Fall Quarter at Evergreen

Well, there have been many moons since I last posted, and if Vatz, K2, and Sean (especially Sean, real happy to have you back buddy) have started posting again, then I suppose I should post a few as well. I'll try to keep each post sort of themed to different spheres of my life.

First, my new graduate program. It is set up more like a training program than a graduate school, which I like. We have workshops and seminars on various readings, with the work flowing more or less seamlessly. We spent the last few months studying educational theorists. The history of schools, developmental psychology, educational philosophy, a little bit of methods, and so forth. We also learned how to research (which was a great deal of review for me, so I helped my classmates instead) and we will continue to write conference papers that will be published by the end of the program. My topic is Urban At-Risk Dropout Prevention, and I'll be sure to make it available to anyone who wants to read it.

In the meantime, if you'd like to see some of the work that I've done, and work I will be doing, I'm maintaining a website here. It's mandatory, but good practice in website creation.

Overall, I like the program. Faculty is pretty supportive, it's just challenging enough to push me, and we're covering a lot of material that doesn't get looked at in other programs. Is it all necessary to becoming a good teacher? Probably not, but I think some of it will help and some has made me rethink some beliefs I've had for a while. I'm already getting a little impatient; I want to get out there and start teaching, but I think that's largely because I'm jealous of Sean with all he's been writing lately. It's odd, because I'm one of the youngest in the program, but I feel behind my peers in some way.

The atmosphere and attitudes of some of the people and focus of the program does have a tendency to aggravate me a bit. I'm aware that I'm very much in the dominant group, being white, male, hetero, mid-twenties, etc, and what that means. I understand that I can't fully grasp what the life of someone who is not in that dominant group has been like, but at times in the program I've felt that I'm supposed to be ashamed of this for some reason and that my opinion doesn't count for much because it's skewed to the dominant group. It's incredibly frustrating and, well, aggravating. It's really only a few individuals, so I'm trying not to let it get to me too much. This coming quarter is entirely devoted covering these issues, and I hope that it can be framed in an accessible way.