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Developing Professionals
If you've noticed that I haven't posted in a few days, you're not alone. I noticed it too. For a fair portion of that, starting last Tuesday, I was traveling the highways and byways of the eastern Midwest, right into the Mid-Atlantic (I guess). I meandered my way to a really wonderful visit with my mom, then out to Pennsylvania to see friends and manage a small, not-for-profit moving company for a day (that is, I took a bed we had in storage, managed to load it into Mom's gas-guzzling truck (thanks go to Kapoo and his class of freshmen for their independent contracting services!), and transported it 3 1/2 hours to my in-laws' through driving rains, all without getting any of it wet.
The lodestone of my trip, however, was Friday morning, when I had a commitment to develop professionals. You see, each year the North Eastern Ohio Educators Association (NEOEA) sponsors a day of workshops for its member teachers. Last year, despite being doubly not a member (not being in Ohio at all and teaching in a private school), Kapoo and I went to my friend Elliot's workshop on haiku, in part because he was desperate for warm bodies in the room and in part because it sounded interesting. Mostly it was the begging though. And it was really good--Elliot did a fantastic job, and I was able to use ideas from the workshop not only at the end of the year when I taught a creative writing class but also later that fall without even mentioning haiku.
After that workshop, Elliot took me out and plied me with barbecued meats and floated the idea of doing a workshop together the next year. Under the influence of that smoky goodness, I allowed that it might be a good idea. Next thing I know, I'm standing up in front of a handful of teachers, presumably developing them.
We settled some months ago on "Survival Literature" as a topic--I taught such a course last winter, Elliot taught a few pieces of literature that fit the category and found the concept interesting. So there we were. As it turned out, we only had five attendees at our workshop, though almost twice that many had originally signed up--and paid their money--only to have their schools tell them they couldn't go. My understanding is that all the public schools had it in their contract at one time but that some localities negotiated it out (I could be off-base on that though). It also seems that many schools, although they give their teachers the day off to attend these professional development opportunities, don't actually hold their teachers accountable for it, and left to their own devices many teachers just take it as a day off. Not that I'm unsympathetic to the workload of a teacher and don't understand how they could want a day off, but isn't part of being a professional--as opposed to, say, a glorified baby sitter--the devotion to improving one's art and craft of teaching?
In any case, we had five teachers there, and four of them were middle school teachers. Problematic? Well, let's see--the course I taught on the subject was an elective for seniors (and, for that matter, taught at a private school where I had a great deal of freedom to teach whatever I wanted). The model for my class--because my friend Meg taught the class at my school in RI for a few years before I did!--was also a senior elective at a private school (and, for that matter, a higher-end one). And now my audience is telling me that coarse language and/or sexual content and/or violent, disturbing content is out for them? Well, gosh, I'm not sure how much I have to offer any more!
As I was presenting material, I had a bad feeling that my audience wasn't exactly enthusiastic, so I was surprised when there weren't more (that is, any, really) negative comments, beyond several wishes that there'd been more junior-high-appropriate content, which was never really who I was targeting anyway. And someone was actually really interested in my presentation of the Harkness discussion method. So, all in all, not too shabby.