"And in the end"... At Least for Now: Reflecting on Pedagogy

My mind is so full of newly acquired information, that - like my desk - everything is stuffed and stacked and piled with no organizaiton, no coherence - waiting for the semester's end so I can sort through it all. Everytime I read something new, I find a thread leading me somewhere newer. I feel relieved to be taking the summer off from classes so I can actually follow up on some of it.

What I know right here and now, however, is I love what I'm doing and what I'm learning, and I love teaching. This semester, my first as a teacher, has been a joy. I loved creating lesson plans and suprising my students who have never failed to surprise me in turn - one of them asked if we were going to have a lesson on listening, so we spent part of a class period playing "Simon Says."

What I know I've learned is that I have to pay attention to my own mind as well as to theirs - I often find myself walking a thin line between a teacher-centered classroom - with me as entertainment and resident "class clown" - and a student-centered classroom - which is where I want to be; though, I'm still trying to discern the difference between student-centered and student-driven.

I kind of like the idea of a student-driven class, because I've come to believe, both from my own experiences and from reading people like Yancey, Lu, and Lindemann, that it is incredibly important for students to take responsibility for their own education - and it becomes my responsibility to guide, to suggest, and to respond.

I've been planning to do a Master's in Education as well as in English, in order to teach K-12, but I find myself, instead, leaning toward staying in the community college, helping students find stepping stones - and not just dead ends.

I've also come to believe that language is important in every aspect of what we teach - in the words we speak as well as in those we don't (either consciously or subconsciously), and it is possible that we must face conflict, struggle, and argument in the classroom to find out why we say -or don't say - what we choose. This is a subject I hope to study extensively as I move toward working on my thesis - a prospect (like walking into the classroom everyday) that both excites me and scares me to death.