Monday, 12/2 & Wednesday, 12/4 &Friday, 12/6
This week is Dead Week, my little raccoons first. However, despite it being Dead Week, I think my students have been quite alive and lively. There's something that I have managed to achieve recently - a change that I cannot name or pinpoint - that is involved in creating the openness that I have wanted all semester. My students have been really relaxed, something which I might attribute to our "funner" activities and less rigid instructions for those activities, leaving a lot of room for creativity.
Over the course of this semester, my students have impressed me with their creativity and their adaptability and, most of all, their growth. I have found that their voices have impacted the creation and development of my own. I no longer feel like the same person. I feel like I have grown substantially, and maybe even blossomed into more of the person that I would like to be. The confidence and happiness that this experience has instilled in me is something that has amazed me, and I think it has helped solidify that I am truly delighted and overjoyed by the pursuit of thought, of exploration, of liberation within education.
I have liberated myself from the silence, a self-imposed debt to no real person, and forged a voice that is full of multitudes - a voice with multiple universes inside of it: various tones, favorite words, mannerisms, and diction. I believe, now, that to consider a voice authentic is not based upon how others evaluate it or how it sounds in a conversation. A voice is authentic when it is based on you, whether that is the you-in-the-moment, a specific version of you, or based upon the self that you would like to achieve. Authenticity means to be genuine, not to be counted as "real" or fitting a prescribed image or idea; authenticity means embodying what you want, how you want, in order to engage and speak in the manner that you want.
This week is Dead Week, my little raccoons first. However, despite it being Dead Week, I think my students have been quite alive and lively. There's something that I have managed to achieve recently - a change that I cannot name or pinpoint - that is involved in creating the openness that I have wanted all semester. My students have been really relaxed, something which I might attribute to our "funner" activities and less rigid instructions for those activities, leaving a lot of room for creativity.
Over the course of this semester, my students have impressed me with their creativity and their adaptability and, most of all, their growth. I have found that their voices have impacted the creation and development of my own. I no longer feel like the same person. I feel like I have grown substantially, and maybe even blossomed into more of the person that I would like to be. The confidence and happiness that this experience has instilled in me is something that has amazed me, and I think it has helped solidify that I am truly delighted and overjoyed by the pursuit of thought, of exploration, of liberation within education.
I have liberated myself from the silence, a self-imposed debt to no real person, and forged a voice that is full of multitudes - a voice with multiple universes inside of it: various tones, favorite words, mannerisms, and diction. I believe, now, that to consider a voice authentic is not based upon how others evaluate it or how it sounds in a conversation. A voice is authentic when it is based on you, whether that is the you-in-the-moment, a specific version of you, or based upon the self that you would like to achieve. Authenticity means to be genuine, not to be counted as "real" or fitting a prescribed image or idea; authenticity means embodying what you want, how you want, in order to engage and speak in the manner that you want.
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