Week 4 Response to Thomas Turner

Thomas Turner’s post:

The one thing that stood out to me in this week's reading has to come from Chapter 11 "Creating Frameworks for Possibility." The reading revealed three main areas for a person to create the frameworks needed to make change happen.
1. Making a new distinction to help reframe the current one.
2. Become a part of the framework around you.
3. Distinguish what is part of being off-track, while remaining on-track.
This chapter describes the very reason I became an educator. I usually get laughed at when I refer to teaching as being an art form. It truly takes a special being to become one. It's become open season lately on teachers. Yet despite all the pounding we take, we trudge on because we know what is at stake
Each day we walk on campus we MUST check our egos at the door because something more important is at stake. I strive everyday to instill the desire in my students to look introspectively and make decisions that will positively impact their lives. Unfortunately, success is not 100% and I'm not naive to think that I will ever be 100%. It's like I hear football coaches being interviewed on television saying that they put their players in the best possible position to win. Very few football coaches are successful at accomplishing this, as history has shown, this has only happened once. This fact does not stop me from trying my hardest every day though.

This endeavor goes hand in hand with the third area. Part of making or reframing the current possibilities of life involves distinguishing between right and wrong. I, like the example given in the text about the orchestra in Sao Paolo, Brazil, was faced with something similar when I was playing high school baseball. We took a trip to New Orleans for a tournament. Our last instructions were to NOT go down to the quarter. When 16 to 18 year old young men are faced with being told not to do something, we chose to do the exact opposite. Our coach took a similar tact as the orchestra leader. We did not get the beat down reaming that we all probably deserved. Although we did not win the tournament, we went on to play some of the best baseball we had played up to that part of the season. Rather than playing for someone who we resented, we were playing someone who we felt we understood.


My response:
Your comments spoke to me. Not all teachers speak of their craft as an art form. Lets tie passion as an asset you have that goes hand in hand with with your teaching framework. Because you continue to "trudge on," you have a passion for what you do.

I was going to say that you passion helps you overcome obstacles and challenges. I guess we should identify those things as possibilities. As you profess your teaching as an art form, you make a difference in those who hear it. By making a positive impact with your students, you are influencing the dialogue in public education. Going back a few chapters, we do not know if the rhetoric on teachers is good or bad. It is. It may seem bad right now but we cannot see what is going to happen in the future and how the current dialogue will play into it. By keeping our passion, we can only believe that things will work out perfectly.