Locality

A few days back was the final exam for my last education course before student teaching. Though this post could easily degrade into a panicky diatribe about feeling unprepared, or rushed, etcetera, instead I would like to focus on one of the essay questions on the exam. The scenario posed essentially was that after teaching for several years, your school asks you to be part of a committee to review and reconstruct the guiding principles for your entire school, every department together. The question then is what two or three ideals or focuses do you advocate for?

The first principle was easy: critical thinking, something I have talked about here before. However the essay demanded at least one more. After some thought (we were given the questions ahead of the exam), I decided that a focus on local life would benefit students in all courses by making the content more assessable, applicable, and interesting.

Making local life a foundation of school could be done in several ways. First and foremost, through planned interactions with the community. This could include both field trips around town and also guest lectures from the area. This would instantly make content more interesting and meaningful by showing how it matters to students' hometown and also how it matters outside of academia. Focus could also be turned local in smaller ways such as framing questions and projects in a local perspective. Teaching grid coordinates? Use the mainstreets as your axis. Teaching about the New Deal? Find WPA projects that started around the area.

The biggest obstacle to locality is that it requires each teacher to be an informed and active member of the town. Despite the inherent appeal and logic that each and every teacher is a pillar of the community, this is often not the case. Though I'm not a teacher yet, I do know that as a student, getting outside of your bubble of peers can be quite difficult. Even after living in Goshen for three years I hardly know anything about the history of this town, and I a history major.

When thinking through this problem I believe that connections with the parents of your students would be the best way to encourage teacher awareness and attachment to their local communities. This would be effective and would simultaneously build rapport between the teacher and parents, and perhaps, the student.

Spending Money on What Matters

This week my house was two dollars over in our budget for groceries. It was the dish soap that did it.

Though this might seem like nothing special, it sparked quite a bit of discussion among myself and the nine other people I live with. The conversation was started by those who were upset, who wanted to be under budget constantly in order to get some money back at the end of the year. Thankfully, this was quickly side stepped by those of us who felt the budget was to be met because, after all, the budget was what we were willing to spent. Besides, we've been under budget pretty much every other week. Therefore the discussion became about what to do with our surplus: would we buy fancier food, or would be buy organic food. I ended up siding on the organic side of things, but that was a gut reaction, I hadn't really thought it through at the time.

When thinking about my reaction, it really wasn't about organic food at all. Though I appreciate fresh produce; organic, non-bleached flour just doesn't mean much to me. In the end my decision was about where we would be buying the organic food: the local Co-Op. I've been a member of this place since moving to Goshen and was a regular member during the first two years of college, however buying for one is a lot cheaper than buying for ten and this year I've been using Kroger as my sole source of groceries. It was one of those changes I hadn't even noticed until I thought about it.

It all comes down to wanting to support a local business. It helps that I like food, and I like the store's style... and I know most of the employees. Since supporting the Co-Op more was such a no-brainer. I quickly started thinking about the other business I should frequent more. Spending time on this was quite mind opening because I realized how many great small businesses there are in Goshen: Better World Books, The County Seat, Universal Tamal, Il Forno, Southside Soda Shop... Ok, so I mostly just came up with food, but I can't help it, I buy what I like. Though I'm not sure if my more miserly housemates will join in with me or not, this thought process/experiment has really renewed my zest for supporting local businesses, because this place has such a special community, why wouldn't I want to support that?