Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Engaging Students and me

 This is my Achilles Heal, my rolling the stone up the hill endlessly. For over 30 years I have worked hard to know my content. I have paid 1000s of dollars for workshops, webinars, etc that my various admins would not pay for to learn about History. All kinds of History, I saw a course or a workshop that had History content that looked interesting, I took that course or workshop. I am still very very shy of a Masters degree, I've tried twice once in the mid 90's an Interdisciplinary Studies degree to combine my Language Arts and my Social Studies degrees, but I was too slow and the degree dissolved. So I began to focus on History only, History is my happy place. Recently actually attempting a Masters in American History, but my life upended, and I wasn't able to keep up the rigor needed. 

Back to engagement, my introverted nature is pathological. The Pandemic set me back decades. I felt very comfortable with the CDL format. Though I still had engagement issues. Of course other teachers keep telling me they had no clue if there were students behind those ubiquitous dots. But I was held to a standard developed before the shutdown and given little to no help from March 13, 2020 until the beginning of the 2020 2021 school year. No, even though they were out there, I didn't ask for help much at all. I went merrily along knowing in my heart that no matter what I did, I would not be coming back to my present district for 2021 2022 school year. Self-fulfilling, perhaps, but I was rarely told what I was doing right other than, "You really know your content." Yeah, I know that, I know more than you do you nut head. But content knowledge wasn't important, engagement was and I suck at it.  

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