K Bechtel

Throughout this chapter I kept trying to classify myself as either a schooler or a yearner.  I so badly want to be totally yearner, but the truth is I’m a hypocritical mesh of both.  What I say I believe comes from the yearner perspective, however what I actually do looks a lot like a schooler.  I say I take a constructivist approach to learning in my classroom, but I am explicit in my directions to students on what they should learn each day.  I believe change can help make bad situations better, but I know change is sometimes difficult and do not embrace it.  I say I do not want my students to simply be consumers of education, however, I teach as if that is what they are.  When I am unable to be at school, I want a substitute that can do all the new methods utilized and use the  technological toys in my classroom and I think this will be difficult to find someone to maintain the amount of normalcy in my absence.  It isn’t.  Retired teachers to brand new ones can pull off what I do without a hitch.  And to think I thought I was different….

I remember my first year of teaching.  I went in to that definitely believing I was a Yearner.  In fact, I was not only going to change my classroom and school, I was going to change the whole world.  I remember thinking of things I would not do as a classroom teacher.  Now 9 years later, where is that ideology?  Reality has made me see that school wasn’t  that bad.  I mean look at me.   I turned out ok, didn’t I?  I truly have never seen anything other than school work so it is hard for me to picture the flip side of it.

Is it though just a flip side?  Can teachers take on this approach or another?  It is actually deeper than that.  When you think of change, schools experience it all the time, so we say.  We have school improvement plans that do things better for this next class of students.  We have school-wide and district-wide initiatives that change how we’ve been doing things.  But do these things actually change anything?  When it comes down to it, teachers fill their classrooms and do what they want to do, what they are comfortable doing. 

So Papert has written an excellent first chapter.  He’s got me hooked.  I so want to learn how to change what I do to allow students to learn better.  I want to fly!