Boring Curriculums...

(I know it should technically be curriculae, but I'm exercising my poetic license, or whatever)

I finally found a way to give meaning to an assignment from my credential program tonight. One of my semester's final tedious tasks, of which there have been quite a few, got returned to me with the instructions to format in APA and expand on my response to question 6b (Explain what you considered as you formulated ideas regarding personal and/or professional implications.) .  The final, somewhat watered down version goes:

b. I started thinking about how this observation will affect my classroom. The first obvious answer is that I would replicate this specific activity in my classroom. From there I thought longer and harder about the general things I observed that I'd like to introduce too, because those are important too. I also reflected on those things too. By those things, I mean the things I stated in 6a. I also spent a lot of time struggling to answer this question and feeling like it was either badly worded, or too indirect for me. I thought more about how I don't like these meta-cognitive questions, and about if they are really bad or just really challenging in a good kind of way, but how silly it is that such an introspective question could ever be measured by an extrinsic rubric. But my mind was getting off-topic when I wrote that, and it only made me more and more angry with my credential program, which is constantly sucking my time away from things I'd rather be doing, and that I need to be doing, to do things like cite sources in APA format, or expand on a thinking process that I handled as effortlessly as I thought I could get away with (and regretfully undershot). Then I got back to thinking about the question at hand and thought about how much I have to learn from this teacher, and how far-reaching the effects of this observation may ultimately be. For starters, I thought of adding reflective writing and group roles to my class because I'm at the point in my professional development where I need to double the amount of actually implementing the things I've only previously talked about.

I added what's in bold, and would like to spend more time re-thinking and re-wording but I can't do it last night.  It's been a long day with what promises to be a long night, but for a brief moment I was finally excited to articulate something to whomever I'm supposed to be writing this stuff to.  It's the first time I've actually cared about what I'm saying or trying to say.  There has to be some kind of analog to my classroom, it must have something to do with quantity vs. quality.