Project #4 - Comments4Teachers - C4T #1

My first comment to Mr. Rice was for a post titled, “Make time for…Getting Socratic.” Oddly enough, it was about questions, which is what our blog assignment for this week is about. My comments apparently didn’t get approval from Mr. Rice, but the post his post was about his goals to ask questions the right way and how he was going to go about achieving that. He hadn’t come up with what types of questions he was going to ask at the time I commented, but he seemed very motivated to get started. Mr. Rice wanted to set such a goal because he realized how important asking questions the right way, with an engaging backbone, seemed to be the right way to get more intelligible responses from his students, as well as his peers. I commented on his insight that led him to reflect on how important asking the right questions are. I backed him in agreeing that asking good questions should be a cornerstone of good teaching. I also let him know how supportive I was of any teacher realizing that there was more to teaching than meets the eye, and that his realization had my support.

The second post I read of Mr. Rice’s was titled, “More time for one-on-one conversations.” I thought this was a great topic that would benefit me later as a teacher, since what got Mr. Rice to write the blog was that he had become a little complacent with involving his student’s in one-on-one communication. I can see how this could happen, since having so many students make it harder to have that kind of interaction with the students. I do realize that his concern was with what he was missing by not being one-on-one with his students more often. Both he and the students benefit from being able to ask questions and interchange ideas without everyone being involved at the same time. Having such a learning experience exceeded even his greatest expectations of what lesson would be learned, especially on a day that was wrought with some stress during educating and helping his class on a research paper. I commented to Mr. Rice that he stays with an education model in his blogs and that getting to know his students, as well as them getting to know him, is something nice to realize. I encouraged him to do more of that with his students, because they learn that they are all a team. I let him know that I was learning from his complacency and how easily it could happen, but that he had me to know more about classroom interactions with the students.

My overall takeaway from reading Mr. Rice’s blogs was that he is a reflective teacher who really wants to do his best to show the students, as well as his peers, that he cares about the profession he has chosen. It is always good to see teachers going above and beyond what is required of them. To me, that is at the heart of teaching and an important part of the passion that springs from the well of education.