Today's epiphany .... well, sort of.

One thing I have tried repeatedly to overcome is this feeling that what I do in class is going to become outdated. I read the story “The fun they had” by Ray Bradbury in class the other day. I’m wondering if I will become a technician someday, rather than a teacher.

At the end of the story, the kids think about the fun that kids at a regular school had. I mean the kids today get to come to my school, go out for smokes every so often, get some high school credits and get out of high school. That is, if they can handle the attendance and the academics.

We don’t just hand out credits here. There is an awful lot of work, in a short amount of time that we do here. It’s more like summer school, to be honest. It goes fast, fast, fast here. We do in an afternoon what most classes do in almost a week. The classes are usually small, but intense. I don't see that in Internet based education. I see a lot less personality and a lot less "interpersonality", too.

And lots of drama - not necessarily the stuff I have to teach during a Shakespeare Unit. The students here, as with students in most schools, love drama. Lots of silly reasons for taking something said ro done as disrespectful, and thus leading to escalations to violence, at least at times.

I’ll never understand why, but at least they are trying to overcome it, well some are, through the use of iPods. Creating their own world, at least musically for the time being, through the use of a set of headphones.

I think that is cleaver, and a sign from the future. Perhaps that is a good thing about learning from home - less people will get hurt from violence, or at least school violence.

There are lots of blogs on the internet about Education, lots of podcasts on iTunes (and elsewhere) on the very subjects we’re “discussing” in this E-ducational trip we’re on. But how do we take advantage of them, make them work for us?

I think my accent is showing again....