Oh dear

Dear Joy,

I have a smattering of thoughts that are related to teaching and learning and schools today. They're not fully formed, but I'm writing to build the habit.

Good teachers are hard to find.
I had an emotional conversation with my yoga teacher on Sunday. Our class had a conference where we ate clementines and banana bread and drank chai... it was the first time I'd been to class since the miscarriage. I'd felt out-of-shape, and uncoordinated through the class, but also really grateful to be there and much more present in my body than I'd been in weeks. My teacher let me know already that continuing to grow my Ashtanga practice and keep trying to have a baby are not compatible right now. She suggested that I could practice at home, stop building my practice, and come to class once in awhile. I sort of wish that she was an uninformed "let it all hang out" kind of yogi instead of a wise, thoughtful one who knows each of her students well, and serves us with great honesty and integrity. Another yogi would tell me it was fine to come to class, that my mind could overpower my matter. But she's a fantastic teacher, just the kind I try to be, so she told me the truth.

This is relevant not just because of the kind of teacher K is, but because of the kind of learner I am, and because it's time for me now to be my own yoga teacher for awhile. In the past, I've fallen for other styles of yoga, or other charismatic yoga teachers, but K turned my own attention and interest back to myself every time. Doing the same sequence of poses every day helped me to learn about my mind and my body without being actually informed by my wise teacher. She knew when just the right moment or just the right day to mention something, or push me a little farther. I learned about the period of time for me right after I've been excited about something I've discovered, the period where I have made the thing part of my identity (bird-watching, uni-cycle riding or yoga) but haven't cemented it as part of my life, so that the identity piece remains even weeks after the last time I've practiced my new interest. My interest in K as a teacher (a very demanding teacher who insisted we practice together three times a year in order for her to teach me) managed to keep me showing up long after I might have under other circumstances.



Teaching myself to teach
From http://www.lessonplanspage.com/MD23.htm

My homework this week is to write a lesson plan. Part of "learner centered" college is that I need to figure out how to do this on my own. (Especially because my mentor is in Egypt for 10 days!) After 5 years of planning curriculum without discrete "lesson plans" I'm so curious about what's out there! I'm on a listserv of teachers from Rethinking Schools and they have occasionally over the years referenced various lesson plans about teaching math with social justice or about the N word, or about military recruitment in schools. Thanks to gmail I still have all of them and I suppose it's time to take a gander. When I googled "Lesson Plans" (I know there are texts on this... I picked other great texts on Curriculum for this class ("Curriculum Planning") but they mostly involve debates about what the curriulum should be or not be, without too many details. The only books I have about the nuts and bolts are about Backwards Design and they don't "do" lesson plans. Which brings me to the internet. Among the gems I've found are:

"This idea involves creating "Penguin light bulbs""
and
"A great Thanksgiving lesson on texture called "Textured Turkeys"."

Ahem. I've got a lot of reading ahead of me!