Down Time

Just after high school my best friend and I got a job at a place called Major Builders. We built MI homes in a shop, labeled each wall, stacked, and nailed them together. After that we would load them on to a semi truck, and they would be shipped to the job site and put together like a puzzle. It was a blast, building a whole house on a table, wall by wall, interior and exterior. The hours were awesome, 4:30 am until 1:00 pm, half hour for lunch, and two fifteen minute breaks. When we would clock out it was time to party. Then I got a girlfriend, and boy did that whole party thing did not fly with her. So I got the newspaper out and found a wanted ad for a company by the name of Romanoff Electric, on the technology side.
I worked for Romanoff for about four years, until that side of the company went under. While working there I met two brothers and we ended up being pretty good friends. We were the last techs to be "laid off", so we exchanged info one last time and went our separate ways. Form there I went to different jobs for about six months, outside the construction field. Then got a job installing metal doors and frames for a company called Titan Doors.
After working at Titan Doors for about 5 years, I ended up on the same job site as the two brothers I met at Romanoff. We went to lunch and talked about what each of us was doing with our lives. They had started a sub-contracting company and was looking to add another employee. When they walked in and saw me they knew who they wanted to hire. So two weeks later I was working for Browns Cabling, a sub contractor for Consortium Communication. Every thing was great, for about two years, we were traveling different places like Michigan, West Virgina, Indiana, Iowa, Alabama, Louisiana, Connecticut, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Tennessee, Georgia, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania. Working a companies like DHL, Best Buy, Buffalo Wild Wings, and the University of Phoenix. Then the "down time" hit, and we were lucky to get twenty hours a week. Before too long we were only working two or three days every two weeks, then we didn't work for a month. But since March of 2008, I had been waiting for Central Ohio Technical College to send my financial aid information. So it was time to go back to school.

Finding Myself

So..... after almost 6 years I'm finally ready.

Immediately after high school i enrolled in a four year college and I had no plan or goal for what I wanted to do. I screwed around, taking all of those boring required classes that everyone had to take like math, and psychology. I also took a few half way interesting classes but it wasn't enough to keep my attention for too long. So, without hesitation, one day i quit. I felt like the only reason i was doing it was to please my family and in doing so, i wasn't happy with myself. I was blind to the fact that they were just trying to help me, like they always have.

Until the age of 10 I was the only child in a VERY large and well off family, so needless to say, i was spoiled rotten and for some reason as i got older, it got worse. Everything in my life has been handed to me. If i ever need anything and couldn't take care if it myself, someone did it for me or was there to help. My nice car was paid for, my college was paid for and i really took it all for granted. I just up and quit after two years and baffled my entire family, leaving them all wondering why. My only answer was "because I'm not happy". Lets just say that didn't sit too well with anyone, but i didn't care.

After traveling around the country i ended up back here in Ohio, got a good job, met an awesome girl, then moved away once again. My girlfriend ended up getting a great job, but it was in Michigan, so i quit my job and followed her up there because she was my dream. As i sat around up there, bored everyday and no friends to hang with i had a lot of time to reflect. Time to think about what i want for myself and my girlfriend in the future. The answer was pretty simple...I want to be able to give my future family everything that my family has given me. I realized that wasn't going to happen working random jobs, living paycheck to paycheck, and getting help from my family. So I sat down, found something that i actually really liked/wanted, and took action.

A lot of my family told me that moving up to Michigan was a big mistake and they still might say that but in my mind its probably one of the best things to ever happen. I had to make some really hard choices, including leaving my girlfriend for 2 years, but it will be worth it, for both of us.

The most important thing is that i am happy with myself again.

It may have taken a while but, after finding something that i really like to do, i finally figured out why education and learning is so important.

Curiosity is my main learning tool.

I always wanted to know everything, except what I was supposed to be learning, especially in school. My curiosity has lead be down many paths during my 35 years, from computers to welding, I never wanted to settle on one particular aspect. My grandfather told me that “You either know one thing really well or you know many things kind of well.” I chose the many things kind of well option, even though I don’t think that was the idea he was trying to instill in me. I graduated in 1991 from Licking County JVS for Computer and Related Technology, where we learned how to work from a Mainframe, program in Basic, RPG 2, COBOL, and learned accounting and various other office related technologies. It always frustrated me because they were teaching me to be a part of the workforce, but I just wanted to know about the guts of the computer. I was always focused on how things worked, and if I couldn’t understand that my learning experience was drastically affected. Looking back on growing up and learning, it seemed like I was part of this huge wave of knowledge and even still to this day I find myself playing catch up to all the new things out there. The things I learned in ’91 for the most part don’t apply today, and that pattern has continued my whole life. That is the main reason why I know I will never stop learning. My curiosity has always led me to new fountains of knowledge; I can still hear my Mom talking to my Dad about all the broken electronics in my room. She was concerned that I only had my Speak n Spell for about a week before I took it apart to see how it worked, of course I had no idea what I was looking at so I spent the next few days at the library figuring out what a transistor was, resistance, ohms law, of course I couldn’t spell any of this new found knowledge, because my Speak n Spell was broken. The same holds true today, although now I don’t have to break my laptop to see how it works, I can get online and look at all the schematics I want, I don’t have even go to the library now that there is Google, and Dictionary.com will pronounce the words I don’t know for me. What it all stems from is my voracious curiosity and my willingness to learn from it.

Re-learning How to Learn

When I was 17 life seemed so simple. High school was a breeze, little more than an annoyance that must be accepted as part of the grander scheme. I had to go, it was the law, but it got in the way of so much that I thought was more important. I earned decent grades with fairly little effort, but only for the classes that kept my interest. English Literature and Algebra were easy, while Physics...not so much. The point is that at 17 learning was something I took for granted, not even something I thought about.

Then, graduation and some tough choices. Let's see, I could continue to live the life that I enjoyed, carefree and irresponsible, or I could buckle down and attend college and make something of myself. To me, that seemed like a waste of time, but I did what was expected of me. I enrolled in college straight out of high school. Then I withdrew two days in.

Eleven years later, there I was, working a meaningless, unsatisfying job and wondering where I went wrong. Then it hit me. I had withdrawn from school so many years ago, and time went on whether I had been paying attention or not.

My life had gone in many different directions over the years and I had learned plenty, most of it the hard way. I learned things like, "don't believe everything you hear", "don't trust someone just because they say you can", "don't give your heart away just because you want to", and "don't eat the brown acid", but I had stopped learning things that inspired me.

Since taking my first class as a DMD student I have been hooked. This relatively new world of digital media has captivated me. I already knew I loved photography and the digital world that it lives in, but I did not anticipate how much I would enjoy learning other things. I had lost touch with the love I felt for learning when I had been inspired by teachers who loved what they did.
While most of my classes have been online thus far, I have been touched and inspired by the instructors that taught them (well, most of them), and I have re-learned how to learn.

Whether from a book, an online lecture, a classroom full of computers, or in the school of hard knocks, learning is not something that ends. I'm just glad that I have found a way to enjoy doing it.

The Importance of my eduacation

I have often times been asked this question, by my brothers and of my sister (all who by the way never finished high school). Why is it that I out of four children chose to be the one to take the ball if you will and run with it? Why is college such a good thing? All very good and very important questions.

The response is simple, I want more.... I want things to be different for my kids and for me. I can be anything that I want to be, and well if it takes me years upon years to complete this task, then I will have done so knowing that I took the risk, and I made it for my kids and for myself. Sometimes I wonder if they resent me in some ways because I finished high school, I have a life that they chose not to experience, and because I will have a college degree that I earned and that I definitely worked hard for.

Why is college a good thing, what's the best part? Well, that to is simple... college is a good thing because it allows me to not only learn knowledgeable material to which I will use later, but to have an experience all in its own. I feel like I have came so far, and hope that my kids will take the initiative as well, to further their education.

All about reading???

Books are so 20th century does sound right... just about. No one really likes reading all the boring, big words that the author uses to make something sound more than what it is. If books got straight to the point, they would be cut down in pages and text to read. All the running on and on of this and that just to get to the real reason why you are actually reading in the first place just bores the reader and gives no interest on finishing.

I feel that this could also be a result of high school education. I'm not going to lie, I didn't take too much in high school very serious. I was a student athlete, receiving many awards in both fields and felt once it was all over, I didn't really work too hard. With the school hours and all the practicing throughout the day, I only managed to make it home to a cold supper and straight to bed, never really worked on schoolwork. I practically lived there, I guess. I was one of the students who was smart, but put only the effort needed into the work. But teachers never really sent us home with reading assignments, which now I feel it's hard to push myself to read in my free time. We always read our material out loud in class or the teacher gave us free time in class to do some reading.

In college, it's a different deal. We're grown-ups and are responsible. But then again, some instructors seem to not care the least bit about students and their education. Some just show up to throw the information out there and get out. Every student has their own little details/techniques that helps them take in the information and understand it. Hands-on, hearing and seeing, note guides, etc. are a few of what students like in their education. I feel as though educators don't give the students a good push and drive to want to learn the details. Finding something exciting in the text that could grab the attention of anyone helps. On the other hand, students need to realize it's the path they chose and deal with it. The least students can do is show up. So the faults are equally balanced between the two.

To end it, books are ridiculously boring and expensive. No one can argue that. :)

Never Growing Up...

...or always growing?

My cumulative learning experience has been extremely balanced thus far.  And perhaps cyclical. While in high school, I wanted to create concept art for video games.  Actually I wanted to program video games; however, my love/hate relationship with math kept me from that.

But before I dove into the world of video games even further, I fell in love with drama.  Because I always enjoyed English class, my mother having been an English teacher for thirty years, theatre was the logical vein off the artery.  During my junior year of high school, I took up plays and musicals and ultimately decided to pursue it as a career.  After two years off emotional ups and downs and two colleges later, I found myself at OSU main campus pursuing a BA in English and a minor theatre.  After wrapping up the undergraduate levels of college, I then earned my Master's at OSU in English language arts.

Then what?  I taught English language arts at Centerburg Middle and High School for three years, directing their musicals and plays to boot, all the while finding that my enjoyment of video games and graphics never vanished.  I discovered COTC's program while having a guest speaker from the school present to my juniors.  How ironic, yes?  After three years of teaching I went back to school.  Enter the DMD program at COTC.  

To put it shortly - I missed expressing my own artistry.  I taught how to express one's self clearly. How to synthesize and analyze.  But all the while, something was missing.  What great book had I written?  What great work was mine besides the diploma that occupied the corner of my bookshelf?  I needed more.  

So how is it cyclical?  In a couple of ways.  I continue to direct, but now I am directing at Big Walnut.  My old school...where this all started.

I am picking up graphic and web design, a close second to video games.

And as I started out as a student and became a teacher, I am a student once again.  I find that I am still a teacher in many ways - mentoring a cast member or helping a classmate.  I hope to reenter the profession down the road.

I would continue this relationship with education that I have as a pupil forever if I could.  A full-time student, picking up majors left and right.  I've already mastered the purposeful use of fragments.  What more can I learn?  Quite honestly, I want to study anthropology now based entirely from the video that we had to watch for class. 

Learning amazes me.  Nothing is as satisfying as discovering something new.  And of course, learning never ends, but there does seem a point that most people reach where he or she enters the live of passivity and mediocrity that I shudder to think about.  What brings people to this? Marriage?  Kids? Age? Food?  The pursuit and need of money?  Hard to say. 

In many ways, I am content.  But in the quest for knowledge, I am not so sure.  Hopefully it will not get in the way of my marriage and the life that we're designed to adopt.  Eh.

Textbooks Are So 20th Century (part 1)

You don't need to tell me that the cost of textbooks is unreal. As the cost of a post-secondary education continues to spiral upward, the cost of textbooks seems to be climbing at a faster pace.

There are several ways to fight textbook inflation in the classroom. 1) Used textbooks. This, of course, only works if the content being taught hasn't changed. In the fast-paced world of digital media, textbooks have to keep up with new software. 2) Look for inexpensive textbooks for the subject. Works great if the content is equivalent. Often it isn't. 3) Stop teaching from textbooks.

I'm a proponent of the last. Sometimes it's a successful methodology; sometimes it isn't.

Does anyone read anymore? Of course they do. They just don't read the way previous generations did. Didn't read the assignment? "Too much to read in too little time," is a major excuse. Okay, the world is moving faster today than yesterday, but there's still time for a visit to MySpace or to watch "The Game." 

No, the problem is most textbooks are boring. I know. I've helped write one. There are either too many words that take forever to get to the point or the lessons are aimed at the least-common-denominator student. And, for the most part, they're verbal rather than visual.

One thing we ought to have learned as teachers is that students each have their own preferred learning style... Active/reflective; Sensing/intuitive... Visual/Verbal... Sequential/Global. Textbooks on the other hand are... the same. And they just sit there.

Students, meanwhile, have been influenced by technology and their environment. Played a video game lately? Moves faster than a textbook, doesn't it? Education and learning consultant Marc Prensky says it with more words: "Because schools haven't adapted to the world their students know and live in, they simply get bored in the classroom. They tune out."

Prensky advocates using games as a teaching tool. The field of "serious games" is expanding rapidly because of this interest. But if you don't have games you can use as a teaching tool, what can you do?

Skip the textbook. Make up your own curriculum. Create your own handouts. More work? Yep. More success in the classroom? Maybe.

Computer-Aided Drafting

I was about 14 years old when my father was taking a class at Muskingum-Perry Career Center for AutoCad. The instructor would set up a computer for me to play around on, and that was what got me into designing on computers. So when I became a junior in high school I myself attended MPCC and took the Computer-Aided Drafting course. The first year we didnt touch a computer, all of the drafting we did was on a drafting board with a piece of paper and a pencil. By the second year we were finally drafting on the computer, and at the begining of the school year Sheridan High School was planning to build a new set of restrooms for their football field. My teacher came to a friend of mine and me and asked us if we wanted to design the new restrooms as one of our projects for class, and after we had finised the blueprints he submitted them to Sheridan. Two weeks later we were informed that Sheridan was going to ues our drawings for the new restrooms.

Born Not Made

I was supposed to be an engineer. At least, that's what my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather were. I'm left-brain on that side of the family going back for generations. My mother's side of the family, however, were artists. So I ride the fence between left and right brain.

It might be handy if there were some kind of test to determine what we should do with our lives, but there is only trial and error or, in my case, expectations. So it was off to college to study physics I went. Organic Chem. Quantum Mechanics.

It took a teacher to save me.

Her name was Mrs. Price, and in one of those twists of fate, I was in one of her Freshman English classes for six weeks. One of our assignments was to do a dramatic reading of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Nights Dream." I was Pyramus... or Thisbe... I forget which. It was fun, but I soon forgot it, as it was a time of great scientific excitement. Satellites. Men in Space.

I was a geek of the first order, even forming my own "Rocket Club," like Hiram Hickam of "October Sky" fame. I hung out with the brainiacs in my class, dreaming of a career in science until that fateful day in my junior year when Mrs. Price grabbed me out of my chemistry class and demanded that I show up that evening at "call-backs."

"Call-backs," apparently are the second try-outs for a play. Me? In a play? Yep. Mrs. Price had been waiting patiently for me to audition and just got tired of me wasting my talent. My talent? In theater?

I was cast in that play and the next three. I watched her direct. I learned to light. My whole crowd of friends changed from nerds to dramatists. I was National Honor Society and National Thespians.

So what did I do then? Right. I went off to college to study physics. Sometimes the lessons that teachers have for us take a while to sink in.

Learning Teaching Learning

I teach.

Now.

But not always. Once I was a student. Most everyone was at one time, I'm guessing. And unless we try really, really hard, we all are lifelong learners. It's too bad that lifelong learning has the patina of academic-speak, as if there is a specific process or pedagogy.

We learn to walk; we learn to drive; we learn we hate algebra. We learn life isn't fair; we learn nice guys don't always finish last; we learn that we are all mortal. Somewhere in there are shoehorned into a formal education, whether public, private or home. We learn the basics of counting, a touch of history, a smattering of art, a bit of the King's English. (Lately, no where near enough of the King's English! Someone please bring back diagramming sentences.)

As I said, I didn't always teach. I learned to be a cinematographer, an editor, then a director. I learned a half-dozen computer languages, and I learned how to animate. I learned about multimedia and the Web as it happened. And all of that created my first career. And my second. And my third.

Often I lectured. And taught seminars. And trained staff. Until one day I was teaching full-time at a two-year college, sharing what I had learned in my lifelong journey with others.

This blog is part of a long-term (if not lifelong) project involving my students in our "Intro to e-Life: the Evolving Web" class. We'll talk about teaching, teachers, schools, learning, why and when we hate and love education, why we're all still in school... from the perspective of students whose attention is on learning new skills and growing beyond the basics.

Is there life beyond learning? Can I never retire? What do my students have to teach the teacher? I can't wait to learn.