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final reflection

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WHO I WAS Student teaching was probably the most stressful event of my life. Not moving from Rhode Island, a state with a population of 1 million-plus, to South Dakota, where cows outnumber people . Not navigating my way through college courses AGAIN, after a five-year gap of unfulfilled, stale dreams at the family business. Teaching.  This past spring, when I entered the classroom in the Providence school where I would be teaching a senior section of British literature, I did not know what I was getting into. Sure, I knew the bones of teaching -- the stuff gleaned from classes over the past two years in RIC’s MAT program. I had read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before, and I had almost-kind of finished 1984 when I was a senior in high school. I knew that social justice would have to be “factored in” when it came to designing my lessons, units, questions… I had the formula, right? But what I didn’t know, is how physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted ...
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turkle and wesch

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"When students recognize their own importance in helping to shape the future of this increasingly global, interconnected society, the significance problem fades away," writes Michael Wesch in his article "Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance." When we step away from the retelling of a narrative (but adding new pieces here and there, as time will permit), and invite students -- and by extension, people -- into the "conversation," (to borrow a word from Sherry Turkle )... that's when, and where, dialogue and change, begin.  After reading both the perspectives of Wesch and Turkle, I do not find they are at odds with each other, but rather, addressing the same issue with different terminology and phrasing. When Turkle says we "have sacrificed conversation for mere connection," Wesch says the need for significance is driving students to that very connection -- a connection that he sees falling flat in his classroom enviro...
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it's complicated: prensky versus boyd

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"I believe that the digital native rhetoric is worse than inaccurate: it is dangerous. Because of how society has politicized this language, it allows some to eschew responsibility for helping youth and adults navigate a networked world. [...] a focus on today's youth as digital natives presumes that all we as a society need to do is be patient and wait for a generation of these digital wunderkinds to grow up" (boyd 197). Reading danah boyd's chapter challenging Marc Prensky's use of the terms "digital natives" and "digital immigrants," I realize that maybe the tension between the two ideas isn't the problem -- but the labels themselves. "Digital native" and "digital immigrant" are, as boyd points out in the quote above (and in further detail throughout the chapter), loaded with ideologies that can create division. In my last entry, I reflected on islands, and being from one and traveling to the other, whereas so-ca...
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