Pure Manaʻo

Na wai ke kupu o ʻoe? Whose sprout are you? Whose child are you?     As I prepare to start  fall semester in a few weeks, I go through the same motions that I have for the past 28 years. I create my syllabus, gather my resources, go over my notes from the year before, create my semester plan, my units, my day one lesson. This rhythm is familiar. But there is nothing familiar about this school year. In this year of pandemic, the new normal is that there is no normal. When our leaders shut the schools down at spring break, when planes stopped flying, businesses closed, when all we had was each other on the other end of a Zoom call to understand that there was a world outside of our house, we were just playing at normalcy because the end of the tunnel was summer when schools would be out, when we would flatten the curve, when we could start opening up again. As long as we could see the light at the end of the tunnel (June 1, July 1, August 1. . .) we could talk ourselves int...

Source:  Alber, R. (2013, October 31). 5 powerful questions teachers can ask students. [Web log]. Retrieved from  https://www.edutopia.org/blog/five-powerful-questions-teachers-ask-students-rebecca-alber?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc What is Sacred: Now that I have been observing teachers, both veteran and new for over five years, I am hyper aware of the questions that I ask in my own classroom. Every time one of my students asks their class, "any questions?" or "understand?" and then moves on, I cringe just a little and vow to model better questions in class later that week. It does not help to scold them or point it out, I just think if better questions are important and if part of humility as a teacher is to ask questions out of mutual curiosity on thinking and not as assessment, that awareness has to come from the teachers themselves. Still, students learning to be teachers need specific guidance and sometimes need neon signs to the watering...