Week+3

Hello its Ian here and I would like to welcome you all to week 3 of the Issues wiki. It is my turn to provide a summary of this weeks lecture.

This week we had guest speaker, Dr Howard Nicholas, pose us all a very important question; “So you want to be a teacher?” He provided a number of examples in visual, audio and print form of how people have viewed teaching in the past and present. These included:
 * ‘The Wall’ by Pink Floyd (Representation of school as a factory)
 * Jaime Escalante (Difficult feelings experienced by teachers)
 * School of Rock (“Sticking it to the man!”)
 * Victorian Government Regulations of 1872 (Older view)
 * Carl Di Stefano (Teaching as a magical experience)

Dr Nicholas then asked us to reflect on our views on:


 * Content (eg British girl’s knowledge of Tsunamis and Dutch class building a coffin for their dying teacher)
 * Physical world (eg Uneven distribution of resources)
 * Economic (eg Increase in global night lights since 1992)
 * Ethical, spiritual and moral (eg Depiction of Christ in a coffin by Hans Holbein)

He also explained that Teachers are bound by their own limitations. He provided a personal story of a friend of his Greg who died under tragic circumstances.

Dr Nicholas then highlighted through music and text the changing of times and how education needs to change with these times. One of these examples compared a letter dated 1910 to a mobile text message from modern day that conveyed similar information. He also briefly described the Oaktree foundation, an organisation where volunteers under the age of 26 strive to make other peoples lives better.

The next part of the lecture put Australian education in context and also examined the social context of education.

The final and most important part of the lecture focused on ‘Teaching and You’. Many important questions were asked by Dr Nicholas, the main ones being:


 * Who are you and who are your students?
 * How will you relate theory and practice?
 * What are the elements of practice you need to have?
 * What kind of theory will you need?

He left us with the final thought that a sense of humour is essential!

When reflecting on Dr Nicholas’s lecture and also the week 3 readings, I have come to the conclusion that YES, I DO WANT TO BE A TEACHER! It feels really exciting to write that and really believe it. I might not have all the answers to the questions posed this week but I feel I am already developing my professional identity as a teacher. I enjoyed reading the Ayers article ‘The Challenge of Teaching’. I found I shared the same passion as the writer. It was also important in the context of the lecture ‘The Challenge of teaching is to decide who you want to be as a teacher, what you care about and what you value, and how you will conduct yourself in classrooms with students’.

I hope we all become the teachers we want to be. I look forward to reading the reflections of the rest of the group.