Justifying Myself!

I'd like to begin this blog by introducing myself and my current situation so that all of you followers (I hope you'll be out there!) will understand the context for the discussions to come!

(As I'm writing this blog, I'm about half way done and this entry is shaping up to be quite legnthy. I'm really sorry about that, and I don't imagine it will be typical of my future posts. I'd love for people to read it, but I know it's loooong and perhaps not as interesting as the youtube videos of kittens you could be checking out, so it's broken up into sections. Please feel free to read portions at a time!)

Who (and where) I am and how I came to be (here):

My name is Hannah Lewis, and I graduated from Penn State in May of 2011 with my B. A. in English and a Minor in Philosophy. At that time, I really wasn't sure what direction I wanted my life to take. I've always loved writing, and I do it constantly, so I thought about pursuing a career in commercial writing, journalism, editing, or anything like that. I was also planning to continue my education and get an M. A. and perhaps, ultimately, a PhD in English lit, postcolonial lit, rhetoric and composition, journalism, comparative lit, commercial writing, cultural studies, literary criticism--really, anything, because I really do love all of that stuff, the academic and the professional possibilities that come with an English degree. But I decided not to jump right into grad school because, without direction and focus, I was afraid that I'd just be wasting time and money without actually getting the full benefit out of my coursework, and there was the possibility that I'd end up just as directionless with my MA in hand as I had been when I received my BA.

So I spent some time--Summer and Fall of 2010--working in an office and reflecting on my experiences, and trying to determine how one should select a career. Should I aim for the financial benefits or potential social prestige and power that come with something like a Law degree? The intellectually steeped life of an academic? The freedom (in best-case scenarios) and self-indulgent possibilities that come with professional writing? Should I be reflecting on what experiences have made me happy? What I felt a duty to do? What would be most rewarding (someone called this "psychic income")?

I felt pretty directionless there for a while, and made some choices--such as where to move after finishing Penn State--for questionable reasons, probably mostly because I was searching for something stable to anchor me, and as soon as the potential for stability presented itself, I jumped on it. But for a lot of reasons--including my reflection on my own skills and interests, the rewarding experiences I had as a peer tutor at Penn State, the extent to which I was coming to value social equity and education as a means to social equity as well as self-fulfillment, the crises(es) in education in the humanities, and the goals I was beginning to form for my adult life--I started looking into teaching programs. I found one that I thought I liked at Pitt, tried out some education classes, found out that I LOVED them, and resolved that I should pursue a career as a teacher. And my licensure program started two weeks ago! I'm working on a professional certification--so it's a graduate program, but not one that terminates with a Master's degree--and student-teaching eleventh graders at a high school in the Pennsylvania Mon Valley, near Pittsburgh.

Which brings me to this blog...

A teaching blog? Why/what!?

The Why?

Any of you who are teachers/preservice teachers probably know that the beginning of a teacher licensure program is totally overwhelming. In the past two weeks, I've purchased hundreds of dollars in textbooks (both professional and literary), purchased my first video camera, joined the National Council for Teachers of English, met at least 5 new professors, my mentor teacher, my clinical supervisor (in case this position isn't a staple in teacher cert programs, she is a retired English teacher/current Pitt faculty member who makes sure my clinical experience, ie student teaching, works the way it's supposed to), met dozens of high school students at my placement site, met dozens of fellow preservice teachers, been introduced to several new ideas, theories, pedagogies, etc, started a twitter account for a class (#pitt_enged), and probably undergone a dozen more experiences that I'm still struggling to process/fit together into a vision of what my teacher training will look like! So why add the extra work of a blog on top of all of that?

For a lot of reasons. The first is a desire for productive dialogue. I've resisted blogs for a loooong time now, because I always thought of them as narcissistic and self-indulgant. Who has that much to say, that someone would want to follow their blog? I used to think. But now I understand that--at least for me as a blogger and this blog as a text--it's not about elevating myself to a state of importance, or believing that my experiences are relevant and valuable and interesting enough to attract readers. Instead, I NEED HELP making sense of all the experiences I'm going through right now! I very frequently make sense of (or attempt to) my experiences, emotions, thoughts, behaviors, etc through writing/journaling. I've been an avid journal keeper since I was probably about 11, but they were always private journals that I wrote just for the catharsis of writing something down, verbalizing it, releasing a thought/feeling I had been afraid to consciously articulate, or making sense of something I didn't understand by writing about different possibilities until one struck me as cohesive enough to settle the question for me.

In all cases, I was writing with the idea that I knew the answer to whatever questions I was posing, and I just had to dig the answer out of myself. In this case, though, I know that I don't have the answer. I might be able to construct an answer, or several possible answers, over the course of my training and the beginning of my career, but the internet is providing me with the opportunity to present my experiences to a lot of people who are struggling with/have struggled with these questions.

I know it can be really helpful for me to dialogue with others, get feedback about my developing praxis (a perhaps inaccessible but jargon-y and convenient way to say theory and practice), and find out what others think the purpose of education, the teacher, the student, the public school, the university, field research, standardized tests, IEP's, etc etc etc might be. So I invite as many people as would like to, or even just not mind, to please please please read this blog every once in a while and let me know when you think I'm totally wrong about something, or when I'm enacting a practice that might be intellectually harmful to students, or when I'm severely overanalyzing a trivial problem! Getting feedback will be awesome, will let me feel connected to other people during a BUSY semester that will probably turn me into a recluse, and will give me a lot to think about and to use to form my developing teacherly identity!

The blog also serves a (some) selfish purpose(s). The act of writing, like I said, has a tendency to help me understand, analyze, and just generally think through new experiences, especially complex and chaotic ones. My high school classroom is totally unpredictable (at least at this point in my career) to me, and so many things are always going on, it's hard to keep track of them all and draw valuable connections without doing a lot of written reflection, so that the thoughts become static and can be represented more permanently than when they're just thoughts hovering somewhere between my long-term, short-term, and working memory (wait, maybe short-term and working memory are the same, but you hopefully understand that I'm just trying to emphasize their flighty-ness, the ease of losing a train of thought as it becomes more complex). So writing will serve that function--I'll get back to this in the "What" part of this entry, though, when I discuss what I envision my blogging process to be.

Along that same vein, though, I want to preserve what I'm feeling and experiencing right now because it's so heightened and confused and chaotic and probably overly reflective. I think that--and I don't know for sure yet, because I'm still a novice at this--that, like any profession, feeling like a good teacher and being a good teacher are two separate and potentially unrelated ideas. In fact, I'm really afraid that I'll develop the habits and routines that I see my mentor teacher using/repeating . I'm not afraid because they're bad habits; I'm afraid of the idea of becoming such a natural at teaching (she's been teaching English for 10 years now) that I can go through the motions reflexively without thinking. I'm sure when you're that experienced, you probably feel like you're good, or at least competent, at your job. But if you're not constantly evaluating your practices, you might not be a good teacher at all! So I want to preserve the preservice, hyper-analytical me so that the potential veteran teacher me can look back and remember all the questions I had about all these big and small issues, and just remember how important even something habitual and routine can seem/be.

And the final purpose for starting this blog is a professional one. The secondary English ed program coordinator talked to us a little bit about our digital footprint and making ourselves marketable, and she made some fair points. If, when administrators considering my candidacy for a job google my name (which they almost certainly will, I'm thinking), they find a blog with videos of me teaching in a real classroom, detailed reflections on my ideas about education, teaching, English, writing, etc etc etc, in addition to my twitter account that feeds into my education class's tag #pitt_enged and a responsibly maintained facebook page, they will know (in a partial way, at least) not only what kind of person I am/present myself to be, but also what I think about various disciplinary and professional issues, and also, if I can include the video clips on here, how I will likely behave in the classroom.

With that in mind, I encourage comments, but I also ask that anyone commenting on this blog (which I hope everyone I know does at least once or twice) all content is professional and carefully selected. Basically, imagine if it's something I would want a potential employer to see--because that's one function I want this blog to serve!

That should give you a general idea of why I've decided to keep this blog, so, on to the what!

The What?

What is this blog going to look/be like? Truth be told, I don't fully know; in fact, it's probably impossible to know what it can become, considering the gradual process that goes into creating/keeping a blog. But I have a general game plan in mind, which I plan to stick to for at least this semester while I'm pre-student-teaching. Really, I don't envision the blog majorly changing until I get a classroom of my own/a "permanent" teaching position (the "" are a shout out to the debates going on right now about the value of teacher contracts/tenure and the crisis in the humanities and in education, leading to a lot of schools making significant cuts). At that time, my needs for the blog will likely change in ways that I can't foresee at this point. But, for now, what I hope this blog will be:

It will likely be topically quite diverse, which is why I hope to get a great diversity of people following it! I want to deal with English issues like the ones I dealt with in my Undergrad work--What makes a piece of literature great? How do we define genre(s)? How important/valuable is each lens of critical analysis/movement in literary theory? What does a well constructed essay look like? What texts/types of texts count as literature? etc etc.

It will also likely deal with professional issues: What teaching strategies are effective, and when are they? How much reading/writing/test prep should I be doing in each of my classes? How do I differentiate curriculum for kids with IEP's while still challenging them (eg how do I scaffold in a mixed-ability class)? What is the role of alternative types of text in my class? How do I select texts for inclusion? How do I select unit topics/goals? etc etc etc.

It will also probably deal with more socially situated quasi-philosophical questions like, What is the value of education? What is the teacher's role in society? What is the student's/citizen's responsibility/role in society? Should I teach knowledge for its own sake, or does it need to be practically relevant? What type of space should a classroom be?

And I don't think I'll be able to totally escape the charged political questions, too: What is it reasonable for taxpayers to ask of public school teachers? How do funding choices affect administrators/taxpayers/teachers/students/resources/instruction/learning? Should teachers encourage students to be politically active participants in a democracy, or should we try to avoid "mobilizing" students? How much political/religious/personal discussion is acceptable/desirable in an English classroom?

And most of all, I want to talk about the process I go through--and all of you go/have gone through when trying to come up with answers to all these different types of questions, because though my answers may change as I develop into/as a professional, I'll always (I hope) be asking them, and seeking to revise my answers--so while the answers may be tentative/temporary, the process will certainly endure, and I need to develop and hone that.

And as far as the format/writing process goes, I plan to write weekly this semester. I observe in my 11th grade classroom every Wednesday, so look for updates every Wednesday. This blog will deal mainly with the thoughts/questions/concerns that arise in my experiences in my classroom, since I get the advantage of classes to discuss the other types of texts/work I'm encountering, and because I don't really have anyone in close proximity to me on a regular basis with whom I could otherwise unpack my experiences at my placement, primarily because the only people who are in the classroom are the students and teacher, who are engaged in learning and teaching, respectively, not in analyzing what's happening, per se. So I plan to post at least once a week every Wednesday until the semester is over, but I may occasionally post if I'm really struggling with a concept I encounter in my class readings, even after the class has the opportunity to discuss it. I'd like to imagine the number of weekly posts will increase in the Spring when I begin student-teaching, because there will be SO MUCH for me to try and make sense of, all of which I would love to have detailed feedback about, but I think that may be impractical, because I'll be even more pressed for time next semester than I am now, so I may not be able to write as often as would be useful. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, though!

Though I'll be discussing my placement, I will only be writing in a positive or a constructive way. I won't be criticizing my mentor teacher's pedagogy/practice, for example, because in a public forum like this, I don't think it would be appropriate or professional. Not to mention she's been teaching English for 10 years, and I've been studying it for not even half that long, so she has the expertise that I don't. That's certainly not to say that I always like/will always like how she runs her classroom, what she communicates to students with various practices, how she views each of her students, etc. In fact, I imagine she and I will differ on many, many issues because we're two very different people with different pasts and different goals. It's okay for her to be different from what I want to be, though! And I can still learn quite a lot about teaching from her classroom, even when we differ in our opinions of what she might be doing with her classes that day. But any discussion of how her practices may or may not match my expectations/what I'm learning/what I plan for myself as a future teacher will be done in a constructive, hopefully dialogical way. And I will never never never be using student names or discussing students in any way but a constructive one! In fact, it's because of my concern for student anonymity that I'm considering weather or not I should post videos to this blog that feature the students I'll be teaching.

Conventionally, though, this will be a fairly typical blog (barring today's EXTRA-long post...) I will be writing in blog style, not paying overly careful attention to surface-level conventions, interrupting myself, talking through ideas without a clear thesis (using what Peter Smagorinsky calls, or cites someone else as calling, exploratory talk instead of final-draft speech). So don't gasp at my use of abbreviations and contractions, my long-winded and twisty-turny sentences/paragraphs, my interjections into my sentences, my sometimes coloquial diction, etc. I'm thinking through things, and my blog will generally reflect the un-polished, disorderly nature of my tentative and developing thoughts.

I plan on my process being basically this: take tons of notes throughout my day at my placement, weather I'm observing or teaching on my own, think through the day on my buss ride home from my school site and try to decide what problems I really need to think out and get feedback on, start planning a general idea of how I'll talk about/contextualize/explain the problem(s) and the situation(s) in the classroom that gave rise to it/them, write really quickly in my teaching journal that I keep in word, which is a more private, more emotional and critical reflection, decide what belongs on a public blog and what does not, and then post on here.

So I was going to reflect on my placement experiences today, but I think I'll let this post stand alone, and perhaps create a separate post to get into the particulars I want to talk about so far. Again, PLEASE everyone who is interested at all read over my posts and give me some feedback when you can! I want to know what I'm failing to consider, or what I can/should try, or how I can improve my thinking and/or my teaching skills/practice!

Thanks for reading thus far, and sorry again for having so-freaking-much to say to contextualize/set up what this blog is/will be!!!!