"My Summer Vacation" Revisited

Yes, it's a cliche, but think about it. Summer is a time when we experience something other than "school" life. What we do on our summer vacations is important, whether we are remembering how to gear down and re-charge or taking off for adventures into the unknown. It's a time worth exploring with our students, worth tapping into to learn what matters in their lives, what their interests are. So I ask some simple questions below that might be used in a classroom, and give my own answers as examples. I'd love to hear your answers too.

1. What is your favorite thing to do in the summer?
That's easy. Read for pleasure. This summer I finished The Known World by Edward P. Jones and re-read Watership Down with my 10th-graders as summer reading. I've started Rand's The Fountainhead, which I've been promising my husband forever that I would read, and I'll be re-reading Black Boy, by Richard Wright, along with my seniors. I've also read some articles in The New York Times, a few issues of The New Yorker, some stage monologues, and lots of stuff on the Internet. For me, it's fun just being able to browse in this and that.

2. Describe something new that you learned how to do this summer.
My husband taught me how to play backgammon. He has yet to beat me at acey-deucey. It's rare for me to be interested in games that don't involve words, but I liked using my mind in a different way, strategizing and taking risks. It was fun.

3. Describe a place that you visited for the first time.
We stayed in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains for a week, on the border between Georgia and Tennessee. Our cabin was built into the steep bank of a creek, and we could hear the creek burbling constantly. At night, we left the windows open to let in the fresh mountain air and the sounds of happy frogs and crickets. We had no Internet or cell phone access, unless we went to town. We hiked to the top of Amicalola Falls (well, Larry did -- I wimped out about halfway). The mountain landscape was simply beautiful -- calm and relaxing, just what I needed.

If these were student writings, I would point out all the possible topics that might be worth pursuing. Plus, I would hope that readers might see a different side of me, learn something about my interests, or find further details about what you already know. Maybe we even have a connection we might not have guessed previously?

So, what about you?

Worth Watching

Occasionally, I will post education-related videos I've found on Youtube and Teachertube. Here is the first, "E-Teaching," about ways to incorporate technology in meaningful ways in a music class. There are lessons here for all of us.

Source information: Murphy, Elizabeth. "E-Teaching." YouTube. 13 March 2007. 1 July 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX94ws03o3o .

Everyone's a Critic

Having spent the past two weeks reading my own student evaluations, as well as those of our faculty, I picked up today's New York Times Magazine with interest to read David Holmberg's "On Language" column commenting on his own experience with student evaluations as a teacher of journalism at NYU and Drew University. He writes, "Sad to say, because Drew is such an exemplary school that in one of my three classes there I experienced the worst psychic injury in my university stint — from words I thought were severely lacking in intellectual openness and self-knowledge" ("Student Evaluations" 18). Not only do Holmberg's reactions and defenses ring true with any teacher who has felt the sting of his or her students' seemingly narrow and unconscious comments, but they also suggest to me the importance of teaching our students what it means to review and evaluate.

Yes, our students evaluate their faculty, but they are also roving critics on the Internet, rating everything from Youtube videos to their friends' comments on Myspace. To do this well, they need to learn the skills of critics -- the discerning eye, the questioning mind, the open perspective -- but they also need to learn how to effectively convey those views to readers, whether their audiences are the subjects of the critiques or it's subject's future viewers or users (a la "product" reviews on Amazon and elsewhere). Our students are just as likely to give rave reviews ("OMG!!!!!!!!") to something they haven't really thought about as they are to denounce something else ("It sucks!") that hasn't tickled their individual funny bones.

There's a responsiblity that goes with reviewing anything, and we have a responsibility to teach it.