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Place de la Concorde, Paris, 2010 = = =About Me=

I am an English teacher at Malden High School, currently teaching freshmen and seniors. This is my sixth year teaching, and I think I have the best job in the world (and I'm not just saying that because it's June). I am taking this class to add to my teaching toolkit. I hope to use what I learn here to support my students as they engage in new, more meaningful ways with the curriculum, their peers and the wider world.

=**2.1: The Twentieth Century Classroom**=

This is an interesting collection of figures. Maybe they should have added the category “Number of people under twenty who know who Bob Dylan is.” J Looking the numbers over, what strikes me more than anything is not //what// has changed (human evolution and innovation are nothing new) but rather how //quickly// the changes have occurred//.// This relates to what many of us discussed in last week’s forum posts: various versions of “Things change so quickly! It’s important, yet daunting, to try to keep up!”

Next year, I am teaching a new senior elective called “The Future” in which we will consider a variety of science fiction / dystopic visions of future societies. As I think over some of the required reading – //1984, Brave New World,// etc, - it always strikes me how many of the authors’ ideas, many of which were intended as satire, are now realities. I am looking forward to using many of the tools we learn in this course in "The Future." It seems appropriate for this class in particular to serve as my "guinea pigs" while I test these things out.