Truly,
Every time I sit at a computer I feel like I have to learn something new....and it's exhausting. New passwords, user names, directions to navigate, AND who are all these people??
So many voices crowding the air, streaming everywhere. What does this do to us as individuals? What will this do to our children? Are our individual voices truly important or are we just another voice in a million, a grain of sand,or yes the proverbial dust in the wind.
In my classroom the effect continues. Attendance, testing, maintenance, student challenges and research, media and lesson creation, they all require these little tidbits of information, little decision hurdles which snip away at my allotment of decisions for the day. I must have on hand, in my available storehouse of knowledge, a huge amount of trivial data to navigate my way through the technology of the day. AND it's always changing. AND this has very little to do with the actual work of teaching children.
The work of teaching children pivots singularly around KNOWING them. Their strengths, weaknesses, needs. Where each is in their own development. It is so easy to find myself lost in the maze of unimportant business. Assignments which don't meet their needs or grading which doesn't give me new or usable information about them. My daily challenge is how to stay grounded in the important work of the day and how to keep the students there with me.
All of this is just in the small microcosm of my classroom. This doesn't address the incoming pressures to use this designated technique, or that curriculum in a prescribed manner. Those pressures and decisions are a rant for another day.
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