Facepalm II
Sep. 24th, 2009 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyrasantae
Week 4 (con't)
Day 7
Going down the street away from campus this morning, I went to get some coffee and breakfast before class. Which is when I run into my instructor going the other way, to our class.
When I got to the classroom with my coffee, her bag was there but she wasn't. The TV was there too.
In a moment she comes in carrying a box full of magazines from the 1950s. The magazines have sticky notes sticking out of them. She explains that she'd been reading them for her research and she wanted us to look at them and find evidence for some of the historical politics in educational administration/policy that we'd read about in the timeline-esque reading for today.
I think we had more fun looking at the old advertisements. $35 round trip Edmonton to Vancouver by bus! The magazine I looked at had a rather difficult-to-take-seriously-but-intended-totally-seriously article on "chronic complainers", complete with a list of self-reflective questions. I really want to find that article again so I'll try to request it from the library sometime. Since my instructor has the paper copy, I may have to go to the microfiche (ooh!) copy.
Anyway, after that, she lectured a bit on teacher shortages through the ages (there's never not been one), as well as a summary of the Progressive Education movement of the 1930s-1940s, using the points from the reading.
("The Teachers' Association had been warning of a shortage as early as 1939, but 'nothing was done until 1944.'" -- Hey, maybe it was that war in between!?)
A guy pushing a wheeled locker comes into the room at 8:25. She notices this and comments that a librarian is coming in at 8:30 to give a presentation.
Then she goes through some questions on her slides, like "what is progressive education," thankfully without elaboration. There's a few slides with just a quotation on each and she gives a few seconds to see if we have any comments on those quotations. We don't.
On Day 2 with the signup thing she had made a one-sentence comment about there not being a student presentation today because there would be a library workshop. I had made a note of this for some reason, so I was totally expecting the kind of thing like in freshman English class where we go sit down in the library computer lab and a librarian walks us through how to search for journal articles online.
But this man with the wheeled locker is bringing the lab to us (even though the library is less than 50 metres away). He passes out a laptop to each. (Then everybody either gets on Facebook or reads the news.) A librarian appears and she just shows us where to find the citation formatting guidelines and demonstrates how to look in a database for articles. And "the difference between a magazine and a scholarly journal is the peer review process."
Yeah. Really. This is done in every freshman English class. This is a THIRD-YEAR course. The vast majority of us are after-degree students and probably have written zillions of research papers.
This takes up the remaining 40 minutes of the period. "Many of you have been using [Youtube] videos to make connections to the readings [i.e. to demonstrate understanding and application of the content], but now you know how to find and can use journal articles too."
One of my classmates remarked that in a class in which (as surveyed at the beginning of term) most everyone knew how to do this stuff already, it probably would have been more time-efficient to provide information on who to talk to at the library or when public workshops are offered there, for the benefit of those who need help.
Mispronunciations of the day:
(I really hate making fun of people's language, but I really need to provide some illustration.)
* "pro-MISSING teachers"
* "add-minnis-TRAITORS"
* "in-TER-per-EH-tive analysis"
Something to think about:
If coming to classes in order to participate in discussions is so important, why have there been so few opportunities to discuss/debate the content?
Day 7
Going down the street away from campus this morning, I went to get some coffee and breakfast before class. Which is when I run into my instructor going the other way, to our class.
When I got to the classroom with my coffee, her bag was there but she wasn't. The TV was there too.
In a moment she comes in carrying a box full of magazines from the 1950s. The magazines have sticky notes sticking out of them. She explains that she'd been reading them for her research and she wanted us to look at them and find evidence for some of the historical politics in educational administration/policy that we'd read about in the timeline-esque reading for today.
I think we had more fun looking at the old advertisements. $35 round trip Edmonton to Vancouver by bus! The magazine I looked at had a rather difficult-to-take-seriously-but-intended-totally-seriously article on "chronic complainers", complete with a list of self-reflective questions. I really want to find that article again so I'll try to request it from the library sometime. Since my instructor has the paper copy, I may have to go to the microfiche (ooh!) copy.
Anyway, after that, she lectured a bit on teacher shortages through the ages (there's never not been one), as well as a summary of the Progressive Education movement of the 1930s-1940s, using the points from the reading.
("The Teachers' Association had been warning of a shortage as early as 1939, but 'nothing was done until 1944.'" -- Hey, maybe it was that war in between!?)
A guy pushing a wheeled locker comes into the room at 8:25. She notices this and comments that a librarian is coming in at 8:30 to give a presentation.
Then she goes through some questions on her slides, like "what is progressive education," thankfully without elaboration. There's a few slides with just a quotation on each and she gives a few seconds to see if we have any comments on those quotations. We don't.
On Day 2 with the signup thing she had made a one-sentence comment about there not being a student presentation today because there would be a library workshop. I had made a note of this for some reason, so I was totally expecting the kind of thing like in freshman English class where we go sit down in the library computer lab and a librarian walks us through how to search for journal articles online.
But this man with the wheeled locker is bringing the lab to us (even though the library is less than 50 metres away). He passes out a laptop to each. (Then everybody either gets on Facebook or reads the news.) A librarian appears and she just shows us where to find the citation formatting guidelines and demonstrates how to look in a database for articles. And "the difference between a magazine and a scholarly journal is the peer review process."
Yeah. Really. This is done in every freshman English class. This is a THIRD-YEAR course. The vast majority of us are after-degree students and probably have written zillions of research papers.
This takes up the remaining 40 minutes of the period. "Many of you have been using [Youtube] videos to make connections to the readings [i.e. to demonstrate understanding and application of the content], but now you know how to find and can use journal articles too."
One of my classmates remarked that in a class in which (as surveyed at the beginning of term) most everyone knew how to do this stuff already, it probably would have been more time-efficient to provide information on who to talk to at the library or when public workshops are offered there, for the benefit of those who need help.
Mispronunciations of the day:
(I really hate making fun of people's language, but I really need to provide some illustration.)
* "pro-MISSING teachers"
* "add-minnis-TRAITORS"
* "in-TER-per-EH-tive analysis"
Something to think about:
If coming to classes in order to participate in discussions is so important, why have there been so few opportunities to discuss/debate the content?
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-26 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-26 05:16 am (UTC)