Reflection

"Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire"
---William Butler Yeats

So I am still procrastinating on this portfolio thing. One of the thing that I have to "reflect" on is my experience with professional development. I am supposed to assert what I have elarned from my professional development experiences thus far, yada, yada, yada.

So here is where I digress a bit (of course)The insane thing about some workshops on how to teach is how badly taught they are. I mean, really. Can you not feel foolish saying to a to a group of teachers, "No one can sit still and listen to lectures for hours at a time. People must get up and move and be engaged on several levels to learn" who have been sitting still listening to lectures for hours at a time?

I went to a workshop earlier this year and I didn't get out of my seat. It was an all day workshop. The workshop was on how to use lots of different techniques to teach different learners. And all they did was lecture. I don't believe that my personal learning style was taken into consideration at all. I would have killed to get up and stick stickers next to my predictions for the day. It would have been nice to hold an index card with a definition on it and then have to search for the person holding the word. Imagine the freedom in writing ideas down on sentence strips and having to arrange them in order.

These were the ideas they taught. I just wish they had taught the way they were teaching us to teach. Instead of listening to them drone on and on. Instead, I passed notes to fellow co-workers. I also wrote haikus in my notebook. I also whispered when I was supposed to be quiet. See what happens?