I took a nice, long autumn ride through long shadows and cool setting sunlight to NCK Cycle Salvage in Woodstock, Ontario this afternoon.
Google Maps was determined me to walk me through the middle of Kitchener-Waterloo in the middle of rush hour and then along a 401 covered in construction. I forced it to route me around the population and construction, which Google Maps took to mean sending me down increasingly small back roads until I was riding through a deep, dark forest tinged crimson with fall colours on a rutted, dirt road. I think at one point I was being chased by a pack of wolves, but hey, I never once sat in traffic.
I eventually wound my way down to Woodstock and found NCK in the west end of town in an industrial estate. I used to do a lot of work on cars, so I was expecting something like a breaker’s yard with bikes laying out in the weather. I was once told by an old motorcyclist that bikes don’t last well in the weather because, unlike cars, they don’t have a cover; NCK agrees with that biker wisdom.
I was worried that the carburetors I was picking up for the Fireblade project were going to be rusty and nasty, but instead they look almost brand new – far better than the battered carbs the muppet who owned the Honda before me had molested.
I was surprised at how organized and dense NCK’s layout was. Nathan, the son of the original owner, is in the process of taking on the family business which has been running in Woodstock since the early ’90s. He took me on a quick tour and explained NCK’s process. They dismantle and warehouse parts as bikes come in. I asked about the lack of European bikes, but Nathan said they tend to either be repaired or written off, whereas Japanese bikes are more common and less expensive, so that’s where the spares market is. They often get bikes from dealers who don’t want an inexpensive bike cluttering up their showroom. Where possible they sell the bike on complete, when it isn’t possible they dismantle the bike, check the parts in to inventory and keep everything organized in their dense, 5000+ square foot warehouse. That inventory system is what allowed Nathan to immediately get back to me with confirmation of the parts I needed when every other motorcycle salvage operation in Ontario was radio silent.
Support a local business indeed! Nathan is the second generation running NCK out of Woodstock, Ontario. If your only experience with junkyards is piles of rotting cars in a field, NCK will show you how it’s done efficiently and with the needs of motorcycles front of mind. This ain’t no field of rusty wrecks.
Since it’s all inside, you’re not getting rusty, rained on left overs and the parts look like they’ve actually been looked after (because they have). We had a walk through the warehouse and I got to see the next project they’re working on, an originally painted mid-70s Yamaha air cooled big twin. It was already in shockingly good condition (the old fellow who owned it lost his storage and had to move it on), so now it’s at NCK getting some TLC. You can tell this is as much a labour of love as it is a well run business.
If you love Japanese bikes and are anywhere within a stone’s throw of Woodstock, Ontario, you owe it to yourself to drop in to NCK Cycle Salvage and have a look around. If you’re working on a Japanese bike, this place could save you a pile of money. I got the ’97 Fireblade carb for $250CAD (they are going for $250US+shipping+customs on eBay). When I was sourcing new parts that the muppet who butchered the carbs before me had broken – strange parts like choke plungers (not even sure how you would break one of those) or carb clamps (because this goof had tried gluing them to the engine!), I was quickly running up a bill into the hundreds of dollars US, plus shipping and border taxes – and that’s even assuming I could find the parts, many were not available.
A nice ride through the countryside on a sunny, autumn afternoon and I’ve got a donor carb that looks to be in even better shape than the low mileage one I was looking for parts for. What I was going to use for parts I’m now swapping in. I’ll take the old one apart and sell off the pieces. I’m only a couple of online sales away from breaking even on the carb purchase.
I can’t recommend NCK enough – they know what they’re doing, do it well and if you’re looking for parts for an older Japanese bike, they might not only save you money, they might be the only ones who have what you need!
Maybe it’s just me, but a place like this scratched an aesthetic itch. That’s a lot of Japanese colour to take in!
Where possible, and especially with older bikes, when a good tank comes in it gets special treatment. Wherever possible they try and keep the tank and paint as original and unblemished as possible.
Fairing bits that might simply not be available any more, or cost you as much as the bike did in a dealer…
Little bits, big bits, mechanical bits; organized and accessible.
Fenders… so many fenders. Got a cafe project? These aren’t so dear that you’re afraid to modify them.
NCK also offers a purchase and store option where you can buy a used bike in the fall and pay it off over the winter while it sits in heated, safe storage in the warehouse – no extra charge. Nice, eh?
I’ve been a Japanese animation fan since way back. I’ve been casting around for motorcycle related animation and discovered Rideback. If you’re a fan of science fiction based motorcycles and ingenues (in this case think Buffy the Vampire Slayer mixed with Black Swan and Pacific Rim), this will definitely do it for you. It’s 2020 in Japan and post-world war three. The left over technology from the war is finding its way into civilian hands, the Rideback transformable motorcycle is one of those devices. Rin, the main character, is a former ballet dancer who is one of the only people able to ride the machine without all the electronic supports in place. I’m only a couple of episodes in, but the story is very coherent for a Japanese animation (they aren’t always). The main character is already well developed and they aren’t shy about explaining the technology. The story arc looks like it’s headed for a large political showdown with a despotic government, but ingenues on transformable motorcycles are just what you need in those circumstances. The animation (if you’re into that sort of thing) is a modern mix of computer and cell and shows off some very complex physics as well as excellent detail. If you like anime, you’ll enjoy this series. If you like anime and motorbikes this one is a must see.
I took the Concours out for a brief ride in the sun this afternoon to get a feel for her. She’s a very different machine than the Ninja. The carbs are a bit touchy when warming up, but then work in a very satisfying and immediate mechanical way once the bike is at temperature. It’s a much bigger bike too (over two hundred pounds heavier), but surprisingly lithe for its size. Where the Ninja picks up nicely in lower RPM, the Concours pulls immediately with a much flatter torque curve; the word ‘meaty’ comes to mind. The Concours was also surprisingly lively at higher RPMs, pulling hard to the redline. Not like the Ninja does (which is more like a bull in a China shop), but it still gets you down the road right quick. The lightness of the internal bits in the Ninja’s 649cc parallel twin make it spool up like a turbine. You can feel the complexity and weight of the Connie’s in-line four cylinder as it builds RPM. Where the Ninja screams like a banshee (and sounds lovely doing it), the Concours has a deeper, more sonorous song, though (and surprising to me because I really love the Ninja howl) equally enticing. I can see why previous Concours owners have said they’ve had no trouble keeping up with sports bikes, this is an agile, athletic machine that belies its size. In corners, especially at speed, the weight of the Connie seems to disappear and I can hit apexes in a similarly precise manner to the much lighter NInja. With so much torque on hand, you don’t need to keep the engine revving hard to get immediate pull out of it. The Connie will go quickly without appearing to, with the Ninja you’ve got to keep it on boil to get that astonishing acceleration (as opposed to merely shocking acceleration at lower revs).
Controls wise the Concours is a much more comfortable machine. The seat is wider and softer, the bike feels more substantial and not so wasp wasted between my knees. The fairings keep the wind at bay, especially around your feet. In the rain your feet are soaked through on the Ninja where they are hanging out in the elements. Riding in cool weather means thick socks. I kept bumping my toes against the Connie’s lower fairing until I got used to using less toe on the gear change. Knee bend is still pretty bent, though not nearly as much as the Ninja and with the wider seat didn’t seem so intense. The Connie’s gearing is much higher than the Ninja’s. At 120km/hr on the highway you’re up around 6000rpm on the Ninja. I’d guess the Connie would be doing under half that at the same speed. A more relaxed bike that still has hidden reserves and is light of foot, I’m looking forward to getting to know Connie better. As I was riding home we fell into a groove, like a horse extending its legs into a comfortable gallop and I realized just how far this bike could take me. She’s been sitting too long and wants to put road behind her. Instead of wondering when to stop on the Ninja, I’ll be wondering how much further I can go on the Concours.
I’ve spent almost 20 years in public school classrooms fighting for better student learning outcomes, often while facing bureaucracy that pushes back in order to retain a status quo that supports their privilege. I don’t have an office hang on to, my classroom is my office and my interests have always aligned with making that learning environment as effective as I can make it.
The pandemic has cast a harsh light on this lack of focus on pedagogy in our education system. This past year could have been a huge step forward for Ontario education in terms of leveraging technology to produce better learning outcomes, but instead of a Bill Davis style, rational, progressive conservative clean up of an education system steeped in almost two decades of liberal ‘vision’, we got the Ford circus. Ontario really deserves better politicians than it gets.
In my time in Ontario classrooms I’ve seen #edtech evolve at a fantastic rate and I’ve always kept up with it. #Onted is a traditionalist organization with many stake holders (unions, boards, ministries, colleges and many other hangers-on too numerous to mention) who are more interested in playing politics in order to justify their role in an increasingly bloated and outdated system. The pandemic has made it clear to me that most of these groups are focused on doing whatever it takes to keep their office jobs no matter how cruel or harmful to students the plan is. My union just sent me another email about how we need to start another political fight over EQAO. That this arrives in a year of historic workplace abuse in the system shows just how tone deaf my union has become. No one seems to be focused on what matters anymore (student learning outcomes, remember?).
Dr Sasha Noukhovitch, a fellow CyberTitan coach and colleague, shared an interesting while paper from The Canadian Commission for UNESCO on how artificialintelligence can revolutionize education. This nuanced look at how AI could provide differentiation and support for all students regardless of their socio-economic situation (assuming we ever make a serious effort to permanently close the digital divide) represents a better understanding of the technology than that shown by the ‘robots will take our jobs!’ crowd and suggests a pathway toward a future where technology works to provide equity rather than what we’re doing with it now.
In a year where everyone likes to talk about equity while doing the exact opposite setting up hugely inequitable pandemic learning schedules, the idea that a an apolitical, rational and student needs focused system could be brought to bear is thrilling. It’s an ongoing frustration that focusing our classrooms on pedagogy feels more and more alien; everyone in Ontario education has lost the plot and left it to exhausted and under-supported classroom teachers to make their inequitable planning work.
Artificial Intelligence offers the kind of individual support specific to student needs that the system has always struggled to provide. I’ve been dreaming about it for ten years. Our low-resolution bureaucracy does an adequate job of managing a mythically average student but doesn’t like to treat students like people because that costs money. AI could do a lot to address that in ability and inequity, but rather than explore this emerging technology you can bet the privileged/political stake holders will do all they can to block it in order to maintain their status quo benefits.
This is about the UK but the conservative playbook looks the same everywhere.
The second article from The Guardian about British schools offers some worrying details about how behind the curve they are in terms of technology adoption (lots of schools don’t have wifi yet? C’mon UKed!). It also suggests a way to improve student learning outcomes that has become apparent from asynchronous online learning:“One way to tackle the achievement gap is surely in-school lessons followed by more personalised online learning, either at home or in after-school clubs.” Of course, in Ontario we rush to apply technology to force synchronous learning (recreating the inequities of the classroom) for political ends while further crushing students whose families can’t provide the infrastructure.
Combine the concept of immanent personalized virtual learning AIs that will tirelessly support students right where they need it and the idea that school can happen both in class synchronously and out of class virtually and at the student’s own pace and you have a recipe for a quality of pedagogy that we simply can’t produce in our status-quo, politically charged bureaucracy intent on retaining all the infrastructure (schools, board offices, union offices, educational hangers-on…) and the jobs needed to run it. A leaner burning Ontario education system focused on student learning might have a similar number of people working in it but almost all of them would be actually involved in teaching.
The thought of a rational, politics free AI focused entirely on maximizing learning outcomes has me dreaming of an education system free of messy human politics and the self-serving political organizations that feed off it. Decisions would be data driven, transparent and then held to accountability through more transparent data collection that would be ongoing and everywhere rather than centred in a questionable and expensive organization run by a failed politician.
I’m in my final decade of teaching and I’ve lost faith in my union and doubt the intentions of educational management all the way through the system. The ‘support’ organizations that also feed off the education system seem to have completely lost the plot in the political haze of education in 2021 Ontario. Spending my final years in the system making student supported AI learning tools a reality and watching them burn the status quo to the ground would be a satisfying conclusion to a career spent focused on student learning. I’ve long hoped to leave the system in better shape than I found it. I think the route to that goal is through adapting emerging artificial intelligence and other digital learning tools through a ruthlessly pedagogical focus. If that burns our bloated bureaucracy to the ground in the process then I’ll have achieved my goal of a more equitable and effective public education system that serves student needs first.
Education would rather  focus on arbitrary and fabricated data, like graduation rates.  It’s easy to increase graduation rates, just lower standards.  It has been working for Ontario Education for years now.  You barely have to even attend a class now to get a credit, and if you fail? A teacher not even qualified in the subject area will pass you along; we call that student success.  The grade eleven university level English paper with no less than three grammar and punctuation errors IN THE TITLE was an example I saw of this.  It was given a 78% by the credit recovery teacher grading it.  That failing student will now go on to university thinking that they are an ‘A’ student (they went from failing badly to 80%!).
There is another way. Â Rather than chasing our own tails by trying to improve statistics that we create ourselves, why not start harnessing data that is actually useful and relevant to students beyond the context of education? Â Digital technology offers us a fantastic and under utilized avenue for collecting meaningful data on student learning; data that might actually help them beyond the walled garden of education.
Rather than addressing the distraction caused by digital devices, we ignore them, or try to ban them. Â Even at our best we only tentatively use digital tools, and when we do we ignore the data they could be providing on student activity. Â Digital devices could shine a powerful light on student learning, instead we call them a distraction and let students abuse them into uselessness. Â Effectively harnessing educational technology could give us granular, specific data about student activity in the classroom, yet we choose to wallow in darkness. Â Really useful data-driven learning is only a decision away from implementation.
Education, like so many other sectors, has become increasingly interested in data driven management. Â I don’t have anything against that on principal, in fact, I’d rather be managed according to logic and fact than the usual management ethos (egomania and paranoia). Â Where we go wrong with data driven educational reform is where human beings are involved. Â Education, more than most fields, prefers not to reveal its inner workings. Â The choices made on what data to collect and how to present it usually revolve around a sense of self preservation rather than a focus on student success. Â The only data we collect is data we can control for our own ends.
The intent of the education factory is to reduce something as complex as human learning down to a percentage. Â That in itself is about the biggest abstraction you could devise, what Twain would call a statistic in the truest sense. Â Those numbers are ultimately useless in anything other than education. Â The only time in your life your grade will ever matter is if you’re transferring from one educational institution to another. Â No will ever ask what your marks were once you’re out of school. Â They don’t even ask teachers what their marks were before hiring them; even educators realize how meaningless grades are.
Instead of spending all our energy fabricating meaningless statistics in the form of grades, imagine harnessing all the data that flows through education technology and presenting it in a radically transparent reporting system that connects students to their lives after they graduate. That system would provide students with a powerful tool for metacognitive review around their own learning, and their use of digital tools. Â Instead of reductive grades and empty comment banks, why not offer an insightful statistical analysis of how a student uses digital tools as they learn? Â The tools themselves are eager to share this data, it is only educators who are stopping it.
A student who is shown, in specific detail, why they failed a course (but watched oh so many fascinating youtube videos), is being shown their own poor choices in stark detail. Â One of the great joys I have in elearning is showing students their analytics. Â When I get the, “I don’t understand this!” line, I ask for specifics, which usually gets me a, “I don’t get any of it!” Â I can then pull up an analysis of what lessons the student has attempted. Â The student who didn’t bother to actually even try any of the lessons gets wonderfully sheepish at this point.
With meaningful data on hand about their poor choices, education’s arbitrariness instead becomes a metacognitive opportunity to adjust learning habits; something we seem loath to do on digital tools, even as we criticize how students use them.
Collecting meaningful student data would allow us to connect the abstract world of education with what students will face on the other side of graduation, especially if we continue to collect data after they move on. Â Ever wondered what high school courses are actually useful (and I don’t mean in graduating, I mean in finding work, being useful, living a good life)? Â How about a live stat attached to each showing employablity based on course choice? Â Think you’ll move over to applied level English because your friends are in there and you don’t like doing homework? Welcome to a 14% higher unemployment rate, and a 6% higher criminality rate! Â Imagine what parents and students could do if this kind of data were available. Â Realizing that there are real world consequences to your educational choices would do much to remove apathy and a lack of engagement on the part of students. Â Education has very real consequences beyond school but we seem intent on trying to remove any obvious connection between education and the rest of a student’s life. Â With open learning data we’d have way fewer students who have missed the starting gun.
Last year my school talked about creating a cosmetology program. Â This would be a hugely expensive undertaking requiring changing the face of the school. Â That was OK though because the board was willing to throw tens of thousands of dollars at an increase in graduation rates for at risk girls. Â What would they do with it once they were out? Â It made me want to start up a video game program, not because it would do anything helpful, but because it would fill sections. Â We subvert usefulness in a desperate attempt to game graduation statistics.
I couldn’t help but think of the college computer engineering program I’d been to see a few months before. Â They had a 100% placement rate for grads with starting pay well above the Canadian average, but they couldn’t find enough people interested in the field to run a full course each year. Â They didn’t have any females in the course at all, and were desperately trying to get more women interested. Â I can’t find enough kids in my high school to run more than one combined senior computer engineering course… in a field that all but guarantees a good job when you graduate and is about as future proof as you could wish. Â I don’t imagine cosmeticians are walking into that kind of employment certainty at high rates of pay, but a future out of school isn’t what we’re aiming students at, we’re just concerned with graduating them.
It sounds harsh, but one of the reasons students are so disengaged from school is because they recognize the cognitive dissonance between the world beyond school and the fabricated reality we keep them in until they turn eighteen. Â If you want students to engage in their educations provide them with metacognitive data that actually helps them. Â Education has gone to greater and greater lengths to try and protect students from themselves and the ‘real’ world, all to chase fictional statistics.
Digitization in the classroom offers us access to meaningful data on student learning behaviour that was impossible even ten years ago.  Instead of being ignored and treated as a distraction, we should be harnessing digital technology and communicating that data.  A student who spends less than 10% of class time working on their project before failing it?  If that data were included in assessment, a student would have a metacognitive opportunity to understand the mechanics of their own failure.  They might then also begin to harness digital tools rather than being distracted by them.  Digitization shouldn’t be an escape from accountability, it should amplify it.
In such an environment, assessment might become something more than a damned statistic.
***
I didn’t even get into how this data could serve employment after school. Â Detailed data on how students tackle work would be of great interest to employers. Â Even the basics like attendance and ability to focus on work would be of more interest to employers than any grade. Imagine an Ontario Student Record that offered employers an automated resume that included attendance and other useful details like ability to complete work in a timely fashion, group/team skills, communications and approach to new challenges. Â Instead of hiding education behind a curtain of graduation, we could begin to make it immediately and obviously connected to future success.
Of more interest from an engineering point of view is Yamaha’s ultralight bike. Since watching McGregor and Boorman trying to right seven hundred pound BMWs in the Long Way Round, I’ve wondered why bikes aren’t lighter than they are. Why aren’t we getting more horsepower out of smaller engines and saving weight that way? Why aren’t we using our modern engineering prowess to build bikes with smarter materials? Case in point, as a high school student I thought the Honda Interceptor was awesome. It weighed 443lbs ready to go. The current 500CBR is a modern equivalent, wet weight? 428lbs. In thirty odd years of materials research and development a company as forward thinking as Honda has managed to shave 15 pounds off a bike’s gross weight? How about Triumph’s last year of the original Bonneville? A 750cc bike, 441lbs. The new one? 496lbs. It’s a bigger engine, but it would need it to lug that fat ass around. Even Triumph’s brilliant and athletic naked Street Triple still tips the scales at over four hundred pounds. Motorcycles are, by their nature, minimalist forms of transportation, but instead of finding ways to make them even lighter and more efficient we’re SUVing them just like we did with four wheelers. Bikes like KTM’s new 390 Duke give me some hope though. At 300lbs I bet 390cc has never felt so powerful. I can’t help but feel that alternate building methods and advanced materials haven’t been explored by conservative
motorcycle manufacturers. Yamaha asks a good question when it asks, where are the two hundred pound motorbikes? McLaren could put together the three seater 200mph+ V8 F1 super car twenty years ago with a curb weight of only 1062kgs (about 2340lbs). We’ve got massive cruisers tipping the scales at 900lbs, meanwhile Mercedes-Benz is putting together Smartcars that weigh only 1600lbs. Even a back to basic bike like the KLR650 with only a single cylinder and basic bodywork still weighs in at 432lbs.
I’m still not a fan of electrical bikes as long as we’re stuck with medieval chemical batteries. With lousy storage and even worse disposal characteristics, rushing into electric bikes right now isn’t the way to go, though one day I hope to see an unlimited charge bio-tech battery that recharges off the buried kinetic/flywheel battery under my house. Our issue with electricity isn’t the making of it, it is the storage and transmission of it. One day I hope to be able to unplug my bike from my locally generated and stored electrical system and get a thousand kilometres out of it before I have to plug it in again. There are levels of efficiency we still need to move through in order to get to that place and the conservatism and marketing focus I’m seeing in bike manufacturer aren’t moving us in that direction. A little less focus on building to marketing niches and a bit more focus on advancing engineering would help us toward a necessary evolution in motorcycling. While Formula One develops energy recovery systems that also act as full on torque turbo-chargers, perhaps it isn’t too much to ask bike manufacturers to go after other areas of efficiency such as weight improvements in chassis and drive-trains. I’d very much like a 400cc bike that weighs only 200lbs. From an efficiency point of view it would be unbeatable as a means of transport and something that would get many more people interested in riding on two wheels.
With the snow finally falling I’ve had time to start into the naked Concours project. Â The first thing that needed addressing was the final drive unit which was leaking from the inner seal. Â When the Clymers manual says you can do it but it’s a big pain in the ass, it’s best to have a practised hand do the work. Â I took the unit off (easily done as it’s held on the drive shaft by four bolts) and loosened all the fasteners on the inner plate. Â
Two Wheel Motorsport, my local Kawasaki dealership, said they could do the work and estimated two hours of shop time and a twelve dollar seal. Â I dropped off the unit and got a call back four days later saying it was done. Â It was a nice surprise to find that the work took less than an hour and my $250 estimate was suddenly a $120 bill. Â You hear a lot of negative talk about dealerships but Two Wheel did this job professionally and quickly, and then didn’t overcharge when they easily could have.
I cleaned out the shaft drive end and re-greased everything.  Reinstalling the unit was easy and straightforward.  With the grease holding the spring in place I was able to simply slot the drive unit onto the shaft splines and re-torque the four nuts.  Everything went together smoothly and the drive feels tight and positive.
Since this was the only mechanical issue with the Concours I was able to begin thinking about the customization side of things. Â With over 100lbs of plastic and metal removed from the bike I needed to start thinking about how to minimally dress this naked machine in order to cover up the plumbing and electrics. Â Having a metal shop at work means handy access to fabrication tools. Â Our shop teacher is also a Concours owner and is eager to help with panel building. Â He suggested I do cardboard cutouts of the pieces I need and then we can begin the process of creating metal body work.
Body work craft day in the garage.
Doing the cutouts is tricky even in cardboard. Â The left side cover goes over some electronics including the fuse panel and needs to bulge outward in order to contain all of that. Â The right side is more straightforward but still needs cutouts for the rear brake wiring and rear suspension adjuster. Â I’m curious to see how close the metal cutouts come to the cardboard templates.
The shop at school has a plasma cutter and we should be getting a laser engraver shortly. Â With such advanced tools I’m already thinking about engraving panels. Â Collecting together a bunch of line drawings of iconic images and sayings in a variety of languages would be an interesting way to dress up the minimal panels on this bike. Â If the laser engraver can work on compound shapes I might drop the gas tank in there and engrave Kawasaki down the spine of it where the gold stripe will go rather than looking for badges or decals.
I enjoy the mechanical work but now that the Concours is working to spec I can focus on the arts and crafts side of customization. Â Next up is trying to figure out how a minimal front panel that contains the headlight and covers up the electrical and plumbing at the front will look.
I’m showing my age here but there you go. That song came out two years before I was born and it was played in our Norfolk sea-side house regularly when I was very little. It was playing in my head as I read an astonishing email from our local union executive this week where they repeatedly congratulated themselves on the system they now claim to have had a hand in creating in response to the pandemic. This is suprising as earlier they claimed that things were happening without their input or consent, but historical hind-sight lets you rewrite the narrative to make it look like you did something, I suppose.
This self congratulatiory email went on to state that teachers should be assigned a maximum of 225 minutes of student instruction daily, and 75 mins of preparation time. Having never been provided with these things I’m at a loss to explain the rhetoric in any rational terms. So deaf has been our union that I’ve quit as our local CBC representative after numerous emails and calls for clarification and support went unanswered, even when I was advocating for other members. I’m pro-union because I know what would happen if One Percenters had dictatorial control, but our union isn’t particularly egalitarian either, though it likes to make noises like it is. The longer I look at OSSTF the more classist it seems, so I shouldn’t be surprised that their support only appears to apply to certain members.
Our president says we’re lucky we don’t teach in other boards, which isn’t very ‘help one another’ of him, but I’ve found that a sense of comraderie isn’t very resonant in our small, white, privaleged district. From throwing other districts under the bus while pandering to provinicial liberal bias to fighting for clear and transparent communication with members, I’ve found our local a difficult beast to deal with. And this from a guy who was once mentoring under the district president and attended many weekend trainings. A guy who regularly shows up to policial protests, tries to present our profession in an honest and postiive light to the public and has volunteered at the school and district level for over a decade in a number of roles.
The problem with the district’s current belief in this fantastic schedule is that it conveniently ignores specific situations where the board doesn’t have the resources it needs to make it happen. I think the board made a good decision under no direction or leadership from a broken ministry of education in setting things up as they did, but we then needed a local union ready to work to protect its members when the specifics of the plan could not be met. What we have instead are a group of self contratulatory district types with a strangle hold on control of our local who are more interested in putting out emails that sound like they were written by our employer than they are in making sure all of their members have access to the same plan in terms of work expected.
What we need, unless qualifications don’t matter, is to agree that any teacher working in a classroom should be familiar with the curriculum and qualified to teach the subject they’re teaching. Ironically, in the same email we were told not to do any writing jobs for TVO’s upcoming elearning program because there is no guarrantee that a qualified teacher will teach that material – that’s exactly what’s happening now in our district and we are waving a victory flag about it.
I did some maths this morning to try and work out who exactly is teaching 225 minutes a day as per our local cohorted covid teaching plan:
Someone ignorant to the job might read this as teachers only working 225 mintues a day, but that’s 225 minutes of instruction. You can’t just walk in and do that. You have to prepare what you’re doing and also mark the results. Teaching is more like presenting in media as a DJ or TV presenter – the part you see is only a small part of the job as a whole. When you see radical differences in instructional time the ‘under the water iceberg’ part of the job is also magnified. I’m having trouble sleeping and I’m often up at 4am marking or prepping for my red-all-year schedule because it’s the only time available to do it.
You have to fall into a very specific catagory to luck out and get the union advertised 225 minutes of instruction. The tricky thing about equity is that it needs to be equally distributed. Having said that, even the 225 minutes of instruction is no cakewalk as you’ve got to create two sets of material (one remote and one face to face) and then deliver them in two places at once all day every day. Re-writing and splitting the curriculum into a never-before-taught format on the fly is difficult enough but there are other political factors diminishing the effectiveness of that remote elearning half of our curriculum.
As you might guess, I’ve been given 6 double cohort sections this year and have never once been given a qualified face to face relief teacher. Teaching technology means you need to have a tech qualified teacher or students have to stop hands on work for safety and liability reasons. Hands-on work in class is at such a premium this year (we only have 52.5 hours of it compared to 110 hours in a regular class), that tech teachers are simply staying in class in order to protect what little tactile time students have – of course most tech teachers have small, single-cohort class sizes, but not me. I get capped the same as a university bound calculus class. Before this all kicked off admin said to us that they expected we’d all wave off relief support anyway in order to ‘let our kids keep on learning’. The worst thing you want to be in a pandemic is a unicorn, just as in the song, you can expect to get ignored, left behind and drown in the indifference shown to you by your union.
I’m the only person in my building qualified to teach what I teach and this isn’t an academic subject that might be taught out of a text book. Technology, like French or other skills based subjects, needs to be taught by people who know how to do the thing they’re teaching; you can’t fake it. Usually the union is all over this, but they’re evidently blind to it this year – unless you want to try and escape this nastiness by writing elearning courses for TVO (yes, I’ve applied).
The union has a long term hatred of elearning and have been dismissive of it outright. Elearning is a challenge, and I’ve been involved it in since its germination, but if done right it could offer a differentiated approach to learning that could serve some student needs (that’s what we’re here for right?). What you don’t want to do (that this government is intent on) is Walmarting elearing into a cheap and pedagogically ineffective wedge that weakens the entire education system. You don’t stop that mean-spirited, self-serving narcisism (the Ontaro PC party has donors who are ready to leap in with charter school options) by refusing to participate in it. What we need is a union researching best pedagogical practices in elearning including which students it actually works for, and then advocating for that. The ‘keep everything analogue’ approach is dangerously out of touch and a sure way to make both the educaiton system and the union itself irrelevant.
Union footdragging on elearing pedagogical effectiveness has made a mess of half our ‘class time’ with our students. Double cohorted teachers don’t get to support their own class in elearning. If you’re one of the lucky ones you’ve got a collaborative, technically savvy, qualified colleague who is helping you manage that, though you’re still responsible for all the planning, prep and review of work – though that gets hazzy too as we keep turning down exectations (no new content, no assessment and now no attendance) in our online cohorts.
We aren’t turning off all these aspects of learning in elearning for pedagogical reasons, we’re doing it to lessen the load on remote learning support teachers as per union direction. This means we’re now trying to pack a 110 hour course in 52.5 hours of face to face classroom learning in a dramatically accelerated schedule with little chance for review or differentiation. This is difficult in any course but in tech courses that rely almost exclusively on tactile, hands-on learning and which have been instructed to allow NO HANDS ON WORK remotely for liability and safety reasons, it reduces pedagogical effectiveness to well under 50% just based on time alone, I won’t get into how difficult it has been to get parts in as the pandemic has worn on.
Eleaarning could have been leveraged make this time-crunch work better from a pedagogical perspective. The first (obvious) step would be to ensure that all tech classes or other specialist taught courses are single cohort in order to ensure both teacher familiarity but also provide qualifiied and meaningful remote support, but that would neccessitate a local union that is fighting for all members, even the ones who teach specialist courses. It would also require a provincial union that isn’t intent on belittling elearning as a tool in Ontario education’s toolbox. We’ve got dozens of teachers not teaching and providing toilet breaks for people in the building so the money and teaching talent was there, it has just lacked focus.
The result of this game of smoke and mirrors is a steady deterioration of remote learning expectations since this year of pandemic teaching began. Every time we go fully remote we seem to lose leverage in the remote half of our regular in-school day.
This politically motivated intentional ignoring of remote elearning has resulted in many classes (I’m told by students) who have little or no remote elearning work at all. There are single cohort teachers doing 120 minutes (2 hours) of face to face instruction in the morning and then simply walking away from the remote half of the course. Students in that class are earning credits and grades based on less than half the normal class work and can’t possibly be coming anywhere close to regular curriculum expectations, but when it suits the political angle the union wants to take on elearning, it’s all good.
The other result of this wildly uneven scheduling of work is that some members are being waterboarded by a brutal workload that can include more than twice the instructional time (along with all the prep, marking and logitistical time required for it). When I pointed this out after my first double cohort double class quadmester and suggested I should have lightened remote support expectations in the quadmester where my prep period resided (something we could have worked around with a more evenly distrubuted schedule instead of clinging to the old one), I was told by admin that wouldn’t be fair and everyone has to do the same duties. That’s exactly the moment my union should have stepped in and shown how much extra work I’d already done, but they’d rather pat themselves on the back for a job well-done for a small percentage of their members. The equity must be great if you’re lucky enough to have it.
I don’t think the current situation is a failure of the school board. I think they made difficult choices as well as they could with no support or leadership from the ministry. What we needed was our local union to show up and help mould that plan into something that is actually fair for everyone involved and differentiates based on availablity of qualifications. More supported, credible and consistent elearning expectations should also have been developed and evolved over the course of this year, but our union’s poltiics can’t get out of its own way when it comes to elearning, even when it results in members being hurt by wildly unfair and inequitable work expectations.
I look forward to the next email that looks like an advertisement for my employer and shows no awareness or concern for member circumstances. It’s probably sitting in my inbox right now. I’m pretty sure I pay the same dues as everyone else, too bad the support isn’t equal.
You’ll see green alligators and long necked geese Some humpy-back camels and some chimpanzees Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you’re born You’re never gonna see no Unicorn.
This unicorn with his rare teaching qualifications isn’t just dealing with another double cohort double class quadmester. This time around it’s double cohort double classes with stacked multi-grade senior classes, which means even more prep (grade 11 face to face work, grade 12 face to face work, grade 11 remote work, grade 12 remote work), and all packed into a single class capped at 31 students – like a university bound academic class, except my class of 31 includes 10% essential students, 35% applied students and over 50% of the class has an IEP (tech tends to attact students with special needs because it doesn’t expect them to sit in rows reading out of the same textbook). The unicorning going on here is starting to feel less like benign neglect and more like systemic bias intent on extinction, which any technology teacher in Ontario education can tell you is nothing new.
The last time I was this emotional about selling a vehicle was when I sold the last car I ever owned as a single guy. That Mercury Capri 5.0, 5 speed was a monster, the Millenium Falcon of cars. It was the kind of thing that you could drive from Toronto to Montreal in 2 hours and 57 minutes! Everything since that car has been a compromise, an appliance.
Seventeen years after that Capri was sold I found myself looking at a flat black 2007 Kawasaki Ninja in a cold garage in Fergus. I didn’t have my license yet, but I went for it. It was the first machine I’d owned in almost two decades that was a thrill rather than a necessity. It was the first vehicle I’d owned in years that I took pictures of. I’ve owned the Ninja for two seasons. I’ve commuted on it, gone on long rides on it and learned how to ride with it. On one of my first rides I realized it was able to do more for me than any car I’ve ever owned, maybe any car I would ever own; it made me fall in love with motorcycling. Bikes tend to provoke a more emotional relationship no matter what the machine. The two of you spend a lot of time exposed to the dangers of the road together. The bike’s agility and power can get you out of any number of tricky situations when the distracted people in cages don’t see you. Bikes reward competence with a wonderful feeling of empowerment. I enjoy the exclusivity of biking as well, not everyone should do it. The Ninja never failed to reward me for my efforts. I went with the Ninja because it wasn’t tiny so I wouldn’t find it weak after getting the hang of riding. That worked well, I’m not selling it now because it lacks in power, I’m just looking to expand my types of riding after having done the sport bike thing. Since my son has taken to riding with me, a bike better suited to two up riding is what I’m transitioning to. Happily, I’m as smitten with the Concours as I was with the Ninja, but that doesn’t make selling it any easier. The Ninja’s 649cc engine was remarkably cheap to insure for a new rider and was phenomenally efficient, often getting more than 60mpg. The bike has been a joy to operate, always dependable, always willing to teach me more as I got better. I love riding, it’s a feeling of freedom like no other. As a means of centering myself, motorbikes are a Zen mechanism that put you in the moment like no other machine (other than perhaps racing). I’ll miss the Ninja, but selling it means I can diversify my biking. The Concours will let me get some miles under my belt while still offering an athletic ride. With the cash on hand from the Ninja I’ll be looking at a dual sport and getting a bit dirtier on two wheels.
BTW: why $3900? Because this! After five people contacted me, the 3rd people to see the bike made an offer and I accepted. The Ninja is sold within a week. Now to consider how to expand my biking options…
Here’s an interesting option: A Kawasaki KLX250 with a big bore kit up to 330cc. Very light, stronger motor close to the Suzuki above in terms of power to weight ratio…
As we’ve been forced to shift online during the pandemic we’ve been placing demands on Google Apps for Education that it simply isn’t capable of. GAFE is, at best, a bunch of cheap software cobbled together by an advertising company in order to collect user data so they can sell things.
Trying to be productive in this environment is infuriating. This cobbled together suite of software has atrocious UI (user interfaces) that my grade 11s could do a better job with. Google has a rep as a software company but they’re really an advertising company that buys software companies and then twists them to feed their primary business.
The other day I likened using GAFE as a productivity tool to trying to do the Tour de France on a bicycle made out of soap. Anyone who tells you GAFE is great has probably capped their professional teaching designations with an advertising company’s logo and is more interested in selling that than they are in providing you with a working edtech solution. I’m willing to bet none of them have ever used other business based productivity suites and don’t know what they’re missing.
While chasing this freemium software, education has tied itself to these questionable systems delivered by dodgy advertising companiesthat aren’t designed for productivity. This makes one of the greatest expenses in education (the professionals who provide it) less efficient than they otherwise could be. How we got to this point where we hand teachers software that actually gets in the way of teaching is beyond me.
An example of how non-educational the apps-for-edu suite is can be found in the evolution of Google Sites. What was once a relatively modifiable system that even let you write your own HTML has evolved into a drag and drop toy that lets people ‘develop’ websites without any understanding of what’s going on behind the curtain. As a means of teaching web development or even just graphic design, it’s about as useful as a slideshow. Google loves to automate things for you to make life easy, but it doesn’t do much for you educationally or productively.
If we treated digital fluency, which is a system wide expectation in all aspects of education since the pandemic, in the same way that we treat literacy and numeracy (also expected in all aspects of education), we wouldn’t be selecting tools that do things for us to replace our understanding. We don’t use tools in literacy and numeracy that just take the hard work out of your hands and do it for you – if we did no one would be able to read, write or do maths.
Our technology stance with digital fluency is the equivalent of teaching spelling by giving all students a word-processor that reads and writes for them while we pat ourselves on the back for a 100% literacy rate. This laziness with digital fluency seeps into all aspects of education where automated digital tools are quickly coming to replace fundamental student skills instead of supporting their development. There are neurologically tested negative results to this kind of digitization, like the inability to recall details when entering new learning digitally. Of course, Google has no interest in you hand writing notes because they can’t monetize that. Reconsidering our educational digital technology would not only mean we could teach digital literacy like it mattered, but we’d also protect pedagogy throughout the system from companies that have no interest in it.
I still dream of a day where we don’t line up to spend tax payer’s money on inefficient and questionable educational technology that has no interest in providing the best possible pedagogical experience for our students while maximising teacher productivity and focus on teaching. Working from a credible basis like that, we could build our own open source educational technology (both hardware and software) and develop the kind of deep understanding of digital tools that would make our classrooms relevant and our students world leaders in terms of technology understanding and use.
I took a nice, long autumn ride through long shadows and cool setting sunlight to NCK Cycle Salvage in Woodstock, Ontario this afternoon.
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