Blog Junkie

Bear with me, this is more than a cliche.

Last night we celebrated my daughter’s birthday with a BBQ for family and friends. I had the incredible pleasure of having an extended conversation with one of her friends, a young man 25 years old, who I have always liked, but could have never said why.  It was a teacher thing.  This young man has pulled himself out of the “hood” from a family with problems.  At the end of our conversation, I more than liked this young man, I admired and respected him. We talked about how some children come from troubled homes and hide their problems when at school so no one will know or see their pain and what that behavior looks like.

We talked about the school were he went for most of his elementary school years.  I know the school and it too has been pulled up by its bootstraps out of the gutter of gang fights, drugs, low academic standing etc… I have worked in several Category 2 inner city schools and struggled with my upper-middle class view points. I told him a story of a young boy in one of my classes who I had tried very hard to reach all year. He also came from a family in crisis.  One afternoon, during an art class, I sent him to get some more paper as we had run out. He had to leave the building, cross a small parking lot to the second school building where the office was. This was not an issue, we did this with the students all the time, out of necessity. The day I sent my student, the door, unknown to me, was locked. He was gone for a longer time than he should have and I sent a student to find him. When he came in he was very, very upset. The look on his face was one I could not complete decipher at first. He was upset and angry and I got that, but there was more that I couldn’t figure out. When I asked him why he didn’t bang on the door or come to the class window he began to get more upset and shut down. It was the look in those deep, dark brown eyes that drilled through me and impaled me to the wall. It took me days to figure it out. I had to shift my point of view from myself to him. He had been in the one place where he would be safe with the one person in his life he knew cared and he trusted. The look in his eyes was betrayal.  I had accidentally, over a locked door, betrayed his trust.  Whatever happened at home to cause this reaction, I had managed to repeat at school.

This story opened the young man at my home to tell me his story. This is why we get up each morning, unlock our classroom doors while balancing the mug of ever present java on top of a pile of marked papers to begin the day, fresh and new from yesterday. He told me of his grade 7 teacher at the school we had been discussing. This teacher took a vested interested in this young man. He had him do small projects on the computers at recesses, had him help build the ice rink outside and give out the skates at recess. He kept him out of the gangs and got him to stop fighting. I quote, verbatim: “He saved my life.”

What have I learned in the Twitter challenge to-date?  What do I think of Twitter now?

It has been a week since I started this Twitter challenge so what happened out there in Twitterland?  I am now following 31 people and have 23 followers.  An improvement over the initial blog report!

I was given Dean Shareski’s blog as one to follow.  The initial post I read was about sharing.  Dean challenged people to:

Here’s an idea: put a sticky note on your desk that says, “What do you want to share today?” I’m not kidding. Then, if anything interesting comes your way: Share It!

I read his “about” page as I became very curious about a man who wrote such a post.  Surprise, surprise, he is a prairie man.  Go figure.  If you ever get lost out there, you can have a 45 min conversation with a stranger, get invited to their house for supper, then get the directions you need!  I ADORE the prairies.  So Dean, nice to meet you, I’m sharing!

I also was sent some great links:

http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/04/02/are-you-twittering-heres-how-i-use-twitter/ by Sue Waters, of course, on the value of using Twitter.

http://thecleversheep.blogspot.com/2008/11/top-ten-types-of-tweets.html from Rodd Lucier on types of communication within Twitter and also http://thecleversheep.blogspot.com/2008/07/to-tweet-or-not-to-tweet.html where there is a discussion on Rodd’s blog about the value of Twitter.

I found a grade 5/6 class blog just when I needed it! http://56c2008.edublogs.org/

I have learned to use, well sort of learned to use, Twhirl.  I have used direct messages and I have managed to put a toe out into the conversations.  I find that not so easy.  It feels like barging into a conversation at a party that you may not have been invited to. I tend to learn by “lurking” and “delurking” is rather a challenge.  So that will be the new challenge for the upcoming week: send out more tweets!

Now here are the more interesting things I’ve learned this week:

This Week’s Twitter in Review…

• chocolate lava cakes are worth moaning about – well chocolate is a food group on the food pyramid ya know!
• cats should not be machine washed http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/11/18/funny-pictures-told-u-not-masheen-washabul/
• baby showers have developed some unusual games since my hosting days!
• I’m not the only one waiting to see the Twilight movie! – Was great and I always said it should have been Jacob and Bella!
• this game causes people to stay up all night, nope it isn’t WOW! http://www.casualcollective.com/games/DesktopTD No, I did not try it.  There is a limit to my new geekiness!

What do I think of Twitter now?  I’ll stick around for another week.  Lord knows what I might learn!

Decided to accept Betty’s challenge to try Twitter for one month.  So now I am following 16 people (who I sniped from Betty and Claire), 3 are following me and I’m still trying to figure out what I am doing!  I still do not understand why I want to do this.  It is suppose to be a great way to develop a PLE (personal learning environment), but I’m still lost in the fog!  Nothing new there:  think at glacial speed and all. It seems I am a new “twit”! HA! The truth is out!  I should probably figure this out in a month or more and have no followers!

Well, well, I managed to add Twitter to this blog!  It’s getting rather cluttered on those sidebars as I learn about and add new widgets!  Impressive!    Hmm, I guess I will have to keep posting about this new little side journey as well as the TLITE journey.  Hop on and join me if you wish!

Could I have found a better blog post?!

After stressing about my responsibilities for report card marks for the research classes I teach, I finally went to my principal for some clarification.  She managed to relieve my 2 weeks of stress in five minutes and gave me hope beyond hope that there are some administrators out there who actively seek to destroy the “martyrdom” syndrome in their staff while still maintaining high expectations of “good” teaching.  AND I had a colleague come to me to ask for help for several of her students because “the kids connect really well with you.”  Thank you for making my day.

All of this got me obsessing on this topic again.  Bopped back to Dan Meyer’s blog and re-read the comments on his post about this issue.  I came across Chris Lehmann’s post here .  On Chris’s blog I find this great post by another seemingly amazing principal.  On this blog I am reading about “making Faustian bargains” (don’t even want to know how many of those I’ve made), working 10 – 12 hrs/day (I actually drove 200km/day to teach and spent around 14 hrs/day working/commuting for 10 months!), “reducing authentic assessment to its simplest form” and “teaching from textbooks…” (all I ever did).

In my former school system teaching was considered a “calling”.  That was used to reinforce the insane notion of martyrdom and minimal pay.  Now I work for a principal with similar thinking to Chris Lehmann.  I can go to work without having to constantly challenge the notion that I chose to teach because I was called to it by God.  Oh yeah, Dan, I received one hell of a pay hike over this system change and it is awesome.

What is the professional funk?  How is it possible to help teachers through this?

A number of things have brought this topic up.  I have had a wicked two weeks of stress. I’ve read a blog by another teacher who also had a bad week,  and I was remembering what happened to me this time last year.

The “professional funk” is when teachers, usually teachers in their first five to seven years of teaching, hit the skids full tilt as the impact of this “noble” profession sweeps them off their feet.  They are overwhelmed, overworked, struggling with various teaching issues – from instructional practices, classroom management to dealing with the damn paperwork.  They are ready to quit.  Many do.  I almost did, last November after eleven years in the trenches.

What to do to help those new teachers?  A mentorship program is definitely a benefit.  Ideas on instructional methods, classroom management are all great, but what about the coping strategies?  How about not letting our newest members fall into that expected “martyrdom” trap where giving up everything “for the kids” is not just encouraged, but expected. That entire Freedom Writer’s syndrome is the height of egoism.  The selfless you.  Are we there, as experienced teachers, taking care that this idea is not brewing in our newest members?  Do we offer support to help new teachers realize how to be satisfied in this job without paying a ridiculous cost – burnout, depression, defeat?  Schools do not just need to take care of their students, they need to take care of their staff.

Crawford Kilian states in his post here on “The Tyee”:

… we faculty still think of teaching and learning as a face-to-face encounter between a standing instructor and a bunch of seated students, making notes of what the instructor says and writes on the chalkboard.  This is simply not what our students are doing anymore.

This reminded me of a conversation I had with two fellow educators of the techno-geek crowd. I teach elementary school and these gents teach high school.  We were discussing the use of technology in the classroom.  The gist of the conversation was that if we, as educators, do not follow along with the technology our students are using we will find connecting with our students difficult and they will begin to disconnect with us and the subject.  We need to meet them on their turf, where they’re at so we are using Web 2.0 tools such as podcasting, blogging, wikis and along with  paper reports we are having students create PowerPoints, imovies, slideshows etc to demonstrate their knowledge of a subject area.  As teachers we are creating lessons using the same software tools to make our teaching relevant to our webhead students.  It was inspiring to find there were other teachers out there, especially post-secondary teachers, realizing the same thing.  If the conservative post-secondary institutions of higher learning are moving forward, there should be hope the those below them.  Or should there?

Kilian goes on to say,

…We might wish they were dutiful note-takers, scrawling with ballpoint pens in their binders the way we did.  But they’re not.  We don’t do them, or ourselves, any good by trying to give them a first-rate 1960’s education.

There would be the key, “a first-rate 1960’s education.”  This isn’t the 60’s or 80’s.  We are in the 21st Century and our teaching needs to be there too.  What amazes and discourages me is how many teachers simply refuse to learn how to use the technology that is relevant to education using the stupid adage, “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” as their excuse. These teachers have entrenched themselves. They have forgotten how to learn and the importance of continuing to learn through-out their teaching careers.  If you stop learning what the hell do you think your students will do?

…From Kindergarten to high school, educators are going to have to get serious about that old cliche, “learning how to learn.”  And we ourselves will have to learn how to learn, or get out of the business.

Bravo!

It’s crunch time and I have to read more research papers for my action research project before my final paper is due.  Seeing as that is still some weeks away, well, it’s too early for all that stress yet.  I’ll read them 2 days before the final paper is due – works for me.

While cruising for research I decided to go back and visit Dan Willingham’s site and what did I find there?  This interesting discussion on the “Mozart Effect”.

…it began when a scientific paper reported that college students showed a short-lived increase in spatial reasoning (e.g., ability to mentally rotate objects) after listening to a Mozart piano sonata, compared to other students who experienced silence or instructions to relax (Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky, 1993). There were many subsequent efforts to reproduce the effect. Some were successful, most were not (see Chabris, 1999, for a review), and it appears most likely that when the effect is observed, it’s not due to hearing Mozart or classical music per se, but rather to a boost in mood and arousal (Thompson, Schellenberg, and Husain, 2001). At their best, the data on listening to Mozart supported a very short-lived boost in spatial ability for college students. Somehow, that transmogrified into the idea that playing classical music for babies would make them smarter for life…

And what is it that our fair city does with classical music, Mozart included?  Why our local 711s pipe it outside to help get rid of the “teenage cluster effect” and the “riff-raff effect”.  Our local upscale hotel pipes it outside to get rid of the local, not so upscale, “downtown colourful streetwalker effect”.  There is a lot of people getting smarter here.

I appreciate the people like Dan Willingham who take educational theories and make them look like what many of them are:  fashion fad’s from Paris Hilton!

Thank you, Dan, for making me look beyond the “fad” to see if the proof is really in the puddin’.

In the September 2008 issue of the BCTF newsletter, the BCTF President talks about being at a Tri National Conference in Defense of Public Education.  It was a conference attended by teachers from Canada, US and Mexico in Los Angles.  The newsletter states:

The public education system is the US has been fractured by underfunding, overtesting, militarization, and privatization.  Rather than providing students with an equal opportunity to succeed, as public education was intended, it serves to reinforce the extreme have-and have-not society the US has become.

“…an equal opportunity to succeed, as public education was intended…” is all very well in theory, but it is definitely not what happens in practice whether in the US or in Canada.  Inner city schools are sorely under-funded and lacking in basic resources, schools with low enrollment find themselves in the same predicament as the inner city schools whereas schools with high enrollment find themselves with much more money and are resource heavy.  So my child’s quality of education appears to depend on where I live and in what catchment area I am in.

I am not implying that the teachers in any one school, resource poor or resource heavy, are any better or worse than one another.  I am saying that if I live in an area where my catchment area is for an inner city school/low enrollment school, then my child will go to a school lacking some very basic resources such as complete sets of textbooks, textbooks for each subject area, enough computers, novel sets in good condition with enough books for each student….But if I live in a catchment area for a high enrollment/wealthy school then my child will have all the needed/prescribed resources, including technology resources.  How can it be that in a first world country, we can have this disparity in funding?  Why is the funding for each school not equal?  How is this just?

Is all fair in education? The haves and the have-nots do not just exist in the US.

I found these YouTube videos by Dan Willingham, a cognitive psychology professor at UVA, on Eduwonkette’s blog, here. Mr. Willingham is presenting a very interesting argument regarding a deeply held educational belief: that students have learning style preferences and that we, as educators, are teaching to those student preferences. If we find that we have a student who has a strong preference for learning visually we teach that student visually – preferably mostly visually.

Mr. Willingham is saying that while research in cognitive science shows that we do actually have learning style preference, we do not learn specifically by those modalities. That learning takes place when meaning is created and stored as a memory representation. If we present visual images to our visual learners they will remember parts of the images as the “gist” of the content. The part of the images remembered will be stored as a visual memory and the meaning of the lesson will be stored as a separate memory representation. I hope I have that correct.

What surprised me was that there is, apparently, some notion that teachers are using one modality only to teach a lesson ie: visual, so all the visual learners will be able to learn. Then the lesson would be presented in an auditory manner for the auditory learners as in some form of centre style format. That is not what I do or ever considered doing. I teach all three modalities simultaneously: visual, auditory and kinesthetic. I am specifically going after learning meaning, not the modality. Mr. Willingham suggests in his paper, here, that each lesson should be taught according to which modality it is best suited for not students‘ learning style preference. I certainly hope that is what I have been doing with the goal of reaching as many students’ learning preferences as possible in order to create meaning (understanding of the content) while being as motivating as possible.

Thoughts, opinions…..???