Pedablogue, by Harvest Bird
teaching beyond tips and techniques
Nostalgia
07 June 2004, 8:37 pm
We have spent quite a bit of time in the prep lit course's unit on literary journals looking at nostalgia as a mode of representing the past, particularly in sports journalism.So the student who refers in their essay to "longing for past rugby" has hit the nail on the head, I think, as far as local culture goes.
It's worth the slog of introducing new ideas to get them so delightfully-rendered.
Spelling
07 June 2004, 4:49 pm
Maori words need to be typed slowly until you can be sure of having spelt them right.Some examples of spellings of "Ihimaera" (as in Witi Ihimaera) include
- Ihimarea
- Imhearea
- Ihmearea
There's also a fair amount of "been" where "being" is intended, for which I guess we can blame our accents, if nothing else (or should I say, eltse).
Language
06 June 2004, 5:58 pm
The best student essays are written in language that is plain, business-like, uses generally straightforward sentence structure and reminds the reader, through echo or explicit signposting, how each point fits into the wider argument.The worst are full of passionate intensity, which I often suspect of being fake anyway.
Compulsion
06 June 2004, 4:41 pm
I roared. And I rampaged. And I got bloody satisfaction. I've killed a hell of a lot of people to get to this point, but I have only one more. The last one. The one I'm driving to right now. The only one left. And when I arrive at my destination, I am gonna finish marking these essays.
That's one last batch of essays, not one last essay.
Elsewhere
03 June 2004, 2:58 pm
Tom Smith, whose workshop on blogging and edublogging for t4t4t members I failed to attend due to a) screening the first half of Traffic to my film studies students and b) picking up my elder dog from the groomer, wishes both the collective and this humble blog well.Thanks Tom, and I'm pleased to see that Canterbury's alternative capital obliged you on your recent visit.
Bloggin'Scholarship
03 June 2004, 2:42 pm
James at incorporated subversion has links to a series of pdf articles from the University of Texas journalism programme. I'm working my way through 'em, but thought this, in the first instance, interesting reading, particularly on the issue of how the informal language of blogging doesn't always sit well with the formal language of journalism (and academic writing more generally?) for assessment purposes at least.Endings
03 June 2004, 2:33 pm
Well, I have finished my lectures for my prep lit course, but am withholding any overall evaluative comments on it until I've finished marking. The last few weeks have been amiable, and relaxed; a little too amiable and relaxed on the students' part, to my mind. I feel like I've done some of my best teaching in the course, working in fields I haven't probed before and combining literary readings with a cultural studies approach, but at any given time less than two-thirds of the class has been there to reap the pedagogical goodness.The exam is worth sixty percent; at least people seem to be taking that seriously.
BlogIII
01 June 2004, 3:43 pm
The on-line discussion forum of teachers to which I belong now has its own blog, which has the pleasingly reflexive subtitle of "A blog for those in the T4T4T project who are interested in examining the use of blogs".Of course it's now linked to at right.
That's three blogs I write or contribute to and counting!
Resolved
01 June 2004, 3:24 pm
Pardon my silence over the last few days. I came to something of a methodological block concerning this blog, which has now resolved itself to my present satisfaction. Let me explain:I began this blog as an attempt to separate my reflections on my teaching from the rest of my reflections, which form my other journal, which is rather more extensive and also more personal. Having set up this site, I started browsing educational writing on the web in order to find out more about the community I was insinuating myself into. As I discussed in this entry, such writing generally falls into two categories, which are sometimes called pedablogs and edublogs. This site seemed to fall into the former category.
The trouble was, when I started browsing other pedablogs (some of which are linked to at right), they seemed different in function and purpose from what I intended for this site, largely because their register and focus perpetuated the "everything's fine" kind of professionalism that I don't believe truly exists.
That's not to say that professionalism in teaching isn't widespread, achievable and desirable, but rather that the purpose of this journal is to mine what that means, not use it as a front-of-house kind of web presence by which to advance.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's just not one of my goals at the present moment, not least because I don't intend this blog to be so much full of practical resources for other teachers as I intend it to be a place where I, and others who are interested, might stop and think.
However, I didn't quite figure this out immediately, and have spent a few days revisiting what my purpose is in writing about teaching here. I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to keep it operating below the professional face of teaching, by which I mean I intend it to be partisan, skeptical, critical and sometimes conflicted, much like the verso of my offline presence in the educational workforce.