or move files. I demonstrated on the big screen, but it didn’t translate. I had to work one-on-one around the room and the bell rang before we ever opened PowerPoint.
We have no mandatory introduction to computer courses in our program. I teach 27 freshmen who volunteered for computer training.
Another change on campus: we are about to embark on an entire campus-wide overhaul of how we structure our lessons more closely to state content standards. Sadly, state technology standards (Standard 16) and CTAP-approved ISTE Standards (newly revised this year) are not included in this 2008 overhaul. Why not ask why?
My candle: I intend to bring all my students up to speed in 21st Century technology-in-education skills. Perhaps I can’t support the whole community anymore, but my students – freshmen, sophomores and masters candidates alike – will push on.