Reflections on Palmer Ch. 1

After reading the first two chapters of Palmer's The Courage to Teach, I am left with mixed feelings. I think the basic premise of the book has some truth to it. A teacher without personal integrity is going to be less effective, for several reasons - they will have no real devotion to their work, they will lack motivation to perfect their teaching technique, and they will have a correspondingly difficult time connecting to and motivating students. However, In my experience a passionate teacher without effective technique is even worse - I think both qualities are central to really great teaching.

Once I started reading however, the contents of the book left me cold. Palmer defines integrity as the process of coming to understand and honor the "forces that converge within us", be they good or bad. This conception of integrity has more in common with the self-seeking narcissism of the self-help movement than with the solid foundation of Christian thought. As the chapter progresses, however, it becomes clear that his real working definition of integrity is the process of confronting and overcoming our personal failings, which then allows us to teach in an authentic way. This is better, but still lacking. Improving ourselves morally is certainly admirable, but Palmer offers no real support for the idea that it is the most fundamental element of teaching. He presents evidence in the form of stories, but I did not find these convincing - it seemed to me that he was forcing his theory over ambiguous situations after the fact.

Journal 5/7 - 5/11

This week we've been focusing on rational expressions - simplifying, multiplying, and dividing them, along with word problems involving side lengths, etc. All these techniques make heavy use of factoring, which is difficult for many students, so teaching the material has been frustrating. I've gone over several mnemonic aids which can be employed to simplify factoring, and this has helped somewhat.

The other challenging aspect of these lessons is that the process of simplifying requires a solid grasp of order of operations and the way that numbers act when they are multiplied vs. added or subtracted. Many students don't seem to have a solid foundation in this, and as a result they split up factors, factor improperly, etc. This is something I would really want to address much earlier in the year, but I may have to conduct a review as things now stand.

Journal 4/30 - 5/4

This past week has been relatively uneventful in the classroom. The disruption of state testing is over, and it has been good to get back to covering new material. I think the students are relieved to be finished with testing as well, and they have been well behaved all week.

I have been experimenting with incorporating group work into my lessons this week, and I have noticed that it can be challenging logistically if it is not a regular thing. I feel like it would take too much time to have students change their seating arrangement if it is not something they are used to doing on an everyday basis - this would involve showing them their new locations, how to arrange the desks, etc. Instead, I am forming them into groups based around their current seating positions - they simply turn to their neighbors and work in groups of 3 or 4. This is not ideal, in that the group assignments are essentially random, and if I start using group work on a regular basis I feel like I would need to develop a system for assigning groups that took into account things like math ability and language proficiency for my EL students.