Meetings enhance knowledge...to a point

While sitting through my 20th meeting/professional development in the last several week, I was thinking about how this might be affecting my progression. A little bit of background, I am a first year teacher. I graduated from college in May, and am in preparation for the first day of school. While I am excited, I know that there are a lot of things that I need to know. But what is the best way to learn? The answer to that question depends on who you are. If you are a conventional district, normal professional development (lectures) is the best way to educate new teachers on practices that they need know. This is the simplest way to teach these people how things are done, and why things are done. And to be honest, it is easy. All that is needed for this approach is one or more speaker and probably a powerpoint. If you want to get crazy, print out some sheets for the new teachers to fill out. But isn't this going against what we are trying to do in our own classrooms? I may be wrong, but isn't the point of our "new age" educational plan to engage our students and take them to that higher level learning? If this is true, then why are teachers being taught differently? Are we supposed to just gloss over the fact that our district is teaching us incorrectly? Maybe I just get bored easy, but I would rather be engaged like my students will be.

First Impressions, Common Core

Holy cow! When I remember my school experience, I remember a lot of lectures, a lots of packets of worksheets, and a lot of reading "popcorn style". These styles must have worked to some degree because I am now a somewhat educated person. However, I feel like most of my education was not done in the classroom, but more socially and perhaps even more independently (i.e. the internet). When thinking like this, I feel like I now understand the process that the common core writers went through to construct these standards. Long gone are the days where children have the patience and the discipline to stay sitting in one spot for more than five minutes. Long gone are the days where it is ok to accept mediocre work and still giving high grades. We as teachers must hold these students to a much higher standard and to much higher expectations than what we were held to. These kids must walk into our classroom constantly wondering wether to not they can actually do the work that we are putting in front of them. However, as teachers, we need to help them achieve the standard that we have set. Mixing these expectations with the scaffolding and adding the positive reinforcement, I believe we can achieve what the CCSS writers were trying to achieve. Andrew Hargis