Graduate School

I am now one semester away from finishing my Master of Arts in Teaching.

So this morning, while enduring another harrowing teacher meeting, I had a moment of lucidity. I've come to realize that every class I have taken thus far has gone exactly the same way, right down to the class discussion. The one and only difference is the order in which the words are used. Graduate school, in other words, is really just a glorified mad lib. It goes something like this.

We pretty much recycle 10 words/phrases. Use them, at your discretion, to fill in the blanks. They are completely interchangeable. Here they are: high interest books, there's no silver bullet, scaffolding, differentiated instruction, documentation, unpacking our personal histories, cultural sensitivity, student mastery, how we need to teach not test, and putting kids first.

The class discussions, invariably, go like this:

Professor: "Well class, today we're going to discuss ___________"
Student 1: "In my school, _______________ is a huge problem."
Student 2: "I agree, but it's always important to remember ____________"
Student 1: "Definitely."
Student 3: "Very important."
Student 4: "You're absolutely right."
Student 5: "But really, aren't we forgetting about _____________?"
Student 1: "You need to be careful though because if you just focus on that, you'll end up discounting ____________"
Student 2: "But then you run the risk of overlooking _____________"
Student 3: "What if it's not just _________ and it's not just __________, but really a combination of the two? We need both so that our students can succeed. __________ isn't the only problem with American education."

At this point, there's usually a profound pause caused solely by the fact that at one serendipitous moment in every class, the odds work out to everyone simultaneously entering a particularly engaging gchat conversation and/or is making a key purchase on Amazon. It's the law of large numbers at work. Then, after the awkward silence:

Professor: "Well, I think today's class discussion has been incredibly rich and informative. I'm glad we all learned from each other today."