Columbine and the Media Vlog

Above is one last video discussing the Columbine research I did. It's a bit long and feels ranty at the end, but that was bound to happen with the subject matter.

Psychology of a Villain

Okay, so the above video is not exactly relevant to the title, seeing how Batman is more of a hero than a villain. Then again, he does have issues of his own…

That’s not important. What is important is that that video, in conjunction with my assignment on Columbine, provided the foundation for my first ever “Unit Plan!” Despite minimal training with curriculums, I ended up having to write one. It was a daunting task (like the majority of graduate school has been) but being the ambitious individual I am, I attacked it head-on. And honestly, I actually kind of like it.

The overarching goal was to understand who a villain is and what makes him/her the villain in the story. This came from the idea from the Columbine shootings. For the longest time, the media and really everyone involved thought they understood why they did it. Yet skip ahead about ten years and the reality was that we didn’t until relatively recently. So this unit plan poses those questions: Who is the villain? What makes him so? Why does he do the things he does? Is it because he is evil? Why he is evil? What is evil?

This unit plan tries to answer all that by allowing the students to explore these issues through readings and discussion. As an English teacher I had to sprinkle in a few writing assignments naturally, but most of them are personal exploratory pieces to simply get the students thinking deeply about these issues. The major piece of writing is a character study in which a student explores all the above questions focusing on a single character and tries to access whether or not a character is sympathetic in their brand of evil. I believe that is an interesting twist and truly challenges a student to think critically on the questions I pose.

My favorite part may be how a bookend the unit plan. I would ask a few questions at the beginning, record the answers and then ask the questions again and see if the answers change. That would judge whether or not my students understood the lesson and if their perspectives changed based on the experiences within the lesson. That is the most important of teaching after all: developing the minds of students and watching them grow within the classroom.

Columbine

It goes without saying that Columbine is not easy to talk about. It truly is a tragedy and is possibly one of the darkest times in the history of American education. Sadly, it is an event that in many cases has repeated itself time and time again with Sandy Hook being a reminder of that, having only happened a year ago. Even as I write this, I am having some difficulty trying to discuss it, failing to find anything worthy to say dare I simply go on saying what has already been said in the past 10+ years since Columbine. I also do not want to stir unnecessary controversy in my discussion of these “touchy” subjects (with full understanding of why many do not want to say anything that is out of place or can be taken in poor taste, though context does help).

However, nativity has been lost in the past few weeks. I decided, of my own volition, to research Columbine. In particular, I wanted to see what people have said about it. To see how people talked about. What people knew, or at least what they thought they knew. I wanted to see how people felt about it.

Given the fact that Columbine had happened more than ten years ago, there was a lot out there. I presumed I knew a fair amount about the shooting. Sure, I was exceptionally young when it occurred and was probably too busy watching cartoons to bother listening to the coverage. Even then, I probably would not have the knowledge or insight to comprehend what happened on the day. Yet, the story has almost become common knowledge since then. Little did I realize that the “knowledge” I once had was nothing more than myths fed to the people by the media. These myths were built on speculation and bold conclusions. Yet, we chose to believe it at least for a time.

Fast-forward to the present, and Columbine becomes that much more complicated. For better or worse, the truth has been uncovered. Columbine had become a terrorist attack, orchestrated by disturbed students. It is hard to tell if Columbine was meant to be a largely political event, and what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had intended, if nothing else to stir the people and make history, but the media had made it political. Columbine became a vehicle of political agendas, powered by fear and anxiety engineered by a media. Few stories ever discussed drove the students other than a disturbed mental state or a small case of bullying. Instead, Columbine became an issue about security and gun control. No source ever talked about the source of problem. We became obsessed with the symptoms.

And that’s the real issue here. The media hardly prescribed solutions that mattered, such as counseling programs that actually help students or education that prevents bullying through more proactive programs. There is so much that society can do to prevent tragedies like Columbine, yet instead we become obsessed with the means of how it happened instead of the “why?” We ask “how did they get the guns” instead of “why did they want them.” We are asking the wrong questions and therefore coming up with the wrong answers. It’s so easy to pass uniformed blame and hope that somehow a good solution will sprout out of nowhere and fix everything. But as long as the powerful force that is the media keeps asking the wrong questions, society will come up with the wrong answers.

Self-Efficacy and Writing

I have recently taken up researching the effects of feedback on student’s writing and the best practices that have emerged in recent studies for as an English teacher, I feel it is my responsibility to understand how feedback affects my students and how to best give feedback to give my students the best education possible. Feedback is one the many, and perhaps most common, ways in which English teachers and instructors communicate with students. Most often feedback is directly at the students’ writing, commenting on what they did well and what they could improve on. However, making it as broad as that does not do justice to how complex feedback truly is. To be completely honest for a moment, I did not expect to see feedback being broken down in the manner in which it is based on the research I completed. I understood the basic fundamentals of what it was, what it entailed and how to put it into practice, but never would I expect a deeper science base and an expansive number of professionals conducting studies on feedback implementation in the classroom.

With this all in mind, what was most interesting is how feedback is so connected to the concept of self-efficacy. I knew such a connection existed, as previous studies on this subject matter proved as much, however the professor whom is guiding my research more or so implied, that one can be studied without the other (thereby allowing me to focus more on practical forms of feedback and ignore most of the theory behind). My research proved otherwise.

Self-efficacy can be defined as one’s own belief in their abilities to complete tasks and accomplish goals. Feedback is proven to be so intertwined with self-efficacy that separating the two became very difficult, nigh impossible, while I conducted my research. This is because a teacher can inspire or cripple a student’s self confidence with the feedback provided. This is because of the theory of mediators, which is essentially, is how we communicate. Questions posed that confuse rather than clarify can be wound our self-esteem and we lose hope. Yet, praise and commendations can stimulate it, as we know we accomplished something.

Feedback becomes so much more than what we say; it also becomes how we say it. Feedback serves as the connecting device between writing and self-efficacy as well. Writing is practically dependent on self-efficacy. Can you recall the last time you felt as though a major writing assignment felt like a burden? That is because of a relative lack of self-efficacy. It drives the writing process, and subsequently, when teachers give feedback, there are studies that prove teachers can improve that. If teachers can tap into that well of potential, writing will no longer feel like a chore or some arduous task. It will become more natural, easier to teach and more fun to engage in. Students can better develop their abilities and become better learners. Isn’t that what teaching is all about?