Never say never..or something like that

We've all heard the saying, "Never say never." It has been around for ages, long before that sweet little Bieber boy, and for a good reason. You just never know what might happen! For some odd reason though, I still catch myself saying, "Oh, I'll never do that in my classroom." I started off this semester with an attitude kind of like that. I guess I just had an idea of what the ideal teacher/classroom should look like after taking a ton of education courses where the ideas are great but are mostly just that...ideas that don't always fall into place once in the actual classroom.  Most of these practices in teaching that we are learning about will take time, patience and EXPERIENCE. When I walked into a kindergarten classroom at the beginning of the year, I expected a heavy dose of positive discipline delivered in a structured, organized, consistent way. I immediately began to think, "Oh, I would never do this in my classroom." I also became extremely overwhelmed that I was not seeing many of the practices and teaching methods that we had learned about in all those education classes. I became almost blind to the many wonderful things that were happening around me.

Once I was able to open my mind and began to look for the things I could learn from my experience, I became not only comfortable in my classroom but confident as well. I realized that because the classroom environment is flexible with its structure and isn't crammed full of rules and routines that are set in stone,  I have plenty of wiggle room to experiment with my own ideas without stepping on my mentor teacher's toes! She has been wonderful in allowing me to try out different methods of rewards systems, classroom seating, and lessons. Every day I am in her classroom, I leave with more knowledge that I came in with. If I had continued the semester with the attitude that this classroom just would not work for me, I would have missed out on such a blessing. Although there will always be things that might not settle right with how I want to run my class one day, there is still so much for me to learn.

Wait...what did I just read?

Maybe it's the spring break laziness that hasn't worn off yet but I didn't really understand the whole multigenre research paper thing. I totally understand what the article was saying about the importance of allowing students to choose a topic based on authentic curiosity and personal connections, but I don't really understand what the multigenre research actually is. From what I can gather, multigenre research is a big project on a significant person or event presented in a creative way. So does anything go when writing the research paper part as long as the information that is presented is well thought out and accurate? I think what is confusing me is that students can include fictional letters or other fictional things in the research paper. I really like this idea a lot because it sounds like something I would enjoy and I can see how it displays the students' knowledge and interpretation of what they have learned about the person or event of study but how does the student distinguish what is fact from fiction in the paper? Now that I think about it, I guess it really isn't all that confusing. I'm really intrigued by this multigenre research process......

As for chapter 12, I like the idea of choosing units of study based on student interest and resources available. If you base your units of study on student interest, you will never get bored year after year because student interests will always be changing!