Back to school

I am getting enrolled at Washburn for the fall semester to finish up my Master's in Special Education and to make a new start at my university education.

I made a lot of mistakes in my last graduate experience. A lot of mistakes. I made some mistakes in my last semester at Washburn (summer of 2006), still taking incompletes in two classes because of my 11 year propensity during my entire university career to always try to extend deadlines to get papers "just right," never completely understanding that the real limitations of time exist, and are facilitated in the form of deadlines, whether I was aware of those limitations or not. This was an enormous source of many of the mistakes I made at KU, also, withdrawing from too many classes as well.

My first full year of teaching at Eisenhower and my experience with summer school at Washburn have taught me much needed lessons about limitations - time limits, personal limits, professional limits, real-time people limits, etc. This last year has been one long lesson on limits. And it has been a welcome lesson.

And I have to say that I am so excited to be enrolled in school again, even as I bump down the academic prestige ladder, because I am so much more mature going into a university experience, this time. I'm more aware of my own limits, the limitations of the world, the limitations of university politics, and the limitations of people, generally, no matter who they are, and the limitations of my professors and university staff and administrators, no matter how brilliant they may be. This lesson would apply whether I was studying with Joe Nye at Harvard or Francis Fukuyama at Johns Hopkins or finishing my Master's in Special Education with Gloria Dye and Michael Rettig at Washburn University.

I am learning, a lot, these days, as a teacher as much as a student, how important individual students and teachers and people are in an school and in an education. As a teacher, I see it every single day, because individual students and teachers make an enormous difference. And as a student, I am much more aware of the power that I have as a student to make an educational experience a really outstanding one or a really sour one. I regret the ways that I made my educational experience a sour one in too many ways when I was in grad school last. I have no intentions of repeating those mistakes. And I feel more confident that I have learned the lessons I need to learn, in life and in school, to make this educational experience a really quality one.

It's both humbling and really exciting to go back to where I started, in a third-tier school with teachers I love and respect, and an education that is all mine to make or to break. I hope I can make a substantial enough showing in this Master's program and publish my work in formal journals and magazines to be a strong candidate for a Ph.D. program of my choice. Studying with Joe Nye or Francis Fukuyama would be a really awesome opportunity, should it be available, although prestige, wealth, connections, etc. are not, at all, my pursuit. If I had to take them or leave them, I would almost prefer to leave them if studying with minds like these weren't such an honor. I would just fine with a Ph.D. from a home state institution or a university like Illinois State where I coached this summer. But it would be nice to be mature and responsible enough to take on a more challenging education, should that be something that might be available and that I might be interested in.

The bottom-line right now, though, is that I'm just really excited to get back to school. I am so excited to be studying again, to be in a university library again, and to be taking advantage of an education that I took for granted at the end of my last tenure that I have no intentions of repeating. Proof is in the pudding. But I trust myself more around this - and the maturity and responsibility that make it possible - than I have ever trusted myself before. Perhaps my personal best will not/does not translate into excellence in a more competitive sense. I will do my best. And if I was ever going to be competitive, this is the best time of my life to do it.

But most of all, I'm just excited to be in a place that takes learning seriously, with 4 years under my belt working and living in a world that does not take learning and studying nearly serious enough. It's my most serious frustration as a teacher, though I think my students are getting used to the rigor and some of them even might appreciate it, when the notion occurs to them and their not busy fighting me to take school seriously. And they're not busy sleeping or passing notes or arguing in class.

In a university I can really appreciate how hard teaching in a middle school, and teaching special education in an urban middle school, especially, really is. It makes me proud of the work. Because the one thing you can always take more for granted in a university or a suburban school or a private school or even a charter school with students from similar backgrounds as the students I teach is that students, generally, want, more, to be there. That is not always true in my classroom, though I do think that is becoming more true the more I work with kids. I can only hope. My strongest student in the 7th grade wants out of my class, right now. She needs to be in a collaborative class (general education class with support from a special education teacher or paraprofessional) with stronger students in a general education class. But I hope she doesn't want out of my class for good reasons that I am just not accounting for well enough, yet, in my teaching. I have so many weaknesses as a teacher I am so clear about now much more than my first year. I hope she gets the strongest education she can get and I can deliver in both my class and her new collaborative class. I want her to be prepared for the college education that she set her sights on the first year we met.

I better head home and get some dinner. I need to get officially enrolled on-line so I can start checking out books from the Washburn library. The library is the one of my favorite places on campus and one of the best reasons for me to be back in school.

Have a great week, everyone.

Love,
Ben