Tag: education

Last summer we went to England and picked up a SIM card and an astonishing 30gigs of data for about $38.  We currently pay about $35 a month for 0.5gigs/month in Canada – prior to that we were paying over $80 a month for a gig each as part of a package deal.  For that month in the UK we felt like we were drinking from the fire hose.  We turned our phone off drip data and discovered what modern smartphones are really capable of.  Canadians are so used to breathing their data through a straw that anything else seems like a trick.  You have to wonder what that’s doing to our global competitiveness in a connected world.


I’m currently out in the Maritimes and managed to run out of data in a single day when the ferry wifi I was on crapped out and Facebook decided to pump a high def video through 4G instead of waiting.  Facebook takes no responsibility for this (I found an option 3 menus deep to prevent it happening again), neither does my phone manufacturer or Canadian telecom, the people actually responsible for this mess.  Canadians live in a constant state of data starvation as they enjoy one of the poorest cost to performance telecoms in the world.


Canadian Telecom Protectionism
Canada Sky-high Data Prices
Canadian prices dropping but still among the highest
CRTC Confirms Canadians pay more

What’s interesting about data starvation is what it does to the quality and focus of your thinking.  Rather than spontaneously share what you’re doing, you’re spending time and energy wondering if and when you should.  Instead of collaborating and connecting you’re intentionally isolating your thinking.  Instead of creating and expressing you’re silent.  As someone who uses digital connectedness for professional and creative communications, I wonder how many good ideas are forgotten and lost in Canada’s data desert.


I was talking about this with Alanna and suggested a way out:  don’t believe that what you’re doing needs to be shared in the moment you’re doing it.  That lets you send data when you’re able, but she made a good point: don’t regret your impulse to share and speak your experience as it happens… doing otherwise diminishes the quality of that shared experience, but diminished quality is our default setting in the Canadian data desert.


I got into an argument with someone recently about reducing carbon emissions.  His angle was that Canada has unique circumstances (large country, difficult climate, low population), and so shouldn’t have to participate in carbon reduction, even if it is a world-wide emergency.  My response was that every country has unique circumstances and challenges and if we use that as an excuse to not do anything we’re all doomed.  The same arguement has been applied to Canada’s telecom sector – large distances, challenging geography, low population, but rather than develop emerging technologies to try and resolve these challenges, Canada has adopted a protectionist system that looks after big business profit lines and creates one of the widest digital divides in the world.


The digital divide is deep and wide in Canada
“income disparity plays a role in determining whether or not Canadians are connected online. Findings show that 97.7% of households that reside within the highest income quartile have high speed internet access, while only 58% of households that reside within the lowest income quartile possess access to the internet at home”
Even relatively wealthy students in my school have trouble finding reliable high speed internet because Canada doesn’t put much focus on last mile connectivity.  We have fibre backbones, but when it comes to connecting people to them, especially in rural circumstances, we don’t bother.  This isn’t even a particularly rural example, the students I’m talking about live less than half an hour from Google headquarters in Waterloo, but that’s how limited Canada’s final mile ICT infrastructure is.


My argument on the climate emergency is similar to my argument for Canadian telecom:  this is an engineering challenge that Canada as a whole can benefit from if we resolve it ourselves.  The technology we develop to help solve our unique challenges will be so efficient that the rest of the world will eagerly buy into it.  What we’re doing instead is the worst kind of hypocrisy as we wait to see what others develop and then buy into it as cheaply and unequitably as we can.


There is a lot of buzz about 5g wireless standards and how these can revolutionize our lives.  This high speed connection prototcol will allow us to communicate with each other in a richness (think virtual reality and other high bandwidth media) that is simply impossible at the moment, but not in Canada.  Most of the country won’t see it at all, and if you’re unlucky enough to live in a city that has it, your 1gig a month Canadian data plan would use up all its data in less than a second – yep, it’s that quick.  Perhaps Canadians can go on holiday to countries that are actually well connected in order to enjoy this emerging technology:  a data holiday.


As we’ve moved across the Maritime provinces this summer, the effectiveness of Canada’s ICT infrastructure has been cast in a rather harsh light.  Less than half the restaurants that offer connectivity actually have it working.  When they do the throughput is often slow to non-existent.  In a country that doesn’t offer usable celllular networks (which themselves came in and out of effectiveness) due to  some of the harshest data caps in the world, the wifi pool can become a cost effective way to draw customers into your business, but most small businesses can’t seem to manage even this simple piece of ICT infrastructure.


This really came to a point on Cape Breton Island in northern Nova Scotia where we had no cell service and no wifi at the hotel (though it advertised it as a service).  There is a part of me that enjoyed that disconnection.  Suddenly I couldn’t work on my Cisco Netacademy Cyber Operations course and I certainly couldn’t teleconference in to our weekly meeting with our teacher.  There’s something to be said for giving up on digital data entirely and disappearing into the world, at least for a few days…

What was strange was returning to the half world of lousy Canadian ICT infrastructure.  In this broken landscape I somehow managed to blow through my entire data plan in a single morning, probably as a result of trying to use the hotel’s not-working wifi the night before.  We got to the ferry to PEI and got on that wifi only to have it flake out on us.  My phone, still trying to catch up on all the things I’d been trying to do in Cape Breton before I gave up and turned it off managed to burn through my entire data plan in a single morning when the wifi dropped.  In talking to my wireless provider I got the typical Canadian telecom response, “yep, that’s too bad, you’ll see a big data charge on your next bill.”


Being completely off ICT infrastructure is rewarding in its own right – it’s one of the reasons I ride a motorcycle, to be off line, but trying to be on it while travelling in Canada is exhausting, and frustrating, and points to a future where the world will be collaborating and helping one another while too many Canadians don’t bother because of the cost and difficulty involved.  We really need to start doing better, especially in that final mile infrastructure and in helping businesses provide usable and cost effective connectivity for their clients.  So much marketing is word of mouth now on social media that you’d be crazy not to apply marketing budget to stable connectivity in order to encourage people to spread the word about what you’re doing.  The federal and provincial governments should be supporting municipalities in helping their businesses get connected effectively. It’s 2019 for goodness sakes!


LINKS:
The digital divide in Canada (StatsCan)
Northern Connections: Broadband & Canada’s digital divide
CATA Alliance: advancing Canada’s competitive innovation ranking
CWTA: the network is fast where it exists, but poor final mile and data capping prevent it working for too many Canadians.
Canadian Government and Industry push for 5G (but only for city dwellers)

Harry Potter Wizards Unite:  my wife is playing this at the moment (think PokemonGo but with Harry Potter), and loves it.  It got her walking again after cancer surgery and keeps her connected with people as she recovers.  On our lousy Canadian telecom she managed to blow through a month of data in a week on it.  We’ve since finessed it to not cost us $50 a month in data, but software developed around the world isn’t defaulted to run on Canada’s ‘unique’ and heavily capped wireless infrastructure.  I imagine Canadians are paying tens of thousands of dollars in overages playing this game, so that’ll be yet another emerging medium we can’t participate in properly.




It makes me wonder if Canadians are going to end up paying data overages constantly once the internet of things gets going and our fridges and washing machines are constantly using data.  IoT, something else most Canadians are going to end up turning off.

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It’s taken me until Sunday to be able to talk normally again after week one of face to face teaching in a pandemic.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: our board has done an incredible job of charting a path through this poorly planned and funded return to school during a medical emergency, but this has still been one of the worst weeks of my teaching career and not because of all the barriers to teaching.

Top of list are the mandatory medical grade face masks I’m told we have to wear (though the Ministry says, “All staff in schools must wear masks, with reasonable exceptions for medical conditions”).  With a head circumference well beyond the human average, these masks are too small for me and leave me at the end of each day with marks on my face, sinuses and ears.  My head is so big we had to bring my son in for testing for encephalitis because he got my big head.  The specialist immediately said everything was ok when he saw me and realized big heads run in the family.  There is nothing worse than being atypical in a pandemic when every system contracts to only suit the average (that’s a theme).

In addition to not fitting my big head, these masks are very restrictive in terms of breathing, especially if you’re working in a poorly ventilated south facing classroom that hits thirty plus degrees celsius on even a cool day when it has 30 or so computers and twenty people in it.  Being a tech shop I’m also moving equipment around.  In setting up the lab I moved over two thousand pounds of computer parts into place.  Being required to wear a mask that’s too small and restrictive while doing physical work in a hot room had me seeing stars multiple times this week.  The Ministry states that reasonable exceptions are allowed but everywhere I turned this week (union, admin, online) told me to just wear the damned mask.  My biggest anxiety is returning to another week of feeling like I’m being waterboarded by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I have a history of sinus issues.  My sinuses are so atypical the specialist who did my deviated septum surgery two years ago (so much blood!) had never seen anything like them and was forwarding them on to researchers.  I can breath much better after the surgery, but wearing a high filtration medical quality mask like that for six hours a day means I resort to mouth breathing almost constantly while wearing it, so I leave school every day with a sore throat and inflamed sinuses.  When I expressed this I was told to just wear the mask like everyone else.  My wife is severely immune compromised and I come home every day to immediately put my clothes in the washer and take a scalding shower.  The last thing I want to do is contract this but not being able to breath properly while having to talk more loudly through a mask is destroying me.  There are sports filtration masks I’d be willing to purchase myself but all I keep getting told is to shut up and wear the mask.

Being the only person wearing a medical grade mask in a room of 16 grade nines wearing everything from homemade cloth masks to bandanas, I’m left wondering at the veracity of this demanding compliance.  A number of other staff are also struggling with this one size fits all zero flexibility approach.  They’ve told me that they (variously) pull the mask off to get fresh air if they’re short of breath and/or fold the bottom of the mask up or fit it poorly so it lets air in and out, which is like not wearing a mask at all.  If the only solution is to wear this thing so poorly that it doesn’t do anything then I think we need to rethink our one-size-fits-all policy.

Beyond the mandatory waterboarding mask, the week went well but mainly because I’m making unsustainable catches at the wall all day every day.  All of the IT tech we had in the lab was in the middle of being used when we were shut down at March Break and it was in much worse shape than I realized.  I spent most of the week triaging and rapidly repairing broken computers so that grade 9s could use them, which isn’t sustainable.  A diving catch is a spectacular thing but if that’s all you’re doing all game you won’t be playing the next week.

I got a really good piece of advice from our spec-ed instructor when I was at Nipissing University for teacher’s college: “your first job is to be ready to come in to work again tomorrow.”  This often gets forgotten in the teacher martyr complex and I see people (myself included) throwing themselves into unsustainable situations that end up preventing them from working effectively the next day.  This whole week felt like that.  Every time I looked for support it wasn’t there and the weight I was carrying got that bit more impossible.

Tuesday was the worst day.  After spending all morning trying to get broken tech working (for my classroom and half a dozen other classrooms in the school), and then struggling to get all the grade 9s through safety training because at least two of them are functionally illiterate (which raises interesting questions around the legalities of dragging them through purely text based online safety training) the teacher who was supposed to come in and provide relief saw how busy I was and said, “if you don’t need me I’ll go” instead of showing some initiative while watching me try to be in three places at once.

This is another example of the system checking a box rather than providing actual support.  Our union has argued for us to get relieved during our nearly three hour marathon face to face sessions (two times a day, thank-you) and I appreciate that effort, but the teacher coming in isn’t qualified or knowledgeable in my field of study and is little more than a babysitter who can’t even legally oversee hands-on shop work.  The week before we were told by admin to just skip our prep/relief and keep working if that’s what we wanted to do, but that is neither sustainable nor compliant with the contract we’ve agreed to.  Being asked if they can just leave and take a 45 minute break from giving people breaks while I’m obviously struggling both physically, mentally and emotionally was… (how can I put this professionally?)… aggravating.

Under normal circumstances I’d have sent the two functionally illiterate kids down to resource who would have walked them through the training one on one.  I can’t do one on one when I have twenty other grade nines all needing my attention at once and while I’m responsible for safe hands on work with live electricity and tools in a technology class.  I can’t send them to resource though because our resource room has been closed and all our spec-ed specialists are now teaching regular classes online.  You don’t want to have an IEP or learning challenges during a pandemic, all the spec-ed support has evaporated.

Anytime I’ve asked for someone to assist me with something they’ve reflected it back on me to do.  If a student needs special supports it’s entirely on me to do that.  If a student doesn’t have digital access at home it’s entirely on me to do that.  Towards the end of the week I had board purchasing asking questions about things from last year that I had neither the bandwidth nor knowledge to answer so I just ignored the emails.  When you’re drowning you don’t go looking for more water.

If you’re operating an engine it will have an operating range.  You work in that range as a balance of efficiency, longevity and performance.  There are moments when you might push past the 100% mark in order to get a burst of power, but doing so means you’ve just shortened the life of that engine.  The diving catch made by a baseball player is one of those 120% moments where you do something unsustainable to make the catch, but you can’t keep doing that all day every day, it’ll break you.

Even with all the barriers to teaching thrown up by this pandemic and this particular government I had a good week instructionally.  I was able to differentiate to different students and pretty much everyone in the class was able to do something they’d never done before by the end of the week (build their own PC).  That one on one work with students learning their strengths and developing skills is what I love about my work, and I’m good at it.

I’m unable to do IT again next week with a new class because we don’t have any working tech left, so I’m doing backflips this weekend trying to work out how to teach electronics in two places in two different ways at once.  Our two cohort system means I’m teaching remotely to one cohort while I’m teaching face to face with the other all day every day (they flip).  It’s twice as much prep but as you’ve read above we don’t really have any prep time.  They gave me a teacher who isn’t qualified and doesn’t have any background in my subject to cover the online learning, but that’s just more people I have to direct.  I asked if we could just collapse my class into a single morning cohort then I could be the afternoon online teacher.  The class is only 22 so it wouldn’t be huge and it means I’m not buried alive and trying to be in two places at once.  You can guess the answer: it wouldn’t look good.  They don’t want any pictures of full classes out there.  It makes sense pedagogically and in terms of staff work load, and with appropriate safety precautions there would be minimum risk of pandemic transmission, but if you don’t have optics on your side in a pandemic you have nothing.  I’m not the only teacher who asked for that.

In addition to trying to generate a week of prep every day both remotely and face to face, I’m also trying to get more IT tech in so I can do that unit with my second class.  Getting parts in a pandemic is challenging.  I’m hoping I can work it out and RCTO has been fantastic in getting back to me and making it happen, but that’s just another of those unsustainable balls I’m juggling that’s up in the air somewhere.

I can manage the avalanche of prep, but doing it while in physical distress all day because of an inflexible mask policy means I’m not going to finish this semester on my feet.  I have to find a way to engineer a solution to this because no one around me will.  The most frustrating part is that the solution is obvious but in a pandemic flexibility and individual needs are the first thing we burn.

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Originally published on DUSTY WORLD, September, 2018…

Last year I attended the FITC digital creatives conference in Toronto for the first time.  I teach a senior high school software engineering class where we focus on project management in terms of game design.  We use Unity to develop interactive 3d games, sometimes in virtual reality.  We use Blender to learn how to 3d model.  I attended FITC to try and get some perspective on how we can use current industry standards in our work, but this conference did much more than that.


I thought I was up at the pointy end of 3d computer generated imaging know-how, we do some exceptional work in class and many of our grads have gone on to work in the industry, but FITC floored me with how CGI 3d modelling has insinuated itself into marketing.  The first presentation that made me question everything I thought I knew was by The Mill and their Blackbird car.  This digital studio has revolutionized how automakers advertise.  The next time you’re watching a car advertisement, ask yourself if you’re actually seeing the car:

 

From a media literacy perspective, if you aren’t aware that what you’re watching isn’t real, are you really media literate?  This can lead to all sorts of strange situations where all of us are media illiterate and at the mercy of the people who aren’t:

Made this week by one of our new grade 11s.  Watching an already talented artist take these digital tools and run with them is one of the best parts of my job.

I’d originally attended FITC to make sure we were current on 3d technology.  I think we’re doing a remarkably good job of that in our high school program, but what I was unaware of was just how many 3d modelling jobs there are beyond the film and video game industries.  There are a number of companies now that focus entirely on the very lucrative marketing industry with this technology.  I was able to bring that back to my students and offer up a new avenue for our talented digital artists to consider when they graduate.


I haven’t touched on many of the other surprises from FITC.  Relatively new jobs like computer animation that I thought were secure are in doubt.  Other skills that I never considered (traditional visual arts skills, mime and creative thinking) might be much more valuable in our digital future than I thought they might.  This kind of information makes me want to diversify my software class and encourage greater artistic influence and experimentation.  Ideally, we should be learning these digital tools in order to amplify and express the creativity and complex thinking my students are capable of.  Technically proficiency isn’t an end in itself, we learn the tools to make our thoughts tangible.

 

We’ve got one of the top 2d animators in Ontario in our grade 12 software engineering class.  He’s pretty handy in 3d as well!

The media literacy side of it still bothers me.  I’m teaching computer engineering so my focus is there, but so few people are interested in learning how this technology works.  I have a pretty healthy program and I work with less than ten percent of our school population.  Many schools in Ontario don’t offer any digital technologies at all.  In my senior programs I’m lucky to have one or two females in the class.  Tech tends to be male heavy and digital tech is no different.  That gender disparity means a digital literacy disparity too.


I see every person in the school using digital technology every day, yet its a curriculum afterthought.   I’ve long argued for digital technology to be a required fluency, especially if we’re going to use it in every classroom and throughout our days.  If you don’t understand the technology it will influence you in ways you won’t even notice.  You’ll also waste a lot of time not doing it properly.  My experiences at FITC this year have opened yet another angle on digital fluency in terms of media literacy.  If you’re watching something you think is real but isn’t, you’re the sucker that PT Barnum and modern marketing dreams about.

If you’re at ECOO #BIT18 this year I’ll be presenting on the many surprises I found at FITC and how you might start to bring 3d modelling or at least an understanding of it into your classroom.  Hope to see you there.





Here’s the presentation:

 

 

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I stumbled across this interesting article on curiosity and the neuroscience associated with  it:

“Encourage students to chase their own interests, cultivate curiosity.  It fires up brains and makes them better at remembering new information.  It also engages students in the best possible way.”


“When we’re hungry for answers, our brain activity changes in ways that help us retain new information. For one, the curious mind engages processes and brain regions associated with anticipating a reward. We want to learn more because the answers are satisfying. In addition, the hippocampus, a memory hub, ramps up activity, preparing to store information. The more we want to know an answer, research suggests, the more memorable it becomes.”

If you’re not a teacher and are a big fan of the new Ontario government’s ‘teach ’em like we used ta‘ approach to learning, this is what we call pedagogy.  There is a lot of neuroscience that directs modern pedagogy in the classroom.  Put in simple terms, we don’t just make this stuff up; the education system spends a lot of time and effort understanding how learning works best and then training teachers to work with that.  Scientific research guides modern curriculum building, at least until right wing populist ideology dislodges it in Ontario.


Showing a teacher how curiosity can be used to amplify retention and encourage a focused approach to new knowledge acquisition is pure gold.  I fear the ‘take it back to basics‘ stance of our new government means this neuroscientific research is ignored in favour of the conservative reductive approach of rote memorization and zero differentiation of instruction.  It’s a common conservative belief that everyone (especially in the public sector) needs to suffer in order to show they are trying, but don’t expect anyone to learn anything in an environment like that.  Contrary to this grossly simplified view of education (in that case advocated by an American with no teaching experience), we’re not in it to punish anyone.  You don’t learn well when you’re being subdued.  You don’t teach particularly well in those circumstances either.

Some other gems in from that article:
“teachers can be models of how to be comfortable with uncertainty”


“When we’re hungry for answers, our brain activity changes in ways that help us retain new information. For one, the curious mind engages processes and brain regions associated with anticipating a reward. We want to learn more because the answers are satisfying. In addition, the hippocampus, a memory hub, ramps up activity, preparing to store information. The more we want to know an answer, research suggests, the more memorable it becomes.”


***


An interesting connection with that piece on curiosity and information retention was this article in The Guardian about the age of skim reading. The author draws some interesting connections between Western society’s rise of populist regimes and the new lack of empathy and critical analysis in the population:


“The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.”

If you’re wondering why we’re suddenly faced with these shocking politicians who seem out  of sync with the world around them, it isn’t them that’s out of sync, it’s you (if you’re reading this you aren’t the new normal).  The conservative ‘you must suffer to pay the private sector’s bills‘ thinking plays nicely with the lack of patience, empathy and curiosity we’ve been cooking for the past fifteen years in the incessant digital noise of the attention economy.  It’s easy to blame this on information and communication technology, but the tech itself has allowed us to make enormous scientific and technical advances.  Smart people have leveraged it to great advantage  It’s the attention economy that grew out of it that is causing problems for everyone else.

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I’m watching the new season of my current favourite sci-fi show, The Expanse.  It’s about the next couple of centuries where Terrans develop the technology to move out into the solar system, but rather than the Star Trek angle that completely ignores the nastiest aspects of human nature, The Expanse imagines a near future with technology advances but none of the social evolution of the Trek universe – it’s a politically messy, self-serving future, much like our present.  It’s something I’m starting to think we’ll never get to.

I’m also spending the day today putting our yard and house back together after a wind storm swept through here, and that got me thinking about all this technology we’re so proud off.  If it gets a bit windy, it all goes away.  After a couple of big gusts yesterday there was no internet and no power.  I was unable to deliver attendance data for my classes at the end of the day, let alone get information on what was happening.

 

We ignore data and facts.

At the height of the wind the local cell tower was down, meaning no information or electricity at all.  In the meantime (and when it works), I’m watching the news closely as the competition we’re supposed to be travelling to in a couple of weeks in Fredericton is in peril because the city is under water.  We’re ever so proud of our vaunted technology, but if it gets windy, or if waters run high, everything stops.  The real irony in this is that our fossil fuel powered society is what’s prompting all this extreme weather.  Even our supposedly green tech is manufactured using fossil fuel based manufacturing.  Our technology doesn’t allow us to control our environment, it provokes it to attack us.


There is this thing called the Kardashev Scale.  If you’re ever thinking how smart the bi-pedal apes are on the third rock from the sun, this scale will give you some perspective.  A level one society is one that harnesses the resources of an entire planet.  We’re not even close to that.  Carl Sagan suggested human society is at about a 0.7 on the way to being able to harness planetary power, but I think that’s wildly optimistic.  Our technology isn’t on its way to managing planetary processes, in many cases it’s prompting the planetary environment to violence – it’s the opposite of control.  There are some cases of sustainable (ie: non-aggravating) human technology, but since we base most of what we produce on fossil fuels and unsustainable manufacturing, it’s hard to say much of any of our technology is actually on its way to sustainable global resource management.  Our stubborn unwillingness to orientate ourselves in that direction is the problem, not our intelligence or technical capability.

When you get up into level 2 your society can manage the energy of an entire solar system.  We’re millennia away from that even assuming we pivoted today and actually worked toward sustainable global management that would allow us to thrive as a civilization long enough to develop it.  The way we’re currently going, we’ll probably cause global environmental upheaval before we’re likely to even establish a foothold in space (by that I mean permanent human habitation off-world, we haven’t even done that yet).  The environmental problems we cause now will eventually produce resource depletion that will result in war.  We love a good war to cap off our own bad habits.  Level 3 (effective galactic resource management and level 4 (universal/pan dimensional resource management) are so far beyond our short sighted, barely evolved minds that they beggar belief.

Meanwhile, here I am about to nail unsustainably manufactured aluminum siding back on to my wood framed house that was built with unsustainable lumber.  We have more in common with squirrels building nests than we do with even a level one civilization, except what the squirrels build isn’t burning a hole in the world.  They’re closer to a level one civilization than we are.


All the other unsustainably built, fossil fuel powered houses in my neighborhood are also missing bits and pieces.  Shortly crews of people will arrive in gas powered trucks to fix these problems.  That very process will further heat up the only world we’re capable of living on at the moment, making future weather violence even more inevitable.  We’ll be lucky to get out into the expanse at all.

Wind storm freak you out?  Don’t worry, it’ll be back to business as usual on Monday…

 

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Doesn’t matter how experienced you are in unprecedented times…

This reflection might come out as a firehose of frustration, but this year in Ontario’s public education system has been one for the ages.  After a springtime of flat footed confusion nothing seems to have happened in the summer as the government kept moving the goalposts on what school openings would look like.  School boards have been left to scramble.  We start tomorrow and I have no idea how it’s going to go.  Some people are hanging on so tight their fingers are going to break while others have already taken a big step back.  My magic powers are bloody-mindedness and empathy.  I’m not particularly brilliant or erudite, but I can take a hit and always get back up again, and I care, which is good because we’ve been pummelled senseless in the past few weeks by chaos and the attendant system think that has arisen to try and control it.

*****

The metaphors are flying thick and fast this year as we struggle to launch Ontario’s public school system.  Tens of thousands of adults are trying to put new processes in place to protect millions of children after the provincial government offered little in the way of central organization and then played shell games with funding all summer.  Most recently they’ve paused everything else while half finished plans to open public schools continue to roll out.

While the premier mocked our union president for having an English degree the rest of us were doing his job for him: creating a plan that will (hopefully) protect staff and students from an ongoing pandemic we still don’t really understand.  Will it work?  Worldwide school reopenings, especially if they aren’t centrally organized and properly funded, cause large spikes in this easily spreadable contagion.  Some countries have managed it by pooling resources and working with all their partners closely to leverage everything at their disposal.  Partnership and teamwork aren’t something Doug Ford’s government comprehends so we’re attempting to open schools in Ontario in the least successful manner possible.

With the meta-framework of Ontario’s public education system being held hostage by a government intent on privatizing it, it’s a wonder the system works locally it all.  It has certainly struggled.  With the COVID19 pandemic piled on top I can say, hand on heart, that this has been one of the worst years to teach in Ontario in its history, but we persevere because education matters.  The only people telling you otherwise want to use and abuse you.

At the local level setting up for this school year has been like running a marathon where they keep changing the course and making it longer, while handing you bricks to carry; it feels like running a marathon no one wants to see you finish.  I know what I’m being asked to do is for the common good, but at some point (which we may have already passed), so much will be piled on that the basic functionality of the classroom (teaching, remember?) won’t be any better than in remote/elearning.

After six months of lockdown everyone is longing for face to face interaction.  I’m feeling it too, but in the drive to do that we’ve lost the plot.  When we started back we were told not to worry about curriculum and just make sure the kids are OK.  I understand the sentiment but the places that do that are called daycares and I didn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of my life to become qualified to work in day care.  Public education is one of the most powerful human being enhancers we’ve created.  Along with publicly funded healthcare it’s the beacon a society sends out to show that it is enlightened.  When our citizens are healthy and educated our country benefits in every way.  This isn’t anything as shady as economics which thrives on disempowerment and privilege, though health and education powers our economy too.  Strong public services that maximize our citizens’ potential is what civilization means.  All the other things (art, technology, medicine, economics) grow in this fertile soil.  We so often get this backwards.

The pandemic has cast a harsh light on the many social mechanisms that cause inequity and in the past decade Ontario has constantly chased economic gain while cutting the public systems that enable it.  Since 2010 Ontario police have experienced double digit pay raises, they are the only public service to see this kind of funding.  Meanwhile defund the police has become a cry to action during the pandemic because police are the hand of systemic racism and inequality in Canada.

Our board has since relaxed the hangout and chill stance and is encouraging curriculum and skills development but any teacher worth their salt knows how Maslow would feel about this.

Knowing that basic needs have to be met before we go after the higher cognitive functioning needed to learn effectively is probably why people at the board office were pushing for a relationship focused quadmester.  Schools have always tried to fill that gap between how poorly a society treats its disenfranchised citizens and the privilege others benefit from, but COVID19 has widened that breach to such a point that it’s impossible for a headless, underfunded public education system to come close to crossing that bridge in this crisis.  I’m starting to feel that the people in charge want to fill that gap with our bodies.

We’ve been buried in wordy presentations and piles of emails dictating our new normal which isn’t normal at all.  Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it you can expect it to change.  Admin are as exhausted as everyone else as we all madly dance to this insane tune.  While the onslaught of instructions, signs and rules continues from on high I’m actually expected to be face to face with students (but not really, we’re all socially distanced and behind masks) all day every day.  While that’s going on I’m also supposed to be monitoring and running elearning for the other cohort because our board’s solution to massive class sizes was to have every teacher being in two places at once.

There are stories of classrooms stuffed full of students in Ontario this fall during a pandemic.  Since the Ministry left it to each board to decide how they would proceed, each has gone in a different direction.  Each plan has its own benefits and disadvantages based on no central planning and inconsistent funding support.  In our board they’ve cut any class over twenty students into two cohorts.  The students who are bussed come in in the morning and the walking students come in in the afternoon, but while I’m face to face with my half classes I’m also supposed to be providing material and managing elearning for the other half.

This approach has the benefit of not overloading classrooms with bodies and so takes steps to mitigate the health risks we’re all facing, but it has its own problems.  I’m now trying to be in two places at once.  They given me a teacher who was on prep to oversee the online work, but this teacher is unqualified to teach my subject, knows little about it and isn’t expected to do anything tangible.  What it comes down to is make-work because we’re not trusted to help the school function without being over scheduled and micromanaged into the ground.  I understand the impulse as a few people will use not being in class as an excuse to do as little as possible, but the vast majority would be able to fill these gaps much more effectively using their own initiative, as I’ve already seen many teachers do.  But initiative, like differentiation, is dead in our micro-managed pandemic classrooms.

Our prep time was also cut in this format where we’re teaching face to face (kinda) all day, so now another teacher is coming in to cover us while we take our prep, except that teacher isn’t qualified to teach my subject either.  They aren’t even tech qualified so students can’t keep doing hands on work when face to face (which is the whole point of being face to face) unless I let my prep go and just stay in the room, which was what admin suggested our entire tech department do.  So, downloading work onto classroom teachers with no prep time and twice the planning is the solution – it’s actually the answer to every question:  download anything that comes up onto the already crushed classroom teacher.  One of my grade 9 parents won’t provide internet when she isn’t home so her son can’t do elearning even though they have all the tools.  The solution was for me to print out a special course of study for this one student on paper to study computer technology on paper, which he then takes home… during a contact tracing pandemic.  Don’t expect flexibility this semester, but do expect absurdity.  They’ll tell you all decisions are based on reducing the risk of transmission, but that one wasn’t.

This situation raised another point:  because students are only in half days, parents working in essential jobs all day are stuck trying to decide how to make that work.  We’re a high school and we’re all having to grow up quickly in this ongoing crisis, so I’d hope that a high school age student could provide some self direction and work from home, but not in every case.  A system response that honours equity and tries to help those families that need the extra support would be to direct those students in need to a socially distanced resource for the afternoon when they can’t elearn at home, but our spec-ed resource room has been cut and the experts in there are all teaching instead.  It’s important to treat everyone the same in an emergency.  Our split day schedule assumes that all students have connectivity and technology at home – it’s a system predicated on privilege that ignores home circumstances.  While all this is going on we’ve been getting PD about how unfair systemic privilege is.

I had a plan in May, Ontario still doesn’t really have one in September.

Looking at how messy some of the other reopenings are in the province I think our board has done an exceptional job with no direction and inconsistent funding, but the two hidden mechanisms that make it work are downloading extra work on classroom teachers and assuming privilege in terms of the digital divide.  We took drastic steps to get  technology and connectivity out to students in the spring but that has since been returned (kinda) and that capacity has dried up.  I dreamt that we’d be building capacity and reducing the digital divide over the summer because you would have to be oblivious to this situation to think we won’t be fully remote learning again at some point, but none of that has happened in the chaos of a mismanaged face to face reopening.

We’re unable to climb Maslow’s hierarchy and do our jobs (developing students’ cognitive skills at the top of the pyramid, remember?).  In the case of such a catastrophic failure of Ontario’s political responsibility to its citizens perhaps all that is left to us is to make sure the kids are ok, as long as we’re all happy living in a less literate and numerate future.  Part of this new < normal is ensuring that you as an educator are still functional physically and mentally.  The ECOO Virtual Conference a few weeks ago kept emphasizing this advice which is inline with what you get from an airline when you get on a plane (remember when we used to do that?).

This past week I’ve been putting my lab together solo because students can’t come in to help me as they usually do.  Even my own son, who is well within my bubble, isn’t allowed to come in and help.  The thick blanket of rules we’re buried under are as much about managing liability as they are about medical safety.  I’ve also been running all over the building helping dozens of teachers, including the many new ones, get their rooms sorted and operational from a digital perspective, all with the usual lack of acknowledgement from administration, though they’re sure to thank everyone at the board office who have been busy making two hour powerpoint presentations that are contrary to our inequitable school opening plan.  A lot of that technical support has also included emotional support because my reflex when I see someone drowning in panic is try and help.

A fine example of this over management was to order all teacher desks to the front of the classrooms.  This was done (presumably) to facilitate better management of people coming and going from the room, but since that isn’t happening much and our face to face class sizes are smaller anyway, I have to wonder which curriculum expert who hasn’t been in teaching in a decade made that decision.  The digital projectors in most rooms are plumbed in to where the teacher desk is so this dictate meant that dozens of rooms were suddenly disconnected from a vital teaching resource.

Another baffling choice in the chaos has been to cancel student safety agreements for science and technology classes.  The board has always vigorously demanded absolute compliance with these documents.  When you’re working on dangerous equipment with legally not responsible teenagers with undeveloped frontal lobes that prevent them from forecasting the results of their poor choices, a signed legal agreement with their legally responsible adult parents or guardians puts everyone on the same page in terms of safety expectations.  These are common sense safety expectations, but common sense and teenagers don’t often occupy the same room, so it’s important to have their parents aware of the weight of this responsibility.  It’s also vital for liability.  When a student ignores the agreement they and their parents have signed and an accident results, it produces a better outcome for everyone, except it’s been cancelled during the pandemic because they don’t want us using paper.  Then in our last staff meeting (which is really a litany of what to do with little collegiality or interactivity) we were told that using paper is fine.  Do try to keep up.

I’m usually able to reflect my way out of a negative place with these blog posts, but I’m still in darkness here.  I’m terrified of bringing home a virus that could be fatal to my partner.  I’m worried about my students’ well being and frustrated that climbing Maslow’s hierarchy is simply a bridge too far this year.  I’m also frustrated by the provincial system’s inability to show any vision or organization in helping us succeed in this crisis.  Finally, my own board’s efforts, while exceptional in terms of what else I’ve seen in the province, are inconsistent, undifferentiated and predicated on assumptions about the digital divide that we’ve already shown to be untrue. 

There are glimmers of hope in the chaos.  I’ve seen cunning and cheap solutions to common technology problems that could expand the functionality of our laptops by turning them into document cameras, and I’ve seen local teachers jump on it and make it happen  (I hope to have these churning out next week).

I also keep finding myself in other people’s ewaste that could be turned into remote learning tools, but being buried under two simultaneous classes a day all day, and having one of my senior sections cancelled by our previous principal, I don’t have the time or the senior student expertise to make this happen.  So much could happen if we depended on teacher initiative and expertise instead of spoon feeding them hours of powerpoint and pages of step by step instructions.  I fully expect to be told to sit in a French class next semester to cover someone else’s prep (I don’t parlez the francais).  Such is the resolution everyone is running at, when it runs at all.

Give me a little latitude and I could perform (bigger) miracles, even in this monstrous circus, but latitude and professional trust was the first victim of this pandemic.  Given a minimal budget and some space I could all but resolve the digital divide in our board and prepare us for fully remote learning that seems inevitable, but they’d rather me just follow the plethora of signs.  Whoever is making those signs seems to have infinite resources.

I just got handed this cart of old netbooks that were headed for ewaste.  With a Linux install they would provide dozens of students with remote learning devices they could keep in a pandemic.  With more latitude I’d be picking up #edtech from RCTO’s Computers For Schools and providing desktops and portable devices for staff and students (as I did in the spring and all summer) across the board.  Give me even more latitude and I’d be in touch with Google’s Loon to see if we couldn’t provide local free school internet to all students who attend a school regardless of the urban/rural digital divide.  But initiative and individual responsibility and expertise are atrophied by a panicked system operating in a pandemic.

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As we stagger towards reopening Ontario classrooms, which is something that, quite frankly, I want to see happen, I’m left wondering why a number of obvious things aren’t happening.

In early August we all got a summer cold, but being the pandemic summer that it is we were worried, so we drove twenty miles south to the nearest city and got tested at the nearest COVID test centre that yes, required us to leave our low risk rural area and drive into a city riddled with it.

The testing centre wasn’t busy and was very efficiently run and we were in and out in about fifteen minutes.  Seventy-two hours later we all had piece of mind knowing we were not infected.  Considering how efficient the testing process has become and how important it is to ensure a safe environment, I’m at a loss to explain why no school board in Ontario is testing its face to face educators before we start up again.  Speaking as a parent, it would be a relief to know that all the staff at my son’s school isn’t guessing they don’t have COVID19, they know it.  Our approach to COVID is so low-resolution that its almost blind.  It certainly isn’t cost effective.

What a thing it would be to put out a press release saying all face to face staff have been tested and are COVID19 free prior to classes restarting. This could happen by school site or board wide, but it really should be happening. We’re all walking around school right now wearing masks and afraid of everything. Some piece of mind knowing we have a COVID-free site, even if it’s just in this moment, would be a welcome thing.

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ECOOcamp Ontario happened in Peterborough last year and was the usual mix of keen people getting together to improve their technical skills and launch another year of teaching in an avant garde style.  Had you asked anyone there what the summer of 2020’s ECOOcamp would look like, a virtual online conference during a pandemic wouldn’t have been the obvious guess, but ECOO managed to pull off #ECOOcampON, a virtual conference using tech most people hadn’t used before, with astonishing fidelity.

As you’d expect there were technical issues, but what ECOO does a good job of spreading is the idea that teachers can become digitally fluent enough to resolve these problems themselves.  Early on link issues stopped the conference in its tracks, but the tech-savvy educators running the event iterated at high speed through troubleshooting and within twenty minutes everything was back on track again.

Digital fluency has been cast in a stark light this year with Ontario’s sudden move to emergency remote learning, so you’d think that more educators have technical proficiency at front of mind as the first school year in a century kicks off in an ongoing pandemic.  ECOOcampON managed over 500 registrations this summer, which goes to show you just how resilient some Ontario educators can be in trying to get literate teaching in a still new(ish) digital medium, though only 0.3% of teachers attended in Ontario and I’d guess that 70% of them need it.  In a better world this conference would have drawn over one hundred thousand educators looking to raise their digital fluency in order to prepare for the inevitable next round of remote teaching.

What follows are some personal reflections prompted by the event.

Krista Sarginson and I presented on CyberTitan, the Canadian Student Cybersecurity Competition on the first day of the conference.  Krista’s CyberLions rocked a 2nd place finish in the middle school division in her first year coaching in 2019.  I’d been looking for a brave teacher to leap into this and help me advocate for it.  Krista is fierce and fearless and did a great job encouraging other elementary panelists to consider giving it a try.

Secondary teachers tend to be more reticent about participating in things they can’t show intellectual dominance in.  I’m hoping that Krista’s influence engages more elementary Ontario teachers in participating in this competition.  It’s a great way to raise awareness around information security and opens up an entire industry to students who might otherwise have no idea it exists.  It’s a tough year to encourage extracurriculars, but something like CyberTitan could become the basis for a cybersecurity course, which is something Ontario is way behind the curve on.  Here’s our presentation if you’re curious:

The round table discussion that night talked about resilience and how we frame challenges.  This past year seems like almost infinite challenges.  From a vindictive government intent on attacking our profession and diminishing public education to a worldwide pandemic, it’s been a burning dumpster fire of a year for educators in Ontario, with no end in site.  The new mix is the vindictive government using the pandemic to physically threaten staff and students.  It’s not understatement to say that I’ve never seen colleagues so scared and uncertain about teaching in a few weeks.  How can we be in poorly ventilated classrooms that ignore the rules we’ve been told to follow for the past six months and feel safe?  Our doughty premier is frustrated at the response (usually framed as an attack on unions), but no other front line workers are being forced to ignore public health rules in their workplaces.

In this context I found the roundtable discussion difficult to navigate, though they gave it a good try.  One of the speakers was a big fan of nature, but it was a romanticized view of nature where people should just find themselves at their ease in natural surroundings.  That park-setting idea of nature is very much dependent on a manicured and managed environment.  I love being out in nature, but I enjoy it because it’s relentless in its expectations of competence.  Being happy in nature is as simple as not being hungry or cold, or avoiding being eaten.  Few people have been face to face with that kind of nature.

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Originally published pre-pandemic in March of 2019 on Dusty World:  https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/stretched-thin.html

I need to reflect my way out of a dark corner.  Yesterday I got some surprise PD on students I have with profound hearing loss.  The PD was quality.  The person presenting it was not only very knowledgeable, but she was also wearing two cochlear implants, so could speak from experience.  By the end of it we had a very tangible idea of just how difficult and exhausting it is for hearing impaired students to function in a standard classroom, and yet a standard classroom is where we expect them to thrive.


How do we expect them to thrive?  By depending on the teacher to differentiate instruction, use technology and modify their lesson delivery to reach those students.  Why that?  Because any other alternative is much more expensive and downloading onto teachers is the default approach to any problem from a cost-effectiveness point of view (that’s the dark corner talking).


Empathy is my superpower when it comes to teaching.  It’s a reflex I can’t stop, but it’s also exhausting me.  By the end of that PD I was emotional about the difficulties these HH students experience all day every day and wanted to do all I could to help, but I’m not sure how much of me there is left to do it.


In a capped-at-27 students open technology class where we are working hands on with 400° soldering irons, sharp edges and live electricity, I have two students who are hard of hearing to such a degree that we are legally required to address it.  I have 9 students, or a third of the class, who have learning impairments ranging from autism to ADHD that I’m legally required to address individually.  The entire class is also in the throes of puberty.  As an open class it contains students who range from gifted/academic and on track to becoming engineers to essential students who are functionally illiterate.  Some students are living in luxury and are about to take a three week March Break on holiday (I’m supposed to plan for that too), while others aren’t getting fed before coming to school in the morning.  I’m supposed to engage all 27 of them equally and consistently no matter where they are using differentiation while also ensuring their safety.  Feel overwhelmed yet?  I do.  And that’s just one class of three.  The other two have similar expectations around size and diversity.

A long time ago now in Teacher’s College we did a day on assistive technology and I couldn’t help but think that this technology would help everyone learn more effectively regardless of where they were.  One of the reasons I enjoy teaching technology is for how it can functionally improve us.  People who use technology to waste time and distract have missed a golden opportunity in my eyes.


At our HH PD the instructor ended with this cartoon.  It speaks to that feeling I had years ago at the assistive tech day.  The sound-field system that I now have not only assists my HH students, but also my students who have signal processing problems with background noise.  If everyone can hear better, everyone will learn better.  It also saves my battered vocal cords, which is no bad thing.  It begs the question, why we don’t have sound field systems in every classroom?  But we all know the answer to that, don’t we.


In the PD it was also suggested that we have acoustically effective rooms by covering walls and floors with soft surfaces that don’t create hard, echoey soundscapes.  It was suggested that we bring in carpets and wall hangings, but based on health and safety responses to other brought in furniture, I doubt that would be allowed.  Having soft materials on the concrete blocks and industrial linoleum floors of our classroom would be great, but I doubt money exists for any of that.  It sure would be nice to work in a typical office environment, but we’re not that lucky.  Plastic floors, plastic chairs and cinder block walls are where learning happens in Ontario.


We were also encouraged to remove ambient noise as it has a deleterious effect on signal processing and requires everyone to be louder to overcome it.  That increased volume wears out voices and ears and makes for a less effective learning environment.  That’s why lawyers, bankers and politicians all have nice carpets and soft walls in their offices.


There is a lot of ambient noise in our computer technology shop.  We happen to be next to the heat exchanger in my relatively new school,, so when the HVAC system spins up background noise thrumming out of the ceiling  jumps by 15 decibels.  The 30+ fan cooled PCs in our lab add to the din, as to the dozens of adolescents sitting at them.  A typical student needs a 5-10 decibel volume bump to clearly understand instruction.  Hard of hearing students need even more.  How do we make quieter learning environments?  By not building schools as cheaply as we can, but that isn’t going to stop.  Well it is, because we’re just going to stop building schools.


So, rather than provide technology and acoustically healthy environments in reasonably sized classes for everyone, including HH students, to more effectively learn, the answer is to download the problem on teachers.  At least then it can be said that we’re doing something about it.  That’s assuming things stay as they are, but they won’t.


All this is happening in an environment of anxious uncertainty.  The general feeling is that Ontario education will be cut to the bone and what we’re expected to do will only become more absurd in the next few months.  It isn’t just in education either.  As the new Ontario cuts programs to support children with special needs, guess who will pick up the slack on that?  Yep, the education system, and it’ll be expected to do it with less.  Fortunately they have a free escape valve, just ask teachers to do more with less, probably for less.


There are numerous places we could find efficiencies in education in Ontario, but thanks to trickle down economics you can bet that the majority of those cuts will land on frontline classroom teachers and negatively impact student experience.  Those higher up the food chain will make sure their jobs are secure.  The Heinlein Starship Troopers part of me wishes we ran things like the mobile infantry: everyone drops, everyone is on the front line.  Too many people find ways out of teaching and yet get paid more for it.  In my efficient Ontario education system everyone keeps a toe in the classroom and teaches.  No one gets to opt out into a support role with zero instructional responsibility.


I get a lot of satisfaction out of my job and have no wish to leave the classroom.  Launching my students into meaningful careers in much-needed ICT roles from workplace to university streams isn’t easy but it is a real thrill.  It’s important work for Canada’s future and I want to keep doing it.  All I ask is that we be supported in that effort and not have the system punish us for its own shortcomings.  What got me down about this PD was that it boiled down to yet another level of differentiation I’m expected to deliver with little or no support.  That the system thinks this somehow resolves the problem is really aggravating; these kids deserve better.

I don’t only cater to easy to teach academics (though my classroom is capped the same way) and want to see my full spectrum of students find success, that includes special needs students like my HH kids.  My goal is to maximize their learning and help them find their best selves.  Because we’re working in ICT I hope this means they will find satisfying and challenging careers that will enable them to support themselves and their families in a very changeable future.

With all that in mind, I’m already stretched thin trying to teach with and around various special needs in a hands-on technology environment that is designed around thrift and the biggest caps in the province rather than effective learning.  That we’re as good as we are now (and that’s in national competition) in spite of all that is great, but the thought of things only getting worse is wearing me down.  If we’re going to up the ante to 35+ students and cut budgets so that we can pay for increased housing allowances and make new jobs at EQAO, I’m going to have to start putting the things down that I don’t get paid for in order to manage a punishing work load designed with generic production lines in mind.


Lowering my efficiency and not pushing us all to be our best in an emerging industry is the last thing I want to do, but needs must.  That HH PD on Friday only underlined for me how complex and multifaceted what I do is.  All I want to do is try and fulfill that difficult role as well as I possibly can, but I can’t do it if the system is intent on being less for less.


If what’s got me down are the dark headlines and ominous future of Ontario education, then I’m falling into the old trap that J.K. warns of.  What I should be doing is what I’ve always done, make best use of what I’ve got and try and reach as many students as I can.  Thanks to Friday’s PD I now have some tech in my room that should help me do that.  On Monday I’ll be speaking a bit softer but being heard better.  I’ll deal with what happens later this year when it happens.

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I’m a teacher with a lot of technical expertise.  I don’t just teach effectively with digital technology, I teach the subject itself.  Fifteen years working in information technology in roles ranging from systems implementation to technical support and training are what led me into teaching the subject.  When I began teaching in 2004 elearning was beginning to evolve out of distance (ie: mail order paper based) material.  I jumped on it the summer after I started teaching at Peel DSB.  At that point elearning was a very loose HTML webpage where you had to write code to display the content properly.  I had some very interesting experiences teaching senior, university bound English on that system.  When I moved to my current board I volunteered for their pilot elearning program and taught a variety of elearning courses purely online, and then did a blended face to face introduction to elearning while teaching the mandatory career studies course.  One of the best things to come out of that project was that all of those students had a very clear idea of whether or not elearning would work for them.  A third of the class never wanted to see it again, and the correlation between students with IEPs and students who had trouble with elearning was nearly 100%.

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