Blog Junkie

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.

Did anything go right this time?  Did anything go wrong this time?

Ok Crawford, how’s that for a deck?  Too little, too much?  I’m workin’ it here!

I’ve been working this Inspiration Software Field Study thing and my frustration and stress levels are nose to nose like the running of the Kentucky Derby!  It has been the WORST two weeks!  To think I actually entertained the notion of laddering into a Master’s program!  Must have lost my mind!  Actually, I’m sure I did!

What went right? The Canucks slaughtered LA!  How good was that! Yes, if the Canucks can actually pull off a miracle I guess so can I.  There were some successes, finally.  My wonderful Super Techie Man fixed my stupid office computer so now I can actually do my job AND access my hand in folder to see what the “hellcats” have handed in or not handed in.  My hand in file that I copied to my external hard drive actually opened at home! I re-created a new note-taking system that should transfer to the Inspiration Web in a manner that makes more sense to the kids.

We brainstormed the “big ideas” we would want people from other countries to know about Canadians.  We then transferred those “big ideas” to the people of Nepal and the new note-taking sheet I had made up.  The “hell-cats” actually listened and when I left them to finish on their own, they DID!   Unbelievable!

What continues to go wrong you ask? Hmm, let’s see!  I had to use the prehistoric overhead one LAST time to teach the “hellcats”.   I’m miles behind in this research project with the kids,  I need this damn research project to stay on-track, I have to have the field study finished by the end of November. I have never had so much trouble teaching research!  I’m sure I have that Stupid Teacher of the Year Award neatly tied up with a bow! There are still three computers in the lab that are not working, Inspiration is still saving in French and I have kids who did not hand in their webs!  The stress levels are at max and the insomnia is back with a vengeance!  AND while I was creating a line graph in Word (haven’t a clue how to use Excel) it (Word) decided to have a problem, reconfigure, lose my data and I had to start all over again!  Go figure!  AND I can’t get screen shots of some of the webs to embed into this post!  Sue Waters, I need you!

What does the data show so far? It shows exactly what it said it would show, improvement in the factual recall.  The study I created was simple because I am a prep relief teacher who only has these kids for 45 minutes once a week – thank GOD!   I initially gave a pre-test to see how much the kids knew about Nepal.  The class average for both classes was 1 out of a possible 10.  The kids researched geographical landforms and plants/animals and created Inspiration webs.  The criteria is that each subtopic has a different colour and/or shape – shape is optional and that each subtopic has web bubbles with facts, these bubbles are to be the same colour as the subtopic heading.  They could choose any web format they liked, ie: webbing all around the heading “Nepal” or creating more linear forms.  They have to add pictures to the web to help with the “visual” memory theory. I then gave a post-test on geographical landforms, animals and plants.  The total possible marks were 14.  Class One’s average was 12 and Class Two’s average was 9.  (Can you guess which class are the “hell-cats”?)

I do have a significant increase in marks – from 1 to 9 or 12, but of course as this is an action field study and there is no control group so one could say the class averages would have gone up anyway just by doing the research itself.  Question would be by how much?  By looking at individual test scores compared to scores for the web, it does appear to correlate with Inspiration’s claims.  If the web scores were low, the post-test scores were low and vice-versa.  Also, my bonus question was answered correctly only by those students who had that information on their web.  Interesting.

I’m very curious to see what the test scores are like for the second post-test.  What will happen to the class averages?  Will I get an increase in the class average for Class Two?  Will the individual web scores improve this time?

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!

Needing data for my field study I have given both my classes a “pop quiz”.  Results appear to be very interesting, but I haven’t finished with comparisons etc…yet.  I need to move on to a new subtopic in our study of Nepal, but my data shows improvement is needed with student note-taking and transferring those notes to Inspiration.  What to do?

I have decided to use World Book On-line as it had more information on this particular subtopic than the previous on-line encyclopedia.  I have my “keener” class in the lab.  I pretested everything and it works fine.  Here we go with the assumptions again.

Some students end up with different home pages than I have and we take forever to get to the information required.  When I do finally get everyone on the correct page I find my “keeners” are way off-task!  This is starting to rattle my confidence.  What happened?  I forget how to teach every time I set foot in the computer lab?

It’s been a bad day, I need to read.  I am currently reading Writing for the Web 3.0 by Crawford Kilian, a communications teacher at Capilano College in North Vancouver.  I am reading his book to improve my blogging, hoping to write for an audience that currently does not exist!  In the book Kilian talks about reading on the computer.  How the low resolution of the computer screen affects reading.  The bells go off in this wee head.  I swear I think at glacial speed sometimes!

The next class is with the “hell-cats” and at the last minute I change plans which is always a risky move.  New plan is to print the section of the World Book Encyclopedia on-line, use it as a paper copy, use the overhead and the specialized note-taking paper. Problem: The print is waaaaay too tiny.  Solution:  Blow it up on the photocopier.  Still too small, but out of time to retype.  Went ahead anyway.  Cannot believe I can have so much trouble adding technology into my teaching!  Could anything go right the first time?  Oh yeah, that overhead.  It was the first one produced after the mimeograph machines went extinct! It was prehistoric!  Why use an overhead and not the computer/projector?  Can’t use a highlighter on the projector to demo the note-taking.

What happens?  They co-operate!  They actually listen!  We work through the first paragraph together and they manage to hold it together and almost finish the entire assignment even though you practically need a magnifying glass to read the thing!

What did I learn?  That Kilian was right, reading on the computer is hard.  These kids are not able to sit with a computer screen at arms length away.  They find the sentences too long, they cannot highlight the key words in the text.  They need to read on paper.  I am astonished at the difference.

Now to improve how to transfer the information from the notes to the Inspiration web.  Still grinding the glacier on that.

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’.

This Field Study is not actually a research project for a Master’s Degree.  It is an action study into my own teaching practices that investigates how I can use technology to improve my teaching and the learning of my students which is a requirement for my post-grad diploma.  All self-directed I might add.  Hmm…… Yep, I do get a diploma out of the deal.

What program am I investigating?  Inspiration Software.   I teach research skills and this seemed like a good idea as our school district has this software in its schools.  It seemed reasonable to find out if Inspiration’s claims that its software webbing program improved student ability to retain factual information.

I chose a research project based on a country as most kids enjoy learning about other cultures, but I needed a country they would know the least about so I could measure their “factual improvement”.  I picked Nepal.  The most they knew, as per a post-test, was that Mt. Everest was in Nepal.  So far, so good.

We began by using the note-taking system I was under the impression everyone was using in the school.  I’m the newbie to the school and as usual assuming things is where the first of a series of woes began.  I used Britannica On-line for our research information.  Good stuff, involved technology, how cool was that.  Kids liked the idea of an encyclopedia on-line…and then I discovered that a third of the kids couldn’t seem to follow either written or oral directions on logging onto the data-base, didn’t understand what “case-sensitive” meant, and only one of my two research skills classes was competent with the note-taking system SOME of the teachers were using!  I know better than to assume anything!

Ok, teach the note-taking system to the class that was not so familiar with it, no big deal.  With lesson plan in place, computer set up on the projector complete with the Britannica On-line page up, I begin.  That is when I discovered I had landed in HELL!  I had a class of 30, 25 boys and 5 girls and those 25 boys can put the fear of hell into its creator Himself!   Never in my teaching career have I had a class fly south like this one did and I could NOT get it back!  Next class I tried my faithful standby for problem kiddies:  intimidation.  I can imtidate Martha Stewart herself!  Hah!  They threw that back at me as fast as a rapid-fire paintball gun!  Good God, what to do?  How about panic! Actually, thinking back on it, it was rather funny! I felt like a lion-tamer, after it had been attacked by the lion!

After thinking about the problem for a week, I did what should have been done in the first place, provide structure. Must be a novel teaching strategy!  I put in place a seating plan, I do not respond to questions where the answer is already know, and I refuse to argue.  You’d think I’d know better, huh!

What happened?  Peace.  Cool.  I enjoy these holy terrors immensely.  They are full of creative high jinks.  They like the computer and technology.

Class under control, all is well.  Notes are being taken, not the best, but we’re getting there.  I don’t have the time to teach the note-taking as properly as I would like due to time constraints on this field study.  We move to Inspiration and create webs. I put up my demo version which is on my jump drive to discover it will not open!  Go figure! (Teaching with technology is starting to loose its glamour.)  It seems I have version 8 at home and my school has version 7.5.  Lucky me. But the  kids pick it up quickly, I reinforce the use of separate colours for sub-topics, repeatedly remind to put in the details for the 3 geographic landforms….blah, blah.  Then we save.  What does this amazing networked PC lab do?  It saves in the French Inspiration rather than the English!  How this is happening has yet to be determined.  Have to ask my darling techie man, who thank you very much, speaks in Non-techie English.  Maybe re-imaging the lab will solve the problem.  I am no IT Tech so hell if I know.  But the kid’s work is in English so all is well.  Then we discover that when we re-open the saved Inspiration document, it opens in the English version.  And I want to add technology to my teaching – definitely losing its initial thrill!

What exactly have I learned so far?  Well, as mentioned in a previous post – technology doesn’t solve a boring topic,  kids pick up computer technology at an amazingly rapid rate, and these kids can create the most amazing PowerPoints.  Some of them should give seminars to educators in how NOT to create boring presentations!  I now know what NOT to do for my final project presentation to my cohort group and I know exactly which gr. 7 I am going  to enlist to help me with my presentation! I’ve learned how to have the kids hand in digital work to my folder, with the help of Techie Man who just happened to be in the lab at the very moment I needed said help! He so earned those brownies I brided him with!  I now need to figure out if I can copy that hand in file to my jump drive and have it open properly at home.  I think I should turn that into a math probability lesson:  chances of success:  100 to 1???  Chances of Inspiration Software improving factual recall….????  Stay tuned!

I firmly believe that the use of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom has such teaching potential, but I’ve never had anything in my teaching career so far that is as frustrating as attempting to use this technology with students on a tightly controlled networked computer system!  The system is so slow that in a 35 minute lab session it takes 10 minutes just to get onto the data-base!  Lab time in a school that is over-crowded is at a premium so getting the lab time and the time slots needed is a battle.  The Admin and staff are unaware of the role technology plays in the teaching of library/research skills.

The next hurdle for this novice user of technology in the classroom is to think 10 steps ahead of the upper intermediate students to be aware of exactly what they are up to.  Some wanted to create a web-page about themselves so I, the new teacher, would get to know them better.  Hmmm, really??? Such a noble gesture!  So exactly where would this web-page be hosted?  Web-page indeed.

A very explicit Internet use policy is manditory and I must say we have one.  Very quiet in that classroom when I told them I knew exactly what was in it and what would happen if it was breached.  Ah, the Internet Nazi was teaching.

Result was things went quite well besides the frustration of computers operating at glacial speed.  Students enjoyed Britannica Online and are looking forward to mind-mapping on Inspiration.  Hmm, wondering how that mind-map will work out?

Also, discovered that contrary to my prior post, with some candid conversation about equality in education, these well-off students were able to understand the concept of social justice and have empathy for others more disadvantaged than themselves and are now enjoying this research much more. Made me realize I should have had more faith in these young people and been far less cynical and jaded.  They really did rise to the occasion.

Next group – Thursday.  Wonder how that will go?

I expected problems in starting my field study as I had heard enough from the past TLITE cohort members to be prepared, so I thought..

I expected glitches and boy did I get them. I saved the PowerPoint in the wrong format and had to correct that.  Should have known better.

I had a class of 30 grade 6/7’s coming in and I wanted them in the library where there were tables to write on, but I needed a laptop and projector for my PowerPoint presentation part of the lesson.  The laptop would not log on to the District server, the remaining laptops logged on, but the cords to connect them to the projectors were lost.  Surprise!  Saved by my TECHIE MAN.  Thanks bud, those brownies are coming your way.

Tech problems were solved in the last minute of the final hour before the kids came in.  Phew, nothing went wrong technically.  But at the end of the lesson, I realized that I was so focused on the technology that I completely blew the teaching!  Shocked would be the descriptor.  I was floored.  I’ve been teaching long enough that this is EMBARRASSING!  The mapping work that the kids handed in was appalling to say the least.

LEARNING:  Remember to focus on the content, the skills, the expectations, NOT the technology.  I considered this a trial run for the second gr 6/7 class to come for the same lesson, re-vamped the lesson plan.  Glitch: had to have a sub teach the lesson!  Notes from sub – new realization:  technology does not make an uninteresting topic any better.  Topic was directly related to the need for no prior knowledge and it is going to be a problem. Once again, I was too focused on the field study and not focused on the PLO’s or on connecting the research project for the kids with their ability to connect with the topic. Should win the “stupid teacher award” for this. Possible solution:  cut the lessons to the minimum to meet the prescribed learning outcomes, finish with students creating a short PowerPoint presentation and cut my losses.

The Ah-Ha moment:  attempting to tackle a field study as a prep relief teacher in a new school, in a new position is not the best of plans.  It may be the reality, but it is not a good reality.

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.

Once again, while cruising through one of my most favorite ed blogs, I find Dan Meyer has yet again provided something for me to think about. I love words and the power they hold. I love art for the power the images create, and to see them together was nothing short of heart-stopping.

The power of this artist’s words and images were immense. He talked about finding a type-face that worked for him. He saw meaning in the various type-faces that would never have occurred to me, but they reflect his “voice” as an artist. They made me redefine the way I see the art I do – I always struggle with being a minimalist with words.

Now as I struggle to reclaim my writer’s voice, and to define my educator’s inner landscape, his words ring true: “You have to be who you are no matter how dangerous it is.”