Eth & Ped: What to bring to the classrom

I liked how the readings tied in so well with the previous week's readings. The comics "Mystery of Teaching", and "Beginners' Guides Contact I and II" were a really nice, pictorial view and really commended the articles that were assigned.

In the "Opening The Classroom Door", I found the following point very compelling:

"Take the elegant but straightforward idea that every

human being is a three-dimensional creature much like

yourself: a person with hopes, dreams, skills, and experiences;

each with a body, a mind, and a spirit that must

somehow be valued, respected, and represented in your classroom

and somehow taken into account in your teaching. If

you take this as a value you intend to carry in your

pocket into the classroom-if it's something you want

to take as an ironclad commitment to live out every day

no matter what--and to embed deep within the classroom

structure, culture, and environment, it challenges

you to find concrete ways to reject and resist actions that

treat students as objects and any gestures that erase,

obliterate, ignore, or silence any other human being."

We're taught from a very young age to treat others as we ourselves would like to be treated by them but its very seldom that this thought is taken into the classroom by the teacher! I'm curious to know how others who have r are currently teaching have taken this into their classrooms or how they've approached this.

I'm also interested in how each of us takes the values and ideas that Quinn speaks about and applies it to practice even in those craziest moments that every teacher dreads thinking about: a class out of control.

Bell's "Knowing Ourselves as Instructors" is also an interesting read, and I really like how the examples and snippets of thoughts from actual practitioners is used. Going through the first readings, I was interested in how professors broached social justice in class, and I liked how this article talks about how that's done and been done.

I especially like the Contact readings, maybe because its easiest for me to digest readings in the form of a story, so I enjoyed remembering points from the Bell and Quinn readings and noting where they popped up in the Contact readings.