Jumping In

I don’t know about anyone else, but this semester has hit me at full-speed and then some!

I’m a little late to the game, but hoping to try and get my feet under me this weekend. Hopefully. In addition to starting to respond to what we’ve been discussing in class, I also feel somewhat obligated to also make this a bit of an introduction, considering we are going to be spending the semester together, getting into one another’s heads VIA our blog posts.

To start: my name is Brittany Cooper. I’ve been teaching since 2009, but between the years spent subbing, a couple of mat leaves, and the void that was the decade between 2019 and 2022, I’m somehow only in my 14th year of teaching, yet also feeling like I should be looking into retirement in the next few years. Alas – no such luck just yet. For the majority of my career, I have been and English Language Arts teacher at the high school level, teaching all grades between 9 and 12, though more on the senior side since I became accredited. With the change in graduation requirements that the government pushed through, and the reduction of ELA credits (and that is a whole other conversation as to how I feel about that!), I have also somehow found myself piloting the new Financial Literacy 10 course this fall.

Yeah. I know. I’m crazy.

This course, EC&I 832, is my fifth course in my M.Ed. journey, so I’m almost halfway. Yeah! I’m trying to figure out how to maybe speed up the second half, because I’m also feeling a little stalled out. But it could just be this semester.

Add into this crazy mix my wonderful husband of 12 years (who works shift work), two kiddos (both girls – ages 7 and 10), and our chocolate lab, and you’ve got a briefest look into our chaotic life.

Anyway, here I am, three weeks in to the new semester, and I feel like I’m still reeling.

But let’s get into the course, shall we?

Our first class together we did the introductions, the overview, and we got into discussing the idea of “mapping our internet”, which I have never really thought about before. And, perhaps more sobering, I don’t know that I am a comfortable resident anywhere.

“The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know.”

~David T.Freeman

The things that I’ve been using longest – Google (mail, drive, docs, etc.), Facebook, Pinterest, Insta – those are the things I feel most comfortable with. Edsby (our online learning platform) I have become comfortable with only because I have no other choice. But the others? I’m a visitor. If even! Things like X, SnapChat, TikTok, LinkedIn, I don’t even have an account, let alone the app on my phone. I’m aware of them, but they are like a foreign country I’m not sure I have any interest in visiting. I occasionally like to hear about what’s happening on them, I’ll see bits and pieces through other platforms, but I have not, at all, dipped my toes in myself. And thank goodness I’m old enough, and my kids are young enough (for the time being), that I haven’t had to change that just yet.

I also feel like, as the quote I provided above suggests, I might be underestimating my comfort and familiarity a bit. I came into tech when it was still in its infancy (as did many of us), and I feel like I was young enough that I caught on to most things fairly quickly. The newer stuff, no. I haven’t seen the purpose, so I haven’t delved in. But do we really understand it? I don’t know. Enough that I find myself teaching my students. There’s more than once that we’ve had to have an impromptu lesson about formatting documents, putting together a slide or powerpoint presentation, editing images on Canva. But does that make me savvy? I don’t know.

Can I just jump in and note here that I had to ask for help in including GIFs in this post? So for all my “savvy”, I feel like that one knocked me flat today, and had me totally stumped. Good times.

Thankfully, the internet is vast enough, and apps plentifully enough, that it really is a “curate your own adventure” kind of thing. None of these (unless you use them for your job) are required! And everyone’s hub, or home base, is going to depend on who they are, and what they need. Which, as I’m continuing to kick myself for not just trying to copy and paste the darn GIF location, comes as a bit of a comfort.