While undergoing this Thesis project, I have indeed developed my understanding not only on education, but how knowledge itself is spread by discourse. Those countless journal articles I have read over the last few years equipped me with the tools needed to analyze an interview I have with a research participant and tie it into my work. Ironically, a recent language activity with my fifth graders revealed to me that elementary students are already doing this type of work unbeknownst to them. Without the training for how to analyze, I sat back listening to student responses to an activity on inferring and realized that elementary school is super-duper close to graduate school; and it is all in terms of how we naturally make meaning out of things. (I’m sorry; I couldn’t resist throwing in some super-duper easy-to-understand rhetoric. It’s been a while).

For this activity, we watched an animated short film titled, “Pigeon: Impossible”. The film is about a secret agent who faces a problem when a curious pigeon gets trapped in his government-issued nuclear briefcase. Important to the inference activity is that it has no dialogue. After we watched the film, we broke down the understanding of it. My students began to tell me the film would fall under the genre of a spy/espionage work due to the musical score that the creator chose to use, the wardrobe that the main character was attired in, and other visuals such as the font the creators chose to use at the beginning of the film. They elaborated on the pigeon’s personality and cited evidence referring to how they knew he was brave, greedy, and curious. They spoke about the agent’s emotions and how he was frustrated, determined and many other things. And they did all this with my simple question: “How do you know?”

I explained that when we infer, or comprehend, or analyze, or make understanding, we take “clues” from the text and combine them with our “schema” or background knowledge. Nothing complicated. That was my lesson on making inferences. Period over, recess time. I sat in my room alone slowly realizing that I’ve been doing the exact same thing through my qualitative study using phenomenological analysis. Only difference, I was doing it in grad school, them in elementary.

I guess I will make my inference on this experience now: children are born with tools required to make understanding out of things. This amazing gift that is bestowed upon us then gets built up through schooling. Unfortunately, it also gets dumbed down or disjointed by school at times (Pollack piece). The teacher’s second role, especially in the language arts, is to bring out this background knowledge of the world in a way that compliments a text, or in some cases, visa versa. Her primary role is to allow for that expression of opinion to be validated in the classroom. The only challenge then becomes using this background knowledge in an articulate way. That is exactly what my students did when they communicated to me their reasons for knowing certain details about a film with no words, which is the same thing I did when I coded and analyzed interviews and articles for my thesis. Basic stuff, we sometimes tend to forget how easy education can be.

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But today, videos have the potential to be more instrumental than ever before. Shoot, at times I feel like YouTube can teach my students certain lessons better than I can! Regardless of the content communicated through that projector, I still feel like I am not doing my job to the best of my abilities whenever my principal walks in and I am playing a video.

I know I should probably hang up that resignation. That is because videos in the classroom, if used correctly, provide students with an opportunity to engage with material in ways that myself, as the teacher, may be incapable of providing them. And I am okay with saying that. We know that all students learn differently. Nonetheless, it surprises me when I turn on a film, sit back, and observe how certain students engage with it. Maybe because it reminds them of something so valuable to their life, the television, they pay extra attention to the visual and oral communication.

Or maybe it is because we have reached a certain level in this technological age where video has firmly grasped its place as one of the most prominent markers of passing on information. What adult has not used a video to figure out how to fix something in or around their house? Or simply to get an answer to an itching question? Video, unlike ever before, is the new mode of communicating an understanding. Teachers are rarely “rolling in the cart” simply to take an hour off of teaching. Teachers, now more than ever, are using videos to actually teach. The multitude of information on video alone makes it seem absurd that a teacher would not use video in her program in order to teach to the curriculum. Simply put, we should not feel that we are not doing our job simply because we use a video in the class to demonstrate or deepen an understanding that we are attempting to instill.

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After celebrities, the “young new teacher” may be the second highest occupation for eliciting an unquenchable desire to uncover a backstory and details about a person’s private life. In my first year as a teacher, students (and parents) wanted to know everything about me. From my first name to where I lived to what I did before I started teaching, down to my marital status, and everything other tidbit of personal information in between. I quickly realized that teacher privacy is something that should be guarded more than those valuable “teacher binders” we all start to build. I indeed made some “rookie mistakes” over the course of that year. So, if you are a new teacher, read the following with a notepad in hand. Here are two “teacher privacy” rules that any new teacher should adhere to. These were two of the biggest rookie mistakes you can make, and both were made by me!

• 1) Teacher Privacy Rule #1: Never call a parent on your personal cell phone:

Rookie mistake number one happened to me despite my good intentions. A parent and myself had scheduled a phone interview due to her inability to be present at a parent-teacher interview. This parent and I started playing phone-tag over the course of a few days. It stretched to about two weeks. One day, after receiving yet another one of her messages, I simply decided to get this interview over and done with. I called the mother from my cell phone during lunch as I stepped out to grab a bite. I made the call as I drove to get some fast food. By the time I was back at school I had my lunch and got an interview, that was hanging over my head for way too long, wrapped up. Killed two birds with one stone I thought. Well, I thought wrong!

Never divulge personal information like cell phone numbers and home addresses. This leaves you in a vulnerable position of always being available. In this day and age, teachers are expected to be more available but a blog site and an email address is as far as it should go. My mistake led to the student getting my number off of her mother’s phone. A few weeks later I got a text about homework from this student. For a while I would get phantom calls where I would answer and no one would talk. A month later I got a “Merry Christmas” text.

I had repeatedly told the student to delete my number and whether she did or not, the one-way communication via text message finally ceased. It is scary to think about the potentially disastrous outcomes that could stem from that one phone call made to a parent just to save some time. One phone call in haste could have led to every student in my class having my cell phone number!

• 2) Teacher Privacy Rule #2: Never divulge your home address

A phone number is part of the personal vault of private information that should be locked away and never divulged to students or parents under any circumstances. Another part of that treasury is your home address. This seems blatantly obvious. Of course you would never share the location of your home with students. But all information has the potential to leak. Hence “rookie mistake” number two.

I brought in some magazines for a media literacy activity. About five minutes into our activity I heard a group of students giggling. I walked over to “address” the situation and after my initial questioning these students divulged that they knew where I live and pointed to the bottom right hand corner of the magazine they are looking at!

I didn’t even notice that my address was on the magazine when I was packing them in my bag the night before. It was something that I took for granted, subconsciously assuming that students wouldn’t care about a little detail on the bottom cover. Once the students showed me, I took the magazine and ripped off the address section. I had a sinking feeling that the damage was already done. And it was. The group of students had already saved my address into their phones! The next few days they would come to school and tell me that they did a google maps search to see exactly where I lived. Luckily for me, I had recently moved. So the place they were looking at was no longer my home.

Rookie mistakes are inevitable and some will be more foreign to you than others. Mistakes that open access to your personal life should be handled with precaution. Students want to know all about their young new teachers. Take the attempted invasion into your private life as a compliment but use it as a way of engaging your students academically. Draw that line and do not let them get too close for comfort.

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