English Methods: Personal Essay

David Vrooman English Methods: Personal Essay 8/1/08

Odd Morning

This morning has been overwhelmingly filled with images and memories from “Celebrity Jeopardy” on Saturday Night Live. I have been trying to find a way that it could be incorporated as a skit into the classroom even though this master’s program did more activities like this last semester than this one. I was thinking of myself as the Alex Trebek role, and another student from my cohort as the Sean Connery role. There would be other students playing roles, but they did not much matter in my mind’s wanderings this morning. Mostly because the best humor from the skits are between Alex Trebek and Sean Connery. I was thinking about this all morning. What really weirded me out though was that once I got to school I turned on my computer and checked my Facebook page. There was a message from a friend about her cousin’s band, which I did not know just happens to be named Trebek. The oddness did not stop there though. I took four Hershey Kisses that our professor so kindly brought for us and went over to visit some friends in the science methods class next door. One of them was surprised that I gave her a Hershey Kiss because she was thinking all morning about Hershey Kisses and even checked her pantry before she left for class. Well, it was either that, or she had a dream last night where she checked her pantry for Hershey Kisses. There have been two odd coincidences already in one morning and though they do not make any difference I cannot help but think about them. This brings me to the larger issue of why this phenomena seems to happen quite often, because a similar instance happened to me the other day as well. In another class yesterday, the group talked a lot about vocabulary and how it relates to literacy, and a little bit, but not much, about why as teachers we should not assume. This professor pointed to the word “assume” and took it apart. I jumped to the conclusion he was getting at without saying it. You cannot assume because assuming has the tendency of making an “ass” out of “u” and “me.” What was coincidental about this, and also the reason why I picked up on what he was getting at before he got there, was because I heard my sister say, “If you assume, you can make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’” two nights before for the first time. I had never heard that expression before, and it struck me oddly that I heard it again so soon afterwards, even though it has come to my attention that it is a fairly well known phrase. Usually, I just let these types of occurrences go without thinking about them too much. But it happens quite often and is always completely unexpected when it happens so I cannot help but notice it. Am I the only one this happens too? I do not think so. In my Reading and Literacy in Content Areas course, the class learned recently about the idea of schema. This idea postulates that whenever you learn something new you set aside a spot in your brain for everything that relates to the item/idea/person/etc. For instance, a person will have schemata for different foods they like and do not like, homework, rollercoasters, and just about anything one can think of. The schema is all the ideas one holds or experiences one has had that have to do with a subject. So teachers should have more developed schema in their content areas as they have spent more time devoted to their subject. Experts, therefore, have highly specialized and developed schema. The idea of schema seems to be, at least possibly, related to the occurrences described earlier. It may very well be that when these incidences happen it is not that it necessarily is because these ideas were heard for the first time, but that one only became aware of them recently and since a person had started to think about them a schema developed in the mind. Therefore when the idea gets brought to one’s attention again it jumps out as being something recognizable and not something new. If the first time the idea were heard but not paid attention to, then the idea may very well go unnoticed when heard again if a sufficient schema had not developed. So it may be the case that a person has heard of something several times, but it has not registered within their mind as being worth holding onto and no schema develops. Until a person recognizes an event as important in his/her mind, associations cannot develop and create a new schema. The mind’s recognition of such an event, idea, etc., appears to be a necessary condition to developing schema. Therefore learning cannot substantially occur until the mind makes a recognition and a schemata begins to develop. The idea of schema may not have anything to do with why the prior incidences occur, but so far it is the best explanation I have for them. My family had a get together with some close family friends two weeks ago. We have this party annually. One of the topics of discussion was the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which I had never heard of. Then the next day, one of the girls from school and I were talking, and she just starts going into how she loves the Trans- Siberian Orchestra, and she asks me immediately after, “Have you ever heard of them?”