Posted on January 8th, 2009 by admin.
Hi guys,
First, thanks for being willing to demo this site. I appreciate your efforts.
Second, it's very much a work in progress. The look of the site is very vanilla and lame, I realize, but that will change. I just want to make sure it's working first, then I'll make it pretty.
Please do a couple of things:
1. Make a blog post and insert a picture in it.
2. Comment on someone else's blog post.
3. Create a bookmark and say something about it.
This is a test
And here we go with a new picture:
While this may look like my old site (same theme), it isn't. I decided to upgrade from Drupal 5 to 6, and in the process completely kludged the old site. While it would sure be a great learning experience to figure out what went wrong, I spent enough hours doing that and decided to start over in D6. So here we are.
I'm a sucker for Drupal. I've followed this software for about 5-6 years now, sometimes straying to others but always coming back. While the technical end of it frustrates me (I'm a dangerous coder), I'm always drawn by that power to do just about anything. Just getting my head wrapped around some of the basic concepts takes time, but every time I play with it, I get more out of it. With the holiday break coming up, I might have some time to tinker.
I want to set up some sort of social learning space for my 10th grade World Civ class, but I'm bumping into some issues: 1. Can I use this site? Is it ready for prime time? 2. Should I just set up a group on Ning? It offers "out of the box" functionality, and we can be up and running in a matter of minutes? 3. Though I really want to improve my drupal skills, can I do that at the same time as we use the site? In other words, can I build the plane while I'm flying it?
Every Disney movie seems to have one or both of these messages: be true to yourself, and follow your dreams. As with all cliches, there's a grain of truth. I've been teaching a new course this year, my first year teaching in upper school in about 8 years. It's been quite an adjustment, hence the gaps between posts.
Today I read this sentence in The Tao of Teaching: "Reach out to find points of empathy with all your students. Encourage them and find ways to provide equal attention with positive language and a sense of personal responsibility." It struck me how necessary this is, how down to earth, and yet how hard to remember every day.
During our weekly SSR (Sustained Silent Reading) period on Tuesday, I read the chapter in Greta Nagel's book The Tao of Teaching with the above title. Then I re-read it. Then I re-re-read it. Then I re-re-re-read it. And then I sat and thought about it. Here's the part that gave me pause: "In schools where the wealthy are in power, one often finds contests. Sometimes the contests are part of the explicit school culture: academic decathlons, spelling bees, top scores, best grades. Sometimes the contests are implicit: who wears the best clothes or has been to the best places, or who can give the best parties. In the Tao students who are compared with themselves and not with one another can be saved the dissension of competition. "Allow students to enter into the process of measuring their own growth. Honor other values over wealth to help free your children and yourself to pursue a calm life together."
We spent a happy hour today in my World Civ class discussing Einstein's theory of relativity. Why, you ask, when we were supposed to be learning about the Age of Exploration? We have been discussing Galileo and Newton and their cosmologies, cosmologies in general, and why they're important. To give my students a peek into why cosmologies are important, why we all have one, and how difficult it is to have that cosmology challenged, I tried (in my own non-physics teacher way) explaining the relativity of space and time.
I hesitate to call any book on teaching my "bible", but this one comes pretty close. It's by Greta Nagel, published 1994 by Primus (ISBN 1-55611-415-X). I like to re-read it every year or so, and it's amazing how much it continues to resonate with me. Here's something that leapt off the page to me today: "At present, our attitude towards teaching is too yang -- too absolute, rational, and aggressive. What is needed is more yin -- intuition, sensuousness, and subtlety -- to bring back a delicate balance.
