Today's sacred writing time and teaching demo have lead me to truly question what the heck I've been doing for the past several years.

Seriously.

I met with a friend for coffee after RCWP today.  I told him that each day I was here, my mind had been blown.  And this is true.  I feel like this RCWP has come along and saved not only me, but the hundreds of students that I will teach in the second half of my career.  

Because sometimes I really feel like I've been just spinning my wheels.  Working my tail off, but getting nowhere.  And changing nothing.

And then I see these women in my group...and it's like they already knew this stuff!  They understand literacy and rhetoric and know how to use words like pedagogy...right out of undergrad!  They know how to incorporate grammar into writer's workshop and how to use mentor texts...and what in the heck have I been doing with my stupid grammar worksheets for the past three years??

Part of me is jealous that I didn't get this in my teacher training.  And the other part of me is thankful because how would I have survived the next fifteen years??  

And then all of me wants to dig in and change the whole dang system.  I don't know what else to say.

Every time we are prompted to write, I resist.  Today's teaching demo was about using iMovie to create an assignment on allusions.  I didn't want to, but it went very well, and in the end I decided it would be a great assignment to have my students do with The Odyssey.  Since I am going to have my tenth graders do the This I Believe project, I need to have a good one for English 9.

This afternoon's discussion of Standards for Authentic Achievement and Pedagogy brought up a lot of interesting points.  I definitely agreed that an ideal assignment will be authentic, but there should be value placed on the "prior knowledge" assignments that we often need to do with our students to give them that broad knowledge base that they could bring to their authentic assignments.

I am constantly frustrated at the inauthentic nature of much of what we do in school.  I have spent several years spinning my wheels and jumping through hoops that really do not improve my students' achievement in any measurable way.  The assignments I have been grading for the last few years certainly will not help them much outside of the walls of a typical American secondary school.

Like me, many of my students have become accustomed to just doing what is asked of them, and not asking themselves what should be done to demonstrate learning.  The discussion we had today simply encourages me to continue to think critically about what I have students do in my class, and in what ways I can make the work they do more authentic.