Category: Education

In this podcast I talk about being famous for fifteen people.

In addition to silkscreened soup cans and pop culture icons, Andy Warhol gave us the quote “Everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.”

This statement has often been rehashed as people earned their own 15 minutes of fame (American Idol rejects, anyone?), but nowadays it’s more likely that everyone will be famous for fifteen people (according to people like Steve Dembo).

Don’t believe me? Well, you’re already famous … relatively. (I’ve talked about this before, although this time I’m going in a slightly different direction.)

Look at your students. Have you ever run into them outside of school? Did the older ones call out to you, smile and wave? Did the younger ones eagerly point out to their parents that YOU were their teacher?

I thought so.

To your students you ARE famous, more so than most politicians or heads of state. Granted this can make many of us uncomfortable, but I think that’s a good thing. If we’re uncomfortable with fame, then we know our ego isn’t totally out of control.

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a ham when I get up in front of a class, but at the DEN National Leadership Conference I was still genuinely surprised every time someone said “Oh, YOU’RE the Art Guy!” I know my students think I’m famous, but I didn’t expect to be so well known by other teachers.

I wasn’t alone in that. Josh Wolff, the Discovery Educator Abroad, is a teacher from New York that had the opportunity to tour the Pacific Rim while taking photographs and creating video webisodes. He knew they were going to be used for educational purposes, but nevertheless he seemed quite shocked when I told him my Kindergarten kids loved his webisode on visiting a tropical zoo.

He was reaching a wider audience than he had expected, and seemed visibly taken aback by that.

Naturally, I then did what any self respecting educator would do at that point – I got my picture taken with Josh, so this year I could show off to my students just how famous I am.

In today’s podcast I interview Josh Wolff from Discovery Educator Abroad … and I call him Jeff. :P

In my 71st podcast I begin going over my summer listening list.

Teachers (at least the good ones) give it their all during the school year. For 180 days, not including weekends and holidays, we grade tests, write lesson plans, and brave rooms full of thirty screaming children armed with only a collection of mismatched paintbrushes, watercolors, and enough blank paper for every kid to have one sheet.

Then summer hits, and we crawl into our dens to hibernate through the warm summer months until the first cries of back to school sales wake us from our slumber.

Ok, maybe we don’t spend the whole time sleeping, but I would be lying if I said I missed getting up before the sun every day. As someone who gets most of his work done in the morning, this means that my productivity has taken a huge downturn of late.

I’m not alone in this – my usual edu-blogs and edu-podcasts have had a marked decline in postings. I’m not shocked by this – after all, it’s summer. We’re on vacation, aren’t we?

Lucky for me, there are still plenty of podcasts out there that are educational, yet aren’t done by teachers who have chosen to hibernate. (That’s one way of saying that they still update regularly.)

So, for my next few podcasts I think I’ll share some of my other favorites with you. Think of this as my summer listening list.

First up is one of my all time favorite podcasts: History According to Bob is the brain child of a history teacher named … Bob. Six days a week (sometimes seven, if he has something special like a video) Bob graces the internet with a 5-20 minute segment on a history topic, from Austria to the Zoroastrians.

I’ve been a history buff since I was little, and I just love learning new things about all kinds of topics. You’d also be surprised at how many times I’ve used the things he’s podcasted in an art lesson.

My only complaint is that he doesn’t leave his podcasts up forever. Once he has a bunch of them on his site, he takes them down and combines them into a CD that you can purchase. This is a neat way to earn revenue, I’m sure, but when I decide on the spur of the moment that I want to hear is podcast on the life of Benjamin Franklin I really don’t want to have to wait for it to be shipped.

In this podcast I address one of the most feared questions ever.

As I’m typing this I’m just finishing part 2 of the Edupodder Pizzacast. (Part 1’s here, FYI.) Edupodder is a blog/podcast focussing mostly on topics that would be of interest to journalism majors in college, but naturally there’s plenty of overlap since blogging is itself a form of journalism. (It’s role in journalism is still being debated, but there it is.)

Their “pizzacast” was a meeting of teachers, students, and even at least one member of the community. While chowing down on the official food of higher education they discussed the curriculum for a new course that would be starting in the fall.

This conversation got me thinking. You see, a lot of the conversation was on what the students would need to know after they graduated. This hit home for me, since that is in fact what every teacher should think about daily. If you have a student who asks you “When will we need to know this?” and you don’t have an answer, then maybe you really are wasting their time.

Now granted there are plenty of exceptions to this. I knew early on that I wanted to be an art teacher and never strayed from that path, but many of my friends had drastic career changes that forced them to draw on otherwise unused talents or learn new skills altogether. Their laments of “When will we need to know THIS?” became “Oh, I’m glad I knew THAT!”

My point is that as teachers we need to look ahead to “life after school” and come up with answers not only for WHAT the students need to know, but WHY they need to know it. Our curriculum guides that are provided by our school, county, or state often take care of that first part for us, but we still need to know why what we’re teaching is so important. Not just the subject, but each lesson.

If you use a standardized lesson plan format like my county does, there probably isn’t a place for the “why” in there. Still, I recommend finding a spot somewhere and answering that question anyway. It’s one more thing to keep us from teaching for teaching’s sake, and instead prepare our students for life in the real world. (Or at the very least, for their next step in education.)

As an added bonus, the next time you have a student ask “Why?” you’ll have a snappier comeback than just “Because.”