The Hits Just Keep on Coming
Today over our weekend cup of tea in bed I was talking with my wife about the "audience" feature on blogger.com and how amazed I was at how this blog had been accessed by people from Russia (29), India (9), China (24), Sweden (9) , Poland (8), ... I thought about some of the blogs I have posted and occasionally I have mentioned those countries. I pondered if that was the reason. I had the idea of finding a list of all the countries in the world and just posting that in a blog and seeing if I got some kind of hit from every country. My wife thought that was a good idea. I said that was not the purpose of the blog. The purpose was to be a record of my last year teaching. She pointed out that the blog has become part of my last year teaching. I could do it as an experiment in blogging for the interest of my blog followers. Above I've listed the number of 'hits' I have had from some countries, so I can track if I get any more hits just because I mentioned the name of the country in this blog. I was about to just list a random country that I had never had a hit from and see if that caused some one to visit this site from that country and I saw I had my first 3 hits from the Phillipines today. Thanks for joinng. If you are reading this, do you mind commenting on why you visited this site? The country I am just going to mention though is ... Denmark.
A Lesson Plan a Day
My wife thought I should post a lesson plan a day. I didn't think people would be interested. I have them all saved on USB, so it is not what I need or want a record of . If anyone would like a lesson plan, post in comment some way to send them to you. Hopefully when I read through this in a few years time it will bring back some of the emotions of the year. If my mind has slipped away much more than it has already, maybe it will help me hold onto parts of what was my profession for 35 years.
The Last Round-Up
I seem to be writing about 2 blogs a week and I just counted 13 weeks (not counting spring break) until I hang-up my whiteboard eraser and head to the San Pedro airport for the last time. I suppose blogging has become a part of my last year. I'm kind of sadly looking at the last 26 blogs or so and wondering what is there I want to capture about the last few weeks of the last year of my teaching career. The blooging has taken on a life of its own and helped me take frustrations and frame them as something I want to remember. At the professional development conference this past week, the director of the school had a session entitled something like 'The 3Rs to the 4Cs'. He was looking at education for the 21st Century (which is now, but the idea is the future has arrived, I guess) and proposing that 'Reading, Riting, & Rithmetic' should be evolving into "Critical thinking, Creativity, Communication (evolving digital/global), & Collaboration'. I found out the next day that these 4Cs are related to the work of Cheryl Capozzoli ( http://web20guru.wikispaces.com/ - a great site for future education connections). The director made the prediction in his presentation that writing would become obsolete and challenged anyone in his audience to debate the prediction. I wasn't sure if he was referring to handwriting skills or the skill of organzing neural firings in the brain and expressing them in some manner so that they can be interpreted by another. I should have clarified that point as I don't think the skill of communicating your thoughts in some organized manner will become obsolete. Even if you could have your thoughts instantly fed into some computer software which imposed The Elements of Style , spell check, and grammatical editing on them before popping them upon a computer monitor, I would think you would still need to review adn make some revisions of your product before making it available for public consumption. Wow, that was a long sentence. Maybe the imposition of that software on my thinking would help as I head into my last 26 or so blogs.
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