December 6, 2007 at 8:20 PM wrote:
What a wonderful discussion! It's great how each of these postings
reflects the person's love of teaching/working with others/desire to be in
education. As a mid-generation baby boomer, I often think about the
longer term
future leading into retirement (about 10 years for me). Marti Weston
very interesting discussion which makes me reflect on several things
1) I once heard Mel Levine talk about the importance of "cognac moments"
and the fact that each of us has to find what brings us that special joy
at least once a week and to hold onto that item no matter how one's job
evolves ... even though he was a cognac drinker (thursdays at 9:30 pm if I
recall) he was using it of course as a metaphor for helping teachers think
about the overwhelming and never ending set of tasks that a teacher works
through in a 50 or 60 hour work week ... as a person who started as a one
person computer dept at Concord Academy in the 80s and then got involved
in CIO jobs that took me out of the classroom, I have known for 20 plus
years that my cognac moments were always with kids whether it be teaching
them or helping them to become tech leaders via a computer dept student
staff .. as I went to Nobles in Boston and to Chapin in NYC, I always made
sure that 1/4 of my CIO job was classroom teaching so that I could
continue to count on regular "cognac moments"
2) too many tech people ("no one on this listserv of course") find the
teaching and support of colleagues to be the opposite of "cognac moments"
which might be metaphorically something with obscenities ... there is
something fundamentally wrong with this picture and every tech dept should
structure itself so that "help desk" functions lead to colleagueship and
good vibrations ... each tech person on an IT staff should get "cognac
moments" and satisfaction out of helping colleagues ... sometimes it is
NOT a job switch that one needs but a restructuring of how that dept does
its daily and weekly work
3) someone once told me that as teachers get into their 50s and 60s and
beyond, they seek to teach younger and younger students ... this has been
true for me ... I now am back to being a one person computer dept at a
wonderful school in Harlem, teaching every grade from first to eighth in
addition to running servers and overseeing the network ... there is no
question that I get my cognac moments from teaching grade 1 .. . yesterday
for example, I taught them that there 29 letters in the alphabet
(including TAB, SPACE BAR and ENTER) and we created a new alphabet song
for the 29 letters as we pressed all 29 buttons on their keyboards
Steve
p.s. today being Larry Bird's birthday, I am seeking a tech person who can
help me here in Harlem with some networking and server issues ... we are
one of the poorest schools in America money-wise and I cannot afford to
hire a networking consultant ... meanwhile our e-rate company is horrible
.. if any tech person out there would be willing to help me remotely at
the rate of $33 per hour (which is obviously not enough) I would be most
appreciative and it might lead to some kind of cognac ... please contact
me off the listserv if interested ... you can read more about my school
(one of the few tuition free Independent Schools in America) either at the
link below or at http://www.summercore.com/2007
Steve Bergen
CIO and Computer Teacher, The Children's Storefront
e-mail: sbergen@cstorefront.org
An Independent School in Harlem
Web site: http://www.thechildrensstorefront.org
address: 70 East 129th Street, New York, NY 10035
also co-director, The "Summercore" Teaching Company
until the Boston Celtics win #17 ... http://www.summercore.com
Summercore 2008 includes July 7-11 and July 14-18 at Horace Mann, NY
as well as July 21-25 at Shorecrest in St. Petersburg, FL (all 3 open to
public)
[ For info on ISED-L see http://www.gds.org/ISED-L ]
Submissions to ISED-L are released under a creative commons, attribution, non-commercial, share-alike license.
