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Erica Jacobs
Education ExaminerErica Jacobs is the Education columnist for the DC Examiner, and has taught high school and college for 33 years. She has been around the education block! Email her at ejacob1@gmu.edu.
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A Steep Learning Curve
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by Erica Jacobs, Education Examiner
I learned to read gradually, and my writing was pretty awful until I went to college, when I also learned to read much more carefully than I had in high school. But technology just came at me all at once in my middle age and the learning curve has been very steep. Being so inept technologically has given me some compassion for many of my students for whom reading difficult literature or writing analytically is an equally steep learning curve. That's what teaching is all about: allowing your own experience to make you more sympathetic to your students' plight!
This blog is a perfect example of a steep learning curve. I was delighted to agree to be an "Examiner" because I'd had a personal blog for nearly four years, and a blog on the DC Examiner site. I wasn't called an "Examiner," but the subject matter was always education. So being an "Education Examiner" should be a piece of cake, right?
Well, my past blogs were much more "laid back," for want of a better term. I posted once or twice a week, and it didn't have to have photos. Occasionally someone read what I wrote, and that was nice. "Nice" is a good descriptor for my idea of blogs before this week.
But once the "Examiners" became a reality, I figured out quickly this was a whole new ballgame. My son, who works in technology, sent me an ominous email asking whether I was planning to post three times a day. Where was that written down? Had I missed taking Blogging 101 in which the rules were set out?
After Day 1, I realized he was closer to the mark than my old blogging habits were. This thing was going to be intense. The other "Examiners" posted regular updates. There were pictures, YouTube videos, all kinds of angles. This was going to be an exciting ride, and I'd better get on board fast or the train would leave without me.
There is a saint behind the scenes who answers Examiner questions, even late at night, so I have help in this project. So far, I am finding I can post twice--with the word of the day--but my job and students will probably not allow me to do much more than that. So I am on board, at least. I want to use all the previous words of the day in subsequent new posts, and that will get pretty interesting (and possibly ridiculous) in about a week when I will be cramming 11 difficult words in a couple of sentences. I may have to start picking and choosing!
It's all about the learning; and that's what this blog is about. Thanks to my teacher, Joshua, for answering questions. Thanks to my "school", the Examiner, for providing the milieu. Learning can be fun, even as it is difficult. But being a student is not so bad!
Topics: word , day , learning , student , blog , Examiner , teacher
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