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As Different As Different Can Be

The wall-o-carbs that blast
the Concours to warp speeds.

I’m looking to expand my riding experience so a second bike had to be as different from the Concours ZG1000 that I have as possible.  The Connie is a 999cc, sport touring heavy weight with shaft drive, full fairings and an inline four cylinder with a row of carburetors that create astonishing power.  It’s a blast to ride on the road.

The KLX I rode home today is a rev-happy 250cc single cylinder bike that weighs an astonishing 370lbs less than the Concours.  Everything the Concours does well the KLX doesn’t and vice-versa, which was kinda the point.

Having never ridden a fairingless bike before I was surprised at the wind blast from the very naked KLX.  It could get to 100km/hr with some judicious gearing and a willing throttle hand.  If I squeezed the Concours that hard I’d be travelling well over 100mph while vaulting over the horizon.

A very different riding experience, and I haven’t even taken
it off road yet!

What else is different about the KLX?  Knobby tires offer some weird feed back.  The KLX comes with some fairly serious off-road tires which make a kind of slapping sensation on pavement.  They almost feel like whiskers, picking up seams and other details in the pavement with surprising detail.  It makes me wonder how nuanced the feel is on dirt. Once I got used to the change in feel it wasn’t a problem to make full use of the 250ccs.  The KLX pulls away from traffic lights in town with aplomb.

The tallness of the KLX makes cornering nothing like the Concours.  Where the Concours (and the Ninja before it), tuck in and conquer corners in a buttoned down way the KLX feels like you’re on a ladder.  Tall rims and seat, long suspension and a clear view ahead conspire to give you an unobstructed view of the road.  Again, once I developed some confidence in the bike’s strange geometry managing corners, I had no trouble rolling on throttle through turns and getting things more settled on the floaty suspension.

A two Kawi garage

 

The skinniness of the KLX is also a shock after straddling the wide and heavy Concours.  You feel like there is nothing around you and virtually nothing under you.

Looking down, the wasp waisted KLX is barely there.  Strangely, it has a less cramped riding position in spite of it being a skinny, 370lb (!) lighter bike.  With more relaxed knees and taller bars it feels like a good fit; it’s funny how such a small bike can feel so big.

I’m hoping to have the paperwork in order by the weekend then it’ll be time to see how the KLX handles what it was build for.  Taking it out on some trails is imminent!

 

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Autumn in the Canadian Woods








Autumn colours and mushrooms in the wet Kawartha Highlands woods.


All photos taken with the Olympus EPL-3 micro four thirds camera in October of 2014.


These are the typical settings for the macro shots below:


E-PL3
f/5.6   1/20   42 mm   ISO400

Long shutter night shots with flaming sticks and flashlights!

The ruins of a truck deep in the woods, this is the engine.

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Digital Amplification of the Mega Self

I’ve finished Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, and I’ve been ruminating on it for a couple of weeks.  Crawford makes a number of educational criticisms in this philosophical treatise that attempts to free us from Enlightenment thinking gone mad.  This post is on how digital economics amplify and feed off our sense of self.

Crawford’s historical argument is that the Enlightenment rejection of authority has been amplified by neo-liberal values and digitization, turning what was once an early scientific rejection of church authority (rationality vs. superstition) into a sort of hyper-individualism that rejects obvious facts about reality in favour of opinion.  In our modern world opinions have the weight of truth, the irony being that the Enlightenment push to free people from authority has enabled individualism to such a degree that it is now ushering in a new era of superstition.

This person-on-a-pedestal is happily embraced by modern marketing which will go to ridiculous lengths to emphasize just how individual you can be if you all buy the same thing.  The modern, insulated self is also coddled by digital media designed to cater to your every whim.  Whole worlds are made where people feel they are accomplished because they followed the script of a game.  Ask any student, they self-identify with their social standing in game play, yet their greatest achievements don’t actually exist.  The scripted interactions in gaming lead many people to believe that they’ve done something other follow a process they were supposed to complete.  You can never win a video game, you can only finish it, like a book.

Crawford uses the example of Disney’s original cartoons in comparison to the modern Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to emphasize this change in how we (teach our children to) approach reality.  The original cartoons emphasized the tension between what we want and what reality demands with characters battling the elements, often with machines that don’t work as they’re supposed to.

The modern Disney playhouse teaches children an almost deified version of technology.  The machines are psychic, performing their functions perfectly before you even are aware that you need them.  Any problems are resolved by the machines, there is never a question of them not working.  Classic Mickey can often be seen repairing broken machines, modern Mickey is permanently happy as the machines resolve every problem that might arise, it almost plays like an Apple ad.  Digital environments designed to cater to your every whim… sounds like the perfect twenty-first century learning environment.


Gamification in education tends to play much like Mickey’s Clubhouse, offering an experience so safe that it’s virtually (pun intended) meaningless.  When you can’t fail, you can’t succeed.  When you’re following a script instead of self-directing your learning, you’re not really learning.  I’m a massive fan of simulation, even digital simulation, but gamification isn’t that.  In my simulations students often fail.  If they didn’t, it wouldn’t be a worthwhile simulation.  What I hope the simulation does is give them the space away from worldly cost concerns to experiment and try more radical approaches.

When I was a younger man I played paintball a fair bit.  When I played, I often tried to live out silly movie fantasies.  I wouldn’t have done this with real bullets, but in paintball it isn’t for real, right?  One time I left my gun behind and ran straight to the other team’s flag, grabbing it and legging it while they were all standing around getting their defence set up.  I didn’t even get hit because no one was ready.  Another time I tried to do the Arnold-Terminator thing, walking down a road, slowly taking aim and shooting people and ignoring the fact that they might get me back.  I shot six people before someone calmed down enough to get me. When they play paintball, most people run and hide like it’s real.  They do the same thing in video games, camping or hiding even though the entire thing is bogus.  If simulation becomes real in the mind of the user, it ceases to have the same effectiveness as a learning tool; just ask Kirk.

Pedagogically, educational technology suffers from much of the same marketing creep as Mickey’s Clubhouse.  It often tries to do too much, but it’s also infected with attention grabbing nature of the digital economy it’s derived from.  The software we use in education is derived from platforms designed to ensnare attention for as long as possible in order to make money from it.  In an economy where nobody makes anything, the only value people have is as consumers.

Crawford goes into detail about how we don’t have a digital technology attention issue, we have a digital economics issue.  Machines are designed to keep user attention because the economy that profits from it made them that way.  We build machines to ensnare user attention (familiarity helps this, it’s why education is ‘given’ tech ‘for free’).

We children of the Enlightenment, having freed our minds from superstition and social authority by amplifying individuality, ushered in scientific and industrial revolutions.  The Enlightenment championed democracy rather than the mystical divine right of kings, but something insidious latched on to that democratic push.  Democracy became democratic-capitalism and now we’re saddled with an economic system that is happy to make use of the individualism championed in the Enlightenment.

Digital technologies latch on to our already amplified sense of self, multiplying it and allowing us to exist beyond the constraints of the real world (at least until there is an internet or power failure).  As long as that comforting digital blanket is wrapped around our minds we are free to believe whatever we want (the internet will provide proof).

If you feel like there is something wrong with how we’re doing things, Crawford’s challenging book will give you the philosophical latitude to do an end-run around this mental trap that’s been centuries in the making.


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Pandemic Reflections from Week 3: Maslow’s Hierarchy, the end of differentiation and labour abuse

Emergency remote teaching during this COVID19 pandemic is turning out to be quite unsustainable.  I staggered to the end of last week feeling stretched to the point of breaking by the endless administrative push to make arbitrary and pedagogically suspect Ministry of Education remote learning expectations happen.


Three hours per class per week might have sounded like a reasonable though random expectation when it was dreamed up a few weeks ago, but it raises a lot of questions.  Here are some from me in no particular order:




1) Basic Needs Have to Come Before Curriculum


How can we set an arbitrary time limit on acceptable work when we’re ignoring basic needs?


Trauma causes a disruption in the foundations need to bring students to learning.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs came about in the 1950s.  Abraham Maslow, the psychiatrist who invented the concept, uses it to show how complex human thinking, like learning, can’t happen without basic needs being met.


The current emergency situation has damaged our ability to mitigate the shortcomings students may be experiencing while trying to learn at home.  Those students who counted on our school’s breakfast program to be fed aren’t being at the moment.  Those students who depended on our developed one on one special education support services in school aren’t getting them at the moment.  Even students who may have enjoyed physiological security before the pandemic shutdown might now be experiencing scarcity for the first time as parents are suddenly laid off.


With all of that under consideration, dropping blanketed, mandated hourly expectations on all students regardless of their circumstances is callous to an inconceivable degree.  Where is the compassion?


The ‘this isn’t elearning or even remote learning, it’s emergency response learning” doesn’t seem to have registered with the people who run things, though it certainly has with all the front line education workers in Ontario who are trying to force this square peg into an infinite variety of unique, never before seen student learning circumstances.


I was so wound up about this on Thursday night after a week of communicating with students and parents in various states of crisis that I was up at midnight trying to think my way out of it on Prezi:



That we’ve also piled transliteracy expectations that many staff and students don’t have on top of a decline in the basic needs required to learn makes the circumstances even more untenable.  There are no skills based requirements and next to no mandatory professional development for teachers in becoming digitally transliterate.  It only happens with our students when they’re lucky enough to get a teacher who spends their own time and money on developing that critical 20th Century literacy.


A coherent, skills based, mandatory approach to digital transliteracy should be a priority when we return.  How this is all going down could be significantly different if we were approaching this with digitally transliterate and enabled staff and students.  We certainly wouldn’t have wasted the first three weeks trying to find out if our staff and students even have ICT technology at home before moving into remote learning using tools most of them don’t know how to use effectively.




2) Why is differentiation always the first thing to die when the system decides to act unilaterally?


Three hours for one student isn’t three hours for another. Are teachers being expected to design individual work for the dozens upon dozens of students they are trying to direct through remote learning?


Let’s say Maslow’s basic needs were somehow addressed and we ensured that every student in Ontario has food, shelter and the other basic needs required to climb the hierarchy to a point where they can focus on learning.  We didn’t come close to addressing it when times were good (actually, the government in charge is actively working against it), so doing it during a pandemic emergency seems even more unlikely, but let’s say we manage it.  Let’s say we also suddenly have staff and students who are digitally transliterate (again we’re miles away from this, but let’s pretend).  Even in that perfect Ontario the three hours per week per course per week expectation would be startlingly insensitive to how students learn.  Wouldn’t it be great if people were all the same?  It’s so hard to manage otherwise!  It might have been easy to trot out a suggestion like that, but 3 hours of work is different for pretty much every student, and trying to assess that through atrophied and inconsistent digital technologies is nearly impossible, even for a digitally transliterate teacher.

I have one gifted, ASD student who had to back off on the third year university equivalent artificial intelligence project she was working on remotely because she doesn’t have the mathematics foundations needed to comprehend it (she was worried this would hurt her average – it won’t).  I have another gifted ASD student whose anxiety has been triggered by this pandemic to such a degree that he’s unable to do anything (he’s also worried about it hurting his average – it won’t, though that’s me, not system-think).  That’s happening with two students with similar IEPs!*

* IEPs are individual education plans that all special education students have, though I think every student should have one since they’re all special and many less fortunate students don’t have parents with the resources to weather the IEP process even when they should have one.  In Ontario even our spec-ed support is predicated on privilege.  We had to put out thousands in testing to get my son’s ASD diagnosis accepted.  If you can’t afford that, you can’t access the support.


Now think about the other three dozen IEPs I’m juggling, but because I’m not an insensitive jerk I treat every student like they have an IEP because you never know what’s happening in a student’s life.  Trauma like divorce, a death in the family or parental loss of income can negative influence a student’s learning at any time.  Like the kid whose dad emailed me this week in response to my contacting them about a lack of  weekly engagement (we’re required to pester people every week if they’re not engaged).  His grandmother just passed from the pandemic, but this interfered with our systemic 3hr/course/week mandate and the systemic response we’ve built to force, um, I mean support it.


I have over 60 students this semester.  Others have over 90!  But bigger class sizes are coming because we’re about to agree to a contract under duress that further deteriorates learning environments by cutting funding and forcing more kids into each class – evidently the pandemic emergency means it’s ok for our government to force (another) illegal contract on us using this emergency as the excuse, but I digress.


Am I supposed to custom design 3 hours of work for each one of my remote learners?  Or just throw what three hours of work would look like for a fictitious ‘average’ student (there are no average students in a pandemic) at everyone?  Even if it might take some of them 10 hours?  Even if some of them can’t do it at all in these circumstances?


Three hours per course per week is the worst kind of reductionist system-think.  The project work I set up for my students is based on self reporting, but still has expected outcomes because the way this is going, we’ll be asked to assign grades to work, and if I don’t have that work then a student’s grade will suffer.  The people who set this as a requirement shouldn’t be working in education.


OSSTF has suggested pass fail, which is a step in the right direction.  I’m going to take it a step further, grades or pass/fail.  No one is going to have this situation diminish their grades, period.  It would be nice if the Ministry mandated that, but if no one making the big bucks can make a compassionate decision that acknowledges the mess that this is, I will.





3) and what about the labour abuse?


If a student is working absurd hours, why are they still being held to arbitrary expectations around time spent in class?  Why is no one looking to labour abuse with Ontario’s students?

It’s the ministry of work now.
Labour sounded too dignified.

The education system didn’t just passively let this student labour abuse happen, it caused it to happen when it suspended classes.  I’m happen to be teaching three graduating classes this semester.  I’m hearing from many of them that they are working more than forty hours per week, in several cases over 50 hours per week in their ‘heroic’ emergency services wage slave jobs.  I had one fifteen year old tell me he just came off a 44 hour work week and was sorry he couldn’t do the remote learning because he kept falling asleep while attempting it.  I’m supposed to put ‘does not meet expectations’ in his work for week three of remote learning because he’s less than three hours on the clock.  I’m also supposed to bother him and his parents (who have been laid off during the pandemic shutdown) every week asking why he isn’t meeting remote learning expectations.


Students in Ontario make an even more miserable minimum wage than the Fordnation reduced adult minimum wage.  He likes to call them heroes, but he won’t pay them any more to be heroes during an emergency.   He just offered a smaller professional group that doesn’t grapple with minimum wage a raise, but not the kids who we took out of school in order to protect them (or at least not be liable for them) so they could go and work in much more COVID-spreadable minimum wage jobs.  Step one would be to realize we didn’t shut down schools to protect students, we did it to protect system liability.  Step two would be to ensure all students are rewarded for their ‘heroic’ efforts.  I think a $20/hour minimum student wage during the pandemic for critical service work is a start.  Step three would be to forgive any student working more than the 28 hour a week student limit.  I don’t imagine any of those things will happen though.  I’m left wondering if many of these students are still being paid student minimum wage, because over 28 hours a week they should at least be making adult minimum wage.  Betcha they aren’t.  If that isn’t the very definition of child labour abuse, I don’t know what is.  It’s shameful.


***



Being asked to deal with student learning difficulties, socio-economic status and even their psychological challenges isn’t new for me as a teacher, but being expected to be their main point of contact through remote learning for all of these things isn’t just overwhelming, it’s emotionally exhausting.  I’m occasionally reduced to tears of frustration by the school system, but last week was a new peak – not that teacher burnout is on anyone’s radar.


When a colleague finally forwarded an inactive student to admin for support the other week the first thing they were asked to do was contact them in more ways.  I’m sure everyone who isn’t trying to communicate on a strict weekly schedule of expectations with a many classes of students through the limited bandwidth of phones and online communications is very busy having meetings (I was dragged into no less than 4 last week and I’m a front line teacher), but those of us in the trenches would appreciate some immediate pickup rather than an attempt to off load even more onto us.


While I’m spending my own money on technology, heating, electricity, internet, telephone and burning through more sanity than I should in order to ‘be the education system’ for the sixth week in a row, I’m told that we now have a tentative contract because students need stability at a time like this.  I’m not sure why they didn’t need stability last year, or why I had to take another strike day pay cut in the face in order to end up agreeing to what was being offered then anyway, but that looks like how it’s going to go.  After a year of outright abuse which has included illegal bargaining (good faith bargaining is protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms, and there has been little of that this year) and repeatedly demeaning our profession, this government (when they aren’t making up fictitious stories about supporting students in remote learning) are going to use this pandemic to increase class sizes and cut learning supports.  We haven’t heard the details yet.  I’m sure we’ll get a very streamlined process designed to force compliance.  It’s hard to work in a system where trust has been compromised in so many places.  I just have to remember what’s most important: don’t let it hurt the kids, though at some point I’ll have taken so many bullets that I don’t think I won’t be able to take any more.



It hasn’t been a great week three in remote learning during a pandemic.




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Moto Anime: Bakuon!!

I’ve written about motorcycle related Japanese anime before, it’s a whole sub genre of media from a country that is a motorcycle producing superpower with its own unique moto-culture.  You name the anime and there is probably a rider on the team who works in motorcycles somehow.  But there is one motorcycle anime where bikes aren’t worked in, they’re the main subject.  Bakuon!! tells the story of a group of high school girls who meet over a shared love of the sport.

 Bakuon is Japanese onomatopoeia for the roar of a motorcycle’s exhaust (the Japanese have some pretty funny word sounds).   In the opening of the show each of the main characters bond over their shared love of riding.  The experienced riders mentor the younger ones as they get their licenses and begin riding together, but don’t assume this is a why so serious coming of age story.  Bakuon!! is edgy and laugh out loud funny.  Even non-riders would find this an accessible and funny thing to watch, but it’ll challenge you.  Bakuon!! is shamelessly Japanese.  If you’re unfamiliar with Japanese humour, which can feel very foreign to gaijin, this show might seem offensive.  All I can suggest is to maybe stow your Western superiority complex away and see if you can wrap your head around it.


Hane Chan is the character you follow into the story.  She’s not really the main character, it’s an ensemble,  but as a new rider trying to get her license you get to discover the joy of riding with her.  She also tends to explain to outsiders what craziness is going on in the group.  Her initial interest is sparked by her first day trying to ride her bicycle up the hill to her new school, and her actual interest in motorcycles is minimal, until she experiences riding for the first time:


How edgy is the humour?  At the riding school where Hane is getting her license she begins a conversation with the bike they lend her (as you do) who speaks to her with an older woman’s voice. At one point Hane asks why the bike has such a masculine name when it has a woman’s voice.  The bike tells her that because it’s a practice bike at the academy it has had all the go-faster technology removed from it, so it was castrated.  When Hane discovers she’s been riding a trans-gendered bike she just nods and goes about her day, as you do.  You might find this foreign in a Western mindset, but the lack of judgement around gender is refreshing.

An even edgier moment happens when the girls take a long trip up to Hokkaido.  When they reach the end of Japan they come across one of the teachers from their school who is attempting to commit suicide by jumping into the ocean because she’s just broken up with another boyfriend.  She failed comedically (the point isn’t a cliff and she falls onto rocks five feet below).  The girls take her back to their hotel where the teacher proceeds to get drunk and attempt to molest them.  At this point your appropriateness meter is probably pegged, but, as they do in all circumstances, the girls back each other up and get out of the situation themselves.  After that moment of girl-power the show signs off with them cleaning their bikes with their swim suits on.  Trying to keep up with the twists and turns in Bakuon!! is part of the challenge.

 The humour in the show is unrelenting.  Each of the girls is smitten by a specific Japanese manufacturer (though Ducati sneaks in there too, but not without a lot of ribbing), and they’re constantly giving each other a hard time over it.  At another point Suzunoki Rin, who tells a dramatic backstory about her accident prone father, has to explain how she has a Suzuki brand on her butt.  Physical humour operates on a different plane in Japanese culture.

In another episode Onsa, the Yamaha or nothing rider accidentally licks Rin’s drool (they both fall asleep on a train – it happens) and catches a Suzuki germ that makes her only like Suzukis.  This kind of brand fixation is a constant source of material in the show.  The only time it gets turned up even higher is when they make any reference to non-Japanese brands, who are all evidently incapable of making something that won’t blow up on you regularly.  Considering the hard time they give each other, the shots at other manufacturers (like my beloved Triumph) comes across as funny rather than nasty.  If you’re ever feeling hard done by when watching the show, at least you’re not a bicyclist. They’re relentless with the Tour de France types.


If you like motorcycles you’ll love Bakuon!!  If you like anime you’ll enjoy this show for its humour and a style that takes some interesting risks, like showing most men in the show without a face.  Yes, it can get edgy, but that tends to be a Western cultural dissonance thing more than any negative intent by the show.  The girls all play off each other for maximum comedic effect and the writing is willing to take unexpected turns to chase down a laugh, as it should.

As an anime with motorcycles but also about motorcycles, Bakuon!! offers you a deep dive into Japanese assumptions around riding that anyone on two wheels would find enlightening.  As a Japanese school girl anime it also breaks a lot of stereotypes.  A group of girls who ride makes this a feminist statement.  The girls are very self sufficient and never look to men or even adults for solutions.  The most skilled rider in the show is the untouchable club sempai (mentor) Raimu Kawasaki who always wears her helmet and never speaks, Top Gear Stig style.  At one point she lifts up her big Ninja effortlessly and frequently performs riding stunts that defy belief.  She was sitting in the school clubhouse alone when the girls show up and was evidently in the club when the school’s current principal was at the school, she might not even be human!  I can’t help but feel that she’s presenting some autistic tendencies, further stretching the show’s reach.

 That Bakuon!! is also a comedy busts another malecentric stereotype.  If you can get your Japanese school girl mindset on (and everyone should), this’ll amuse and entertain.  You should give it a watch.



You can watch Bakuon!! on Crunchyroll online.

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Tiger Tales in a Never Ending Winter

It’s been an icy, crappy spring, but it looks like the end is nigh!

Tiger tales on a wintery April Weekend.  Last year at this time  Max and I were out doing a 300km+ run to Blue Mountain in some fresh Ontario spring air.  It was cold, and even flurried in places, but it was doable on dry roads with winter well behind us.

After another round of freezing rain last night we were up to ten degrees today.  Over the next few days it looks like riding season will start officially.  The Tiger is at my local mechanic getting saftied.  I should be on the road and ready to go by Wednesday, the day everything starts to get better.  In the meantime, while waiting for the ice age to end, I’ve been playing with some digital imaging:

Tigertester by timking17 on Sketchfab – a 3d model of the Tiger

Soon enough I’ll be able to stop looking at it and starting to ride it!

Variations on a garage photo:

 

 

 

3d printed Triumph logo
I backed the Tiger out while trying to get the carbs sorted on the Concours – 2 hours later is was a white out out here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3d printed Triumph logo

 

Triumph logo 3d printed

 

Dremel 3d printer doing the business
I scanned the Tiger with a Structure Sensor and then printed the 3d model on the Dremel 3d printer – not just a model of a bike, but an exact scale model of my bike!



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Superior Ride

Just over three thousand kilometres around Huron and Superior…
I saw the Tiger in the
parking lot at work today
& was sorely tempted to
jump  aboard and disappear

I did Georgian Bay last year and I’m already thinking about Great Lake circumnavigation again.  With the Tiger cleaned up and ready to go, it’s time to lob one over the horizon.  Huron & Superior would be the single longest trip in the Great Lakes series.

Day 1:  Elora to Tawas City, Michigan (~604kms) North Star Motel
Day 2:  Tawas City, MI to Marquette, MI (~545kms)  Marquette Day’s Inn
Day 3:  Marquette to Duluth Minesota (510kms) Radisson Duluth Harbourview
Day 4:  Duluth to Thunderbay Ontario (305kms)  Days Inn Thunderbay
Day 5:  Thunderbay to Wawa (487kms)  Wawa Motor Inn
Day 6:  Wawa to Little Current (513kms)  Anchor Inn Hotel
Day 7:  Little Current to Elora (334kms) 1:30pm-3:15pm Ferry to Tobermory
~3200kms

I could be done in a week with no extreme days and enough time in there to wander off the route if the mood struck us.  Max and I are already trying to work out a week we could do it on.

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March Break Moments

Some random moments from the weekend…
Mercury & Venus at sunset – using the P610 Nikon superzoom bridge camera – I tried higher zoom shots but they didn’t come out (wobbly atmosphere, shaky, cold hands)

Fat finches on the feeder – Using the Canon Rebel T6i with the long ‘kit’ lens (55-250)

Snow flurries were just hanging in the air during a quiet Sunday morning sunrise…

Snow flakes falling… done with the Canon.

Snow falling on trees

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Think Different

A grade 8 career fair last week had my senior computer
engineering students giving hundreds of grade 8s their
first glimpse of virtual reality.

Being one of the first to set up virtual reality in our area, I’ve had the pleasure of putting hundreds of students in it for the first time.

When they first find themselves in Google’s Tiltbrush, students tend to either scribble in 3d, write in space or, on occasion, try and build something intentionally three dimensional because they’re realize where they’re working.  With a steady stream of students trying it for the first time on Thursday, this kept happening until something different occurred.

When you get a student who knows how to draw they tend to sketch quite effectively in the virtual space, though it tends to be based on 2d thinking (like they’re drawing on paper).  We had a girl who had never tried VR before but obviously knew how to sketch enter the HTC Vive virtual space, but rather than working in 2d she immediately began sculpting 3d shapes.  


This immediately caught the eye of the gifted grade 12 I had operating the system.  He got our attention and we watched her build out complex, identifiable 3d shapes.  What made it more amazing was that she was doing this without moving her head.  She was drawing in 3d but from a 2d perspective without even seeing what she was doing.  Everyone around the VR sets stopped what they were doing to watch something special.

Afterwards her teacher came up to me and said she was ASD and not very verbal.  I imagine the school system sees her as an expensive non-standard student but what we saw was a kind of genius.  Our gifted VR operator certainly thought she was exceptional, and not in a bad way.  Perhaps it requires an exceptional intelligence to recognize another exceptional intelligence.

***

POND Family day.  One of the largest sources of data
on neuro-atypical children in the world and based in
Ontario!  Our family is part of the DNA research and
our son volunteered to get fMRI’d as well.

On Saturday my family attended the POND Network’s family day at UofT.  Having kids can often act as a kind of mirror, showing you more about yourself.  Having an autistic son has made me more aware of how neuro-atypical I am (I’ve learned coping mechanisms, but they aren’t my natural state).

Where other people seem to require social interaction in order to be happy, I am very much an introvert.  There are few cases where I find people who engage rather than drain me.  I tend to go to ground after a week of teaching because I’m all peopled out.

The research presented by the Ontario Brain Institute was very interesting, and frustrating.  Google has been doing fantastic open source computing work doing the heavy lifting with sequencing genome data for neuro-atypical brains, but the process is still in its infancy.  We need much more data from more people and faster computers to narrow down the genomic complexities of neurological issues like ASD.  The current thinking is that ASD isn’t caused by one or even a few genes, but by complex interactions between hundreds of them.  Understanding this process will require many people providing data to a massive computing effort.

A moment occurred in the presentations when a parent asked how close they are to being able to give a biological rather than psychological diagnosis for ASD.  He asked because students with a physical disability will have the earth moved to be accommodated, but students with psychological disabilities are generally warehoused and ignored, especially if they aren’t problematic.  The example he gave was in education, where a school will spend tens of thousands of dollars on ramps and elevators for a student in a wheelchair to be able to access the building and integrate with their peers, but won’t offer a fraction of that to a student with a neurological issue.  This got a round of applause from the audience.

The speaker had an even better answer.  She said this is awkward because she’s a psychiatrist and the issue isn’t whether or not this is a physical or mental diagnosis but instead an indictment of the government and society in general’s stigmatization of mental illness.  It doesn’t end at mental illness though.  If you aren’t neurotypical, you aren’t accorded the same rights and access to care.  The goal should be to enable all people to reach their potential, the type of diagnosis is irrelevant.  This got a big round of applause too.

It also raised some hard questions around how we treat difference of thought.  My son has a great deal of trouble organizing and completing linear tasks, but he can make diabolically difficult lateral connections.  Having a conversation with him will force you to think laterally in ways you never had before (unless you’re too stupid or lazy to make the effort, in which case he sounds nonsensical).  I’m a pretty good lateral thinker, but the connections he makes are astonishing, yet he’s considered substandard because he’s not at the level of his peers in a loud, socially driven classroom.  He almost failed French because he wouldn’t speak it in front of the class – the kid with social anxiety and ASD wouldn’t perform like the other kids would.  He’s sat in a desk in a row in a crowded, loud classroom with neurotypicals who thrive in this environment, and then he’s told he doesn’t stack up to them.  Their accommodation is to give him access to a support room twice a week.
I often think that if the school system doesn’t destroy him, my son is going to grow up to do something exceptional precisely because he doesn’t think like everyone else.

If you look at a movie from the ’80s you’ll find that we’ve come a long way in how we treat gender and sexuality differences.  If you watch a film from the 1950s you’ll see that we’ve come a long way in how we treat racial differences, but differences in how we think are still a place of stubborn prejudice.

Last year at a Head’s meeting I suggested that neuro-atypical people should be in teaching.  They will cause it to change by offering different approaches that might improve the system as a whole.  Our head of guidance thought this was ridiculous.  Outliers shouldn’t be teaching or even in education.  Education should be about moulding students to society’s expectations.  I’ve never felt more disenfranchised by the education system than I did at that moment, and I’ve frequently felt disenfranchised by it both as a student and a teacher.  I guess people will always find a systemic reason to identify and diminish another group of people for their own benefit.

When my son was first diagnosed with ASD I was hoping for a cure, now I believe that he isn’t thinking incorrectly, just not the same as most people, and that can offer us all a social advantage.  It would be very shortsighted of us to try and stamp out that difference.  His ability to make lateral connections of thought might one day allow him to solve a problem in a way that no one else could even conceive.  This is assuming the education system doesn’t beat it out of him.  Instead of exploring his differences of thought he’s repeatedly forced to perform neurotypical tasks in a substandard way and then rebuked for it.  There is no point in his day where he’s allowed to explore his intelligence in the way that a gifted student is because his mode of thought is deemed foreign.

A good place to start would be to take away the distinction between physical and psychological diagnosis and treat all students to the same support.  That might mean breaking down the systemic, grade based process of education by introducing purely individually driven learning goals and achievements.  My son may not graduate on time because the system he is in seems designed specifically to not work with how he thinks, but he’ll get there eventually, and it would be nice if he wasn’t constantly being told he was a failure when he does.  The chances of him going on to develop his unique talents in spite rather than because of his education would be much greater if he doesn’t feel like the rest of society thinks him a loss.

Education, like socio-economic status, is an invented sense of superiority.  If you do well at something designed specifically for you, have you really done anything of value?  If you struggle to do well in a system specifically designed to work against you, are you a failure? Neurotypicals might not be able to use their customized education to grant themselves social advantage any more, but can you imagine an education system in which every student was able to minimize their weaknesses while maximizing their strengths without some shortsighted idiot judging them?  The human race would flourish in the diversity of ideas that would bloom from those graduates.  We only have to get past our prejudices to get there.

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Austim & History – where would we be without these people?
8 Inspiring People with ASD

Putting Students into VR for the first time shows many ommonalities, and exceptionalities…

 

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Educational Maelstroms

 

Nice to see you’ll support pension cuts,
shame that was never on the table


I find myself in a bit of an educational maelstrom at the moment.  Government twitter trolls who like to tell me I must be enjoying my summer off instead get sharp replies about my sitting in a computer lab in Milton taking my 3rd AQ in 7 years of teaching.  When I’m done here I’ll have 4 teachables (English, history, visual arts and computer engineering).

I’ve also taught summer school four times.  Since I started teaching in 2004, my summers have been busy, and expensive.  I know there are teachers who don’t do additional training.  I also know that whenever I did training when I worked in the private sector, they paid for it.  Getting lumped in with a brand of teacher who expects more for less makes me angry, I’m not that guy.

I also attend Edcamps, self directed professional development.  I can’t recall ever seeing my private sector colleagues driving an hour out of their way on a Saturday morning to spend the day learning how to do their jobs better.  Then there are the conferences (that take a lot more of my time than just the day or two of school I miss) where I spend a lot of my own time developing educational theory and training for (I hope) the benefit of teachers and students.

I’m immensely proud of Ontario’s education system, and don’t see it as a political pawn to be used in a game that has more to do with financial shell games than anything real.  I’m a liberal who can’t vote liberal any more.  Worse, I’m a voter who doesn’t know what the point is any more, because political parties in Ontario only stand for re-election, they don’t actually stand for anything else.

I haven’t mentioned the department headship I took on with minimal notice and then was attacked for taking on in a full time capacity; working with teachers can be very tiring.  I haven’t mentioned the sixty or so hours I spend each year coaching soccer.  I can’t understand why my own government is intent on generating public hatred at my expense for their own ends.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/04/30/bank-bailout-ccpa.html

I’m not sure what I did wrong.  Looking at any metric you care to apply, we do more at less cost than just about any education system in the first world.  Our cost to performance ratio is excellent.

Instead we get strung up, vilified and turned on by the very government that won office by scare mongering the electorate away from the blue myopia.

Ontario will bail out poorly run businesses because they live in the ‘real world’ and are meaningful, tough, manly ways to make a living?  They drive the economy?  If that were the case, we’d still be in a destitute market that eats itself to pay 1% of the population.  If you think private business will do anything other than the least it has to while feeding itself, you’re naive, and dangerous.  The economy is like a cockroach, let it pick up the scraps, you don’t feed it steak.

Thank goodness we have higher standards in education, health care, and other services.  If we ran the province like GM, or American banks, or Blackberry, we’d be in real trouble (though we would have a small group of hospital administrators and school superintendents who were immensely wealthy).

I guess that’s where we headed, because if we’re gonna stink, we might as well all stink equally.