Reflective Autumn
On a whim I decided to try Wikiquote to see what it had to say about April (no good, all northern hemispherical) and then hit gold with a seach on ‘autumn’:
“If winter is slumber and spring is birth, and summer is life, then autumn rounds out to be reflection. It’s a time of year when the leaves are down and the harvest is in and the perennials are gone. Mother Earth just closed up the drapes on another year and it’s time to reflect on what’s come before.”
Mitchell Burgess, Northern Exposure, Thanksgiving, 1992
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Autumn)
Reflective is exactly the right word – I had a lot of time out in the backyard this weekend (7 loads of washing hung out and brought back in again) and I found myself contemplating the bright daffodil-yellow scattered amongst the emerald leaves of the apricot tree, and watching cloud shapes against a blue blue sky, listening to the sounds of early season AFL games from the oval at the end of my street, and watching my dogs. I have been thinking about what to post on this blog, because so much has been happening that I don’t know quite where to start.
Most recently we had three days of training on how to use our new Library Management System, which basically consisted of the trainer going through all twelve modules of the software, one by one, showing us how to navigate, where to find common functions, how to do what we need to do. If I had not had my laptop there with the software already installed I would have gone completely bonkers by the end of the second day! The trainer was very nice and knowledgeable, and apologised for the lecture-format, but given the time available (she is based in Perth, so popping back over for a follow-up is not an option) we had to get through as much as possible as quickly as possible. I had post-it notes, pens, a Word doc and the new software up and running, and spent my time tagging useful parts of the training manuals with post-its, writing up procedures in my Word doc, and copying the trainer’s actions in the new software so that I could practice doing it for myself. I even took screenshots and added them to the right spots in my notes doc!
What relevance does this have? Well, it is a huge reminder to me that being made to sit passively while someone else transmits the information is stultifyingly boring!!!! This may explain why I have always made copious notes, frequently with multiple colours – and occasionally illustrated – throughout my high school and university studies. I have to do something to experience the learning, and I have no doubt at all that the young boys in my classes feel exactly the same way.
Actually I find it kind of amusing that despite being an avid reader, academically successful in the traditional school model, and now a Teacher Librarian (surely the most stereotyped as a print-bound teacher?) I do not like to learn things by reading them! At a bare minimum I talk things through, but to really feel sure that I have learnt something I like to practice or perform it. I am trying to embrace this in my teaching – I want to know what it is like to use various tools in my classes, and just reading about the uses of Flip video cameras or wikis isn’t enough – I am trying them out to see what happens. This can make planning, assessment and classroom management a little tricky sometimes… but the students seem to enjoy trying these new things out, and I am certainly learning new things!