Teaching and Society

I think that this week's facilitation was great!! I loved that we looked at the link between society and education and discussed how the two are inextricably linked. There is no way to teach "in a vacuum," so everything that is going on in the "outside world" or "the real world" is going to directly affect our students, and therefore, it should directly affect our teaching. I think that this week there was a great balance between seeing some of the negative aspects of our society and the subsequent effects on our schools and the obstacles we as teachers have to face, but also striving to see the positive rays of light that can be found in specific students or simply in what other teachers are striving to do to help the education system one student at a time.
I believe that the most important focus of this week went back to what we have talked about from week one in this course, and that is the importance of finding a true connection with our students; that is done through seeking to get to know our students on a deeper level as well as being genuine about our own lives and our own journey toward knowledge and understanding, that even we as teachers are continually working toward. I think that the key word in all of this is genuineness. We must be genuine with our students... Genuine about wanting to get to know them as human beings as well as genuine about who we truly are as their teachers. This is definitely not easy to do, but it is necessary in order to help our students navigate our society, which can be quite a daunting task.
We tackled some difficult issues this week, such as the difficult place adolescents hold in our society, the pressures and ostracism of some students in the LGBTQ community, and the prevalence of eating disorders and body image issues in our schools. I think that the common theme with all of these issues is the importance of being open and honest with our students about these topics and actually working to incorporate them organically into our curriculum. I already mentioned (in the facilitation questions last week) that I would like to incorporate the idea of body image and culture into my Spanish class, bringing up that fact that many Spanish speaking nations seek after a few "extra curves" and that they do not have the preoccupation with "being skinny" that many people in the United States do. I would also love to look at different coming-of-age customs throughout the Spanish-speaking world in order to bring in the aspect of adolescents in our society and celebrate where they are in their lives, as opposed to ignoring it or even looking down on their particular stage in our society. I believe the last issue we discussed in class-- that of students in the LGBTQ community-- would be the most difficult for me as a foreign language teacher to organically incorporate into my curriculum, but I was thinking that perhaps we could look at LGBTQ issues from a global perspective, and see the cultural differences of how this community is accepted (or ostracized) not just in the United States, but also in Spanish-speaking countries.
This week again reminded me of the great responsibility we have as educators to bring "the real world" into our classrooms as well as getting to know the "real world" our students carry with them into our classrooms daily.

Complicated Conversation...

So, the title of this week was "Anti-Intellectualism and Complicated Conversation," and to be completely honest I feel like I have stayed in the state of "complicated conversation." There were so many different topics that were touched on...the privatization and feminization of education and their negative effects; education becoming a business model and being destroyed because of that; teachers who start out committed, yet end up losing their focus; the somewhat negative idea of teachers starting families; the difficult implications of teaching morals to students; and the societal shift of seeing intellectuals more negatively as eccentric. Usually, I leave class feeling inspired to do something or change something in my actual classroom on a daily level, but this week I left feeling a little directionless. The issues discussed were so big and over-arching, and sometimes I question my ability as one single teacher to truly change anything in a monumental sense. I know that all of the things that we discussed are extremely important to discuss, but I felt that some of the discussion was a little more negatively focused than usual. To be completely honest, I believe that some issues were overly generalized, which led me to remove myself a bit from the conversation because I do not deal well with confrontation.
As I reflect, while I do not have some great revelation this week that will change the way I teach forever, I do feel that I have gained a greater understanding of myself as a student. I have to be willing to stand up and speak my mind and disagree in a respectful, forthright manner. If I cannot become comfortable to do that myself as a student, then how can I expect to cultivate that as a teacher in my own students?
I am still processing my thoughts from this past week, so this reflection may not be as rich or refined or complete as I would like it to be, but that is where I currently am, and I cannot become good at reflection unless I am honest about where I am in the process...