“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” Robert Burns
I am knee deep in grading the final projects for the summer semester but looking forward to trying out retirement. I even announced it to the world, or at least the few people who read this blog.
Then the email from the department chair arrived yesterday evening: two sections of an undergraduate information literacy course are available for the first term. The course is developed and just needs a facilitator. It will mean working through the weekend as the semester begins Monday. I said yes. The money isn’t great but it helps stave off social security. Plus, of all the jobs I have done in my career, I love teaching the most. Even asynchronous, online courses offer opportunities to connect, learn and grow with other educators.
So, full retirement is on hold at least through the end of this year. We shall see what 2027 brings!
As part of my initial introduction to my college students, I mention that I am not a procrastinator and encourage them to fight the inclination to put things off. When there is work to be done and a deadline, I will do the work first, no matter the temptations pulling me away, no matter the voices telling me I have plenty of time. I am not sure where this proclivity came from, but it served me well throughout my academic and professional career. I think it was partially a survival mechanism: I have trouble relaxing if there is work to be done, even if the deadline seems to be far away. Plus, I have lived and worked with technology long enough to know that expecting the unexpected is a solid philosophy.
I teach for a major university here in Virginia. We just finished the spring semester. I spent Monday and Tuesday grading and submitted my grades on Wednesday morning. In between, I worked on my summer course. Yesterday, I completed the final touches, made the copy to the second section, and as I enjoyed a congratulatory drink, I heard the news that local K-12 school divisions had been hit by a Canvas security breach.
This morning, my university announced the breach and that Canvas was temporarily offline while Instructure, Canvas’s parent company, investigated. It appears widespread and includes Virtual Virginia, the state’s online course provider. While I do feel sorry for those professors who had planned to use next week to get ready for summer, I may have enjoyed a self-satisfied little smile knowing that I am ready to go.
A very short post to encourage you to read Jen Orr’s blog post about life in her classroom right now. She calls it venting; I call it an authentic cry for help from a seasoned professional. If she and her students are struggling, I am scared to think what less experienced are educators are feeling.
Book Cover of Black History Saved My Life: How My Viral Hate Crime Led to an Awakening by Ernest Crim III
I follow Ernest Crim on Instagram and have learned so much from him about being Black in America from history to present day. In a recent post, he challenged white people to list five white anti racists, and for white parents to encourage their children to adopt one or more of them as role models.
Not surprisingly, John Brown was the first person the came to my mind as he does show up in American history classes. I also thought of Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison, both from the same era as Brown. I wondered about Eleanor Roosevelt and a search found this interview with Vernon Jarrett who describes Roosevelt’s growth as an anti racist. So, I’m up to four…Jane Addams, the founder of Chicago’s Hull House, also came to mind. This time the search revealed the complexities that often surround supposedly “good” white people: Addams was close friends with Ida Bae Wells whose push back on Addams’ views on lynching helped her grow. But, there are still questions about her general views on Black people as being culturally inferior, a typical progressive white view of the time, and Hull House rarely housed Blacks, focusing instead on immigrants.
A larger Google search provided a list compiled by Teaching While White. It includes both old and new white anti racists and I encourage you to check it out. It helped jog my memory with a few more names, mostly abolitionists, and widened my perspective. I’m planning on a bit more reading and research and may choose my own role model for the year.
Choose Your Own Adventure in Technology Land poster
My twitter feed is filled with pictures of my K-12 teaching friends as they begin the year, eager to connect with their students. I am excited for them and, even after decades of being out of the middle school classroom, I always have a pang of regret that I took a different path in 2001.
That unconventional path has provided me with a variety of opportunities to work with educators across the country. But, I don’t necessarily think of that as teaching. I was engaging in professional development, which to my mind has a different quality than teaching. I have continued to teach, however, working with students in a formal setting where we have time to develop relationships, explore curriculum and create knowledge together.
This fall, I am teaching two courses, one for Old Dominion University and one for University of Richmond. Both are graduate courses related to instructional technology for a mostly K-12 educators. The two courses represent the ends of the spectrum in terms of how teaching and learning is done in higher education.
The Old Dominion course is designed for career switchers, people with degrees in other fields who wish to become teachers. It is always a wonderfully diverse mix of individuals as they come, in some cases, from all over the world. The course is completely online and asynchronous. But, we still create community using tools like Flip and Padlet to share and explore. I don’t have a lot of leeway with the content as the course is taught by multiple professors, but I am able to bring my own personality and practices to teaching online. But, it is a still a very different relationship than my face to face course.
At University of Richmond, I have taught School Technology each fall to students in the graduate education program for many years and it is most definitely MY course. Pre-COVID it was fully face to face with perhaps one virtual meeting to give them a flavor for learning online. I revisit the content and curriculum each year as well as the way I deliver the course. We have been almost completely online for the past years. This year, I am experimenting with a hybrid format that allows for us to connect as a whole group and then give students time for their own exploration and work.
Basically, I have front loaded the content into September. We work together on campus until fall break. Last year, I began using a textbook: the small but impactful volume, Closing the Gap: Digital Equity Strategies for the K-12 Classroom. I am continuing with that this year as the authors cover the big picture with the lens of equity that helps connect various topics in a useful way. They also provide a framework for students to consider their own problems of practice that lead to their final, individual projects, which they work on in November.
In between, October is given over to the students to explore on their own. I created a Choose Your Own Adventure activity that focuses on four different areas of ed tech that I don’t have time to cover in any depth. They learn a little about each one and then choose one to explore in more depth, with the goal considering how they might roll it out in their schools. A secondary objective is for them to think about how they use technology to research, reflect and report. What tools do they for curation? Collaboration? Communication?
We meet tonight for the first time and I am a little nervous, as always.
