Our school is the only local high school in the area. If students want Catholic or special education, they get on a school bus for over an hour a day of commuting down to Guelph. I’m a big fan of choice so, while I think it mad, I don’t have much to say about a student who wants to spend over 194 hours a year (that’s over 8 full days of riding 24 hours a day) on a bus to Guelph and back for specialized education, as long as it’s a choice they’ve made.
Ontario’s high school streams seem pretty straightforward, they are anything but in practice.
Our public board think it wise to ship our essential level students down to Guelph for special education. This isn’t a choice, it’s a system driven process. The Guelph school for this doesn’t fill up with locals so the surrounding community schools are expected to ship their most at-need students out of their home communities every day. This is an ongoing pressure in our community. At our recent heads’ meeting there seemed to be support for the idea of our school being a comprehensive, community school that serves everyone, but we struggle to run essential sections because parents resist putting their children into it, the board doesn’t section us to run smaller essential classes and many teachers in our school would rather be teaching academic students. It’s an uphill struggle to create a comprehensive local school that supports everyone in our community. Because we aren’t sectioned for essential classes (those smaller sections are given to the specialist school in Guelph), we end up populating applied level classes with essential students. It is so difficult to align parent perception, board support and student ability that we place all non-academic students into the same room. This is where the proliferation of fifties comes in. A teacher in our school recently said, and in retrospect I agree, that we place essential students into applied classes and lower course expectations to accommodate them. This not only does the essential students no favours, it also dilutes applied curriculum goals. The people running the education system tend to be successful professional educationalists; very experienced with the system having spent little time outside it. These educators see kindred spirits in academically streamed students who are successful in school and make effective use of the system. These teachers want to teach students like themselves. Asking them to work with students who find school a challenging environment or aren’t on the same academic trajectory they experienced is difficult for them. The predisposition of teachers makes academic curriculum somewhat sacred, but applied classes aren’t. Applied students should be on apprenticeship and college skilled labour tracks that demand hands on (applied?) skills. While less theoretical in approach, applied classes are supposed to be rigorously skills focused. When you put students who lack basic literacy and numeracy into a grade 10 applied class you make grade appropriate learning nearly impossible. How do teachers manage this? If you fail a student, you get called into promotion meetings at the end of the semester where the grade you’ve given becomes the starting point for an inflationary process that floats fails up to passes. The best way to avoid this is to simply award a 50%. What is a fifty when it’s really a 42? At its best, a fifty means a student has not reached minimal expectations for a class. Would you want the mechanic working on your brakes to have gotten there with fifties? The teacher I was talking to suggested that the number of fifties being handed out has mushroomed in the past few years. Those statistics aren’t made available to us because they would make a travesty of curriculum expectations, but I suspect he is right. A fifty means the government gets to say graduation rates are up. A fifty means the ride ends at graduation because no secondary program would accept a student with a D average. A fifty means you’re not sitting in promotion meetings watching your semester of careful assessment being swept away to support policy. The range of student skill in my classes is astonishing. My current grade 9 classes range from students who could comfortable complete grade 11 computer engineering curriculum next to students who appear unable to read, yet I’m supposed to address that range of skills in a 50-100% range in a single course. Perhaps we will find a way to reintegrate Ontario’s carefully designed secondary school streaming system, but considering the various pressures on it in our area, it’s going to be an uphill struggle. NOTE Re: school busing children… Time isn’t the only resource being spent. School buses get6-8mpg, Guelph is about 15 miles away. A (very conservative) 30 mile round trip (it’s much higher if you want to consider all the pickups and drop-offs) is a (very conservative) 15 litres per day of diesel (probably double that for your typical start/stop run), per bus, and we have a number of buses making that trip 194 days per year. Someone better than I can calculate the overall environmental impact (how many other vehicles are also held up burning fuel while these buses grind down to and back from Guelph every day?). Making an economic (let alone moral) argument for shipping our essential students out of their home communities seems impossible.
I’m watching the new season of my current favourite sci-fi show, The Expanse. It’s about the next couple of centuries where Terrans develop the technology to move out into the solar system, but rather than the Star Trek angle that completely ignores the nastiest aspects of human nature, The Expanse imagines a near future with technology advances but none of the social evolution of the Trek universe – it’s a politically messy, self-serving future, much like our present. It’s something I’m starting to think we’ll never get to.
I’m also spending the day today putting our yard and house back together after a wind storm swept through here, and that got me thinking about all this technology we’re so proud off. If it gets a bit windy, it all goes away. After a couple of big gusts yesterday there was no internet and no power. I was unable to deliver attendance data for my classes at the end of the day, let alone get information on what was happening.
We ignore data and facts.
At the height of the wind the local cell tower was down, meaning no information or electricity at all. In the meantime (and when it works), I’m watching the news closely as the competition we’re supposed to be travelling to in a couple of weeks in Fredericton is in peril because the city is under water. We’re ever so proud of our vaunted technology, but if it gets windy, or if waters run high, everything stops. The real irony in this is that our fossil fuel powered society is what’s prompting all this extreme weather. Even our supposedly green tech is manufactured using fossil fuel based manufacturing. Our technology doesn’t allow us to control our environment, it provokes it to attack us.
There is this thing called the Kardashev Scale. If you’re ever thinking how smart the bi-pedal apes are on the third rock from the sun, this scale will give you some perspective. A level one society is one that harnesses the resources of an entire planet. We’re not even close to that. Carl Sagan suggested human society is at about a 0.7 on the way to being able to harness planetary power, but I think that’s wildly optimistic. Our technology isn’t on its way to managing planetary processes, in many cases it’s prompting the planetary environment to violence – it’s the opposite of control. There are some cases of sustainable (ie: non-aggravating) human technology, but since we base most of what we produce on fossil fuels and unsustainable manufacturing, it’s hard to say much of any of our technology is actually on its way to sustainable global resource management. Our stubborn unwillingness to orientate ourselves in that direction is the problem, not our intelligence or technical capability.
When you get up into level 2 your society can manage the energy of an entire solar system. We’re millennia away from that even assuming we pivoted today and actually worked toward sustainable global management that would allow us to thrive as a civilization long enough to develop it. The way we’re currently going, we’ll probably cause global environmental upheaval before we’re likely to even establish a foothold in space (by that I mean permanent human habitation off-world, we haven’t even done that yet). The environmental problems we cause now will eventually produce resource depletion that will result in war. We love a good war to cap off our own bad habits. Level 3 (effective galactic resource management and level 4 (universal/pan dimensional resource management) are so far beyond our short sighted, barely evolved minds that they beggar belief.
Meanwhile, here I am about to nail unsustainably manufactured aluminum siding back on to my wood framed house that was built with unsustainable lumber. We have more in common with squirrels building nests than we do with even a level one civilization, except what the squirrels build isn’t burning a hole in the world. They’re closer to a level one civilization than we are.
All the other unsustainably built, fossil fuel powered houses in my neighborhood are also missing bits and pieces. Shortly crews of people will arrive in gas powered trucks to fix these problems. That very process will further heat up the only world we’re capable of living on at the moment, making future weather violence even more inevitable. We’ll be lucky to get out into the expanse at all.
Wind storm freak you out? Don’t worry, it’ll be back to business as usual on Monday…
We were recently told that our board is moving to a formal exam for every course model. We’re told that this needs to happen because if we don’t use formal exam days for formal exams, we’ll lose the days. Perhaps we should lose the days. Formal exams are an echo from the past. Desperately trying to ‘keep’ them by forcing them on everyone isn’t the best approach to learning, it never was. Clinging to status quo thinking seldom produces outstanding results in anything. This conundrum once again has me feeling the friction between academic and technology classrooms. To the majority of subjects in our school, an exam for every class simply means setting up more desks and running off more photocopies.
One of our auto-shop teachers tried running a ‘formal’ exam this semester. He had tinkered with a car and then had students diagnose it. Since he doesn’t have a 24 bay garage, he has to have students approach the car one at a time in order to diagnose it. Because he is expected to have all students in the room at the same time (exams are blocked into two hour scheduled time periods, one per day), he had students come up one at a time to diagnose and resolve the problems while the rest wrote written tests that did not reflect how students had learned in his class during the semester.
Cookie cutter exam schedules for cookie cutter learners.
The formal exam structure didn’t work at all in the shop. The first kid up shouted out, “do you want me to change out this fuse?” and suddenly everyone in the room knew an answer. It then kept happening. When you’ve been teaching students to collaborate on diagnostics all semester, why would you suddenly have a summative that demands they don’t? Even if that’s what a ‘formal’ exam is? All that effort to create a genuine assessment within a standardized exam structure was wasted, but that doesn’t stop us from being expected to bring meaningful assessment to all our technology students in this cookie cutter final exam format. How meaningful can this two hour window be when our courses are tactile, stochastic and experiential? In a class where there is a linear progression from question to answer, and were the skills are assessed on paper this works a treat, but not in tech. Coop avoids the exam problem by creating individual summatives (each student has an interview). Of course this means that each teacher is handling 25+ hours of assessment for each class they teach. I’m surprised that they can stuff all that meaningful assessment into a single exam week. While this resolves the problem of trying to fit individualized exams into cookie cutter academic schedules, it doesn’t address the complexity of creating an entire class set of experiential problems of equal complexity (you couldn’t have the same problem because the first student out would happily tell the rest what they are about to face). Creating individualized, immersive simulation for each student might be the ultimate in summatives, but a factory styled school system isn’t remotely designed to produce that kind of individualized learning opportunity.
Is this what an exam for every course looks like? Kinda like
the floor of a very serious factory, or a university…
Would I like to create a ‘formal’ exam that offers my computer students real-world, immersive, experiential computer technology problem solving? You bet, but expecting me to do that in a two hour window for dozens of students at a time suggests that the actual goal here isn’t meaningful and genuine so much as generic and formulaic, like most ‘formal’ exams. ‘Formal’ exam is code for a university-styled, written, academic assessment. It typically involves lots of photocopying and students sitting in rows writing answers to the same questions. The teacher then spends a lot of time trying to assign value to this dimensionless form of assessment. Like many other aspects of high school, formal exams are high school teachers imitating the university professors they wished they could be.
For hundreds of thousands of dollars with corporate sponsorship
and post-secondary support, Skills Ontario championships
create meaningful, experiential tech-assessment.
If you’re looking for an example of an immersive, complex, skills based assessment, we have a fantastic home-grown example. Skills Canada does a great job of creating experiential assessment of technology knowledge and tactile abilities, but with million dollar budgets and support from all levels of government, private business and post secondary education, they exist in a different world from my classroom. They’re also catering to the top 1% of 1% of technology students. I have to cater to the other 99.9% with nothing like that kind of budget. I’ve been mulling over how I’m supposed to create meaningful assessment for my technology students in that two hour time slot and I’m stumped. No budget is forthcoming to purchase equipment and tools so that I can have every student doing the same thing at the same time – I don’t even have enough screwdrivers for all students to be building computers at the same time, let alone the computer parts needed to build them. Those would be computer parts that some students would not ground themselves properly when installing. Funding wouldn’t just need to be there for tools, it would also have to be there to replace breakage due to incompetence. Technology teachers already struggle trying to explain technology costs to academics with only a vague understanding and little experience in apprenticeship and the trades. When students are heavy handed or absent minded it costs us money to replace what they break, yet we struggle to get funded on par with academic courses that do most of their work on paper. Now we face the prospect of being forced to reduce our tactile, experiential, immersive learning into cookie cutter summatives that jive with the pre-existing academic scheduling. Just when you think we might be evolving beyond the 20th Century factory model of education it rears its ugly head and demands reductionist assessment for all. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were looking to diversify summatives instead of cramming them all into the same schedule that existed fifty years ago?
We’re moving into poetry in the senior academic English class I’m teaching. Poetry is one of those things that can seem a bit pretentious, especially to high school students. We looked at contemporary lyric poems to begin with. After some Practical Magic and other free verse I thought it might be time to take a swing at it ourselves. I’m curious to see what students bring to class today. Hopefully writing about something that interests them will remove that pretension and let them get some ideas on paper in the relatively unencumbered contemporary lyric format.
In My Pocket
あ and ん
alpha and omega
binary beginnings and silent ends.
ones and zeroes?
no, math is an abstraction but certainty is in the machine.
Doesn’t matter how experienced you are in unprecedented times…
This reflection might come out as a firehose of frustration, but this year in Ontario’s public education system has been one for the ages. After a springtime of flat footed confusion nothing seems to have happened in the summer as the government kept moving the goalposts on what school openings would look like. School boards have been left to scramble. We start tomorrow and I have no idea how it’s going to go. Some people are hanging on so tight their fingers are going to break while others have already taken a big step back. My magic powers are bloody-mindedness and empathy. I’m not particularly brilliant or erudite, but I can take a hit and always get back up again, and I care, which is good because we’ve been pummelled senseless in the past few weeks by chaos and the attendant system think that has arisen to try and control it.
With the meta-framework of Ontario’s public education system being held hostage by a government intent on privatizing it, it’s a wonder the system works locally it all. It has certainly struggled. With the COVID19 pandemic piled on top I can say, hand on heart, that this has been one of the worst years to teach in Ontario in its history, but we persevere because education matters. The only people telling you otherwise want to use and abuse you.
At the local level setting up for this school year has been like running a marathon where they keep changing the course and making it longer, while handing you bricks to carry; it feels like running a marathon no one wants to see you finish. I know what I’m being asked to do is for the common good, but at some point (which we may have already passed), so much will be piled on that the basic functionality of the classroom (teaching, remember?) won’t be any better than in remote/elearning.
After six months of lockdown everyone is longing for face to face interaction. I’m feeling it too, but in the drive to do that we’ve lost the plot. When we started back we were told not to worry about curriculum and just make sure the kids are OK. I understand the sentiment but the places that do that are called daycares and I didn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of my life to become qualified to work in day care. Public education is one of the most powerful human being enhancers we’ve created. Along with publicly funded healthcare it’s the beacon a society sends out to show that it is enlightened. When our citizens are healthy and educated our country benefits in every way. This isn’t anything as shady as economics which thrives on disempowerment and privilege, though health and education powers our economy too. Strong public services that maximize our citizens’ potential is what civilization means. All the other things (art, technology, medicine, economics) grow in this fertile soil. We so often get this backwards.
The pandemic has cast a harsh light on the many social mechanisms that cause inequity and in the past decade Ontario has constantly chased economic gain while cutting the public systems that enable it. Since 2010 Ontario police have experienced double digit pay raises, they are the only public service to see this kind of funding. Meanwhile defund the police has become a cry to action during the pandemic because police are the hand of systemic racism and inequality in Canada.
Our board has since relaxed the hangout and chill stance and is encouraging curriculum and skills development but any teacher worth their salt knows how Maslow would feel about this.
Knowing that basic needs have to be met before we go after the higher cognitive functioning needed to learn effectively is probably why people at the board office were pushing for a relationship focused quadmester. Schools have always tried to fill that gap between how poorly a society treats its disenfranchised citizens and the privilege others benefit from, but COVID19 has widened that breach to such a point that it’s impossible for a headless, underfunded public education system to come close to crossing that bridge in this crisis. I’m starting to feel that the people in charge want to fill that gap with our bodies.
We’ve been buried in wordy presentations and piles of emails dictating our new normal which isn’t normal at all. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it you can expect it to change. Admin are as exhausted as everyone else as we all madly dance to this insane tune. While the onslaught of instructions, signs and rules continues from on high I’m actually expected to be face to face with students (but not really, we’re all socially distanced and behind masks) all day every day. While that’s going on I’m also supposed to be monitoring and running elearning for the other cohort because our board’s solution to massive class sizes was to have every teacher being in two places at once.
There are stories of classrooms stuffed full of students in Ontario this fall during a pandemic. Since the Ministry left it to each board to decide how they would proceed, each has gone in a different direction. Each plan has its own benefits and disadvantages based on no central planning and inconsistent funding support. In our board they’ve cut any class over twenty students into two cohorts. The students who are bussed come in in the morning and the walking students come in in the afternoon, but while I’m face to face with my half classes I’m also supposed to be providing material and managing elearning for the other half.
This approach has the benefit of not overloading classrooms with bodies and so takes steps to mitigate the health risks we’re all facing, but it has its own problems. I’m now trying to be in two places at once. They given me a teacher who was on prep to oversee the online work, but this teacher is unqualified to teach my subject, knows little about it and isn’t expected to do anything tangible. What it comes down to is make-work because we’re not trusted to help the school function without being over scheduled and micromanaged into the ground. I understand the impulse as a few people will use not being in class as an excuse to do as little as possible, but the vast majority would be able to fill these gaps much more effectively using their own initiative, as I’ve already seen many teachers do. But initiative, like differentiation, is dead in our micro-managed pandemic classrooms.
Our prep time was also cut in this format where we’re teaching face to face (kinda) all day, so now another teacher is coming in to cover us while we take our prep, except that teacher isn’t qualified to teach my subject either. They aren’t even tech qualified so students can’t keep doing hands on work when face to face (which is the whole point of being face to face) unless I let my prep go and just stay in the room, which was what admin suggested our entire tech department do. So, downloading work onto classroom teachers with no prep time and twice the planning is the solution – it’s actually the answer to every question: download anything that comes up onto the already crushed classroom teacher. One of my grade 9 parents won’t provide internet when she isn’t home so her son can’t do elearning even though they have all the tools. The solution was for me to print out a special course of study for this one student on paper to study computer technology on paper, which he then takes home… during a contact tracing pandemic. Don’t expect flexibility this semester, but do expect absurdity. They’ll tell you all decisions are based on reducing the risk of transmission, but that one wasn’t.
This situation raised another point: because students are only in half days, parents working in essential jobs all day are stuck trying to decide how to make that work. We’re a high school and we’re all having to grow up quickly in this ongoing crisis, so I’d hope that a high school age student could provide some self direction and work from home, but not in every case. A system response that honours equity and tries to help those families that need the extra support would be to direct those students in need to a socially distanced resource for the afternoon when they can’t elearn at home, but our spec-ed resource room has been cut and the experts in there are all teaching instead. It’s important to treat everyone the same in an emergency. Our split day schedule assumes that all students have connectivity and technology at home – it’s a system predicated on privilege that ignores home circumstances. While all this is going on we’ve been getting PD about how unfair systemic privilege is.
Looking at how messy some of the other reopenings are in the province I think our board has done an exceptional job with no direction and inconsistent funding, but the two hidden mechanisms that make it work are downloading extra work on classroom teachers and assuming privilege in terms of the digital divide. We took drastic steps to get technology and connectivity out to students in the spring but that has since been returned (kinda) and that capacity has dried up. I dreamt that we’d be building capacity and reducing the digital divide over the summer because you would have to be oblivious to this situation to think we won’t be fully remote learning again at some point, but none of that has happened in the chaos of a mismanaged face to face reopening.
We’re unable to climb Maslow’s hierarchy and do our jobs (developing students’ cognitive skills at the top of the pyramid, remember?). In the case of such a catastrophic failure of Ontario’s political responsibility to its citizens perhaps all that is left to us is to make sure the kids are ok, as long as we’re all happy living in a less literate and numerate future. Part of this new < normal is ensuring that you as an educator are still functional physically and mentally. The ECOO Virtual Conference a few weeks ago kept emphasizing this advice which is inline with what you get from an airline when you get on a plane (remember when we used to do that?).
This past week I’ve been putting my lab together solo because students can’t come in to help me as they usually do. Even my own son, who is well within my bubble, isn’t allowed to come in and help. The thick blanket of rules we’re buried under are as much about managing liability as they are about medical safety. I’ve also been running all over the building helping dozens of teachers, including the many new ones, get their rooms sorted and operational from a digital perspective, all with the usual lack of acknowledgement from administration, though they’re sure to thank everyone at the board office who have been busy making two hour powerpoint presentations that are contrary to our inequitable school opening plan. A lot of that technical support has also included emotional support because my reflex when I see someone drowning in panic is try and help.
A fine example of this over management was to order all teacher desks to the front of the classrooms. This was done (presumably) to facilitate better management of people coming and going from the room, but since that isn’t happening much and our face to face class sizes are smaller anyway, I have to wonder which curriculum expert who hasn’t been in teaching in a decade made that decision. The digital projectors in most rooms are plumbed in to where the teacher desk is so this dictate meant that dozens of rooms were suddenly disconnected from a vital teaching resource.
Another baffling choice in the chaos has been to cancel student safety agreements for science and technology classes. The board has always vigorously demanded absolute compliance with these documents. When you’re working on dangerous equipment with legally not responsible teenagers with undeveloped frontal lobes that prevent them from forecasting the results of their poor choices, a signed legal agreement with their legally responsible adult parents or guardians puts everyone on the same page in terms of safety expectations. These are common sense safety expectations, but common sense and teenagers don’t often occupy the same room, so it’s important to have their parents aware of the weight of this responsibility. It’s also vital for liability. When a student ignores the agreement they and their parents have signed and an accident results, it produces a better outcome for everyone, except it’s been cancelled during the pandemic because they don’t want us using paper. Then in our last staff meeting (which is really a litany of what to do with little collegiality or interactivity) we were told that using paper is fine. Do try to keep up.
I’m usually able to reflect my way out of a negative place with these blog posts, but I’m still in darkness here. I’m terrified of bringing home a virus that could be fatal to my partner. I’m worried about my students’ well being and frustrated that climbing Maslow’s hierarchy is simply a bridge too far this year. I’m also frustrated by the provincial system’s inability to show any vision or organization in helping us succeed in this crisis. Finally, my own board’s efforts, while exceptional in terms of what else I’ve seen in the province, are inconsistent, undifferentiated and predicated on assumptions about the digital divide that we’ve already shown to be untrue.
There are glimmers of hope in the chaos. I’ve seen cunning and cheap solutions to common technology problems that could expand the functionality of our laptops by turning them into document cameras, and I’ve seen local teachers jump on it and make it happen (I hope to have these churning out next week).
I also keep finding myself in other people’s ewaste that could be turned into remote learning tools, but being buried under two simultaneous classes a day all day, and having one of my senior sections cancelled by our previous principal, I don’t have the time or the senior student expertise to make this happen. So much could happen if we depended on teacher initiative and expertise instead of spoon feeding them hours of powerpoint and pages of step by step instructions. I fully expect to be told to sit in a French class next semester to cover someone else’s prep (I don’t parlez the francais). Such is the resolution everyone is running at, when it runs at all.
Give me a little latitude and I could perform (bigger) miracles, even in this monstrous circus, but latitude and professional trust was the first victim of this pandemic. Given a minimal budget and some space I could all but resolve the digital divide in our board and prepare us for fully remote learning that seems inevitable, but they’d rather me just follow the plethora of signs. Whoever is making those signs seems to have infinite resources.
I just got handed this cart of old netbooks that were headed for ewaste. With a Linux install they would provide dozens of students with remote learning devices they could keep in a pandemic. With more latitude I’d be picking up #edtech from RCTO’s Computers For Schools and providing desktops and portable devices for staff and students (as I did in the spring and all summer) across the board. Give me even more latitude and I’d be in touch with Google’s Loon to see if we couldn’t provide local free school internet to all students who attend a school regardless of the urban/rural digital divide. But initiative and individual responsibility and expertise are atrophied by a panicked system operating in a pandemic.
Alanna’s been channelling Simon Sinek. Perspective helps:
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success. – C.S. Lewis
Four years ago I decided to show what we know in the information technology focused computer engineering course I teach at Centre Wellington DHS. The Skills Canada I.T. and Networking Administration contest seemed custom tailored to do that for us. That first year we took two competitors down to Guelph and finished second and third to an urban(e) high school in the regional competition. We took what we learned from that first round and applied again the next year, this time winning our way through to the provincial competition for the first time. Had we not known the competition by failing at it the first time, we never would never have been able to re-orientate ourselves and get out of the regional battle.
That first student we sent to provincials was a polymath, gifted at pretty much everything, but once again we were unprepared and we ended up finishing fourth overall. Like mechanics and other stochastic skills, I.T. is experiential. You can be the sharpest person in the room, but the more experienced technician will usually figure it out first because the problems aren’t always obvious and linear; instinct based on experience plays a surprisingly large part in analyzing problems. Still, fourth in the province wasn’t bad for our second go at it. Our competitor came back and debriefed on the provincial competition just as our previous students had with the regional competition.
Our third go at it had two competitors having to face off challengers regionally. They finished 1-2 and we were off to provincials again. Our second run at the big competition showed just how much the scope of the competition could change year to year. We once again finished in the top ten, but didn’t medal. As before, our competitor came back and did a thorough debrief, helping the next candidate (the one who’d finished second regionally) get ready in more detail than ever before. The old adage goes: I was able to reach so high because I stood on the backs of giants. In our case this is completely true. Had those previous students not leapt into the breach and shown us the way, we would never have seen the steady improvement that we did.
We just got back from provincial competition once again. We gold medalled in I.T. and then finished top three in all technology competitions combined – meaning we didn’t just beat other competitors, we also got a near perfect score in the process. The first thing Zach, our gold medalist, did when he found out he won was shout out to the people who came before him, thanking them for the doing all that dangerous reconnaissance blind.
We’re off to Moncton next month to compete in Skills Canada at the national level. Ontario’s is the biggest provincial skills program with the toughest competition, and we scored highly, but it’s our first time nationally. I didn’t consider changing our approach. Our goal is to go there and learn. Zach has benefited from the failures of previous students, and now it’s his turn to go first and pave the way.
Can a small town school compete against massive, urban
school boards? Yes, yes we can.
At first glance it might look like those previous students failed, but they didn’t, they were part of something bigger than themselves that has succeeded. I know some people look at competitions like Skills Canada and wring their hands over how harsh it is on tender adolescent egos, but our failures made us better and our approach meant we were resilient in the face of those failures. Even when we were sending different individuals year on year there was a team feeling as new competitors read over the notes, advice and encouragement of now long graduated students (all of whom are enjoying post-secondary computer focused success). In many cases current competitors connected with grads through social media in order to further develop this mentorship.
The education system has focused relentlessly on student success. A big part of that push is to mitigate failure wherever possible. When failure is removed from learning you can’t develop nonlinear, experiential skill-sets or take risks on new challenges because those things in particular demand failure in order to learn. You also can’t learn to fail forward or consider your learning to be a part of something larger than yourself. No fail learning is remarkably selfish on a number of levels, damaging not only a student’s ability to learn stochastic skills, but also weakening their resiliency, resolve and humility before a task. The concept of no-fail learning is very academic in origin, no real-world learning process would consider such an approach viable. It’s unfortunately ironic that one of my best teaching experiences and a unique learning opportunity for many students has to happen outside of the classroom, where the many benefits of failure are still allowed to happen.
A couple of years ago I realized were were on a multi-year trajectory, so I started putting up posters in the classroom for each competitor so that new students would realize they are part of a dynasty!
Our school mascot is a falcon… geddit? For the less sports focused among us, a predatory bird doesn’t really jive with what we’re doing.
I’m aiming to outline what I’ve used and how in the classroom, then I’m hoping we can crowdsource what other people have used and create a wiki of current, useful digital learning tools with explanations written by the teachers who have made them work.
The PISA results for 2015 have been published and Canada is once again top ten (6th) in the world. I imagine this means I’ll once again attend a bunch of Canadian educational conferences with American (30th best in the world) speakers who want to tell us how we need to completely re-imagine our (their) failed system.
I tend to take statistics as less of a truth and more of a vague indicator of what’s happening. They don’t explain complex systems like human education very well but they do take the temperature. Since Ontario is the largest single education system in Canada we lend a lot of weight to the country’s successes and failures in these UN tests. If Ontario is performing well it tends to push the country’s scores in that direction, so we must be doing a pretty good job if we’re sixth in the world.
There are a variety of statistics pulled out of the OECD PISA data that are interesting to consider. To begin with, the top Asian countries only pitch their most gifted students at PISA while Canada, Finland and Estonia are representative of their entire populations. From that perspective all Canadian students were only beaten by the highest streamed students in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. If this were an apples to apples comparison we’d have done even better.
Another interesting statistics is truancy (on the left). There are a number of countries, Finland among them, that have seen a surprising jump in truancy. Unsurprisingly, the countries that are only putting their strongest students in also don’t tolerate truancy. Canada, as in every aspect of the results I’ve seen so far, exceeds the OECD average and performs well in this area, even when we include all socio-economic and geographic areas of the country.
The other argument I’d be expecting from the neo-con right is that we pour tons of money into education so of course we get good results, except we don’t. When compared to OECD countries world-wide, Canada is mid-pack in percent of GDP spent on education. Australia spends slightly more than us and the US only slightly less to get significantly worse results. Finland spends significantly more of their GDP on education than Canada does and finished behind us this time around.
It’s a quiet time in Ontario education right now but I’m sure the Ontario Liberal party is already concocting stories in order to villify Ontario educators in the next round of bargaining. While that’s going on I guess we’ll just keep producing world class results at a reasonable cost.
I wonder if publicly funded private religious education systems in Canada brag about these UN numbers because they ignore this: http://ift.tt/2gpwjEA http://ift.tt/1ZfOD8j
This is one of my favorite bits of digital technology: A Casio Pathfinder wrist watch. What’s so cool about a watch you ask? They’re SOOO 20th Century!
Well this one is also an altimeter, barometer, compass and thermometer. It’s also a stop watch, alarm clock and just plain old watch.
But none of that is what makes it cool.
What makes this piece of tech one of my favorites is that it isn’t tethered to anything; it’s one of the few pieces of digital technology that I own that is entirely self-contained, and that’s somewhere that I want all my hardware to go.
This watch is fantastically accurate, but what makes it even better is that it picks up a signal and keeps itself atomically accurate. It’s a watch that never has to be set.
It’s also a watch that never has to be wound or have the battery replaced. The face is also a solar panel that recovers enough charge out of even a well lit room to recharge itself.
On top of all that, it’s virtually indestructible. It’s encased in a rugged body that can withstand a car driving over it, it’s freeze proof to well below zero, waterproof to diving depths and probably bullet proof as well.
Fragile energy vampire!
What I’ve got here is a tough, self-reliant piece of technology that always works no matter where I am. When I look at my choices for computers, tablets or even smartphones, I’m looking at fragile, energy vampires that are lucky to work a day in regular use without the need to draw from a socket.
Faster is nice, but I’m also looking for tough and self contained. Until I can lay in the bath with my e-reader or turn to my phone without seeing red low battery warning lights, the digital tech isn’t nearly as tough and self contained as I need it to be.
The edtech question to ask is should we be putting fragile tech into the slippery hands of teens and children? The repair/replacement rate of these fragile little digital flowers are going to be much higher than they are in the steadier hands of adults.
Until digital tech is as tough as the analog it’s replacing, it’s an edgy proposition to push it as the main focus in instructional tools.
In the meantime, Casio keeps evolving the tough tech. Soon enough I’ll have a watch PC that will communicate wirelessly with peripherals and power itself (hope hope).
As we stagger towards reopening Ontario classrooms, which is something that, quite frankly, I want to see happen, I’m left wondering why a number of obvious things aren’t happening.
In early August we all got a summer cold, but being the pandemic summer that it is we were worried, so we drove twenty miles south to the nearest city and got tested at the nearest COVID test centre that yes, required us to leave our low risk rural area and drive into a city riddled with it.
The testing centre wasn’t busy and was very efficiently run and we were in and out in about fifteen minutes. Seventy-two hours later we all had piece of mind knowing we were not infected. Considering how efficient the testing process has become and how important it is to ensure a safe environment, I’m at a loss to explain why no school board in Ontario is testing its face to face educators before we start up again. Speaking as a parent, it would be a relief to know that all the staff at my son’s school isn’t guessing they don’t have COVID19, they know it. Our approach to COVID is so low-resolution that its almost blind. It certainly isn’t cost effective.
What a thing it would be to put out a press release saying all face to face staff have been tested and are COVID19 free prior to classes restarting. This could happen by school site or board wide, but it really should be happening. We’re all walking around school right now wearing masks and afraid of everything. Some piece of mind knowing we have a COVID-free site, even if it’s just in this moment, would be a welcome thing.
A friend who is a chef mentioned that she’s expected to be tested each week. This is yet another example of how businesses are expected to (and do) comply with public health, but Ontario’s school reopening plan (which has a number of medical experts concerned) seems to go out of its way to ignore the rules that everyone else is complying with. This virus is a slippery thing that ducks detection with a high number of asymptomatic carriers. How ignoring the medical directions that everyone else is following to deal with that slipperiness is anything other than political cynicism at its worst is a betrayal of the public trust. When things go wrong, and the biology suggests it will, I’m sure the weasels running this show will still somehow find a way to make it the teachers’ fault.
This absurd situation is in no way the fault of the school boards. My own board has done everything it possibly can with no centralized plan, insufficient funding and random changes in direction from our politically misguided Ministry. If the province wanted to pivot and stop playing political games with staff and students’ lives, aligning Ontario’s school opening plan with what’s happening everywhere is an obvious starting point. Working with local health units to provide onsite testing at schools would be a great next step. It would also offer a glimpse into what a more functional COVID19 world might look like in the coming year.
Solutions to viruses in the form of a vaccine don’t arrive with Dustin Hoffman on a helicopter, except in movies. In the world we actually live in we more often manage viruses with testing and social adaptation. Our focus on testing has been… poor, but there is hope. Rapid COVID19 testing is on the horizon and might get to market as soon as October. What might this look like? An automated, highly accurate, non-invasive testing system based on spit that provides results in seconds; that’s where the velvet rope comes in.
In my better Ontario we would be opening schools based on need rather than ramming through a poorly executed and underfunded plan that doesn’t even align with other public health rules. Classes that have to be face to face for liability reasons (I’m thinking technology and physical education specifically), should have priority in f2f classrooms. The other priority should be students in need. We should be reopening based on equity needs rather than doing this poorly designed full-court press. A cautious, differentiated f2f opening means our schools would stay open and the people who need them most would have access to them.
Students who are on the wrong side of the digital divide? Families who are working in essential services and need schools to normalize? Subjects that require the safety and expertise of a face to face classroom? These are where schools should focus their reopening, but Ford’s inequitable government can’t conceive of its responsibilities when it comes to addressing inequity.
Our staged, differentiated, equitable reopening would also include on-site testing which would increase as testing improves. Ideally, but the end of 2020, we’d have rapid on-site, automated testing at every public school in Ontario. When we know (not guess) that our schools are COVID19 free, we can relax all of the other expensive and restrictive practices we’re doing poorly, like PPE, social distancing and OCD levels of cleaning, and all students could return to a safe, normalized learning environment. Our current approach is expensive and not effective because we’re flying blind.
With cheap, effective, accessible testing COVID would stop sneaking around in asymptomatic carriers and spreading like it does. There might still be COVID19 outbreaks, but they would be quickly recognized and stopped. Carriers would be isolated and we’d finally have a handle on this thing. Rapid testing would lead to less transmission and take the wind out of the COVID sails.
After months of flinching everytime someone sneezes, imagine how it would feel knowing your kids were going to school in a COVID-free environment. Imagine how it would feel going out for dinner knowing everyone in the restaurant is green. Playing hockey knowing that everyone on the ice was COVID-free? Life as we once knew it could return and we could start to relax our blind, awkward and expensive social distancing/PPE/OCD cleaning scramble.
I have ten more years of teaching left and I have a number of things I want to achieve before I hang up my boots. There may be teachers who don’t ever want to go back, but I’m not one of them. We had a Skills Ontario championships and a pile of travel and learning opportunities taken from us by this lousy virus in 2020 and I want to get back to pushing pedagogy in a rapidly changing technological landscape and showing students that they can achieve things they never imagined. A staged return focusing on differentiation of learning based on student and curriculum need and then embracing rapid testing as it comes online in the next few months is how we can get there. What I fear is going to happen instead is that the current plan will cause schools to be shut down and emergency remote learning (which we’ve done nothing to prepare for) will land on us again by Thanksgiving. And a lot of people will get ill as a result.
We need schools for students and programs that need that infrastructure to succeed, but throwing everyone back into it while ignoring public health requirements is going to cripple public education with another round of school closures and poorly delivered emergency remote learning that we’ve done nothing to resolve digital divide issues with. A differentiated, staged return with testing anyone?
