This morning I finished teaching my classes here at Upward Bound. It was bittersweet. As a last activity, I had my students reflect and write one thing that they learned in class that they would carry forward with them into their lives in the “real world.” Hearing their responses — which ranged from bringing a more critical view to their encounters with the media, to thinking about whether they are making the most productive use of their time, to spending time looking for the “hidden” messages that are conveyed in the world around them — was tremendously gratifying. Their final writing assignment was to think about how their attitudes toward the media/technology have evolved over the course of the summer, and I am really looking forward to reading them while I work on their evaluations next week.

I always have a difficult time when classes come to an end, especially those that I am facilitating. Inevitably, I always feel like I have so much more that I want to say and that there is so much more that we could have done. But, I am really happy with how our work together went this summer — I think everyone involved got something valuable out of our discussions and time together. I am feeling sad to see my time with these wonderful students come to an end, but I am tremendously invigorated about returning to teach second grade in the fall!

In between my work on teaching here at Upward Bound and prepping things for the start of another year in second grade, I have been taking an online course offered through the HarvardX online platform. HarvardX is this awesome project that allows people from anywhere in the world to access online course content from Harvard professors. (There is also a site called Coursera, which is based out of Stanford, that offers a similar learning experience but draws from a number of different institutions.) These programs are highly flexible, as you can either browse course materials and do what interests you (like an audit of a course) or you can complete all task assignments to get a certificate of completion.

I haven’t taken a course that was entirely online before, but I am thoroughly enjoying the experience. It is wonderful to be able to work at my own pace through the material and to not worry if I am feeling stressed one afternoon — I can just make up the work later. The content has been released one week at a time, which helps to keep me on pace, but there are no hard deadlines until the very end of the course, so there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of time.

Anyway, the course that I am taking is called “Leaders of Learning” and it’s offered by Dr. Richard Elmore at the Ed School at Harvard. The content in this course has been perfect for me at this juncture — because it is about exploring and articulating your own personal theory of learning and thinking about what types of roles you might be able to fill in the rapidly exploding landscape of the education sector. The introspective nature of the course has been eye-opening for me, because I’ve now seen explicitly that my personal orientation toward learning as well as my leadership style do not jive smoothly with the structures of traditional schools (hence one of the key reasons why I think that I was so often frustrated in my job during my first year teaching).

This is terrifying to me, because I am a product of public schools and am so passionate about the equal opportunities that public schooling can theoretically provide — but it’s also invigorating, as I start to think about what kinds of roles there might be around schools that might allow me to circumvent some of the things I find frustrating about the structure of traditional schooling while still reaching the underserved populations that I am so drawn to teaching and working with. In sum, it has been a really exciting journey thus far and I am really excited to see where it takes me as I continue through the course. It has been so glorious to be back in the student role, too — I think I am always going to be one of those people who misses school, so it is thrilling to me that online courses that are high quality are becoming much more commonplace.

I have been way too busy for my own good these past couple of weeks. We are down to just 18 days of school left and I have no idea how I will fit everything in! I have a lot that I want to do to bring closure to this year with my first class, but things keep popping up and cutting into the little bit of time that I have left. I really can’t believe that my students are almost ready to go on their way to the third grade!

Tomorrow I have a meeting with my supervisor for my summer position at Upward Bound. I am going to start that job the same day that I wrap up my own school year, so there’s no break in sight for me. I am really excited about this summer job, though, so I think it will be worth it. I’ll write more about this position when I find the time for a real blog post!