What is a "hard" teacher?
Okay so as some of you heard me vent a little at the last 21st century meeting, I am sick to death of the adjectives "easy", "hard" and "fun" being used to describe teachers/classes. We need to expand the students vocabulary as to how they define classes/teachers.
The terms"easy" and "fun" usually give people an image of a ridiculous blow off class in which no "real" or "hard" work is required. And I truly believe that students, parents, other teachers, and administrators that hear these terms think that little to no learning is probably done in these classes.
This really bothers me. Are we saying that learning can't ever be fun? Or that the only definition on fun in a class equals playing games? Isn't it just possible that kids engaged in a class and motivated (due to their own ideas being integrated) is why they classify a class/teacher as "fun"?
Now lets take the adjective "hard". What does that mean? Boring? 20 pages of homework a night? Sheer lack of understanding of the subject matter?
I guess I get tired of people getting incorrect images about classes/teacher because of these types of adjectives being tossed around.
I loved Marlys' comment that we need to then ask the students, "What did you learn from that class/teacher or but did you learn alot? Or... What did you walk away with from that class?"
I guess I am just hoping that we can redefine some of these adjectives and replace them with other ones that really talk about the learning.

Autonomous Learning to Graduate?
So once again I have been out on the Web reading everything I can get my eyes on. Lately I have become interested in many high schools that are implementing an individual project before students are able to graduate. What? Autonomous learning to graduate???
The districts that I have read about that are implementing this major independent project require students to integrate various "content" area learning/curriculum into their projects. Some students do some what of an intership/apprenticeship then create a presentation to share their observations, data, questions and insights to what they discovered. Teachers were available to answer questions, share ideas, brainstorm, help problem solve etc.
I am thinking about integrating this idea into my classroom. I would have each student do an independent project using Spanish to complete the class.
I could give them pretty much complete autonomy and just be there to help out when they need some guideness or assistance. I would need to create a rubric that I could use, but I think it is a fun idea to think about. Students could use Spanish to create a bilingual brochure for something, to create a bilingual webpage, to creat our own AHS Drumbeat in a bilingual format?
What are some of your thoughts? Should we have an independent learning project be a graduation requirement???

Technology literate...Critically Literate!
So I started looking forward to the April 21st Century meeting I am looking a great deal at technology literacy and critical literacy. Both should be essential learnings for students. It seems to me that the two are almost one in the same. As I read on these topics I found myself becoming more and more confused about what we can actually accept as truths. It started to seem to me that everything (yes even school text books) have a certain bais and slanted views. One of the articles I read emphasised:
"Texts are social constructs that reflect some of the ideas and beliefs held by some groups of people at the time of their creation." http://wwwfp.education.tas.gov.au/English/critlit.htm
In general I think that teachers often spoon feed students information from texts that are selected for the students which are considered to be "reliable". However, learning to question what they read for logical thruths and gaps, and analyzing opposing view points to what they are reading enables students to truly internalize and understand the information. Today, with the incredible amounts of information available to us, I think sifting through information and questioning its validity is essential!
I like the idea of teaching students to be skeptics and always ask for the evidence. Every sight I researched said that students should be required to get two articles from each view point of a topic and look in at least one more factual reference book to get a basic idea about a topic. By continually requiring this type of referencing, maybe questioning the logic/truth behind something will become second nature to students. I don't think we have option to ignor the importance of becoming information analyzers.
I think that adults also need to be critically literate. There are millions of adults (many of whom I know well) who believe something because the read it or saw it on the news. It is sad to me that even adults don't understand that everything is slanted with a specific view point. "Aren't all stories a selective version of the truth?"