If you haven’t heard about www.kahnacademy.org yet, you probably will soon. Sal, the teacher on all the videos, has support from some pretty amazing organizations, and the slick interface and quick upstart makes that clear!

Here’s the premise: if we let students learn skills through dynamic online tutorials at home, we can free up class time to be full of actual collaboration (as opposed to the psuedo-collaborative process of even the best whole class questioning).

Check out the TED talk here.

Could you have learned math this way? Could this free up class time for more dynamic and collaborative activities?

By Garrett Hedman

It’s 6am on a Saturday. I’m sitting outside my apartment watching the sunset’s splash of colors reflect on Lake Ferguson. I’m bundle up with a wool hat, sweatshirt, and an extra blanket. Andrew Bird whistles a sweet melody on my computer, and I’m struck by a strange thought—what lead to me being up SO early on a teacher’s sacred Saturday morning? Am I turning old?

I remember my roommate’s post about the life of a young teacher and it starts to give reason to my early alertness, working long hours in a sometimes chaotic environment, but I wish to complete the young teacher’s “full day” reflecting on the hours outside of instruction to help explain why I’m up early on this Saturday morning.

4am: I’m up. Awoken to the ironic ring-tone of ‘peaceful dreaming’ on my phone, I grab my mac book pro and stare into the illumination. I begin to plan the lesson for the day that in just a mere 6 hours I will teach.

7am: Cocoa Puffs. At the beginning of the year I began to eat an ‘All Bran’ type cereal with thawed fruit, but now I realize that my mornings, after concentrated lesson planning, need to be pure pleasure, and this is only done by satisfying my sugar cravings deprived as a youth—a bowl of cocoa puffs.

7:20am: Off to school.

7:40am: Arrive at school. Set up my room for the day: make copies, update quiz scores, update class points, put up the new objective on the board, and clean up the trash; basically, I make the place where I work, a place where I want to be.

8:30am: Go to the courtyard to process tardies with other teachers and administrators. If students have a parent with them they are allowed to go to class unpunished; otherwise, today, they get a one-day suspension for being tardy. Why this harsh punishment? Because students would rather talk in the halls than go to class in the morning—so something has to get them to class.

9:00am: I finish the power point for the day and put up the bell ringer.

9:40am: I read either a science magazine (Popular Science or Scientific American) or a fictional story to give my mind rest for the long morning.

10-4pm: I teach.

4-5pm: This time consists of phone calls to parents, tutoring, writing referrals for the day, and cleaning up the room…again.

5-7pm: On Tuesdays and Thursdays I coach the goalies on the soccer team, on Wednesdays I have professional development through Teach for America, and on Mondays and Fridays I run for my personal enjoyment.

7pm: I attempt to make dinner. I’m a college boy cook—pasta, soup, frozen pizza and rice are my specialties.

7:30: I read again or watch a TED video. I’m exhausted by the day, so really doing any work would be painful to endure.

8am: I’m asleep.

8 hours later I begin the day again.

My younger brother commented that my sleeping schedule reflects a transformation into an old person. Early to bed, early to rise. But right now…as I sit and look out upon the lake in front of me, I cannot help but smile because I don’t feel old. On the contrary I feel quite alive; I feel young.

I recall the mornings in elementary school waking up at 5am to watch Sonic the Hedgehog before my parents awoke. I loved those mornings, and perhaps that is what I’m reverting to, my past 6-year-old habits.

Chilled by the morning and warmed by my thoughts, I take my 6-year-old self in my apartment and begin my cherished weekend.

By Garrett Hedman

I’m here to inspire students to become learners, and starting Wednesday, I will be a full time inspirer. I’m going to center my class around the theme of “One Step”, and to explain the theme I will say this poem I wrote a year ago. I hope you enjoy!

One Step

It’s when you see a baby—a bluberous, bulge of a being
Making the effort to go against all odds and conquer the pull of the earth
To reach the first step
The step that makes people cheer because the baby
Stepped into a new way of life.

It’s when you see hero—an American story, an American legend
Who captivates the attention of millions of people across the nation to go to a place beyond all imagination—the moon.
To take one small step for man kind.

It’s when you see a stranger—a dirty, society claimed outcast
who is the only one that sees a friend out cold on the ground
so he takes a step of desperation and 10 more into a run to help the rejected
A step to help an invisible man.

It’s when you see a man take one step forward and bow down on his knee
To look at his partner in the eyes and see the future ahead of him
To see that love conquers all
After a step forward is taken.

Whether it’s a dancers beat of life or a baseball player’s step to the plate
A step can be the start of change, a start of something new
And to only wonder what steps could have been taken, haven’t been taken, will be taken
By me, by you

by Eric Benzel

Isn’t this picture wonderful?! My dad took this photo of a bunch of teenagers playing in the fire hydrants this week while they were out here to visit: classic NYC. Students had their last day of school last friday, and there have been kids playing everywhere! Last friday was also graduation across most of the city: the subways were full of students in their dress clothes and graduation gowns holding flowers. Proud parents surrounded their beaming graduates! It was pretty exciting.

This all has got me thinking about being a teacher! Graduation seems like it means something very different for teachers. What will I feel when my first students walk across the stage and receive their diplomas? Pride of course. Maybe sadness, excitement, fear, or loss? Students that I will have known for a semester or four years will be leaving the safe space we try to create in schools to enter the real world. How will I feel as a teacher?

That is, if I get to be a teacher here in the city next year. If you haven’t caught the news, NYC is on a hiring freeze, and the mayor and governor have proposed budget cuts to prevent laying off thousands of additional new teachers. Nonetheless, last year, NYDOE recieved 23,000 applications for new teachers and hired just ten percent of applicants! The real world is quickly approaching! Its going to be application time before we know it… is it too soon to be thinking about the first graduation?

By Nate Reaven

Now THIS is what university education schools should look like.

I currently believe (I am open to changing my mind with a solid argument and good evidence), that education schools at the undergraduate level focus on good things, but not the best things. For instance, at CU Boulder, in the majority of my education classes, we were instructed to create 20-minute lesson plans in groups on books like The Kite Runner or To Kill a Mockingbird. We were given weeks to plan this one activity. We taught our peers, all of whom are in college, are intelligent, and want to be teachers. In other words, we taught the ideal middle-school student. Standards are addressed, but they usually seemed to be secondary to the activity. I once received an A++. Really? An A++ is a lovely grade, certainly one that improves the GPA, but a grade that did not encourage me to improve, because I did not know what to improve upon. I was apparently, perfect.

For these reasons, I am excited to begin teaching summer school. I knew that I would be teaching real-live students, with real-live learning difficulties, and subsequently, real-live skills to improve on. However, I did not hypothesize that the training would be quite this good. We focused on skills that we will need in the classroom right away. We focused on how to write a lesson-plan far more explicitly than I ever did in college. We focused on the Say/See/Do (SSD) method of teaching a concept, and the Visual Instructional Plan (VIP) method of teaching a skill. We focused on breaking down skills into easy-to-digest steps. We focused on Active Participation (AP) in a way that allows students to remain constantly entertained and focused. We focused on creating an objective – how to backwards plan, with more purpose then I generally found in an educational classroom in college. There are no grades for the teachers – not just because we aren’t doing this for school, but because we are learning how to be teachers for ourselves. We want to learn how to do better.

I cannot describe how helpful this training has been.

At this point, I am contrasting training-styles and content focuses. It is unfair of me to choose one style over the other and call it superior. It could all just be my personal preference.

I will say this – beginning Monday I will be teaching Romeo and Juliet to middles school, inner city, underprivileged, and under-taught youth for six weeks. I will have a mentor teacher checking all of my lesson plans every week, coming into my classroom multiple times a week, and other experienced teachers at my disposal to discuss lesson-plan ideas. I will have teacher-peers who will be going through the same experiences, and teaching the same kids every single day, as I will. I will be able to improve regularly, and rapidly.

I have no doubt that all of these resources will prove to be invaluable as I move on to student teaching in the fall, and a career in education later. I just wish that every future teacher had this same opportunity.