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Tom Panarese
Charlottesville, VA
Tom Panarese is currently in his fourth year as an English and journalism teacher and yearbook adviser in Virginia. Prior to a career in education, Tom worked in marketing as a proposal writer for a a variety of companies in technology, telecommunications, and law. He also spent the early part of his career working for the Central Intelligence Agency, a fact that seems interesting until he confesses that he was merely a copy editor. Tom graduated in 1999 from Loyola College in Maryland with a BA in writing and political science and a minor in English. His essay, "Sometimes a Fantasy: Degrassi and Teenage Entertainment in America" was published in the 2006 compilation "Growing Up Degrassi" and in July 2008 he wrote an op-ed for Education Week about yearbooks and the First Amendment entitled, "A Lesson in Free Speech."
Recent Activity
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Tom commented on the article |You both have good points, but I think you also need to look at teacher training from another perspective--that of the career switcher. So far, both the original post and your reply seem to be discussing programs for the relatively young (college graduates, TFA, etc.) which is where, yes, most of the teachers in the nation come from ... and I wholeheartedly agree that a solid liberal arts education, especially that with a good background in the humanities, is vital to become an educator (even if you're teaching science or math), but there are quite a few teachers (like myself) who enter the fray from another career.
Right now, there are more or less two options to do this: first, you go back to school and earn another degree, or at least take the classes necessary to earn a teaching license; second, you go through a career switcher program that is offered by a university or even a school district. Both options have their pros and cons, the major cons being time, money, and amount of actual learning done.
I went through a career switcher program in my first school division, and it was taught mostly by administrators and principals in the district and was very broad and pretty quick. I feel that it should have been more thorough, as I really didn't feel ready to be a teacher until I started to hit the end of my first year. I think this is why so many who leave another field to go to teach because they think they can do it and it will be easy leave so quickly.
But I would have never been able to take the time and spend the money to quit my marketing job and go back to school full-time, which was pretty much my only other option.
So, being that one option isn't necessarily cost-effective and the other, while a little more convenient, isn't thorough enough, what do we do to make switching careers to a teaching career appealing to those who want to do it but give a nice dose of reality to those who think it's going to be a cake walk?
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Tom commented on the article |Word. Word. Wordy McWord.
One of the most frustrating things is to have that state trooper-type presentation at your school because honestly? The message will never change, even though the medium does. First it was AOL chat rooms. Then it was your blog. Then it was MySpace. Now it's Facebook and Twitter. What's next? Well, that will be eeeeeeeeeevil too!!! Because that's the EASY way out.
Your last two paragraphs hit it right on the head -- why do we continue to act as if this is a horrible thing, or seem "scared" that our students or kids know more about the computer than we do? I mean, doesn't this boil down to what Stan Lee himself once wrote: with great power comes great responsibility?
As has been noted in comments of your other posts, there's so much potential here and it's going to end up being wasted if all that ever comes of it are navel-gazing personal updates and the same head-up-my-ass narcissism that is typical of angy generation of teenagers (there's an irony in the fact that the more "plugged in" teens get the more ignorant they seem to be). So let's grasp that potential, right? Seems like a no-brainer. Well, except to the authorities.
Excelsior!
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Tom commented on the article |@Clay: Yeah, I know ... so many greats did die poor and commercial success does not necessarily equal quality. But I wanted to at least point out that there's a difference between writing and publishing. One's a craft, a profession for those who are lucky. One's an industry, and when gushing about what's new in reading and writing we tend to lose sight of how the industry actually works (kind of the same way we lose sight of the major problem with public education being that it's a bureaucracy).
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Tom commented on the article |
One of my students dozed off during class when reading All Quiet on the Western Front to herself. When the bell rang, she commented about how sleepy she gets when she reads in class. I asked her if she had anything on when she read at home (iPod, computer, TV, stereo, etc.). She quickly realized that shutting off the noise and focusing was what was making her tired -- she wasn't used to it.
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Tom commented on the article |
Before I was a teacher, one of the companies I worked for was a digital imaging companies and I was on the marketing team that sold digital photo labs to stores like Wal-Mart and Ritz Camera. The company tanked when the dot-com bubble burst but my CEO had a really good grasp of what was going in the market. At the time (this is 2000), nobody really had a digital camera and few people were burning their pics to a CD. His "pitch" was always that if a photography company (Kodak, etc.) is going to survive they have to realize that they are in the "memories" business and not the "camera" or "picture" business. Now ... well, I order one print here and there if I want to put it in a frame. And my yearbook staff? Completely digital.
This more or less supports the point I made above -- nobody has yet to come up with that sentiment so that we move away from the book. Yes, the Kindle is cool and I get most of my news online, but ... the pulp is still out there.
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Tom commented on the article |
Ugh, that should read "The thing in the way is that there still isn't a completely foolproof online business model for a house like HarperCollins or Random House to pull in the millions that they do putting the latest Grisham, King, or even Julie & Julia in Barnes & Noble."
I should have proofread BEFORE hitting "post"
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Tom commented on the article |
Here's the thing, though. Publishing was never about being seen or having your voice heard. It was about making money. Why did I dust off a manuscript the other day and start marking pages in the Guide to Litereary Agents when I could very well publish my novel online (or by myself)? Because while getting things out there and being heard is great, a $25K advance with someone to help me promote the book and rack up royalties is nicer.
The publishing industry is dying a very long, slow, painful death, and I'm sure that whatever paradigm shift is taking place will eventually be fulfilled, but the thing in the way isn't a bunch of English majors who spend their days pining away until they can edit for Knopf. The thing in the way is that there still isn't a completely foolproof business model for a house like HarperCollins or Random House to pull in the millions that they do putting the latest Grisham, King, or even Julie & Julia in Barnes & Noble.
Print journalism is having the same problem. A recent article in my city's free weekly about how the daily paper is more or less on its last legs has this prescient quote: "'The fundamental problem is that no one has figured out how to make any money off the Web yet. Then kaboom, the economy tanks. Nobody had time to figure the magic bullet,' says Brian Richardson, Dean of the Journalism School at Washington and Lee University."
And I'm not saying all this to poo-pooh what you've got up here. I personally love that communication and information have exploded like this over the last decade; however, I'm more of a skeptic, even a cynic when it comes to this. Not that those who are creative are in it for the money but I think even the most steadfast "indie" person will admit that it brings a certain cache that DIY doesn't have yet.
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Tom commented on the article |I have a tendency to download the YouTube files I want to use in class anyway because you never know if the day you go to show the video is the day the server is down ;).
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Tom commented on the article |
Agreed. I've attended technology in-service sessions that are all about using things that do nothing more than enhance a chalkboard, yet those things that my students are actually engaged in are blocked and we have conferences about "cyber-bullying" and other terrors of being online. It's insanely frustrating.
I've also heard the bandwidth excuse bantered about before as the reason YouTube is blocked. That kiiiiinda makes sense, but I think sometimes it's a cheap out.
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Tom commented on the article |I agree, what a great tool!
But Katie Couric giving interview advice? Uh ... maybe if I use it to illustrate "irony."
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