"Live" blogging going back to school again.

I'm not a consistent writer. This blog is probably the best I've done and the last time I posted on a regular schedule was 2015. The idea of writing and being a writer has always been an appealing one even if I'm not really sure where I got that from. My family doesn't care much for academics. They've never attended a graduation of mine or celebrated any academic success. It's probably no coincidence that high school was mostly a game for me; I wanted to get through with as little effort as possible. Not once was I ever under the impression that education was the key to my success.

Yet I'm a teacher. (Yes, I still tell myself that despite going on four years since I last taught in a classroom setting.) I love school. I like the idea of writing and talking about ideas and being a person who values thinking and analysing above just about everything else. As far as self images go, I couldn't do better than academic.

So there I was about a year ago coming out of an isolated small town and moving somewhere with access to top-notch universities. Of course I did something stupid like try to get certified in the most difficult state to seek certification in. Of course I didn't pursue the thing which drove me most passionately when I last taught, literacy. Of course I thought the prudent thing to do was to bang my head against the education system and try to teach in New York public schools.

That's what I did last time too, by the way. When I graduated college and knew, absolutely knew, I wanted to get a teaching graduate degree I still tried to find work first. It's a mistake I've resolved not to make again. When you know you want to do something, you should do that first. While it seems self apparent, I'm a dense individual with endless capacity for mild self sabotage. I've internalized that feeling of indifference from my family about teaching, learning, and education and made it into this weird drive to appear practical. Sure, I might think, I'm a loser academic but at least I'm finding work and not wasting time in school! I would deploy this weird circular reasoning to justify not getting the training and skills I desired. I still want to be a teacher. I believe school is valuable. But I don't want to go to school? That's some fine reasoning there!

I'll cut to the chase: I'm going back to school to earn another master's degree. I'll begin at Columbia University this May in a 1 year accelerated program to become a Literacy Specialist. I had considered going the SLP route but I'd need at least three semesters of science and math courses which I'd avoided as an English major and I'm not eager to go back and take undergraduate chemistry or neuro. Beyond that, I really do value the classroom as an environment for learning. I always wanted to stay a classroom teacher and not a "pull out" teacher. I don't want a student one-on-one. I just don't think that is a realistic or scalable model in the our public schools. I'd even argue we're moving more toward massive blended learning courses with 50+ students in a section and break-out groups a bit like you'd find in introductory college courses.

If I'm going to be a teacher, I want to be functioning in the typical environments that most students face. I have some pretty deep feelings about this from my time at Centennial High School where I felt like I was identifying a large number of students with significant gaps in reading and writing in both the special education and general education setting. No school system, certainly not public schools, will be giving each kid individual literacy instruction. Especially not at a high school level where those resources are least allocated. If you're interested in some of what I was thinking about back then, look at 2011-2013 blog posts. I especially recommend On Constructivism because I think it's closest to where my thinking is right now.

As an aside, I ended that post by saying:

As I'll begin presenting later, modern science is quickly discovering how our brains function and how learning really works. It's shining new light on old methods of teaching which probably seem ore[sic] familiar to the baby boomer generation than to ours.

I never wrote that follow up post. I'm sorry for that because I still think about these issues all the time. I'm also sorry that I don't reply to comments. I wish I got an email or a notification that somebody posted a comment because I don't think I go back to my posts much after hitting publish. In fact, just email me!

My plan for this blog is to use it as a space for reflection on my new learning adventures. One thing I think I will really enjoy about Columbia is their focus on literacy work in classrooms and with classes of students instead of a more clinical setting. I'm going to be riding the train every day for two hours each way and I intend to use that time to read and plan my blog posts. Ambitiously, I would like to blog after each class. For the summer that would only be twice weekly but it would pick up in the fall.

Hopefully, I am good about this and can use it as a kind of open ended discussion with my past self and with the new ideas I'm encountering. Keep your fingers crossed.