Episode 1: Welcome to the Teacher As…Podcast

Transcript

(transcribed by kayla.r.fainer@gmail.com)

Welcome to The Teacher As… podcast. I'm your host, Melissa Milner. In the past few months, I have heard the reasonable question over and over: Melissa, what is The Teacher As… podcast going to be about? I feel the answer is really involved. So to start, I'm going to ask some questions so you can decide if this is the right podcast for you. So here we go. 

Number one, do you enjoy learning creative, inclusive approaches to working with your students? Number two, have you utilized a passion you have outside of education to make your teaching better? And number three, do you ever watch people of other professions do their job and say to yourself, “Hey, that's just like teaching!” If you answered yes to any of these questions, then we are of the same tribe, and you're going to love this podcast. 

My goal is to help us explore our passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better our teaching. So I'll highlight uncommon parallels to teaching as well as share practical ideas for the classroom. We will hear what educators are passionate about. And we will be enlightened and inspired by hearing from professionals outside of the teaching profession. 

Before I forget, my website, www.theteacheras.com, has my blog posts and will house the transcripts to all The Teacher As… podcast episodes. Many of The Teacher As… episodes will be interviews. I will start with the topic of The Teacher As Change Agent. Some of my guests will be Grant Hightower, the METCO Director for my school district; Julia Hendrix, the principal of my school that I teach in; Paul Solarz, author of Learn Like a Pirate; Angela Stockman, who's the author of Make Writing; and Leah Henry, a teacher and instructional coach, and moderator of #PBLChat on Twitter. 

So The Teacher As Change Agent interviews are educators who are working right now on making change. It's a very specific topic. Some interviews will be with educators that will highlight passions outside of education and how they use them in their teaching. For example, the teacher as punk rocker, the teacher as archaeologist, the teacher as baker. 

What makes The Teacher As… podcast a little different is I will also interview professionals outside of education, and we'll learn from them things that we could maybe use in our classrooms. So for instance, the teacher as firefighter, the teacher as orchestra conductor, or the teacher as co-anchor of a news program. It goes on and on. The possibilities are endless. And that's what really excites me. 

Another feature of The Teacher As… podcast is the “Zooming In” segments. I got the idea from the segment “What’s Making Us Happy” on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. This segment is about what I or my guests are zooming in on right now. I decided to call it “Zooming In” because, number one, it’s a camera move, but it has a deeper meaning to me. My Uncle John, who passed away way too young, used to enjoy people watching and what he called zooming in. So this section is a tribute to my Uncle John, John Chalfin. Once in a while, I'm going to have some bonus episodes. And they're going to be entitled “Zooming In.”

Movies are my passion. If you go to my blog, you'll see that I've written a lot about film making metaphors and how we can learn from movies and the people who work in movies to better our teaching. In my interviews, I have a question at the end, and it's asking whoever I'm interviewing, what is their favorite movie. Because you can learn a lot about a person from what their favorite movie is. If it's an episode with just me, sometimes the “Zooming In” segment will be about a movie, sometimes it won't.

There's the wide shot of The Teacher As… podcast, and now it's time to zoom in. 

[ZOOMING IN SOUNDBITE]

So I'm zooming in on my favorite movie of all time, Jaws. On my website, I will share two to three of my favorite movies in many different genres. It is very difficult for me to pick just one movie that is my ultimate favorite. But since I am asking the people I interview to do it, I guess I need to step up and do it, too. 

In my blog post “The Teacher As Screenwriter: Teacher Talk Versus Student Talk”, I write about Jaws in relation to its most famous line, “You're gonna need a bigger boat.” I'm not going to go into depth here with the parallels to education in this movie. I will say that this is my favorite movie of all time for many reasons. 

Number one, it is a huge memory from my childhood, and I wrote a little bit about that in the post. Number two, huge understatement alert, another reason this is my favorite movie is the screenplay, the direction, the cinematography, and John Williams’ musical score. But the heart of the movie for me is the relationship with Chief Brody, Hooper and Quint, played brilliantly by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. The fact that these three characters, despite their differences and antagonism towards each other, get to a place where they share stories, find things they have in common, sing together and work as a team to defeat the actual antagonist, the shark. It is ripe with metaphors. 

I'm gonna get heavy for a minute here. That shark could be any problem in education or the world in which we have to work together to solve it. I zoom in on Jaws not only in admiration for the film making, but also for the deeper theme that I take from watching it. I do wish this movie had a more diverse cast. Many of my favorites on my list of genre topics have diverse characters and diverse casting. So check out that list on my website when you get a moment. 

If you enjoyed this episode and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button so you can get future episodes. For my blog, transcripts of this episode, contact information and more, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the “Zooming In” soundbite. And my dad composed and performed the music that you're hearing in the background right now. My Intro Music is “Upbeat Party” by Scott Holmes.

So what are you zooming in on these days? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share our passions and what we're doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap!