A learner for life

As this quarter comes to an end and I am moving slowly, checking my work for errors I discover how much I have learned. I love learning but at times it feels so exhausting. I can only imagine where I will be a year from now.
Technology is changing rapidly. I try to keep up learning about all the new things that are out there and find it hard to keep up. From blogs, to creating websites, and making digital stories it seems the list is never ending. Google keeps discovering new ways to give us more to learn. It seems that each week there is something new to be found whether it is through a new gadget or a new web sharing site. My mind is working harder than ever to learn all of these things.
But then I must learn about the mind and how it learns. How do students learn how to read; what strategies do they use; when is it time for them to move to the next level? As a teacher there as so many questions to be asked about students. Teachers are always learning new ways to best teach their students. It seems as if we find a way that works really well but then a student shows up and teaches us that one size does not fit all.
I can only imagine how young learners feel while sitting through hours a day of class and taking in so much information. At the end of each day I feel like I could collapse on to my bed and sleep for a week. Now I am realizing that I am learning just like these young minds that I have observing.
There have been times that I have asked myself if this is really what I want to do. But I am reminded often by the students that in the end it is worth it all. I love learning and I am always proud of myself when I come to a point where I start to feel as if I really get it. I love watching students as they teach me and as they learn from each other.
As this quarter comes near to an end, I sit here and reflect on how much I have learned about young literate minds and how technology appears to be shaping our world.

literacy

Lamott seems to really capture me. I feel like I am sitting down with her with at a coffee shop and discussing writing. Although she is harsh at times, I feel that she is honest on her thoughts, like a friend who sometimes tells you things you do not want to hear and keeps telling you until they are sure you heard them. There are times when I feel like we are talking about me and how I write but then we jump to how students I have watched and observe write.
This week as I read it I felt like we were talking about me as a person and how who I am affects how I write. It made me realize that if I sat down more often and just started writing I would probably do very well with it. I am often like the person she talks about in her book who stands back and observes what is going on around them instead of participating in it. I like to see what is happening before I get into something and can’t get out of it. I like to see the whole picture. I feel like I have a lot going through my mind and if I could put it down on paper it might turn out to be more organized that what it is in my mind. If I could take what I see and make it into something new that people would be able to connect to and enjoy I wonder how my writing would turn out.
Lamott talks about how writing often has a hidden message in it whether it is meant to or not. I think that this is very true however; it seems that as humans we need to find purpose for something therefore we make up the meanings and sometimes the meaning will be different for me than what it would be for someone else.
Lamott takes a look at Mel Brooks advice saying “Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it”. She relates it to intuition and how we need to put aside the still voices inside of us that cause us to jugde and have doubt but to write without thinking about what it is that we are saying. We are so use to being doubtful of our work and have little confidence in what we say or do that our work doesn’t turn out as well as it might if we just followed our intuition.