Of course, no one with enough annoyance at her own lack of eloquent language could write anything worth reading after reading Ian’s blog. Yet, my mind is drifting to summer projects and spring cleaning that has been pushed back until my 20 pg. paper is completed, and if I don’t write this blog now, then I may never do it.
This class has been (oh crap I’m getting sentimental. Excuse any Pregnancy-hormone influenced emotions) the best class I’ve taken in college. I had no idea that such a small group of people with the right teacher and right texts could lead me to think about things I usually push aside. I’m usually taking classes about how to trick students into being interested in the texts that I’m supposedly going to force down their throats. But that’s a gripe I have against the depressive perspectives people take against students. Yet it fits, and the reason it fits is because I was always the text book answer student who became dazed and confused when presented with an assignment that combined educational information and creativity. How could they expect such a thing out of me? When given the chance to be creative at home (my mom is a craft junky) I was able to make anything available to me from small sculptures to a stained glass replica of the Beauty and the Beast rose… but together I was stumped. And this class commanded it from me again, to think not just to reiterate what was already said. It was fun and at first really scary for me. But through this experience, I have grown as a future teacher. This class has taught me to question what I took for the right answer in education and to stop just trying to get through classes or maybe even life without growing as my own person. My husband is a questioner, and sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, but he doesn’t take for granted social rules of conduct, but instead asks why I feel the need to do something until it comes down to the fact that I am and always have been a people pleaser. I will do things just because of the fear that if I don’t please people then- well of course the world will come crashing down around me. I still see value in community, and yes, I still struggle with my comfort level being thrown out the window when I question things like grades, High school Diplomas, mandatory schooling, and Maine Learning Results. But at least I know that I’m taking the time now to question those things, and if I end up settling for how the school system works today, then it won’t be for a lack of thinking about it.
My reading of Pragmatist Philosophy has influenced the way I look at teaching in many ways. I have more room to grow in that part of my life than I realized. I look at my daughter and I can see the start of her stubborn personality shining through in everything she does, and I worry that without the love for growing and the love for intellectual pursuits, her stubbornness will prevent her from changing and questioning. But with the knowledge of how that has affected my life and my career, I hope to teach her as well as my students in a way that is always open to new ideas and new loves.
So I didn’t say Pragmatism and Poetry enough in this little reflection, but it’s there. William Stafford says poetry is “anything said in such a way or put on the page in such a way as to invite from the hearer or reader a certain kind of attention.” And right now philosophies of education and lesson plans are my poetry.
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