2006 - 2007: Year of The Jones

The difference between this year and last year? Experience.

The precise meaning and usage of words is as much a part of my soul as anything, being the high and mighty Classicist and Great Booker I am, so it bothers me when the literature in the School of Education employs throw-away phrases and terms and ideas without thinking twice. One of Molina's incessant complaints last year concerned experience; if that is, after all, the vast majority of what makes us good educators, then why create highly artificial classroom simulations and call them university classes with no rhyme or reason int he first place? I chafe to say that experience has made me a better teacher, in that it is not experience itself that makes us better but reflection on that past experience and growth based on those observations and reflections.

So perhaps experience is a poor way to put the Pinkerish Mentalese tossing about in my head while simultaneously rendering me inarticulate, but then again, the Wittgenstein in me tells me that I've said what I've said and I must deal with it. The problem, then, I'm having with the word experience in describing the difference in school years stems from knowing that little has changed but so has everything. My teaching style remains anti-whatever-they-tell-me-in-professional-development-and-at-Ole-Miss-and-unsurprisingly-very-successful and I still don't deal well with the beaucracy (sp?!) embedded in everything JPS to name a few examples, but here I am with a strong rapport wiht the majority of kids who are learning a whole lot to boot. It just feels different and good.

Now I'm not going to put too much serious thought in this, but still, it bothers me how vague and undefined it all is. Maybe "experience" is inherently synonymous with wisdom even if that wisdom isn't always manifest or what we would like to see in someone, maybe it's just a pretty word to describe behavioralist thought but apply it to humans who of course can't be trained like monkeys or programmed like robots, or maybe it's something else entirely. But again, experience seems the best way to describe the more positive and auspicious tone in my classroom this year even if I can't quite put my finger on what that means in my superficial reflection. I'd be happy to entertain some thoughts from others...