buried

I stayed home from work today, as I had all kinds of crazy appointments, and I'm so far behind on the reading for my new class (I'm taking "Web-Based Learning and Teaching and The Virtual University" at the University of Maryland University College) that I decided I better do some work before the prof just throws me out.

There's something terribly reflexive about taking a web-based class on, well, web-based classes, but I'm enjoying the process so far. I've never really been certain of the value of education classes - they've always seemed too 'soft' to me, unless they were actually hands-on, go into a classroom and teach what you just learned type classes. As with all disciplines, the theorists seem to get carried away a bit. So far, I haven't seen much of that. Hopefully I won't.

I found the education class (College and University Teaching) that I took in grad school to be quite valuable. Though there wasn't much actual teaching - we had only one 15-minute lesson to give in the entire course - there was a lot of exploration. We developed our own teaching philosophies, studied a topic of interest (mine being the experience of the novice teacher, of course), and had long discussions on a variety of educational topics, ranging from assessment to diversity to lesson planning to teaching techniques.