Instead of double doubling classroom teachers with absurd remote/face to face simultaneous instructional expectations and a schedule that fires a month of work at students that teachers are then expected to prep, deliver (in two places at once) and mark with no time given, let’s review and improve this situation.
Course duration has always been set in Ontario at 110 hours, but instructional time has been systemically devalued by waiving expectations for remote learning and dropping unqualified teachers into make-work support roles instead of using them for what they should be in schools for.
In a pandemic where everyone is stressed, a schedule that is uneven and cruel has put unnecessary pressure on both staff and students. Let’s take a step back and see if I can’t spitball a better solution. I ain’t no senator’s son sitting in an office deciding these things, I’m just one of the people who is being waterboarded by them, but I’ll take a swing at that difficult job anyhow.
THE SITUATION WE’RE IN NOW
A teacher typically teaches three classes of 20-31 students per semester. Let’s say that’s 75 students you’re responsible for (some semesters I’ve had 90+). If we made all classes capped at 20 students (a single cohort), each teacher would be responsible for 60 students, which is less than most of us normally are.
We have way fewer students in schools right now because many have opted for fully remote learning, so there are empty classrooms all about.
We have a shortage of specialist teachers and can’t provide qualified coverage for them.
We cling to the idea that we need to keep prep periods in our schedule and then fill them with meaningless, un-pedagogically sound busy work while causing always on quadmesters where your prep isn’t happening even as you’re being asked to rejig a curriculum to a schedule no one has ever seen before.
Students with special needs are swamped by the machine gun like efficiency of quadmestering.
Students without special needs are overwhelmed by the drink from the firehose curriculum of quadmestering.
A CRUELTY FREE SOLUTION TO PANDEMIC RESPONSE TEACHING
in semester 2 return to semesters and end the quadmester cruelty
each week is one class with a weekend to de-COVID the place (that’s a good idea)
make every Friday an independent review and catch up day for students to give them time to make sense of the hectic influx of material
on those Fridays staff are given time to mark the week’s work, contact students with updates and concerns and prep for the next week’s influx
each month/4 weeks is a complete tumble of the schedule
teachers don’t have prep ‘periods’ any more (they have the Friday and smaller cohorts)
teachers all provide their own remote learning support (so a qualified person is teaching students they are familiar with)
leverage the empty classes generated by fully remote learning to spread out cohorts and cover the bump in classes running
leverage the teachers currently brought in at teacher salaries to babysit to actually teach classes
each class is a three hour face to face morning session (12 hours of instructional f2f time per four day week)
each class has a 2 hour remote/online expectation for review and consolidation of learning WITH THE SAME QUALIFIED TEACHER
teachers can leverage their relationships with students to engage them in online work
at five hours per day of instructional time, and 16 weeks of class (4 tumbles through the schedule), students would experience 48 hours of face to face instruction and 32 hours of guided online instruction with a qualified teacher familiar with them from face to face learning. They would also have 5 hours of Friday consolidation of learning time each week for a total of 20 hours in the semester. That adds up to one hundred hours of learning at a pedagogical effectiveness we can only dream of right now.
add in an exam/culminating presentation day per class at the end of the year and you’d be at 103 hours of instruction with credible culminating grades generated (exams are cancelled currently)
students cannot opt out of remote learning and every effort will be made to ensure they have connectivity and technology at home with which to do it (this is happening now anyway – not the opting out part, you can do that – people are knocking themselves out to ensure this isn’t a digital divide issue though and would continue to)
The benefits of this approach?
small cohorts to reduce the chance of COVID transmission
a qualified instructor who knows students providing remote learning
a much higher quality of remote teaching
a teacher not expected to be online and in class simultaneously
time given for meaningful one on one feedback both face to face and remotely
time given for redesigning an entirely curriculum schedule on the fly (that’s not happening right now)
time given to recognize the cognitive load on students trying to cover a month of material each week
time given for pedagogically sound learning
time given for students to sleep on and review their learning and consolidate it
students with special needs would have time given to support them (currently that’s all cancelled)
a more reasonable schedule that is evenly distributed and isn’t trying to kill people with stress during a pandemic (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d have to write)
restore credibility to online/remote learning after a year of the Minister and now boards suggesting it’s optional and doesn’t matter
SUMMARY
We’ve clung to some assumptions (teacher semestered prep periods in scheduling) while tossing out others (time spent in a course doesn’t really matter). Our priorities are out of whack and the result is hurting people and damaging learning. Things are never going to be as they were prior to COVID while we’re under the weight of this pandemic, but we can get closer with a bit of flexibility and kindness.
Teacher prep periods have remained even though they make no sense in a quadmestered system. The result is a massively uneven quadmester schedule that waterboards staff with high class caps in one and leaves them with make-work in the other. There is enough real work to go around.
By leveraging the empty space we currently have in schools due to fully remote learners and adjusting the work load by producing smaller class sizes and spreading out instruction, we could have a schedule that comes much closer to providing a kind and more effective learning environment.
The lack of focus on what we’re supposed to be doing (providing effective and differentiated instruction that maximizes student learning, remember?) suggests that these things never really mattered in the first place. Got special learning needs? Too bad, special education support is cancelled. Find keeping up with school difficult? Too bad, we’re going to fire you through courses at record pace even though everyone is reeling from a pandemic. Don’t worry though, it doesn’t really matter if you keep up or not because you’re getting credits regardless.
I’m able to provide interactive, relevant online learning opportunities for my students and even I still struggled with between 20-40% disengagement in remote learning this quadmester. I’ve heard of other classes that just did nothing online. If you talk to admin about it they’d rather pretend it’s happening than do anything to ensure it is with anything like quality in mind. I had a class drop down to twenty students which means it could have become a single cohort and I could be their online instructor, but making a change for pedagogical effectiveness that would have alleviated a staff member’s medically supported issues with the provided face masks wasn’t something anyone had any time for.
I recently learned that students can opt out of remote learning entirely if they want. This has resulted in kids who have attended less than fifty hours of instruction earning Ontario high school credits this quadmester (Ontario high school courses are supposed to be 110 hours of instruction). Remote learning with a teacher unqualified or even knowledgeable about the subject (as was my case with both of my online support teachers) can’t be called instructional time anyway. ‘Quadmester’ should be changed to ‘freemester’ or ‘fakemester’.
This kind of inflation is exactly what the current government has been trying to do over the past two years by pushing massive class sizes (even during a pandemic) and devaluing complex pedagogical practice in order to cheapen public education. They couldn’t stuff more students into classes, so they reduced expectations and lowered the efficacy of the system to the point of absurdity while handing out credits like candy, and the people making it happen are getting bonuses for devaluing our education system! They must be very proud. Fear not though, PC party backers are ready to step in with private for-profit options that are likely to perform worse and cost more.
***
As I wrap things up from my double cohort/teaching continuously all day/double class/teaching continuously every week quadmester one I’m struck with how this drink-from-the-firehose schedule that doesn’t remotely meet Ontario standards not only injures already traumatized students and staff but also removes the most challenging work I do in class.
We got to the culminating projects (exams are cancelled – as is all safety paperwork because why not) and I found that my grade 9s have not had the opportunity to develop a rigorous and resilient engineering process in the way that they would in any other year, though considering the class is half as long as it should be I shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve been able to cover the basic material, though the speed at which that came at students was overwhelming even to the stronger ones. Neurologically speaking, you need time to reflect and internalize new learning, but best pedagogical practices have long since been flushed down the toilet.
I keep hoping that we’ll make adjustments toward making Ontario education more equitable and fair to everyone as this slow burn pandemic grinds on, but the powers that be appear to believe that they are finished and are ready to fire us through quadmester after quadmester rather than responding in a best practices-continuous evolution. I’ve suggested previously that the week-on week-off is already problematic, so why not just go back to week on week off semesters? If we did that with a Friday fully remote review day we could also give teachers and students the headspace they need to consume new learning, but the new normal is too waterboard everyone with a pedagogically bankrupt schedule that only has the appearance of credibility.
As we lurch into quadmester two with no quadmester ending in sight I’m looking forward to not being waterboarded any more, but I’ve still been handed another technology course with two cohorts and a teacher who has no background in my speciality ‘covering’ the remote part of the course, so I can expect another poorly engineered schedule designed to hand out cheap credits. I got handed the same thing (a course I’m not qualified to teach) to provide remote support in even while I’m still providing technical support to people across the school and beyond. There is evidently no way to differentiate teacher schedules to give them time to provide system support either.
I’ll do what I can to mitigate this poor scheduling (again), but since the system has downloaded all guidance and special education expectations on me as well I’ll be stretched (once again) to the breaking point trying to protect students from a schedule designed by people who don’t seem to care for their personal circumstances and well being… while struggling through a pandemic with my own health concerns.
Even evidence that the system think types are evolving this in the right direction would be helpful, but communications are nearly non-existent and there is no sense of vision or even an acknowledgement that what we’re doing isn’t kind, let alone working. The new normal is a cruel, undifferentiated and ultimately meaningless place. With a complete lack of leadership from the Ministry or Minister, we’re likely to see Ontario plunge in years of darkness as a result of this overwhelming and cruel schedule.
The following is relevant to what’s happening in my board, but since there appears to be no central plan from a ‘ministry’ of education, every board is doing their own thing, so this might not apply to you. In my world the double-double is now an overwhelming truth that combines all the difficulties of remote learning with the challenges of providing face to face instruction in a medical emergency simultaneously all day every day. I have two classes like that so I’m prepping for two different lessons and instructing in two places at once (online and f2f) all day every day every week, no breaks.
I have some ideas on how to fix that:
I’m able to cover the basic hands on and theory learning in my face to face technology classes, but the morepedagogically complex work like developing an adaptive and agile engineering process by working out how to solve problems in non-linear, failure heavy learning situations simply isn’t happening in our drink-from-the-firehose quadmestered schedule. There is no time or the space you need in order to iterate past problems and internalize this deeper learning, and there is no time as a teacher to generate this prodigious amount of material. How could we make moves to fix that?
TIMETABLING SUGGESTION #1: NO MORE QUADMESTERS! A good old fashioned semester with one class each week has its own problems (like 3 weeks between each subject), but would also mean no more double/doubling because we’d never have an always on quadmester.
A weekend break between crossovers between subjects along with our current cleaning regimens (which seem to do a better job at stopping COVID19 than the general public) suggest that we could return to a semestered system safely. Rather than waiting months to take a breath, teachers would have a rotating prep each month where they could plan for the next onslaught. Senior students would have a breath too if they have a spare.
Double cohorts of simultaneous face to face and remote students mean teachers are producing learning content at high speed (a week of intensive class equals almost a month of regular class) while also having to produce online and face to face lessons. The marking obviously comes at an accelerated rate too. This is absurd. I wish we had a union. Breaking up the quadmester system back into semesters means everyone would cycle through all their classes every four weeks, and while there will be retention problems, there are anyway. At the very least getting semesters back would mean that students with spares would get to experience them and teachers would actually be given time to prep what they’re teaching. It also means that we’re not dragging kids through rapid fire quadmesters and they would have time to digest what’s coming at them. Best of all it means we’d never have to use the term ‘quadmester’ again.
***
The remote part is happening simultaneously and I’m supposed to be designing and running that too… while I’m teaching f2f at the same time. Parents are wondering why I’m not responding to questions online in a timely fashion while I’m teaching the other cohort in the classroom. In the meantime I’ve given a ‘remote learning support teacher’ to help me with that, except they’ve yet to be able to provide anyone who has the faintest clue what we’re doing in computer engineering.
I’m seeing make-work for teachers instead of them focusing on teaching, let’s stop that.
TIMETABLING SUGGESTION #2: CAP ALL SPECIALTY CLASSES THAT YOU CAN’T FIND A QUALIFIED TEACHER TO REMOTELY SUPPORT AT 20 AND MAKE THEM SINGLE COHORT CLASSES.
Rather than inventing make-work that has people making teacher salaries to babysit students online (no marking or any other responsibilities), let’s let subject specialists remotely support their own classes.
The myth is that we’re providing 2.5 hours of face to face instruction and 2.5 hours of remote instruction each day adding up to enough instructional time to equal a credit, but if we can’t provide a qualified, knowledgeable teacher to manage the learning then we’re not providing the instruction time the Ministry of Education claims is required to earn a credit. A split f2f/remote cohorted system does good things in reducing face to face class sizes (though when students are coming off buses with 38+ students on them you have to wonder how effective it is), but f2f/remote quadmesters are a shell game when it comes to actual instructional time.
I’ve got 15-20% of my grade 9s (the ones with IEPs who need support – but that’s been cancelled in school) not doing any remote learning at all. Since the remote learning support teachers aren’t qualified to speak to the material and don’t have any clearly defined responsibilities anyway, these kids are falling through the cracks. This academically driven rapid-fire quadmestered system is predicated on privilege and aimed at student success for the successful. Kids who struggle in the system are being run over by it (as usual).
We’ve been given ‘remote support teachers’ who are supposed to oversee the elearning half, but they’ve yet to provide me with one who is qualified in my subject area and both have said that they have no idea what we’re doing in class. I’m unable to put them as teachers in the Cisco Netacademy LMS because they aren’t qualified to teach it, which is kinda the point. Guess who gets all the content question emails? Except I’m kinda face to face all day too.
This could be fixed at next to no cost. Tech classes have smaller caps anyway, so setting them to the cohort limit (or changing the cohort limit to tech caps) wouldn’t change class sizes or displace students at all while ensuring that qualified teachers are teaching specialist subjects. Tech numbers have remained strong because they are hands-on classes that don’t translate to a remote learning platform well. In the spring we were told students can’t do any tech work at home even if they had the tools at home for liability reasons, so there is another reason to protect this specialized learning in face to face situations. Any class that focuses on tactile hands on learning should be prioritized in face to face classes. Those classes (tech, art, etc) shouldn’t be lumped in with academic classes that work online.
We’re frequently told this situation is flexing, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of flexibility in planning once it’s in place. I only hope the people responsible for arranging the deck chairs on our ship aren’t nailing them into place, because they’re placed poorly.
***
I’m watching my grade 9s struggling to wrap up this overwhelming rapid fire quadmester now. I’m crawling to the end of the damned thing wondering how things have gone so wrong. In the first couple of weeks I didn’t know how I’d get to the end. It turns out the answer is: do less less well, which I’m not satisfied with. I’m not sure that the people running things who haven’t been in a classroom in the 21st Century are as frustrated by that as I am though.
The nines struggle to adapt to a semestered system when they end in January in normal scheduling. In this pandemic scheduled school year they are getting buried even while being overwhelmed emotionally by the limitations inflicted upon us by this virus. There was a lot of talk about mental health and care before we launched this waterboarding schedule. It’d be nice if that focus returned when people were thinking about how the second semester might go down in February.
If not a weekly/semestered schedule, how about a four day week with one day as a fully remote working day where teachers who are teaching their students rather than babysitting them could interact meaningfully with them in that online environment in real time (hard to do when face to face at the same time)? Doing that instead of inventing make-work ‘remote support teachers’ would be a much more functional use of time. If prep times were integrated into that remote learning day we’d also be able to cut the dozens of ‘teachers’ who are covering (or not if they aren’t qualified) teachers in order to provide them with prep time. I haven’t had any prep time since this quadmester started because they’ve yet to be able to provide me with a tech qualified teacher to cover my class, and I’m not going to pull my students out of hands-on work even if I desperately need the prep time because the whole point of face to face classes it to restore tactile hands-on learning that was lost in remote teaching in the spring.
We could even vary classes based on what they are instead of lock-stepping everyone through the same always on quad-mestered system, but locking all classes to academically focused approaches is the education system’s knee jerk response to everything. Wouldn’t it be something if this pandemic emergency actually produced better pedagogy through creative and differentiated scheduling rather than overwhelming everyone with the same, simplistic and unsustainable quadmestered plan?
I’ve been a student and then a teacher through the earliest iterations of online learning. At university I took one of the last mailed correspondence courses in the mid-nineties and I’ve been online since BBSes and user-groups in the early 90s. That whole time I was working summers and holidays in IT jobs, though they weren’t called ‘IT jobs’ yet. For two summers I helped Unitel Engineering digitize their paper based parts ordering system at their electronics shop in Scarborough by moving everything in their decades old paper based system from filing cabinets to Lotus123 on DOS/early Windows.
After graduation I got my first full time gig at Ontario Store Fixtures where I was attached to the programming team that was converting their old DOS based manufacturing system to JDEdwards OneWorld integrated management process. This was a very early server based system that was the step between desktops and the cloud based systems we use today. Two years teaching overseas in Japan showed me the technology that was soon to arrive in North America, such as digital cameras and high speed home internet. I played Diablo with a friend in Mississauga from my apartment in Akita City and watched Y2K pass over us at a thousand year old temple. When I wasn’t doing that I was helping engineers and doctors translate their work for international consumption, working on everything from electronic/robotics systems that helped parallelised people move their limbs to the latest in LCD technology coming out of the NEC factory near where we lived.
By the early naughties we were back in Ontario and I was a certified IT and network technician and working full time in the field. I changed directions into teaching in 2003/4 and my first teaching job in Peel Region had me setting up the first wireless router in the board in our library so students with their newfangled Blackberries and wireless laptops could get online – it would be years before board IT caught up with us. The next summer I got a job in their new elearning summer program. We were using the Angel online system which was a rudimentary webpage with such basic media that you had to hand code the html if you wanted it to be anything other than text.
One of my favourite elearning experiences came in those early days. Peel didn’t run elearning as a credit factory. They focused on strong students with digital experience and then pushed for advanced course delivery. In our Grade 12 academic class we had students from across Ontario as well as international students from Bangkok, Tokyo and Shanghai who were taking the course to prove they had the English language skills necessary to attend university in Canada. Working with this international group felt like what the future of teaching could be.
A good example of the above and beyond nature of these students was the final exam, which happened in a live two hour window. The students overseas were up in the middle of the night and when the internet went down in part of Mississauga my student who was in that blackout called around, found a friend with working internet and rode her bike over there to complete the exam on time. Back then elearning wasn’t an excuse to do less, it was a reason to do more.
I continued to teach elearning in summer school for the next five years as I moved to my current school board and they started up their own elearning program (I volunteered to be in the inaugural group and was the only one in it who had actually taught any). This branched out into blended face to face and elearning classes ranging from career studies to a specialized locally developed media arts program for at risk students as well as the usual online English courses. Early versions of video conference like Adobe Connect came up and I always seized this emerging technology to develop better learning relationships and bandwidth with my students. One day we were all on a live video conference working independently when one of the student’s moms came in and asked if he wanted takeout hamburgers for lunch. She laughed when we all replied that hamburgers sounded great. That was in 2008 before unions and school boards conspired to take video conferencing off limits. It took the education minister in a pandemic emergency this past spring to get Ontario’s education system to begin using this technology again… twelve years later. Sabotage by political interests in Ontario education are a big reason why we are still so bad at elearning.
Rather than focus on students who needed access to courses and had highly developed digital skills and resilience, elearning devolved into a way of offering credits for at risk students that didn’t want to attend school. It was then decided to give elearning sections to teachers in smaller schools that were losing population instead of giving those sections to teachers who had the experience, skills and interest in making this challenging emerging learning situation work. The end result was students and teachers who didn’t want to be in elearning. As that all happened I found myself removed from teaching it and by 2012 I was no longer doing any elearning at all.
Elearning implementation has always suffered from a lack of vision. It stumbled into existence as a substitute for mail order courses in the late 90s and early Zeroes because it was cheaper and faster than all those stamps. In the early days it was tentatively adopted by programs like Peel’s independent summer school but it has never been adopted into specialized virtual schools and was still struggling for acceptance up until this year when suddenly everyone was an elearning/remote teacher.
Even in 2019 unions were attacking elearning as a ‘lesser than form’ of teaching in an attempt to stop government attacks on public education. That Ontario’s anti-education government was suggesting stuffing 40-50 students into elearning classes shows how this scalable system is prone to abuse and pedagogical deflation. Those union attacks annoyed many members like myself who have been working on developing this emerging medium of learning for most of our careers.
There is nothing education does better than look backwards and poorly handle change. If it does adopt technology it’s usually to try and redo what it has been doing for decades as a cost saver. Google Docs instead of photocopies, online forms instead of quizzes, worksheets on screen instead of paper; educational adoption of digital tools is all about the Substitution in SAMR; use it while keeping things as much the same as possible. As I said earlier, elearning implementation has shown a startling lack of vision and leadership.
***
There was a time when you had a choice…
I recently didn’t get an elearning job, but that’s OK because the last thing I want to be doing is middle managing to the status quo, What I want to do is explore and expand our best digital pedagogical practices; seeing how cheaply we can do the minimum doesn’t do anything for me (or anyone else not in management). There still seems to be a lot of pressure to overload elearning classes with students and then using limited corporate walled-garden systems from attention merchants like Google. This is baffling from a f2f teacher perspective where I’m seeing people getting paid teacher salaries while not actually doing any teaching. We could leverage the influx of teachers into the system much more effectively than we are to quickly create smaller remote classes that would involve teachers actually teaching and supporting learning instead of babysitting.
I’d want to advocate for smaller class sizes in elearning, especially in higher needs classes where remote teachers are also doing the jobs of guidance counsellors and special education support in a dangerous time. I’d also want to advocate for an efficient system for vetting alternative online systems that offer greater bandwidth with our remote students, but most boards have equated student privacy and cybersecurity with exclusive deals with tax dodging advertising/technology giants rather than looking to create a diverse yet secure ecosystem of online digital tools for learning. Signing an agreement with an attention merchant to indoctrinate the students in your care in their advertising systems so you can hand them graduates familiar with their products is an easier box to check.
***
What would my dream elearning job be? Let me take my digitally expert senior students in software engineering/game development and computer engineering, give us leading edge tools and let us see what digital learning is capable of in 2020. By exploring emerging technology we could not only make elearning more effective, but also ease the social distance anxiety many people are feeling.
Just before school started this year in its masked, socially distanced, quadmestered and frankly diminished capacity, I saw this tweet from Jon Resendez. It stayed on my mind as we launched this uneven and unsustainable (for the people doing double cohort, double classes remotely and f2f all day every day simultaneously) quadmester. More pedagogically sound elearning processes wouldn’t just help remote teachers at the moment, they’d help everyone since we’re all remote teaching in one way or another, it’s just that some of us are trying to do it while face to face with students at the same time.
There are two sides of elearning I’d want to explore with my digitally skilled students. My computer engineers could focus on the physical hardware that might improve remote learning outcomes and my senior software engineers would be able to explore and even write the software we need to explore and expand communications between remote teachers and their students.
One of the exciting evolutions happening right now is in virtual reality. We’ve been exploring this through our board’s forward thinking SHSM program since 2015. As the technology has matured prices have tumbled. The Oculus Quest 2 runs at a resolution that would have required a $1000 VR system connected to a $2000 high speed PC back in 2015, but it now costs less than $500 (very close to what a Chromebook costs). What might a class equiped with immersive, fully interactive virtual and augmented reality look like?
Experiential learning takes a huge leap forward in VR. Giving students a chance to virtually explore Anne Frank’s house instead of talking about it or passively watching a video makes the benefits of immersive experiential learning obvious.
If you’re more future thinking how about a detailed 3d model of the ISS that you and students could explore:
… or a universe simulator that lets you create gravitationally accurate solar systems? You can explore the deep ocean or amaze yourself in Google Earth VR, which is so engaging that you often forget you have the headset on while you’re in it. It was a lifesaver for me during lockdown when travel wasn’t happening. Seeing parks on the south tip of Africa closed for COVID also brought home for me the world wide nature of what’s happening.
The benefits of experiential learning in VR can even extend to giving everyone a feeling of what it’s like to be autistic. Students who experience VR tend to feel that they’ve actually experienced it. This is a big step away from passively reading a webpage or watching a video, which is about as far as elearning goes these days. Bringing experiential and immersive experiences to elearning will revolutionize the process and radically change what our ideas of a field trip is (elearning students don’t currently have field trips).
Beyond the experiential benefits of elearning, what I’d really like to go after is using virtual and augmented reality as a work around for social distancing. This is leading edge stuff – labs are looking into it now, but from a business perspective. Education won’t stumble into it for years, but wouldn’t it be something if we could leverage this current technology in time to help us all manage the social isolation we’re all feeling?
In 2018 Nick (our national finalist CyberTitan) led a team that developed a VR title they called a ‘virtual classroom’. The idea was to let students use 3d avatars to meet in virtual reality. All VR headsets have microphones, speakers and cameras build in, so they’re already inherently designed to be communications tools… and that was more than two years ago…
Our kung-fu in the software engineering class has only improved since. Not only could we explore existing virtual and augmented software opportunities for educational use, we’d also be capable of developing our own VR classroom 2.0. We just need the room and support to make it happen. What would room and support look like? I’m currently looking at 31 students with a waiting list in software engineering next semester. If we’re still waterboarding everyone with quadmesters in semester 2 then splitting that massive class into two sections of 20 each would mean we could all meet face to face in the morning to resolve problems and take aim at new ones and then go virtual in the afternoon to test what we’re working on instead of the current schedule that would have me trying to be in two places at once while depending on another teacher who has no idea what we’re doing to ‘support’ the remote learning. In short, it would mean arranging the class around pedagogical effectiveness rather than seeing how many students we can stuff into one section.
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Beyond the hardware and software research, I’d also like to address the massive gap we’re experiencing in our current elearning charge. The digital divide is deeper and wider than you think because it’s not just about a lack of connectivity and available technology at home, it’s also about technological illiteracy because Ontario education assumes that students and staff all know how to use digital tools rather than training and teaching them in it.
We hand students digital technology in the early grades and just assume they understand what it is from home use, but that home use, if it exists at all, is usually habitual and very limited. Just because students aren’t afraid of technology doesn’t mean they understand how it works. Every year I see grade 9s who think they’re digital experts because they’ve owned a series of game consoles since they could walk. Their parents’ choice to digitally impoverish them by only ever handing them toys instead of tools makes it even more difficult to teach them computer engineering because they think they know everything when they don’t even know how to share a document, or unzip a compressed file.
It would be a satisfying thing to develop a hands on mandatory technology curriculum that makes all students literate in technology use in the same way we expect them to be literate and numerate in languages and mathematics. Like those other foundational literacies, digital/media literacy is a foundational skill if we’re using this technology in every class (as we are).
***
There is much to do in remote elearning in order to make it a viable learning strategy both during the COVID19 pandemic and beyond, but we need vision and the will to explore where this is going instead of just waiting for business to hand us down their leftovers or an uncaring government to use it as an excuse to Walmart education into pedagogical irrelevance.
I was once talking to an administrator who said, “I hate the word pedagogy, what does that even mean anyway?” The complexity in the concept is exactly what we should be protecting as we continue to evolve learning in our digital age. Pedagogy is not a concept that plays well with a management approach that is looking for cheap and easy solutions. Perhaps that’s why I always feel like I’m the one fighting for it when I’m talking to educational management, but we should always be working toward it even if it’s difficult.
Developing a more pedagogically powerful elearning system won’t just help us manage this pandemic crisis, it would also help us manage the looming environmental crisis of which this pandemic is just a symptom. If we could get elearning to begin approaching the pedagogical complexity and interpersonal bandwidth of in-class learning we could be restructuring education so it isn’t pumping millions of tons of carbon emissions into the air from bussing students to remote locations every day. A truly digitally empowered local school could be a k-12, walk-in experience for all but a few students because engaging, high bandwidth virtual communications and connectivity would mean we’d no longer have to burn the world to keep education looking like it did in the 1950s.
There are so many reasons why we need to develop vision and stop reflexively supporting status quo thinking in Ontario education. Leveraging experts in the system for their expertise rather than populating the system with middle managers intent on maintaining the status quo would be a great place to start.
“Among richer families, youth sports participation is actually rising. Among the poorest households, it’s trending down. Just 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport at least one day in 2017, versus 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000. In 2011, those numbers were roughly 42 percent and 66 percent, respectively.”
This isn’t a story about childhood; it’s about inequality.”
I used to love playing sports. Refereeing and coaching at summer hockey camps helped me feed myself in university and I’ve coached, time kept and ref’d soccer and hockey since I was 10 years old.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve found men’s leagues echo the pointlessly competitive nature of kid’s sports with ex-Junior players playing in D division men’s hockey just so they can score half a dozen goals each week and run up the score. It’s nearly impossible to find a men’s hockey league that isn’t populate by assholes.
Max used to love gymnastics, but he ended up getting chased out of it in his pre-teens because the only way to do it was competitively (being female was also increasingly a prerequisite because the entire sport, like all sports these days, orientates itself on the most likely competitive success).
Coaching at school was a way to stay in touch with sports, but that too went sour with student athletes (only the wealthy ones who could afford the time and money to play games and practice after school nearly every day) not showing up to practices and playing with that same pointless competitiveness even when they didn’t rate against the opposition.
I’m currently on a hiatus with sports, but I still miss them. I wish I could find a hockey league that wasn’t an excuse for men to work out their frustrations on each other. I wish my son could participate in sports for the shear joy of it rather than turning every physical activity into a competition. We’d all be much healthier and happier if we had access to financially accessible and for-the-joy-of-the-game sports.
It’s a shame how we’ve turned sports into an excuse for competitiveness – usually along with the pipe-dream that your kid will one day be made a millionaire for playing a game. Having coached at a competitive hockey camp, it’s a tragedy to watch those all or nothing kids not make the cut into professional sports – statistically speaking almost no one does.
Norway sounds like they’ve got this, like so many other things (they also nationalized their oil reserves and used them to pay off their national debt and offer free education to all its citizens), right.
“Norway’s youth-sports policies are deliberately egalitarian. The national lottery, which is run by a government-owned company called Norsk Tipping, spends most of its profit on national sports and funnels hundreds of millions of dollars to youth athletic clubs every year. Parents don’t need to shell out thousands to make sure their kids get to play. And play is an operative word: Norwegian leagues value participation over competition so much that clubs with athletes below the age of 13 cannot even publish game scores.”
I got into elearning early on, before there were Learning Management Systems or plug and play anything. My first elearning class required that I code HTML in order for students to see the material. I’d just come out of over a decade working in IT so I was one of the few people in the system who could engage with elearning early on. I was deeply involved in virtual learning until I attempted to apply for an elearning management position. After not getting it I was also suddenly also not an elearning teacher any more. I moved in other directions and have developed a successful and competitive computer engineering program instead. In the process I’ve won a couple of awards for integrating technology into teaching and my students have won all sorts of things, so I’m happy with where I’m at.
These days everyone is an elearning teacher. Thanks to a virus dictating pedagogy we’re leveraging digital communications in education like never before. This unique situation has even led to strange advancements like Stephen Lecce actually improving Ontario education by demanding the use of video conferencing when all the other partners had done everything in their power to make it a career ender. That it took a government intent on dismantling public education to move the powers that be in education forward says all sorts of things about how the system works.
I enjoy teaching and I’m proud of what my students and I have achieved in the past seven years. That much of it has been despite the system rather than because of it makes what I do more difficult than it needs to be, but then something came up last week that messed with my pride and I couldn’t not do it.
I didn’t volunteer for remote teaching even though there is huge demand because I didn’t have a medical reason not to and I greatly value the hands-on learning we do in my computer technology classroom. Until we were handed incorrectly fitting PPE and given a dual cohort schedule with twice the preparation, no time to do it and then simultaneous remote and face to face teaching all day every day I was looking forward to coming back to school. Like many I’ve been crushed by this absurd schedule. On top of that my classroom has a long history of HVAC issues and we were running into the thirties Celsius on the warmer days in early September. To say I’m struggling with this quadmester with its absurd lesson preparation expectations, demands of being available simultaneously virtually and face to face all day every day, lack of online and in-school support for students with special needs and ill fitting PPE is an understatement.
As if on cue a job came up for an Information Technology Support Teacher for online learning. I do this job now in our school (and beyond) voluntarily because I can’t sit by and watch my colleagues struggle with technology that I know my students and I can sort out for them. The idea that I could be given the time and space to do technology support at 100% and on a board wide scale rather than in addition to this absurd quadmestered, cohorted teaching load was appealing. I fired my resume and a cover letter at it that contained references from presidents and educational technology icons from across the province and got an interview. This caused me great anxiety. I’ve built a successful program out of a crack in the sidewalk and walking away from it would doom it (our school has just cancelled face to face computer science classes so viable 21st Century pathways aren’t high on the to-do list). On top of that I wasn’t sure how I’d get along on the other side of the curtain in a board office job.
I didn’t get the job. Based on an interview with no technical questions they went with someone else whose answers they liked more. To be honest I think I dodged a bullet there. The moment you step out of the classroom you aren’t working for students any more, you’re working for the system, and the system and I have never gotten along particularly well. As their IT support teacher I would have improved access to tools in a platform agnostic way. I would have found ways to make things work and improve our bandwidth with students instead of telling people to do less with the limited resources they’re handed.
My vision of elearning has little to do with what we can and can’t use today. If Minister Lecce has taught me anything it’s that the powers that be in education are more interested in maintaining the status quo and seeing how little they can do with digital technology than they are in exploring the possibilities to be found in virtual learning. A job holding that status quo has little interest for me and I argued with myself all weekend about what I’d do if I got it. The only part that bothered me when I asked for some clarity on why this other candidate was chosen was the sweeping statement, “all the candidates had excellent technical credentials.”
I’d be happy to go toe to toe with anyone in our school board, our IT professionals included, on technical qualifications. I’ve been an industry certified IT technician and network administrator since the early naughties and had worked in various IT roles for thirteen years before I became a teacher. Since becoming a teacher I’ve picked up two computer technology AQs and multiple Cisco networking qualifications including becoming the first high school instructor (and still maybe the only one) who is qualified to teacher Cybersecurity Operations. My qualifications also express themselves through my students’ success; we’re Skills Ontario medalists for the past four years in IT & Networking Administration and provincial champions twice, we’re also three time national finalists in CyberTitan. I’m not sure what made the other candidates ‘excellent’ in terms of their technical qualifications, but I’d love to see our qualifications and experience in IT all lined up side by side. There are a number of reasons why another choice might be better than me, but falsely levelling technical expertise and experience isn’t one of them.
I’m a keen amateur mechanic. I’ve taken motorcycles out of fields and restored them to operation multiple times. I’ve rebuilt cars and pulled engines. I’m capable enough that I trust my mechanical skills with my life (I do my own brakes and other maintenance on machines with very thin margins for error). I have built up a working garage space, have the right tools and know how to use them, but I’d never tell a qualified mechanic that I’m their equal. The difference between a professional and an amateur should be fairly obvious, yet Ontario education clings to the idea that a university degree trumps any kind of skilled trade… like information technologist. If they want to go with a status quo middle-manager who is aiming for administration then that’s their choice, but belittling my expertise in the process was annoying, though it highlighted an ongoing prejudice in the system. Ask tech teachers why they make less on average than everyone else in the building and you’ll see that academic privilege and skilled trades devaluation is a systemic prejudice.
A few years ago a colleague who is handy with computers (as everyone should be, they aren’t that complicated) casually mentioned that he should go and get his qualifications as a computer technology teacher. He has a university degree so he’s used to doing whatever he likes in the education system; it’s made by and for people like him. I told him that he might find it difficult to generate five years of industry experience on top of professional accreditation in order to qualify for the AQ. Just because you’re a keen amateur doesn’t mean you have the professional expertise to teach the subject, though we’re especially bad at recognizing technical skills in computing in both staff and students in education. It’s the main reason digital skills are a bit of a disaster in Ontario education.
Having highlighted that academic prejudice, Ontario’s absurd additional qualifications rules also railroad professional expertise from the skilled trades side of things as well. I had to almost produce a blood sacrifice to OISE to be accepted into the computer technology AQ because they wouldn’t accept my industry certifications and experience without putting me through a grinder. When I got to my AQ class most of the other people in the program had no background in computers at all. They were teachers from other technology disciplines ranging from cooking to media arts and hair dressing who were allowed to take another technology qualification because they already had one. OISE made it sound like I was going to be dropped into a program full of Grace Hoppers and Bill Gateses, instead I found I was one of the most technically proficient people in the room.
These stupid little short cuts in teacher training belittle the work people put into their professions and undermine expertise in the system, but as long as they are self serving and cheapen the costs I doubt we’ll see anything change. It’s hard to find fault with administrators belittling the hundreds of hours of training, industry qualifications and thousands of hours of work experience I’ve achieved when the system gleefully does it automatically.
I got into class the next day still of two minds about not getting that job until I started teaching again and remembered that what I’m doing here is the single most important thing I could be doing. My students love what we do, I enable them to do things they didn’t think they were capable of and I end each day feeling like I’ve done something genuinely useful and fecund. I think I only considered leaving the classroom because I’m in such physical distress from poor PPE and this absurdly scheduled school year that I grasped at it. Any other year I’d have let it pass by so a future administrator could pad their resume. I am still frustrated at not being able to explore future technology assisted pedagogy on a wider level, but that’s why I blog… that’ll be the next post because even though I’m overwhelmed in the classroom, I can’t let it keep operating at this poor status quo, especially when there is all this fantastic technology around to help us circumnavigate this lousy pandemic.
We attended the POND family day a couple of weeks ago and the steady, plodding nature of drug based (forget gene therapy, it’s miles away) research around ASD and the frustration expressed by some parents got me thinking about what I’d do if they suddenly could ‘fix’ ASD.
Watching my son growing up with an ASD diagnosis that I never had sheds a lot of light on how my own mind works. When I watch him fly into a rage and begin looping I realize that he is a piece of me. When I watch him hyper-focus and grok something completely, that’s a piece of me too. While I’m frequently frustrated by social interaction, I’m not sure I’d be as good at some of things I excel at if I weren’t neuro-atypical, the same goes for Max.
My undiagnosed ASD has made for a strange educational history. I dropped out of high school before finishing, an apprenticeship before finishing and college before finishing. I was on my way to dropping out of university when I started battling my default approach of getting everything I wanted to get out of something before walking away. The social conventions around education, especially the graduating bit, has never held much sway over me. I only started attending them at the behest of girlfriends who suggested that the ceremony mattered. From my point of view once I’d learned what I needed to know I was done.
I played sports throughout my childhood but the getting of the trophies was always an anti-climax; something I tried to find ways out of. I loved the competition but found no value in the social conventions around the awards ceremonies.
Social conventions have always been difficult for me to grasp. The natural tribalism that neurotypical people seem to thrive on is foreign, abstract and often upsetting. Obviously definable traits that other people cling to like religion, nationality and political affiliation seem like strange abstractions to me. Even obvious associations like gender and orientation seem like affectations. Would life be easier if I just fell into those assumptions and social conventions like most people do? Probably.
I have few friends but that doesn’t make me feel lonely. That idea of loneliness and belonging is another one of those neurotypical assumptions that I find foreign. When I started motorcycling a number of people immediately tried to get me into group rides; I don’t get them. The whole point of motorcycling is to feel free. How does riding in tight formation all over the place accomplish that? Others feel power in that social affiliation and get a real rush out of publicly expressing it. Being out in public in a big group makes them feel noticed and important, but I just don’t get it. This has led to ongoing difficulties, especially with groups that thrive on hierarchy and social presentation (which is to say most of them). Because I’m not bothered with the group dynamic I’m seen as an outsider and potentially disruptive to the organization. People who get a charge out of the drama and politics of group dynamics find it easy to alienate me from a group, and tend to do so.
I generally undervalue my influence on other people because I assume they feel the same distance I do. I’m almost pathologically unable to remember names. This is often described in terms of introversion or shyness, but if this is what ASD feels like then it’s more like being a stranger in a strange land all the time; I’m always a foreigner. I used to think this was because of my emigration to Canada when I was a child, and that certainly set the tone, but I’d been odd like that even before we left. My lack of belonging is endemic. Every so often I meet an exceptional person who is able to see me as I am and not be frustrated by it, I never forget the names of those people.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve been able to better define my strangeness and I’m trying to manage it more effectively. I find that exhausting, but not having giant lists of friends or feeling an important part of an organization? Not so much.
This is made doubly tiring because of the career I’ve wandered into. Teaching is a social process, and while I love the intellectual complexity of pedagogy, technology and curriculum I’m constantly frustrated by the political and social pressures associated with it. Whether it’s union, administration or parental social expectations, I’m often oblivious to what people expect of me and baffled by their responses. I expect ethics and reason to dictate people’s actions, but those things aren’t guiding principles in many decisions. Self interest hidden in socially normative ideas like class, religion or group politics are what drive many interactions between people.
I recently backed out of headship and tried to refocus on the parts of teaching I’m good at rather than trying to herd the cats. Even when refocusing on teaching I find that I’m having a lot of trouble with social expectations. In 2017 a student’s attendance is optional, their willingness to learn is optional and any failure seems to be entirely because I can’t teach. Parents can pull their child out of classes for weeks at a time in the middle of a semester and I shouldn’t wreck their holiday by assuming they will keep up with class work while they’re gone. At some point teaching has turned into daycare, which means the things I enjoy (curriculum and pedagogy) don’t matter so much any more. For someone who doesn’t intuitively understand socially motivated change, this lack of clarity around the evolving expectations of an education system that is evolving into a social support construct is very challenging; it has been a bewildering and upsetting couple of weeks at work.
So here I am, feeling quite out of place, but that’s nothing new. If I was suddenly told that they could cure ASD with a drug would I do it? Would I be less stressed falling into the same political and social conventions neurotypical people seem to thrive on? Would I be better off thinking like the majority? Probably. I can only speak to my own experience, but if it meant losing my ability to focus, which happens because I’m not predisposed toward social or political gamesmanship, on creative and technical expression then no, I don’t think I’d volunteer to become less of what I am.
I’d let Max decide for himself after researching the science, but I’d hope he values his independence and uniqueness of thought as well, even if it generally annoys other people and isn’t the easiest way forward.
The only reason other people want you to think like them is so that they can manipulate you. Why play to that?
What’s it like teaching in a pandemic? Frustrating and exhausting. My best guess is that we’re running at about 60% of what we usually cover curriculum wise. There are a number reasons for this, but the underlying one is that we’re letting a virus dictate our pedagogy. SARS- CoV-2 is dictating a lot of things about being human at the moment, so it isn’t surprising that it’s also dictating how we educate our children, but COVID19’s ways are alien and harsh. SARS-CoV2 might be even more mean spirited than the politicians we have running Ontario at the moment. It’s at least as equally short sighted, self-serving and cruel. It’s no wonder that the two get along so well together, COVID is the hammer this government has been trying to hit us with for the past two years. They’ll still be gleefully holding our heads under water for weeks after the rest of the province has shut down.
For those of us trying to ride this out in the system, COVID19 throws everything into a permanent state of panic. The system, which has been struggling under political attacks for over two years now, has been forced into reopening without any central plan or consistent support. The result is a calcified, wounded thing lacking in flexibility and responsiveness. In the rush to force school re-openings a number of strange inconsistencies have shown themselves. If students aren’t in the building it’s perfectly OK to stuff up to forty of them on a poorly ventilated school bus for up to an hour at a time while transporting them to and from their socially distanced classrooms. There is minimal oversight on masking policies at that time as the only adult in the vehicle is busy operating the vehicle. Students then disburse from their crowded buses into carefully sized cohorts of under 20 so they aren’t in big groups… like the one they just sat in to get to the school.
You might think the walk-in students in the afternoon cohort are managing better, but driving home I regularly see large groups of 20+ students not wearing masks while play fighting and jumping on each other after a long afternoon of mask compliance and rigorous rules. When COVID dictates your school’s daily activities it’s with an iron grip powered by fear and blame. I don’t remotely blame those kids for jumping on each other after a frustrating afternoon of being kept apart and muzzled, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think all the rules are reducing transmission routes, the water’s just running around the rock that is the school. Meanwhile, in school we’re making classroom maps of who is sitting where so we can trace contagion in the place it’s least likely to happen. We don’t trace it anywhere else because it doesn’t affect system liability. Compliance with liability issues appears to be what drives system decisions, not efficacy against this virus.
There is a reason we don’t didn’t do quadmesters when viruses weren’t dictating our school schedule. Human attention is a limited resource (these days it’s being strip-mined too). In education speak this is often referred to as engagement. Some media has conflated this into a reduction in attention spans, but my experience in the classroom doesn’t support that. I’ve watched CyberTitans and Skills Ontario competitors peak perform for hours at a time, so sustained attention is something today’s students are more than capable of, but it only seems to work in genuine learning opportunities. Overly fabricated lessons with fictional connections to the real world are where engagement fails. Students can quickly see through that kind of fabricated value. You might get away with inauthentic learning in a 76 minute class, but in a 150 minute class you’re going to run into problems.
The quadmester fire-hose curriculum is problematic on a number of levels. Fast moving students who are fluent in the system can adapt and even benefit from that kind of focused attention on a subject, but for the other seventy percent of the class, massive burst f2f and then remote/elearning classes are damaging their ability to learn, but we’re not dictating pedagogy any more, a virus is, and the virus actually benefits from disaffected, frustrated people. It’s odd that we keep handing these kinds of people to the disease. SARS-CoV2 isn’t intelligent in the traditional sense, but it is a reflexive opportunist that will and does benefit from our ham-handed responses.
In addition to student focus, quadmesters produce a number of other issues that are especially difficult to manage during a world wide medical emergency. I’ve just spent three weeks trying to order IT parts in for my second grade 9 class. The first one took out enough of what parts we had in the lab (many of which were in rough shape because we’d been in the middle of using them before March break) that I couldn’t do the IT unit with the second class. In a normal year I’d have weeks to sort that out, in the drink-from-the-firehouse quadmester curriculum where we’re covering 4+ days of material each day and almost a month a week, there is no time to wait on parts. They take longer to source and deliver anyway because there’s a pandemic happening. I’m now trying to line up a month’s worth of coding curriculum to deliver next week instead – online and f2f at the same time all day every day.
Another one of those inconsistent system responses is the withdrawal of support services within the school. Special education support rooms are closed, guidance is closed and libraries are closed, presumably so students aren’t mixing in school. When you’re facing 16 bused in students every morning who are bringing over 500 secondary connections with them into your classroom, the idea that sending students who need support to specialists who can help them, or sending one of the many students I’ve had in emotional distress over the past few weeks down to guidance seems like a reasonable expectation, but evidently it’s absurdly dangerous.
COVID19 seldom transmits through airborne droplets. You’d have to be within two meters of someone when they sneezed or coughed while not wearing a mask while you’re also not wearing a mask (though COVID can infect through eyes too) to even have a chance of transmission that way. Yet we fixate on masks and ignore the most common means of transmission. The single thing that’s made SARS-CoV2 so difficult to manage is its ability to survive on surfaces. Smaller groupings and frequent spot cleaning is what will strangle this thing, not myopic mask fixations. Following the actual pathology of the disease, there is no reason why we can’t apply effective cleaning regimes and distancing to guidance, spec-ed support and library access, but we don’t because we’d rather panic and shut them down while giving the virus the frustrated people it needs to thrive. Less is more when it comes to ignoring special needs in a pandemic.
While quadmesters are problematic in a lot of ways, the dual cohort is also an imperfect solution to a problem we’re only half addressing. The initial idea was to make every classroom teacher do twice as much prep work designing both face to face and online instruction and then being both online and face to face with alternating halves of the class all day. In practice the splits didn’t happen evenly because we’re a country school and way more students get bused in than walk, so our morning/bus cohorts are often 2-3 times bigger than our afternoon cohorts (16 vs 6 last week for me). Our union then worked out how to provide us with prep time by having covering teachers come in for 30-45 minutes in each two and a half hour marathon face to face session, but in practice I’ve yet to have a covering teacher qualified to teach what I teach and none of them have the faintest idea what we’re doing. From a safety perspective, if the covering teacher isn’t tech qualified I’m supposed to pull students off hands-on work (which is the main focus in technology classes) and do seat work (which isn’t)… with someone who has no background in the subject? We were told to just work through our preps. It’s bandaids all the way down in 2020.
Having to produce days of remote lessons for the half of the class not face to face is another place where a bandaid was thrown on. The teachers covering the online work? Yep, they’re not qualified to teach my subject and have no background in it either. Furthermore they were told that they are to do no marking and make no material for the class, so they’re… what? Taking attendance? On any typical day I’m trying to teach a face to face class while also trying to respond to online emails from students at home at the same time. Not only is this an incredible burden to bear for classroom teachers, but it also casts the no-contact rules with people still doing support work in a stark light. If feels like we’re expected to go over the top every day into no-man’s land while other staff are experiencing minimal workloads.
Overflow classes for students who need special one on one support? That would have been a good use of teachers not in the classroom. We could have pivoted around student need instead of ignoring it. Emotional support spaces for students struggling with the last six months? That would have been a good use of teachers, but thanks to an arbitrary and rather inconsistent response, support is dead while people on the front lines are being snowed under.
The reflexive tightening of the system while under this extraordinary pressure while also two years into a provincial leadership vacuum has resulted in an inflexible response that is providing the appearance of safe, face to face schooling without actually delivering it. I struggled early on with system leaders telling us to just provide day care and not worry about curriculum, but I didn’t take years of schooling to provide day care, though, of course, I’m very cognizant of my students’ mental well being. Others have suggested that it doesn’t matter if we cover curriculum as long as we just make sure the kids are OK, but that’s very difficult to do when the very systems in schools that ensure child well-being are inaccessible. Do you want to be having surgery done on you by COVID-grads who never actually completed a credible education system? Do you want them fixing your brakes? Building your bridges? We ignore expertise at great cost to our society. We have to get back to maximizing human potential because that’s what society needs us to do – our students need us to do that too. Summer should have been all about planning and organization, but it is clearly evident that the government and the ministry its mismanaging didn’t plan anything. We’re watching boards scramble with no clear funding or central planning by provincial governance to try and make this work, and it really isn’t.
Where to next? Well, Ontario’s second wave is breaking on us quickly. Where is it coming on strong? In school aged kids and the people most likely to be in contact with them. Some have suggested that younger children aren’t at risk because they’re not showing a lot of high positives, but considering COVID19’s strange habits, such as the fact that the vast majority of under twenties who get it show no symptoms at all, and considering that Ontario’s half-assed back to school plan has had parents missing work to take their kids with colds, asthma and allergies to day-long line ups to get COVID tested, I’m not surprised. We’re good at skewing our own data.
Here’s a happy thought for you: what if students are freely spreading COVID19 on overcrowded buses and before and after school by being non-compliant with safety protocols (young people are the most likely cynical spreaders, along with conservatives, so our area is doubly blessed). They then take it home where older siblings and parents produce the biggest spike in cases. Give it a bit of time and it’ll spread to older groups where it is much more likely to be fatal. After a week in school, a weekend visit to grandparents might be about the nastiest thing you can do. It took less than two weeks for me to personally know a teacher who was sent home to wait on a COVID19 test. Don’t think it can’t happen to you, it’s inevitable.
How to fix it? It’s self correcting. Thousands of parents are starting to see the holes in this government’s lack of planning and are pulling their children back home for fully remote learning. As in everything else in this pandemic, people are leveraging their socioeconomic advantage and privilege to look after themselves. Rather than creating fictions around a normalized return to school (for the kids’ mental health!), we need to focus face to face schooling on the students and families that specifically need it. Instead of using the school system as an underground transmission system for the virus, we should be using it to focus on providing equity and support for people in distress. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks (when I’m not teaching face to face and online simultaneously in an accelerated curriculum all day every day) talking down students and their parents – both of whom I’ve seen burst into tears while venting.
We realized an important distinction early on in the emergency cancellation of classes in the spring: this isn’t elearning, it’s emergency remote learning, and expecting students to be open and able to learn while under that kind of stress isn’t reasonable. I knew we were going to struggle to get through curriculum in the circumstances, I just didn’t expect the system to redesign itself to make it harder as well. We’ve tried to reopen schools while our pedagogy is being driven by a virus rather than how people best learn. The result is a problematic system of delivery that is causing more problems than the virus itself. We’ve lurched from video communications getting you fired to video communications being essential in a matter of one weekend, and we’re still working out the social conventions around that. But that stumbling forward into readily available technology also suggests a pathway out of this mess. I honestly believe that our reluctance to understand and explore the possibilities of digital communications has put us on our back foot over and over again in this medical emergency. If we embraced the opportunities to be found in digital pedagogy we could not only provide a pathway around COVID limitations but also reveal enrichment opportunities that we could continue to leverage well after this pandemic has passed.
Face to face schooling has always been a series of compromises, but the pandemic has made those compromises increasingly stark while also ignoring a number of health gaps that might end up hurting people. It’s difficult starting another day of trying to be in two places at once knowing that students in crisis have no where to go. I’m not going to leave them dangling, but there is only so much of me to go around. All in all we’re just another brick in the wall. I always keep that song in the back of my mind when I teach so I see my students as people. SARS-CoV2 doesn’t see them as people, it sees them as a resource to be used up. I wish the people running our education system didn’t see our classrooms in the same way a virus does. I wish we could find a way forward that leverages the technology we have so we could focus our limited face to face resources more effectively and sustainably.
For me it’s another week back in the trenches being told to drag kids in distress through a sped up schedule designed by a virus. I’m not sure how long we can all keep this up, pandemic or no pandemic.
Does education have to be about bricks in the wall? It seems to be what we’re reduced to during this pandemic piled on top of two years of government abuse. This has to end eventually, surely.
I’ve been teaching the engineering design process for the past two weeks to grade 9s in very difficult circumstances. The engineering process underlies all the work we do in our stochastic, tactile technology/engineering program. We aren’t rote learning to the same standardized answer, so blind obedience to processes won’t get us working results. We need to be organized, agile and able to step back and gain perspective in our non-linear problem solving circumstances like any good technician or engineer would when solving a complex, arbitrary problem.
I’m struggling with the half-baked safety plan we seem determined to follow at all costs. Rather than get more frustrated with the optics, politics and bureaucracy that drive it, I thought, “why not apply the engineering process to my intolerable situation?”
ENGINEERING DESIGN: COVID MASKS
ASK:how do we resolve physically untenable policies around masks?
IMAGINE: a Heath Unit/Canada COVID19 compliant masking system that is effective and comfortable (if it isn’t comfortable it isn’t effective)
PLAN: collect data, research how COVID actually works, find existing solutions to best mitigate its spread
CREATE: build a testing system, create a solution based process
EXPERIMENT: try different mask types and materials
IMPROVE: deliver an improved masking policy that is constantly in review
PLANNING: DATA COLLECTION
It got up to 30°C/70% humidity in our it-has-never-worked-properly incorrectly ventilated classroom on Friday, which equates to a humidex temperature feeling like 41°C (that’s 106°F if you’re old school). I was rotating grade 9s outside to demask and breathe. It’s hard to learn when you’re seeing spots and can’t think straight… during a pandemic.
We were building circuits with Arduinos so I built a temperature/humidity sensor, which is how we captured data. Just for giggles I put the sensor on longer wires and put it up inside my mask while I was instructing. Curious about the results?
Inside the too small and tight, restrictive masks we’re required to wear all day every day at school the temperature is 4-5 degrees warmer than the outside air. I was getting readings of 33-35°C inside the mask depending on whether I was breathing in or out. But what gets you is the humidity. Inside the mask it was ranging between 92-97% humidity. Run that through the Canadian Humidex calculator and I’m stewing in what feels like 54°C all day, every day.
If I were in a climate controlled environment like the medical people who wear masks are this would probably be much more manageable, but I’m not.
CONCLUSION: the small, restrictive medical grade ASTM Level 1 masks we’re required to wear might work in a well ventilated hospital, but they don’t work in schools where climate control is a distant dream. When temperatures rise medical grade masks quickly become a liability more than a protection.
PLANNING: ASTM Level 1 Mask RESEARCH:
WHERE & WHY ASTM1 MASKS WORK: If you’re a medical professional working in a dentist, doctor’s office or hospital you’re working in a climate controlled environment that must follow strict guidelines. In that context ASTM1 masks work effectively because the environment is supporting mask use rather than fighting it.
In an uncontrolled environment medical masks are restrictive and can cause discomfort which makes them a liability because people start fidgeting with them.
Staff struggling in uncontrolled climates (ie: most classrooms) resolve their breathing difficulties by breaking many of the rules for safe mask use:
I regularly see staff having to move restrictive medical grade masks around or wearing them with gaps or incorrectly just to get a breath. Wearing a medical grade mask incorrectly is less safe than wearing a properly fitted non-medical grade mask correctly. Discomfort from an improperly mandated masking policy drives this misuse.
PLANNING/RESEARCH: WHEN TO USE ASTM1 MEDICAL MASKS
ASTM1 surgical masks, such as are being provided to teachers, are medical usage masks that work in concert with a variety of other PPE options that teachers haven’t been provided with. This video gives you an example of how medically focused these masks are:
What do ASTM1 medical masks do that a more comfortable, properly fitted non-medical option doesn’t? Not much in the context of a classroom. In a medical environment where a professional is working with COVID19 positive patients, a medical mask would be used in conjunction with a face shield to keep the medical worker safe in a known high risk situation.
“Medical masks are designed to protect against large droplets, splashes or sprays
of bodily fluid or other type of fluid.” (Health News Hub.org). In a medical context these masks provide a valuable level of protection, but an ASTM1 mask by itself isn’t a better barrier to COVID transmission, especially when worn incorrectly.
“It’s unlikely you’ll be infected in public by airborne viral particles.
The real threat is touching an infected surface and then putting your
hand to your face: Frequent hand-washing is a sure way to avoid
COVID-19” (Health News Hub.org) A focus on cleaning surfaces and regular hand-washing would be far more effective than the false protection of a single layer of PPE/incorrectly applied medical mask.
Smaller class sizes, reduced bus loads and more frequent spot cleaning is a far more effective barrier to COVID19 transmission than stipulating a medical grade mask with no other PPE, but it does provide the appearance of greater diligence without the effectiveness and makes uneducated jumpy people think things are being handled diligently.
ASTM1 mask compliance in non-medical settings also puts Ontario’s public education systems at odds with the public health unit and Health Canada masking stipulations:“Due
to critical shortages during the COVID-19 response, we are implementing
and/or proposing a range of strategies to respond to the increased
demand for medical masks”Bins full of them outside every public school in Ontario every day isn’t helping to solve this world-wide shortage, especially when it’s done for optics rather than efficacy.
There are numerous well researched sources of information on mask usage this far into the COVID19 pandemic. Its modes of transmission are known and technology is on hand to mitigate them, yet myths persist, like the idea that a medical mask is somehow a cure-all and significantly ‘safer’ than a correctly fitted cloth mask. Every health agency in the world wouldn’t be advocating non-medical masks if they didn’t work.
PLANNING: RESEARCH: THE LIMITATIONS OF MASK ONLY PPE
“The coronavirus can spread through eyes, just as it can through nose and mouth” (American Academy of Ophthalmology) so demanding medical grade nose and throat protection while requiring no eye protection is wildly inconsistent and dangerously disingenuous. The droplets that a properly sized and fitted cloth mask would stop and that an ATSM1 medical mask is designed to specifically stop 95% of would happen in a situation when a COVID19 positive person coughed or sneezed in your face without wearing a mask themselves, but with no eye protection you’re going to contract it anyway. Rather than pretending to act from a sense of greater protection, more logical and consistent masking policies from the provincial government would not only make educational staff more comfortable but also less likely to contract the virus.
The appearance of medical safety, without the efficacy..
That educational staff are being required to wear poorly fitted and environmentally damaging ATSM1 medical masks at a time when they are vitally needed by people who would be wearing them with a complete set of PPE in an appropriately controlled environment is problematic. The education system seems incapable of understanding or providing a masking solution that aligns with masking requirements everywhere else. We need to stop acting like this is a marketing gimmick and start acting like it’s a medical emergency.
PLANNING: RESEARCH: LACK OF CLARITY AROUND EFFECTIVE MASK USE
All medical mask directions stress a smooth seal with your face to ensure effectiveness, but another wildly inconsistent piece of Ontario education’s approach to mask adoption is demanding ATSM1 medically compliant masks with no direction around facial hair. A beard or moustache that prevents a seal around the nose and mouth makes the mask all but useless, but there has been zero direction on the mandatory removal of facial hair. The CDC as well as other health groups have made suggestions on facial hair that allows for a proper mask fit, which is a challenge. CBC’s piece on it suggests a larger cloth mask would actually be more effective than smaller medical grade mask that won’t cover the beard. Another piece suggests COVID19 droplets spat onto your beard from a virus carrier can live for hours, but wear an ATSM1 mask incorrectly and the powers that be are happy. The only conclusion that can be drawn is that ATSM1 mask usage by Ontario educators is a marketing move and not a medically viable choice. That so many teachers seem to be buying into it is astonishing.
You’ll find a lot of panicky accusations saying this
is a conspiracy theory from early in COVID19, but it should be fairly
obvious that a beard would prevent a ‘tight seal’ as required in any
surgical mask directions.CDC has always recommended shaving for medical professionals wearing medical grade gear.
CONCLUSION:
It appears Ontario public education is using ASTM1 level masks to produce a sense of false protection in the education system. By ignoring the more difficult and expensive medically proven ways of preventing COVID19 spread, such as resolving decades long HVAC issues in schools and not providing the full range of PPE required to provide medical levels of protection, Ontario’s pick-and-choose safety approach with an emphasis on medical mask use without any other criteria is both ineffective and misleading.
CREATE/EXPERIMENT/IMPROVE: FINDING A MORE EFFECTIVE MASKING SOLUTION
For staff with breathing and size issues the Chinese manufactured disposable ATSM1 masks are all but ineffective. A policy that allows for public health/Health Canada compliant masks would not only produce staff in less physical distress, but also provide greater safety for everyone at this difficult time.
SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS FOR MASKS:
Must fit the wearer’s face (current one size fits all masks do not fit all user faces)
Masks must be comfortable enough for 150 minute continuous usage scenarios
Masks must be breathable enough that users aren’t constantly pulling them away to breathe
EXPERIMENT:
Purchase a variety of mask types and sizes and experiment with them to find effective fit and duration results. In a medical situation professionals choose a mask from a selection of sizes and types. They aren’t all handed the same sized and shaped mask as educators have been. By experimenting with appropriate fit and breath-ability options a more effective masking solution would reveal itself. None of this happened in preparing for the new school year. This doesn’t appear to be happening now either.
IMPROVE: COVID19 IS STILL BEING UNDERSTOOD SO RESPONSIVE CHANGE SHOULD BE BUILT INTO ANY PLAN
With COVID19’s transmission still under review by major players like the CDC, the safest route would have been to provide remote learning for the majority of families so that social isolation bubbles could persist. Schools should have only been opened up to students in need or for specific classes that require face to face instruction.
A more cautious and medically researched approach to this school year would have prevented the current increases in cases, but the provincial government picked what it liked in terms of medical advice and ignored the rest, while using medical mask usage to whitewash any questions of efficacy.
The latest data suggests that droplet transmission happens when people are in close proximity to one another. In this scenario it is much more important that staff and students have properly fitted, comfortable masks than it is to have a splash ready ATSM1 medical grade mask.
Beyond a metre the droplets tend to fall out of the air, though this is in question too. If airborne transmission can happen from infected droplets that hang in the air for hours, the only logical choice would be to shut down face to face schooling again as a single infected person in any school would be spreading COVID19 indiscriminately anywhere they travel whenever they remove or incorrectly wear their mask. Even a properly fitted mask is up to 95% efficient so COVID19 transmission would occur anyway with enough exposure.
Following WHO’s current understanding that COVID19 is most easily spread in close quarters, it’s vitally important that staff and students have comfortable, properly fitted masks that they aren’t constantly touching and making ineffective.
IMPROVE: A FLEXIBLE, MEDICALLY DRIVEN MASK POLICY FOR ONTARIO SCHOOLS
By experimenting with a variety of sizes and types of masks Ontario education could create a more effective masking policy that better protects its staff and students.
By closely following medical research on transmission and management, Ontario education could provide timely updates to its masking and PPE policies that keep people safe.
Larger, systemic issues like poor classroom ventilation and class sizes will have far more efficacy than a simplistic and misleading one-size-doesn’t-fit-all masking policy. Some boards (mine included) have taken steps to reduce class sizes but in some cases the Ministry intervened and prevented boards from creating smaller class sizes. In our case the cohorted solution to class sizes has downloaded all of the effort in making it work on classroom teachers which is creating marathon sessions of face to face classes while teachers are simultaneously expected to manage the other half of the class online. This is twice the preparation and work along with the impossible expectations of being in two places at once – all day, every day. Doing this while wearing an ill-fitting mask with breath-ability issues in a poorly ventilated classroom is a combination that will hurt many employees. Rather than enforcing a misleading, half-finished medical masking policy, a focus on these other urgent matters would produce better outcomes for all involved.
“Dr. Sten Vermund, infectious-disease epidemiologist and dean of the Yale
School of Public Health, he told us he trimmed his own facial hair down
“so that the mask could completely cover my beard.” The key, he added,
is to make sure there are no gaps and that the mask is hugging your
skin, not your facial hair.”
A well written article by a pile of doctors that explains how viral transmission happens. An airborne virus is a terrible thing. Whether or not COVID19 is airborne is still in contention, but the latest from CDC suggests it is.
“Currently, WHO guidance
considers surgical masks to be adequately protective for healthcare
staffers working with potential COVID-19 patients, and advises using N95
masks in limited situations, such as when intubating patients, which is
known to generate small particles from deep in the lungs. Healthcare
workers who follow these recommendations have been generally protected
against the virus, WHO notes.”
“A dual-layered cloth mask is sufficient to protect people in public settings. It’s unlikely you’ll be infected in public by airborne viral particles. The real threat is touching an infected surface and then putting your hand to your face: Frequent hand-washing is a sure way to avoid COVID-19”
“medical masks protect people from the wearer’s respiratory emissions. But it’s designed to protect against large droplets, splashes or sprays of bodily fluid or other type of fluid.”
“The challenge before many healthcare workers in combatting the disease
would be a daunting task unless proper administrative, clinical, and
physical measures are taken within the healthcare settings”
– wouldn’t hurt if educational administration followed proper measures too…
This is a WIRED story about tech software startups in the Denver area. In it a man who has an idea about buying insurance online has become a ‘TECH CEO’ even though he has no idea of what it is he is actually building. With no background in technology hardware or software development, this guy is trying to launch a tech-startup with an idea and little else.
The quotes below are from the article. The bolding is mine…
ROSS DIEDRICH HAD gone pale and raw-boned. The CEO of a year-old startup in Denver, he’d stay at his office until the middle of the night, go home and sleep for about five hours, then chug a spinach smoothie and start again. He was just 27 years old, but he felt wrung out.
He still didn’t have even a basic version of the software that he could demo—an “MVP” in coder parlance, for minimum viable product. Chris was still holding down his full-time job; he didn’t want to quit until Covered had some funding in hand. The lead development engineer that Ross had brought on, a big, quiet nerd named Jonathan Baughn, was juggling a bunch of projects and wasn’t as available as Ross had expected. But Ross didn’t want to put too much pressure on Baughn. As a contractor, he was within his rights to work for others. A junior software engineer Baughn had brought to the project, Reyna DeLogé, tried to manage on her own, but they kept blowing past their self-imposed deadlines.
He navigated to the demo site, typed in his password, and tapped on the mousepad. Then he tapped again. Nothing happened. The demo was broken. “What the heck is going on here?” he murmured.
I’d feel wrung out too if I was building something that I had no idea of how it works and kept blowing through deadlines. Demoing it and having it fail to launch and then having no idea why would be exhausting.
I would posit that you need at least a passing acquaintance with the technology you’re pedalling before you try to claim ownership over it. An automotive executive who has no idea what is under the hood would be a poor manager. A head chef who doesn’t know how to cook would be a poor manager. A general who has never stepped foot on a battlefield would be a poor general. A principal who was a disaster in the classroom would be a poor principal.
The film Steve Jobs does a good job of examining the contradiction of a manager who has no engineering skill:
Where Jobs diverges from the disaster described in the WIRED article above is that he surrounds himself with the most knowledgeable engineers – an orchestra of expertise, and then focuses on having them produce their best possible work. An argument could be made for a manager like this, but not at the expense of engineering, never at the expense of engineering.
Your ideal manager must have some technical background if they are to work with skilled labour. In the clip above Woz tells Jobs that he can’t do anything, which isn’t really true; they met and bonded over their shared knowledge of electronics. Jobs may not have been able to engineer the devices he helped create, but he was very aware of the technology and how it worked. With that knowledge he was able to gather experts because he could appreciate their expertise.
A manager who is only an expert in management is best when not managing people who perform skilled work, whether that be engineering or teaching or any other complex, skills based process. Matt Crawford does a great job of examining this in The World Beyond Your Head. In the book Crawford distinguishes between the skilled labourer who modifies or ‘jigs’ their environment to better perform their profession and the unskilled script follower who does what they’re told in a prefabricated production line. Being free to manipulate the physical environment in order to perform your expertise is a foundation stone of professionalism in Crawford’s mind. A lot of the downward pressure you see on worker valuation in education and employment in general is because of the Taylorism of workplaces into script following routines. Making the end goal of education a result in a standardized test plays to this thinking perfectly. In those prefabricated and abstracted workplaces skill isn’t a requirement, obedience is.
An effective manager of skilled labour acknowledges and cultivates expertise in their people. You can’t do that without having some kind of handle on that skillset. Being oblivious to how reality works and managing complex, skilled labourers who work in that demanding environment like they are a production line is the single greatest point of failure in management, unless your goal is to chase out skilled labour and turn your organization into a mechanical process where the people in it are little more that scripted robots. There are financial arguments for that, but they aren’t very humane. We might not perform as many repetitive job tasks in the future, but if we remove human expertise from the workplace it will damage us as a species, and any financial gain from it would be short lived.
