Archive for category reflections
Brain fry
Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, reflections on January 20, 2011
Ever get that soupy brain kind of feeling?
I usually come to the end of leave (hmmm, telling – I used to call it ‘holidays’) feeling focussed and refreshed. Not always ready to end the holiday mind you, but at least with my head together.
2011 on the other hand has arrived with a distinctly where is my mind vibe.
A few months ago, Darcy left me thinking with a post asking about what we think our individual future holds. It struck me that submitting my PhD and starting an awesome job at QUT looks distinctly like already being in my future. Exciting, of course, but the prospect of now having to be in it and of having to *shudder* set new goals is apparently more daunting than I gave it credit for.
I need a meme or something to solve this problem.
Should we have a safety word that you can use if my posts get too boring/navel-gazey?
2010 in review
Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, reflections, technology on January 19, 2011
I wonder if the popularity of my top five reflects audience interest in curriculum issues, or the hot-ness of topics such as ‘HSC’ and ‘multimodal’ (due to its appearance in the English National Curriculum)?
Either way, thanks for reading in 2010 
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2010. That’s about 29 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 71 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 181 posts. There were 41 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 16mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.
The busiest day of the year was January 24th with 189 views. The most popular post that day was Choice based on what now?.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, facebook.com, google.com.au, eduleader.org, and Google Reader.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for kelli mcgraw, julia gillard, multimodal text definition, multimodal, and multimodal texts definition.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Choice based on what now? January 2010
37 comments
Defining ‘multimodal’ May 2010
13 comments
The Australian Curriculum for English March 2010
10 comments
HSC English: Standard or Advanced? March 2010
11 comments
5 reasons why HSC and ATAR scores make the angels cry December 2009
12 comments
2011
Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, personal, reflections on January 17, 2011
Back from San Francisco and trying to muster a direction for blogging…is it too late to flag closure of 2010? I thought this Facebook app was pretty cool:
*sigh* I’m expecting to need a different approach to online communication this year as email and social networking become more closely aligned with my ‘work’ than with reflection and dialogue. What that means in reality…stay tuned!
The HSC again. and again.
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, HSC, reflections, school on December 16, 2010
In NSW yesterday Year 12 school leavers got their HSC results back. And again, we reflect.
so-and-so got x amount of Band 6s this year…should I teach more like them?
my kids didn’t go as well as they had hoped…did I fail them?
there were some great successes at our school…what pressures will this bring next year?
The dizzying heights…the devastating lows.
I’m sure this post / these tweets should have some ‘IMHO’s peppered through them, but stuff it – the HSC is an evil device.
I’m so proud of every HSC student who got through the year, and was beyond excited for my ex-students who got the results they sought (I always will be). Motivation, goals, mastery, achievement, I believe in them all. But the HSC provides them too sparingly, for students and their teachers.
And now it’s time for recovery. again.
Congratulations one and all – bring on 2011…
So, what do you actually do?
Posted by kmcg2375 in reflections, university on November 21, 2010
Recently I’ve had explain to more and more people what I do in my job as a University Lecturer.
This is tough, because no matter how much I try to jazz it up, until I get another ‘big research project’ that I can talk about, the description just sounds like ‘oh, you know – reading and stuff’. And ‘my head is like a giant computer that mostly knows about teaching English’ just sounds a bit loony.
Up until last week I was still in teaching time. This made life easier – I could describe giving lectures and grading essays. But now that I’m on the research clock…well, things are a whole lot less defined.
I saw a great summary in a faculty email today of the three core criteria comprising our definition of research activity:
- publications,
- HDR supervision,
- research grants/consultancies.
That’s a nice list to use I guess. And given that I don’t have any students to supervise yet, or any research grants, I guess that leaves me with publishing over the summer.
So, in terms of what that means I will do with my actual time? With the actual minutes of my day?
Looks like I am up against a lot of computer time, more self-directed learning, lots of getting to know journals in the field, and reassembling bits of old writing into new hopefully interesting things to read…so much to do and so little to talk about, in short. But, so far, I still love it.
I wonder if my blog will get boring?
I wonder if I’ll need glasses soon?
Too Much Reading
Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, random, reflections on October 7, 2010
I just loved every minute of watching this Valedictory speech by Erica Goldson:
The full transcript can be read at her blog.
One of my favourite section from the speech is this:
School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.
I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.
‘I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme.’
Powerful stuff Erica. Definitely worth a watch!
Writers on writing
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, english, random, reflections on September 28, 2010
I’m just choosing some quotes about the writing process to put into an English course book chapter on identity and storytelling. Some corkers out there! Here are a few that struck a chord with me, but which I suspect are a bit too terrifying to introduce to 7th graders 
- Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money. (J. P. Donleavy)
- As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture. (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. (Douglas Adams)
- Remarks are not literature. (Gertrude Stein)
- The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. (Socrates)
- There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write. (Terry Pratchett)
- Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear. (H. P. Lovecraft)
- You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. (Stephen King)
- Poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written, he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. (T.S. Eliot)
So: ‘torture’, ‘evil’, ‘hack’, ‘nervousness’…’a mug’s game’. Yep, that seems about right!
Thesis complete!
Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, reflections, research on August 26, 2010
Today I took my finished PhD thesis to the printer to get bound for examination
This is an awesome, wonderful, terrific day!
Big hugs and love to everyone who supported me in finishing the beast. I could never have done it alone xo
Thesis-ing (final days)
Posted by kmcg2375 in personal, reflections, research on August 24, 2010
I just want to put it out there, for anyone who was wondering:
Writing a PhD thesis is hard.
(like, seriously, fcuking hard.)
I have just 2 days left until I have to take this puppy to get printed and bound for examination.
I feel like my brain is going to explode.
Far out, I’d better turn out to be seriously smart after this!
See you on the dark side of the moon, people xx
Insubordination
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, reflections on August 11, 2010
This tweet caught my eye today:
It caught my eye because I have been musing on this observation made by Jan, a high school Principal on Twitter last week:
We work within a system. Of course there are systemic priorities. That is the reality of any workplace IMHO.
I wanted to flag this because I think both of these tweets are right, but this is a problematic standpoint as ‘working within a system’ and ‘being insubordinate’ are tricky agendas to keep in balance.
There has been much promotion recently amongst NSW DET leaders of adopting a ‘Tight-Loose-Tight’ model of working in schools. It’s a model I support, and I think it provides a really terrific framework for teachers and school leaders (and system bureaucrats) to work on common ground without constantly arguing about, say, NAPLAN. By accepting policy and product requirements we can get on with developing the ‘Loose’ area – the bit where we actually teach in the classroom using different and divergent strategies that are relevant and engaging and meet the needs of our personal teaching style, our individual students and our local school context.
However, recently I have definitely felt that critical comments made by teachers about ‘the system’ are being taken personally by leaders who are higher up the chain and see this as either a personal attack or an undermining of their innovative work in planning their school. A few weeks ago I wondered if the answer is that we need a more realistic paradigm for collaborating with the people who ultimately are our ‘boss’. But to tell you the truth, I find that idea quite dispiriting. I hate having to mind my p’s and q’s…it’s why I decided NOT to go into politics!
I don’t have much to say about this today, but perhaps you do?
How can we show our leaders the love (and our commitment to common goals) while maintaining a healthy level of insubordination?
NB: I’m talking very NSWDET here, but I’ve found a similar conundrum working with people on development of the National Curriculum…it’s tough to authentically engage in developing something so prescribed-from-above when your gut reaction is to kick against the pricks. Conversely, it’s tough to promote engagement with the resulting best-case-scenario product to people that I in turn lead when they want to fight against it too!
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