Blogs

I’m Elissa Matheny.  I grew up in Durham, New Hampshire, a small university town.  However, this summer my parents moved to St. Louis, so now I have a new home in the Midwest, quite a different experience from New England.   I’m really excited to be in In Class/Outclassed because although I’ve never considered myself interested in becoming an educator, I’ve discovered a recent fascination for learning about educational reform in America.

 My names Amy  Giarratana, and I’m from Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, and I attended Ramapo High School. I’m obviously a freshmen and I live in Pem East in a quad. Literally all I’m looking for right now are my classes and hoping not to get lost. But in a less literal sense, I’m just looking for a education suitable for me and trying to experience college life as much as I can. Honestly I didn’t understand where Foucault was coming from in The Order of Things. I assumed when he was quoting the Chinese encyclopedia he meant that “animals” were actually people. Such as the stray dogs, I thought he meant poor people, or drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, meaning wealthy people. I don’t think this is where he was coming from at all, so his writing wasn’t my favorite to try and interpret. I’m not a good writer so I hope I gain writing experience from this class.

Hi--this is Kaye Edwards, who along with my friend and colleague, Anne Dalke, will be the other co-teacher/learner for P5 this fall.  Anne and I began our brainstorming for this version of the class knowing that Judith Butler would be giving the Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr this semester and wanting to feature her work on precarity and performativity.  However, I felt constrained by those categories and wanted to expand our sights to include lighter/brighter dimensions that could focus our attention on new opportunities for social justice.  Loving alliteration, I suggested "play" (to which Anne immediately agreed) and "potential."  As a natural scientist (my academic training is in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology), I have long loved the concept of "po

Hey--I'm Anne Dalke, one of the co-teachers here. I'm excited to be "reviving" and "revising" a version of the core course in Gender Studies that I first taught w/ Kaye Edwards in '97 and again in '98. It's been amazing for me to see, as we planned the course over the summer, how far each of us has traveled since that initial collaboration. I have to admit that I'm just a little bit worried about the overfullness of the syllabus--all those P's! Among them, "precarity" is strong to me now, because a good friend of mine, Paul Grobstein, died earlier this summer.

I’m Jody Cohen, teacher of one of the ESem sections, and I’ll introduce myself by sharing a piece of my educational autobiography.  I grew up in a suburb outside Washington, D.C.

We watched this video during a small group activity with other teachers and had some discussion on it. I thought it was interesting and wanted to share:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html

What was my role?

This year was my first year teaching in the virtual setting
as a math specialist. In this role I remediate seventh graders who are not
where they “need” to be mathematically for their grade level. I see each
student twice a week for about 45 minutes. 
I have had several barriers throughout the year due to the students’ own
barriers. It definitely has been very different for me working in this world. I
will give you a glimpse of it.

... of my (rather checkered!) educational autobiography. I'm Anne Dalke, one of the profs for this ESem. I was raised in the rural south, where I attended (pretty poor) K-12 public schools; spent a year in the 13th grade of a girls' school, as an exchange student in northernmost Germany; returned to the States to attend the College of William and Mary -- feeling aggrieved because the better state school, UVa, wasn't taking women in those days (!!); however, the tuition cost was only $500/semester! I majored in English (I'd always liked to read, and I was dating a man who kept writing poems that I didn't know how to respond to...).

This was an exciting year for inquiry.  My students and I took what we learned this summer and included it from the first day of school.  My students became out of the box thinkers and they were able to look at old ideas in new ways.