I do not think there is ever an acceptable reason for a teacher to show violence in the classroom. Kids see enough of that on TV and elsewhere. So no, I do not justify your teacher throwing your lunchbox through a window (which is a rather odd response might I add!). I don’t categorize these two teachers the same way. I’m a young teacher and I am always looking for ways to improve my teaching styles and ways to help light the candle that every student carries. I see in this other woman from Web 2.0 that same strive to better herself and to me, that’s what makes a teacher. She may not be to that level of “mastery” yet and I’m sure I’m not either. I still have room to grow and hopefully I will never stop learning and improving. But I do commend this woman for the desire to improve herself as well.

I do have immense respect for teachers. I have friends who teach and I admire their selfless dedication.

But I think we’ve all had experiences with good teachers and bad teachers as students (and also, in your experience, as colleagues). I’ve had teachers who changed my life. I’ve also had teachers who made me hate a subject. Hell I even had one teacher who threw my lunchbox through a window because I accidentally left it under my desk. I see her as a crazy woman who should have been fired; perhaps you see her as someone who was overworked and had a bad day. Actually both are probably true!

When you are in a group it gives one more sympathy for those inside the group and less outside. So you’re sympathetic to this teacher, and I was only thinking of her as an anecdote. There was probably a better way to make my point.

I’m not perfect; perhaps I went overboard with my point about this teacher. I’m sure she is nice and it’s obvious she is invested in her class & students. I really didn’t mean to be that hard on her. I was just trying to illustrate my point, which I don’t even agree with completely anymore.

However, I think you’re overreacting in the other direction and it makes me want to brush you off with humor instead of seriously considering your points. Questioning my education, manners, and acceptance of others is probably not the best way to be persuasive.

It must be hard for teachers when people critique them without official credentials. I’m sure if I had the proper degrees, I would see her poor spelling & grammar as an asset to the “creativity” of the classroom. And maybe I would also repent of the audacity of speaking my mind on my own website.

Perhaps in my intellectual squalor I cannot comprehend what enlightenment might result with digital comic strips. If only I had been born gifted in this brave new world! I would have had the privilege of learning how to make comic strips on a computer about the downfall of the Roman Empire.

Shame on me! I should have chosen a better age to make my entrance into the education system!

I don’t know this teacher. Maybe her curriculum DOES need improvement. My point in the matter is that to use her and to annihilate her reputation to argue against WEB 2.0 did not accomplish your purpose but instead turned what could have been an educational debate about “e-sharing” into a bashing of a particular educator and her particular methodology.

Maybe this teacher does need to reconstruct her virtual classroom. But the fact that she is networking, looking for new and creative ideas, and having educational discussions means that she is there for the right reasons–to improve herself and therefore improve the education of her students. It is not educators like her that I worry about. Instead it is the educators who have done the same thing for twenty years and who are simply surviving rather than mastering; those who believe that they have it all figured out and that there couldn’t possibly be a better way than the way they teach their curriculum that I wonder about. At least this teacher is not complacent, but instead, constantly thriving to improve education by looking for new ideas in an everchanging, technological world.

Do a little research about higher order thinking(Harry Wong), or Blooms Taxonomy and you’ll find that the highest order of thinking is called “creating.” Students learn from hands-on education and how do you know that part of this educator’s comic strip doesn’t require students to research information, just like they would have to do for an essay? I absolutely believe that critical thinking, reading, and writing skills are invaluable to our industry but you also don’t know the methodology in which this teacher was employing. In fact, I do believe she stated that she wanted the project to demonstrate “…how the geography of the area has played a very important role in determining how the society developed and what technologies evolved…” Is this not a valid topic for the discussion of Ancient Civilization? You may not agree with her methods but again, you don’t know her curriculum. I would like to think that if she is a teacher of gifted students that she has earned this position through dedication and hard work. Personally, I believe you should recind your judgement and apologize to the teacher in question. You are quick to judge another’s profession, yes, profession, which makes them a professional–but yet you deflect my response to your original post with a simple “man, take a chill pill.”
It seems that your professional education was not only “lousy” (as were your own words) but your manners and acceptance of others must also have suffered as well.
Shame on you!

I wasn’t intentionally ridiculing her — I was trying to give evidence of my skepticism of Web 2.0 being the future of education. Even as I look back on that teacher’s note, though, I can’t help but think I wouldn’t want her to be a teacher to my gifted kids, unless it was elementary education.

Maybe I’m being too hard on her. I have been known to have too high of standards. If you find that offensive I apologize.

I’ve revised my opinion on this since I wrote it. The web will definitely have a large part in the future of education. However, I still think I make valid points about the need for kids to be challenged with more than making comic strips and writing blog posts.

But I’m just a nobody with a blog, so it’s just my opinion.

First and foremost, who are you, Joshua Sowin, and what gives you the right to ridicule this teacher?

Reading this blog–which I was required to do for a class–angers me so much that I almost can not respond.

First of all, any teacher going onto these sites trying to find or share information is most likely doing one of two things: either they are sharing their knowledge with others so as to help less experienced teachers or they are gaining information that could help them to become a better, more informed teacher. Hopefully they are doing both! Please tell me how this could be a bad thing?

Secondly, if you had taken half as long to actually read her post as you did to ridicule her on it, you would have noticed that she specifically states that her class is an online course. So your suggestion of drawing a comic strip is asinine–even if students DID hand-draw these, they would have to upload and email them; why not cut out the middle man and just create them online in the first place?

Also, because her course is likely an elective, she has the freedom to be a little more creative. In essence, she is not “teaching to the test” but instead teaching her curriculum in a manner that students will both use in the future and respond to. Students relish the opportunity to use technology and if you can piggyback education into a task that they already enjoy doing such as using their iPods, you are much more likely to reach them and encourage them not just to participate in higher order thinking but also to find opportunities and information out on their own. No student–and may I even state no adult (including educators) has ever picked up a text book and did a little “pleasure reading” but I assure you that if you can peak their interest in a topic and then make it available for them online that they WILL find it and use it. For example, I challenge my students to create a blog or social networking account in Spanish and to work on it at home in their free time. I even offer an extra credit point if they bring in a hardcopy of their blog. I have received SEVERAL copies already. I tell students about a website that uses verb drills or hosts articles in Spanish and they will find them and choose to participate on their own a lot more so than if I hand them a book and tell them to read chapter nine. Not that I discourage use of hard-copy literature but I think we have to remember that jobs of tomorrow and even of today are a lot more likely to ask you to find information online than in a text book.

As far as the comic strip goes, I personally would not be likely to use a comic strip for my content (High School Spanish)but I would never ridicule a teacher for thinking outside the box and trying to use resources that the students would actually relate to. I can tell you that my students have used their text books MINIMALLY this year and yet, according to their test scores, (we are an accredited school and follow state standards in foreign language) they are right on track for college level Spanish, with many of them going on to become Spanish majors in college. I use a lot of cooperative learning techniques, which does include using the internet for drill and practice grammar lessons, communicating with students in other countries, and by integrating my SmartBoard into my lessons, I can take students on a virtual tour of the countries that they are studying.

And insinuating that this woman, who has probably spent more time and money in education than you can imagine, is incompetent because she misspelled a few words on a social networking site is just low brow. I would argue that the majority of people (even those of us who are phenomenal spellers) are more likely to make an error in spelling or grammar when we are networking (texts, IMs, blogs, etc.) than we would be writing a term paper. Most likely this woman was typing quickly and did not take the time to notice the errors, assuming–obviously incorrectly–that she was there to network with other teachers and not to be judged on her vocabulary skills.

Maybe your “lousy education” is the cause of your uncaring and unbridled defamation of this woman’s character.

Your points are well-taken. However, I think my post communicated something that I didn’t intend: that I’m talking about the current tools of Web 2.0 as a solution to education.

What I want to communicate is that what we are calling Web 2.0, or the framework of the Internet which has extended the democratizing of publishing and expanded the ability for dialog, will be essential both for changing our perceptions of education and for addressing those changes.

It’s something I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

Classroom 2.0, the social network you’ve quoted from, is an example of how teachers can now network with each other in ways that weren’t really possible before. Whether the discussion is on collaborative tools in the classroom, or specific aspects of teaching 4th-grade US history, these tools allow and facilitate connections and dialog that will impact students and teachers. A student interested in something esoteric will now be able to study it, find others interested in the same thing, and potentially participate in the creation of knowledge in that area.

The particular discussion that you saw may not represent your highest ideal for this dialog, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other conversations of great value.

Hope this helps the discussion. Since I hate how hard it is to follow conversations on blogs (Blogger now has a great feature allowing you to ask to be emailed any follow-ups), you may have to consider this a “drive-by” response and ping me if more takes place here that I can respond to–which I’d be glad to. I’m at steve@hargadon.com.

Cheers.