History Matters to Me

New Course: Educational Psychology

anitaprentice — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:19:26 +0000

After some welcome time off, a new class begins: educational psychology. The first voluntary assignment in the textbook’s first chapter is to create a blog (done that already) and then a post on “Does HIghly Qualified Mean Good Teaching?” with reference to “No Child Left Behind.” My answer would be be a qualified yes: highly qualified teachers mean better teaching. Getting an advanced certificate demonstrates that: the graduate courses I’ve taken at Pace have not focused on content but have instead given me strategies, self-knowledge, techniques, ideas, counseling, to make me more effective in getting across content and more importantly ideas when I (finally) enter a high school or middle school classroom.

Time Does Not Creep in its Petty Pace from Day to Day

anitaprentice — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:49:42 +0000

Time has flown, actually, since I thought to start this blog. The moral is that it is just hard to keep up with the reading and writing for the two classes I am taking this semester. I love both classes; they have been very interesting and thought-provoking—and they each demand a paper of some description every week. If I had time, I would click open every document I have composed this semester and add up all the characters I’ve typed—the total would be astounding. That’s not to say the quality of the writing has been that terrific; I have had trouble getting my hands to type all the ideas that the readings and class research have churned up in my brain. So, a tribute to Professor Kava and Professor Clayton for the content of their courses.

It Begins with Tumblr

anitaprentice — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:05:32 +0000

A blog for St. Philip’s Nursery School. A blog for my husband’s campaign for Town Council. I did these, but never my own blog until now. It begins with Tumblr – a “scrapbooking” Web 2.0 product that I began just a few days ago to show my graduate professor, Beth Kava. Right away I liked it a lot, but I missed the possibility for comments and the possibility of pages and a list of links and tags. So, a parallel blog. May or may not work; we’ll see.

This is how I began, with a photograph that’s not great but that I like because it captures two very different worlds that are both classic Hudson River Valley: the momentous Revolutionary history that happened here, and the industrial history of the 19th and 20th centuries that we live with. The photograph was taken at a September 2007 reenactment of a crossing of the Hudson in 1782, after the defeat of Cornwallis, when Rochambeau’s and Washington’s troops marched north, the French to return home, the Americans to await the final political outcome of the war. I went to the reenactment with my friend Kay; we had a lovely time on the Verplanck riverside.