Blog Post #9

Mr. McClung's World

On Mr. McClung's blog post "What I Learned This Year (2011-2012)", he starts off saying that he hasn't learned much this year as he has the last couple years as a teachers. He said that he has learned to main this year though and has named them, "You Gotta Dance With Who You Came to the Dance With" and "Challenge Yourself." In "You Gotta Dance With Who You Came to the Dance With," he explains that through his 2 years as an educator he has realized that he has never worried about what his peers thought of him as a teacher. He has always worried whether or not the kids were having a good time learning. He explained how the approval of fellow colleagues have put stress on him. He said that it has never done anything positive for him, but making sure that taken care of and enjoying class has done wonders for him. He said that he should always remember who he really worked for and wouldn't want to stray down the wrong path. This has really made me think about how I should start and finish my career as a teacher and how I should try and help the students rather than make a big name for myself in front of my peers. On his second post I read "What I Learned This Year (2010-2011)", he talks about keeping his students attention rather than the administration. If we give our administration too much attention we would leave our students out of the picture. Here's one quote from the article, "Our decision making process should always be student centered and not centered around pleasing adults." Another moral lesson in this post is that we cannot allow others to stifle your own excitement and joy that you experience in teaching or any other facet of life for that matter and how the teaching landscape is full of individuals that once had a fire and excitement for the profession but somewhere along the way they joined the darkside. He continues on to talk about a similar topic to the last two sentences about how we need to be ourselves in front of the students and to not go to the "darkside." We shouldn't fall into the typical stereotype of teachers. One topic he talked about was to never touch the keyboard. Which can be summed up to never do the work for them. Often times when we are teaching a task to a student and they are having difficulties completing the particular task, it is very easy to take over and basically do the work for them...because we can always do it better. However, the major issue with this is that if we do the work for the students then they will never fully master the skills. No matter how difficult it may be we must resist the urge to take control of the keyboard.