Apologies to the legions of die-hard EDUflect fans out there that have been patiently awaiting this entry (Patti I'm looking in your direction). Regrettably, it has been quite a while since my last blog (if brevity is the soul of wit, then by God, I'd say I'm bout the smartest man on the face of the planet...which might not be saying a whole lot) and very much has happened both in my physical realities and my ideological outlooks. In the past 2 months I have moved from Vallivue High School, to North Star Charter School, To Idaho Arts Charter School (long story), back to North Star, and will, tomorrow morning, finally be settling in to my placement at Centennial High School for the remander of the year.
To briefly summarize my rather unfortunate and uncomfortable ending at Vallivue (as I could likely rant on for hours on the subject), my lead teacher and I finally concluded (each individually, and to our own superiors) that our working relationship was not ideal (to say the very least), and that it was probably better for all parties involved to move onward and upward. Admittedly, I was a bit surprised by the abruptness of my parting and even more saddened by the missing opportunity to say goodbye to the students I had come to care for so deeply, but I am convinced that the hand of fate was to be found in the way events unfolded.
Before things went south at Vallivue, I had been looking into North Star Charter School as a potential intermediary home before my second semester theatre placement. This turned out to be one of the best possible decisions I could have ever made. When the ashes settled after the brief and confusing firestorm at VHS, I was placed with Shirley Rau (and I do not use a pseudonym here as I have absolutely nothing but good things to say about the marvelous woman), and could not have felt more at home or happy! Our working relationship had everything that I felt the lack of at my previous placement. We worked collaboratively and creatively together, balancing the workload and pushing each other's ideas to places where neither of us could have gotten alone. It was challenging, it was fun, it was supportive, it ambitious, and I finally felt like the lessons I was teaching had the freedom and the structure that the lessons I want to teach everyday would have (I know that last statement sounds contradictory, but I swear it is the truth)!
We taught Moby Dick to our juniors (more on this later), The Great Gatsby to our Sophomores, and A Midsummer Night's Dream to our freshmen. We did gallery walks (Roaring 20s for the sophs), directors production notebooks (MSND for the freshmen), and had some amazingly insightful and creative interpretations/responses from our Juniors about an incredibly difficult text (one of our students I am convinced is going to make a name for herself by her musical interpretations of the text). I finally got to use some of my video talents in my lessons (cutting up scenes of different adaptations of MSND to emphasize differing interpretations of a text), and pushed the limits of my own reading/interpreting skills with each of these rich, complicated texts. To put it in shorter terms, I grew by catapults and vaults (as leaps and bounds does not do justice to the amount of growth I feel I experienced in this brief month and a half period).
As I am somewhat limited in time today, I will try to reflect more on this change in future blogs, but I do want to say that my experiences have given me first hand proof that learning has A LOT to do with environment. Whether you be a student teacher or just a regular student, if you find yourself in a place where you feel you are being judged at every step and you are not getting the support that you need to find your own voice as well as how to blend your voice without losing its own distinct tone and character, you are never going to allow yourself to be put in a postilion where you open yourself to the questioning of your own most basic assumptions and beliefs, and without this, no real learning is ever actually accomplished. Thanks to Shirley Rau and the extremely friendly, welcoming faculty/staff at North Star I was lucky enough to see what this environment looks and feels like. I will be forever indebted to them for this gift!
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