Meme: Summer Professional Development: My Goals

Sioban Curious has tagged me for the Professional Development Meme 2009.

Here's the scoop:

Directions:

Summer can be a great time for professional development. It is an opportunity to learn more about a topic, read a particular work or the works of a particular author, beef up an existing unit of instruction, advance one’s technical skills, work on that advanced degree or certification, pick up a new hobby, and finish many of the other items on our ever-growing To Do Lists. Let’s make Summer 2009 a time when we actually get to accomplish a few of those things and enjoy the thrill of marking them off our lists.

The Rules:

NOTE: You do NOT have to wait to be tagged to participate in this meme.

*Pick 1-3 professional development goals and commit to achieving them this summer.
* For the purposes of this activity the end of summer will be Labor Day (09/07/09).
* Post the above directions along with your 1-3 goals on your blog.
* Title your post Professional Development Meme 2009 and link back/trackback to http://clifmims.com/blog/archives/2447.
* Use the following tag/ keyword/ category on your post: pdmeme09.
* Tag 5-8 others to participate in the meme.
* Achieve your goals and “develop professionally.”
* Commit to sharing your results on your blog during early or mid-September.

My Goals: Read a Lot, Take at Least Three Free Online Courses from Yale, Berkeley, and M.I.T.

Since I'll be teaching grade 9 Western Civ and a mixed grades 10-12 Chinese history classes, I'm going to take some university courses in these subjects - for free, and for the knowledge instead of the piece of paper - via the Open Courseware offerings at Yale, Berkeley, and MIT.

I'm already doing so, in fact. Yesterday, I watched Lectures Five through Nine of Prof. Christine Hayes' Introduction to the Jewish Bible ("Old Testament," to Christians) course at Yale. Think about that: I was able to "attend" two weeks' worth of in-school lectures in one 5-hour sitting in my home last night. I've never done such a thing before, and can tell you that the experience of all of these lectures back-to-back, without the two day waits for the next lecture, enhanced the learning experience for me. No distractions, no forgetting, no losing the narrative thread from one day to the next; instead, it was closer to the experience of reading a novel in one sitting. I can't recommend Hayes' course strongly enough: her synthesis of 200 years of textual and archaeological scholarship on the history of the Israelites and their sacred texts is eye-opening indeed. She frames the evolution of the Jewish Bible as a sort of "civil war" within Jewish culture, between more inclusive henotheists (or even polytheists along the lines of the surrounding Canaanites) and the exclusive Jahwist monotheists. It's a first-rate intellectual adventure story that I only wish our fundamentalists - and their preachers - would watch, in order to learn how misguided so many of their beliefs about the Bible are.

I'm going to follow Hayes' Yale class with Berkeley's "The Ancient Mediterranean World," I think. It's only mp3's, no video, which is a shame. If I find a video alternative, I'll take it instead. It has a hefty number of lectures on the oft-neglected Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures that so influenced the Greek, Roman, and Christian worlds, so I look forward to the refresher and any new learning.

I just finished reading Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity by Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King - more fascinating looks into the "civil war" of early Christianities as they fought over what and who Jesus was, and the meanings of his teaching. I'm now reading Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why in order to give a more historical account of the rise of Christianity in the Western Civ. course.

After that, I'm going to skip the Middle Ages and watch Berkeley Prof. Margaret Lavinia Anderson's "The Making of Modern Europe" course. I've already written about it here.

Besides that, I hope to spend some time collaborating on the "Critical Supplement to High School History Textbooks" wiki project I proposed here last month. A few other history teachers on the National Council of Social Studies social network have signed on (newcomers always welcome), so we need to develop the framework that will scaffold students' abilities to critically read those so-suspect history textbooks we foist on them.

I need to find a community to help me fine-tune my assessment practices. I feel good about the forms and methods of my assessments, but where I need help is in reducing the overload. I kill myself by assigning too much work that takes too long to assess. There's got to be a better way. Suggestions, anyone?

That's about it. Now I'm supposed to tag some teachers, but I'm going to leave it open. If you want to play with this meme, feel free.