Back in the day,\u00a0before cell phones made us nearly always message-able if not totally \u00a0reachable, the answering machine was a big deal. It was a little disconcerting at first as many people talked to the machine’s voice before realizing they had to wait for the tone to leave a message. I remember my Dad’s first few messages went something like this, “What? Hello? Oh, Audrey, they have one of those message machines! What aim I supposed to do?” An audible sigh is heard before Mum would reply, “Leave a message, \u00a0Lloyd.” \u00a0As I think about working with students, I sometimes feel a bit like my Dad, not sure what to do when the the message doesn’t seem to be hitting a live, or rather lively, audience. That is why I am really interested in working on strategies to help enhance student engagement though the use of inquiry and new technologies, hoping that they pick up in person or later on!<\/p>\n
Now, that is all great but there is more to this message sending and receiving thing. A long while back now, in the late 70s and early 80s, AT&T and Bell had ads out that urged people to make a long distance call in order to “Reach out and touch someone!” They were fun ads and the jingle still sticks in my mind. As a teacher, one is in the reaching out business. I get that. But here is something else that I have been thinking about. It is based on something I saw about Blue Jay star Josh Donaldson. His high school coach was interviewed and given credit for getting a somewhat head strong player who wasn’t always ready to accept coaching on the right track. The coach said \u00a0something like this, ” Oh sure, I helped, I reached out to him all right. I do that for all the players. The big thing was that he was ready to reach back, that made all the difference.” In my work, I am trying to keep that in mind. I am going to do my best to learn, grown, and build my craft. I am going to prepare lessons and tasks that have lots of options and handholds for different learners. I am going to try to reach out to them as people and learners. I am also going to try to understand and accept that they may or may not reach back today, tomorrow, or to\u00a0me at all. That is the humbling path that I see myself travelling in this work. I think\u00a0trying my best and understanding the results before pushing on will make all the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in the day,\u00a0before cell phones made us nearly always message-able if not totally \u00a0reachable, the answering machine was a big deal. It was a little disconcerting at first as many people talked to the machine’s voice before realizing they had to wait for the tone to leave a message. I remember my Dad’s first … Continue reading “Reach Out”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-face-2-face-sessions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cohort21.com\/danbailey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}