What are your current challenges?

[Connie Weber]

Hello All,
Here's a "community check-in forum."
Wondering: what are your current challenges?
We're on our way in a new academic year--or continuing on if you're from the Southern Hemisphere (hi, Ian!)--so, what's happening?
What challenges are you facing this year? Is anything new or different for you, or are the challenges the ones that always seem to come around at this time of year? What, in particular, is presenting a challenge for you, whether it's a "thinking challenge" or a "making it happen" challenge?
What's up? (This is for everyone, not just teachers...)

[Ian Carmichael]

Hi Connie,
Since you 'fingered' me from afar ... beautiful spring day, birds are shining, flowers singing, sun blooming.
THE challenge, for the second year in a row is having a life and being an effective teacher.
In particular, I'm challenged by the shape mathematics needs to take in the modern world, and in the classroom, its place and applications - and particularly the shape it can have for the algebraically challenged. Is there a great assistive role for CAS and graphics calculators? - certainly the advent of scientific calculators has revolutionised the capacity for students to succeed in trigonometry and other complex calculations - a capacity locked away through many pages of tables - traversing trig to log to antilogs [some of you others will remember them!].
I don't yet see a good set of answers to my challenge - the traditions of the discipline are very strong!

Anyway - I'm off into the sunshine to mow some lawn! Evenin' all.
I'

[Connie Weber]

Ian, here it's clearly Autumn, with firey forests, fields of dark brown soybeans, beige cornstalks rattling in the wind. Glorious... but foreshadowing the cold that's coming. I've got that feeling of wanting to hunker down, get all cozy and safe.

It's interesting that you bring up math, as that is one of my biggest challenges this year. We've switched all of our school's K-5 math to Everyday Mathematics. The learning curve is steep, the challenges numerous. My biggest problem is that now it's tempting to spend way longer on math than should be. The lessons that the program designers think will take 40 minutes invariably take my class an hour or more. Of course I'm letting the students go into the work deeply, and we're spinning off on a lot of meaningful tangents. I like the program a lot; it's fascinating, actually. But BALANCE has become the big issue. What about social studies, what about reading, writing, creative exploration, and play?

More challenges I'm facing: implementing a new year-long thematic social studies program I designed, studying "Change" and "Connections," and using the Project Zero approach. The program is interwoven into all our studies and also into our new class network. Whew--a lot to take on at once.

Beyond that, I'm taking grad courses for an additional masters. My personal investigations within the topic of educational leadership include studying in-depth the problems of urban poverty, trying to figure out what in the heck is going on. Trying to see what I can do to bring into people's awareness the damage that the testing movement has done, trying to show alternatives that actually increase engagement in schooling rather than destroy it.

It's actually quite shocking to hear rather conservative and very wise professors saying that schooling as we know it in the big cities will shortly collapse and be replaced by something quite different, something we may not even recognize as schooling. This is fascinating although the picture of the near future seems dire. I'd love to hear what people are thinking about this, just want to know more and more and more. Recent influences on my thinking come from Gerald Grant (Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh; and Mike Rose (Why School?) I think that Arnie Duncan has put us right on a collision course, a crash course for urban education, and for education in general. Add that into the standards movement in the US, the intense involvement, even control, of education by politicians, and we have to really ask where are we heading. I'm trying to wrap my mind around all this and keep a steady course towards meaning and purposefulness in education, and I'm trying to help others keep a big view.

Another challenge: aging. The good side is having the perspective you get from having seen so many eras, so many fads, trends, and swings of the pendulum in education. I am starting to feel wise (if not very powerful to DO much of anything with my self-proclaimed wisdom.) The bad side of aging includes having kids leave home (I really like to have everyone around or nearby), not wanting to play as aggressively in soccer, and seeing too many wrinkles on my face when I look in the mirror!

But challenges, hey, they're good for us, right? I keep telling myself so. I know I'm learning a lot--the lessons just keep coming. And the wrinkles around my eyes my grandmother called "laughing lines" so that's how I'll think of them.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Connie, my big challenge right now is finding ways to help my students with their writing... even as I struggle with these big questions:
1) is writing really something of value to my students now and also in their futures?
2) is helping my students with their writing the best use of my time/energy as a teacher?
3) given my students' huge writing deficits, can a single semester really make a real difference?

Big questions without definitely answers but, so far anyway, I am feeling pretty good about the semester!!! The materials I created over the summer seem to be helping, and at the half-way point of the semester, I would say some students are definitely doing better with their writing, now that they know other people are actually going to read what they write (they love having other students read what they write). Plus, they are now clear about the fact that I am going to hold them to high standards AND help them to meet those standards (revise revise revise).

Still, every time I open our student newspaper and see all kinds of writing errors there in print ("Scholar on campus to discus modern politics" was a recent headline), I start thinking about those big questions again and feeling big doubts...! :-)

[Marie Doherty]

Hi Connie,
I think that my biggest challenge at the minute is trying to find the right balance between teaching facts and content, helping the children become independent learners and 21st century learners and trying to give my class a love of learning. At times I feel that I am using too much technology and letting the kids do too much independent research and not doing enough of the drill and practice and direct teaching that has traditionally been done. When the kids leave me they go to secondary school and I am afraid that my teaching won't leave them ready for the exam driven secondary education they will face.
I believe in my heart that the best thing I can give my class is a love of learning and the ability to use all the technology available to further their learning but I wonder is that what they need most in our traditional education system.