I feel that I need to apologize for sounding so anti-technology. Yes, I have an iPhone, I use a laptop on a weekly basis, and my car has power windows. But in my world, everything needs to be balanced. I don’t rely heavily on one thing and lack in another and I wish that others could do the same. And yes, I know that everything I say could be debated since I leave a lot of gaps in my typed form of thinking, but I also know that I’m not willing to dedicate a whole lot of time into defending my personal views in a blog devoted to a class of five other students.
I completely agree with the tidbits (and Sanna) that teachers need to have passion in order to be successful and I feel that they are completely hopeless without it. ‘Nuff said.
I also was surprised to see the Batman quote. It’s corny, it’s not that creative and is a cheap spin-off from profound things that have been said by others, but pushing all of that aside…I totally dig it. Whenever I feel really down, I like to think that I’m learning something from the experience and that in and of itself picks me back up. I think that as a new teacher, this level of thinking will be very helpful to myself as well as my fellow newbies. It is comforting knowing that there will be others out there floundering and gasping for air just like me and that there are different systems put in place to be able to connect.
Every now and then I am blown away at how many resources are readily available within our society, both through technology and social interactions. However, on that same page, I am a bit wary about the advice that was offered through the Edutopia article. Fifty-percent of the tidbits involved using the Internet as a resource. Is this okay? Is this what it has come to? I suppose I am just afraid of technology (maybe I’ve read Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 too many times?) and where our world is headed with it, but this seems a bit extreme. I think about my day (starting at 6:00 AM and ending at 11:30 PM 7-days/week) and I wonder: when the heck am I going to find time to do any, even if just one, of these things? I have a hard enough time staring at a screen as it is, yet the advice I’m being given is to stare at it some more?
At this point, I feel that education is relying too heavily on technology as a teacher and that some core values need to be instituted before a teacher can really start to do their job well. A person needs to be educated before they can educate. They need to know the basics, which sometimes need to be established in basic ways like reading, communicating or researching. Exploring these things on one’s own is the best way to learn and weed out what is or isn’t important. Is is too difficult to try to do something practical or hold something real in order to learn? There needs to be a balance between the real, attainable information and the information that is floating around in Cyberspace. I feel that this tidbit article was based on technology. What about the day when the Internet is down in the school? Or the electricity goes out? What then, smartypants?