Introduction

Greetings all,

My name is Chris Doyle and I'm in the Childhood General Special Education program. This is the second-to-last class I have to take before completing my studies at Bank Street. Needless to say, I'm excited.

I started in September 2007 coming from Washington, DC. There, I worked for a not-for-profit organization conducting education research, primarily in the field of reading. It was a unique opportunity to travel the country to observe in K-3 classrooms, interview school-, district-, and state-level folks, and see how schools around the country (rural/urban/west/east/south) are dramatically different. Writing comprehensive reports is much less satisfying than actually teaching students, so I came to Bank Street in order to work more closely with children.

This semester I'm working as an assistant teacher in a private school for children with autism. Most of the students with whom I work have Aspergers. In the fall, I worked a student teaching in a school in Brooklyn. In each setting, I've had a chance to use a team-based approach to teaching. It's been a great experience, and I can see so many advantages to collaborative format.

I'm originally from NJ and recently decided to return to the Garden State next fall to teach in a progressive charter school. I feel connected to the area and I'm really invigorated about the opportunity to return home and work in a community that needs lots of help.

With the spare time that I have outside Bank Street, I enjoy cooking, photography, following baseball, reading graphic novels, and traveling with my girlfriend.

UPDATE:
I finally was able to post this introduction after a few unsuccessful attempts. You may see this post in duplicate elsewhere on this blog, so if you do I apologize. Initially, I was not given the option to post content to the blog on the dashboard page. I used my google account and an existing blogger account to follow the class blog, but I couldn't find an icon inviting me to, "post," anything to the site. I tried to rejoin the blog a few times, but to no avail. Using trial and error, I ended up just posting a comment to the initial introductory post, but of course it existed only as a comment and not an actual post visible to everyone on the home page. Since it's an online course and we'll be posting periodically throughout the semester, I had to redress this blogging blunder and figure out how to post a new entry. Back to the drawing board.

I have an existing blog on blogger which I deleted it b/c I thought for some reason that I couldn't post content to a blog I was following in addition to a blog I already had on blogger. I even went to the 'blogger help group' and posted a question to the larger blogging community asking for help. I consider myself pretty tech savvy, so I was somewhat frustrated when I couldn't figure out what was going on. To make a long story short, I received an e-mail from blogger inviting me to be a contributor to the class blog. I accepted the invitation and went back to the dashboard. Low-and-behold I saw an icon that asked me if I wanted to post. I'm about to click publish, and I have to admit I'm excited to see what happens. Talk to y'all soon!