Tag: Edtech

What’s it like teaching in a pandemic?  Frustrating and exhausting.  My best guess is that we’re running at about 60% of what we usually cover curriculum wise.  There are a number reasons for this, but the underlying one is that we’re letting a virus dictate our pedagogy.  SARS- CoV-2 is dictating a lot of things about being human at the moment, so it isn’t surprising that it’s also dictating how we educate our children, but COVID19’s ways are alien and harsh.  SARS-CoV2 might be even more mean spirited than the politicians we have running Ontario at the moment.  It’s at least as equally short sighted, self-serving and cruel.  It’s no wonder that the two get along so well together, COVID is the hammer this government has been trying to hit us with for the past two years.  They’ll still be gleefully holding our heads under water for weeks after the rest of the province has shut down.

For those of us trying to ride this out in the system, COVID19 throws everything into a permanent state of panic.  The system, which has been struggling under political attacks for over two years now, has been forced into reopening without any central plan or consistent support.  The result is a calcified, wounded thing lacking in flexibility and responsiveness.  In the rush to force school re-openings a number of strange inconsistencies have shown themselves.  If students aren’t in the building it’s perfectly OK to stuff up to forty of them on a poorly ventilated school bus for up to an hour at a time while transporting them to and from their socially distanced classrooms.  There is minimal oversight on masking policies at that time as the only adult in the vehicle is busy operating the vehicle.  Students then disburse from their crowded buses into carefully sized cohorts of under 20 so they aren’t in big groups… like the one they just sat in to get to the school.

You might think the walk-in students in the afternoon cohort are managing better, but driving home I regularly see large groups of 20+ students not wearing masks while play fighting and jumping on each other after a long afternoon of mask compliance and rigorous rules.  When COVID dictates your school’s daily activities it’s with an iron grip powered by fear and blame.  I don’t remotely blame those kids for jumping on each other after a frustrating afternoon of being kept apart and muzzled, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think all the rules are reducing transmission routes, the water’s just running around the rock that is the school.  Meanwhile, in school we’re making classroom maps of who is sitting where so we can trace contagion in the place it’s least likely to happen.  We don’t trace it anywhere else because it doesn’t affect system liability.  Compliance with liability issues appears to be what drives system decisions, not efficacy against this virus.

There is a reason we don’t didn’t do quadmesters when viruses weren’t dictating our school schedule.  Human attention is a limited resource (these days it’s being strip-mined too).  In education speak this is often referred to as engagement.  Some media has conflated this into a reduction in attention spans, but my experience in the classroom doesn’t support that.  I’ve watched CyberTitans and Skills Ontario competitors peak perform for hours at a time, so sustained attention is something today’s students are more than capable of, but it only seems to work in genuine learning opportunities.  Overly fabricated lessons with fictional connections to the real world are where engagement fails.  Students can quickly see through that kind of fabricated value.  You might get away with inauthentic learning in a 76 minute class, but in a 150 minute class you’re going to run into problems.

The quadmester fire-hose curriculum is problematic on a number of levels.  Fast moving students who are fluent in the system can adapt and even benefit from that kind of focused attention on a subject, but for the other seventy percent of the class, massive burst f2f and then remote/elearning classes are damaging their ability to learn, but we’re not dictating pedagogy any more, a virus is, and the virus actually benefits from disaffected, frustrated people.  It’s odd that we keep handing these kinds of people to the disease.  SARS-CoV2 isn’t intelligent in the traditional sense, but it is a reflexive opportunist that will and does benefit from our ham-handed responses.

In addition to student focus, quadmesters produce a number of other issues that are especially difficult to manage during a world wide medical emergency.  I’ve just spent three weeks trying to order IT parts in for my second grade 9 class.  The first one took out enough of what parts we had in the lab (many of which were in rough shape because we’d been in the middle of using them before March break) that I couldn’t do the IT unit with the second class.  In a normal year I’d have weeks to sort that out, in the drink-from-the-firehouse quadmester curriculum where we’re covering 4+ days of material each day and almost a month a week, there is no time to wait on parts.  They take longer to source and deliver anyway because there’s a pandemic happening.  I’m now trying to line up a month’s worth of coding curriculum to deliver next week instead – online and f2f at the same time all day every day.

Another one of those inconsistent system responses is the withdrawal of support services within the school.  Special education support rooms are closed, guidance is closed and  libraries are closed, presumably so students aren’t mixing in school.  When you’re facing 16 bused in students every morning who are bringing over 500 secondary connections with them into your classroom, the idea that sending students who need support to specialists who can help them, or sending one of the many students I’ve had in emotional distress over the past few weeks down to guidance seems like a reasonable expectation, but evidently it’s absurdly dangerous.

COVID19 seldom transmits through airborne droplets.  You’d have to be within two meters of someone when they sneezed or coughed while not wearing a mask while you’re also not wearing a mask (though COVID can infect through eyes too) to even have a chance of transmission that way.  Yet we fixate on masks and ignore the most common means of transmission.  The single thing that’s made SARS-CoV2 so difficult to manage is its ability to survive on surfaces.  Smaller groupings and frequent spot cleaning is what will strangle this thing, not myopic mask fixations.  Following the actual pathology of the disease, there is no reason why we can’t apply effective cleaning regimes and distancing to guidance, spec-ed support and library access, but we don’t because we’d rather panic and shut them down while giving the virus the frustrated people it needs to thrive.  Less is more when it comes to ignoring special needs in a pandemic.

While quadmesters are problematic in a lot of ways, the dual cohort is also an imperfect solution to a problem we’re only half addressing.  The initial idea was to make every classroom teacher do twice as much prep work designing both face to face and online instruction and then being both online and face to face with alternating halves of the class all day.  In practice the splits didn’t happen evenly because we’re a country school and way more students get bused in than walk, so our morning/bus cohorts are often 2-3 times bigger than our afternoon cohorts (16 vs 6 last week for me).  Our union then worked out how to provide us with prep time by having covering teachers come in for 30-45 minutes in each two and a half hour marathon face to face session, but in practice I’ve yet to have a covering teacher qualified to teach what I teach and none of them have the faintest idea what we’re doing.  From a safety perspective, if the covering teacher isn’t tech qualified I’m supposed to pull students off hands-on work (which is the main focus in technology classes) and do seat work (which isn’t)… with someone who has no background in the subject?  We were told to just work through our preps.  It’s bandaids all the way down in 2020.

Having to produce days of remote lessons for the half of the class not face to face is another place where a bandaid was thrown on.  The teachers covering the online work?  Yep, they’re not qualified to teach my subject and have no background in it either.  Furthermore they were told that they are to do no marking and make no material for the class, so they’re… what?  Taking attendance?  On any typical day I’m trying to teach a face to face class while also trying to respond to online emails from students at home at the same time.  Not only is this an incredible burden to bear for classroom teachers, but it also casts the no-contact rules with people still doing support work in a stark light.  If feels like we’re expected to go over the top every day into no-man’s land while other staff are experiencing minimal workloads.

Overflow classes for students who need special one on one support?  That would have been a good use of teachers not in the classroom.  We could have pivoted around student need instead of ignoring it.  Emotional support spaces for students struggling with the last six months?  That would have been a good use of teachers, but thanks to an arbitrary and rather inconsistent response, support is dead while people on the front lines are being snowed under.

The reflexive tightening of the system while under this extraordinary pressure while also two years into a provincial leadership vacuum has resulted in an inflexible response that is providing the appearance of safe, face to face schooling without actually delivering it.  I struggled early on with system leaders telling us to just provide day care and not worry about curriculum, but I didn’t take years of schooling to provide day care, though, of course, I’m very cognizant of my students’ mental well being.  Others have suggested that it doesn’t matter if we cover curriculum as long as we just make sure the kids are OK, but that’s very difficult to do when the very systems in schools that ensure child well-being are inaccessible.  Do you want to be having surgery done on you by COVID-grads who never actually completed a credible education system?  Do you want them fixing your brakes?  Building your bridges?  We ignore expertise at great cost to our society.  We have to get back to maximizing human potential because that’s what society needs us to do – our students need us to do that too.  Summer should have been all about planning and organization, but it is clearly evident that the government and the ministry its mismanaging didn’t plan anything.  We’re watching boards scramble with no clear funding or central planning by provincial governance to try and make this work, and it really isn’t.

Where to next?  Well, Ontario’s second wave is breaking on us quickly.  Where is it coming on strong?  In school aged kids and the people most likely to be in contact with them.  Some have suggested that younger children aren’t at risk because they’re not showing a lot of high positives, but considering COVID19’s strange habits, such as the fact that the vast majority of under twenties who get it show no symptoms at all, and considering that Ontario’s half-assed back to school plan has had parents missing work to take their kids with colds, asthma and allergies to day-long line ups to get COVID tested, I’m not surprised.  We’re good at skewing our own data.

Here’s a happy thought for you:  what if students are freely spreading COVID19 on overcrowded buses and before and after school by being non-compliant with safety protocols (young people are the most likely cynical spreaders, along with conservatives, so our area is doubly blessed).  They then take it home where older siblings and parents produce the biggest spike in cases.  Give it a bit of time and it’ll spread to older groups where it is much more likely to be fatal.  After a week in school, a weekend visit to grandparents might be about the nastiest thing you can do.  It took less than two weeks for me to personally know a teacher who was sent home to wait on a COVID19 test.  Don’t think it can’t happen to you, it’s inevitable.

How to fix it?  It’s self correcting.  Thousands of parents are starting to see the holes in this government’s lack of planning and are pulling their children back home for fully remote learning.  As in everything else in this pandemic, people are leveraging their socioeconomic advantage and privilege to look after themselves.  Rather than creating fictions around a normalized return to school (for the kids’ mental health!), we need to focus face to face schooling on the students and families that specifically need it.  Instead of using the school system as an underground transmission system for the virus, we should be using it to focus on providing equity and support for people in distress.  I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks (when I’m not teaching face to face and online simultaneously in an accelerated curriculum all day every day) talking down students and their parents – both of whom I’ve seen burst into tears while venting.

We realized an important distinction early on in the emergency cancellation of classes in the spring: this isn’t elearning, it’s emergency remote learning, and expecting students to be open and able to learn while under that kind of stress isn’t reasonable.  I knew we were going to struggle to get through curriculum in the circumstances, I just didn’t expect the system to redesign itself to make it harder as well.  We’ve tried to reopen schools while our pedagogy is being driven by a virus rather than how people best learn.  The result is a problematic system of delivery that is causing more problems than the virus itself.  We’ve lurched from video communications getting you fired to video communications being essential in a matter of one weekend, and we’re still working out the social conventions around that.  But that stumbling forward into readily available technology also suggests a pathway out of this mess. I honestly believe that our reluctance to understand and explore the possibilities of digital communications has put us on our back foot over and over again in this medical emergency.  If we embraced the opportunities to be found in digital pedagogy we could not only provide a pathway around COVID limitations but also reveal enrichment opportunities that we could continue to leverage well after this pandemic has passed.

Face to face schooling has always been a series of compromises, but the pandemic has made those compromises increasingly stark while also ignoring a number of health gaps that might end up hurting people.  It’s difficult starting another day of trying to be in two places at once knowing that students in crisis have no where to go.  I’m not going to leave them dangling, but there is only so much of me to go around.  All in all we’re just another brick in the wall.  I always keep that song in the back of my mind when I teach so I see my students as people.  SARS-CoV2 doesn’t see them as people, it sees them as a resource to be used up.  I wish the people running our education system didn’t see our classrooms in the same way a virus does.  I wish we could find a way forward that leverages the technology we have so we could focus our limited face to face resources more effectively and sustainably.

For me it’s another week back in the trenches being told to drag kids in distress through a sped up schedule designed by a virus.  I’m not sure how long we can all keep this up, pandemic or no pandemic.

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I’ve been teaching the engineering design process for the past two weeks to grade 9s in very difficult circumstances.  The engineering process underlies all the work we do in our stochastic, tactile technology/engineering program.  We aren’t rote learning to the same standardized answer, so blind obedience to processes won’t get us working results. We need to be organized, agile and able to step back and gain perspective in our non-linear problem solving circumstances like any good technician or engineer would when solving a complex, arbitrary problem.

I’m struggling with the half-baked safety plan we seem determined to follow at all costs.  Rather than get more frustrated with the optics, politics and bureaucracy that drive it, I thought, “why not apply the engineering process to my intolerable situation?”  

 

ENGINEERING DESIGN: COVID MASKS

•  ASK:how do we resolve physically untenable policies around masks?
• IMAGINE: a Heath Unit/Canada COVID19 compliant masking system that is effective and comfortable (if it isn’t comfortable it isn’t effective)
• PLAN: collect data, research how COVID actually works, find existing solutions to best mitigate its spread
• CREATE: build a testing system, create a solution based process
• EXPERIMENT:  try different mask types and materials
• IMPROVE: deliver an improved masking policy that is constantly in review
  

PLANNING:  DATA COLLECTION

It got up to 30°C/70% humidity in our it-has-never-worked-properly incorrectly ventilated classroom on Friday, which equates to a humidex temperature feeling like 41°C (that’s 106°F if you’re old school). I was rotating grade 9s outside to demask and breathe. It’s hard to learn when you’re seeing spots and can’t think straight… during a pandemic.

We were building circuits with Arduinos so I built a temperature/humidity sensor, which is how we captured data. Just for giggles I put the sensor on longer wires and put it up inside my mask while I was instructing. Curious about the results?

Inside the too small and tight, restrictive masks we’re required to wear all day every day at school the temperature is 4-5 degrees warmer than the outside air. I was getting readings of 33-35°C inside the mask depending on whether I was breathing in or out. But what gets you is the humidity. Inside the mask it was ranging between 92-97% humidity. Run that through the Canadian Humidex calculator and I’m stewing in what feels like 54°C all day, every day.

If I were in a climate controlled environment like the medical people who wear masks are this would probably be much more manageable, but I’m not.

CONCLUSION:  the small, restrictive medical grade ASTM Level 1 masks we’re required to wear might work in a well ventilated hospital, but they don’t work in schools where climate control is a distant dream.  When temperatures rise medical grade masks quickly become a liability more than a protection.

 

 

PLANNING:  ASTM Level 1 Mask RESEARCH:

 

WHERE & WHY ASTM1 MASKS WORK:  If you’re a medical professional working in a dentist, doctor’s office or hospital you’re working in a climate controlled environment that must follow strict guidelines.  In that context ASTM1 masks work effectively because the environment is supporting mask use rather than fighting it.

 

In an uncontrolled environment medical masks are restrictive and can cause discomfort which makes them a liability because people start fidgeting with them.

 

Staff struggling in uncontrolled climates (ie: most classrooms) resolve their breathing difficulties by breaking many of the rules for safe mask use:

 

I regularly see staff having to move restrictive medical grade masks around or wearing them with gaps or incorrectly just to get a breath.  Wearing a medical grade mask incorrectly is less safe than wearing a properly fitted non-medical grade mask correctly.  Discomfort from an improperly mandated masking policy drives this misuse.

PLANNING/RESEARCH: WHEN TO USE ASTM1 MEDICAL MASKS

ASTM1 surgical masks, such as are being provided to teachers, are medical usage masks that work in concert with a variety of other PPE options that teachers haven’t been provided with.  This video gives you an example of how medically focused these masks are:

What do ASTM1 medical masks do that a more comfortable, properly fitted non-medical option doesn’t?  Not much in the context of a classroom.  In a medical environment where a professional is working with COVID19 positive patients, a medical mask would be used in conjunction with a face shield to keep the medical worker safe in a known high risk situation.

 

“Medical masks are designed to protect against large droplets, splashes or sprays
of bodily fluid or other type of fluid.” (Health News Hub.org).  In a medical context these masks provide a valuable level of protection, but an ASTM1 mask by itself isn’t a better barrier to COVID transmission, especially when worn incorrectly.

 

“It’s unlikely you’ll be infected in public by airborne viral particles.
The real threat is touching an infected surface and then putting your
hand to your face: Frequent hand-washing is a sure way to avoid
COVID-19”  (Health News Hub.org)  A focus on cleaning surfaces and regular hand-washing would be far more effective than the false protection of a single layer of PPE/incorrectly applied medical mask.

 

Smaller class sizes, reduced bus loads and more frequent spot cleaning is a far more effective barrier to COVID19 transmission than stipulating a medical grade mask with no other PPE, but it does provide the appearance of greater diligence without the effectiveness and makes uneducated jumpy people think things are being handled diligently.

 

ASTM1 mask compliance in non-medical settings also puts Ontario’s public education systems at odds with the public health unit and Health Canada masking stipulations: “Due
to critical shortages during the COVID-19 response, we are implementing
and/or proposing a range of strategies to respond to the increased
demand for medical masks”  Bins full of them outside every public school in Ontario every day isn’t helping to solve this world-wide shortage, especially when it’s done for optics rather than efficacy.

 

There are numerous well researched sources of information on mask usage this far into the COVID19 pandemic.  Its modes of transmission are known and technology is on hand to mitigate them, yet myths persist, like the idea that a medical mask is somehow a cure-all and significantly ‘safer’ than a correctly fitted cloth mask.  Every health agency in the world wouldn’t be advocating non-medical masks if they didn’t work.

 

 

PLANNING: RESEARCH: THE LIMITATIONS OF MASK ONLY PPE

“The coronavirus can spread through eyes, just as it can through nose and mouth” (American Academy of Ophthalmology) so demanding medical grade nose and throat protection while requiring no eye protection is wildly inconsistent and dangerously disingenuous.  The droplets that a properly sized and fitted cloth mask would stop and that an ATSM1 medical mask is designed to specifically stop 95% of would happen in a situation when a COVID19 positive person coughed or sneezed in your face without wearing a mask themselves, but with no eye protection you’re going to contract it anyway.  Rather than pretending to act from a sense of greater protection, more logical and consistent masking policies from the provincial government would not only make educational staff more comfortable but also less likely to contract the virus.

 

The appearance of medical safety, without the efficacy..

That educational staff are being required to wear poorly fitted and environmentally damaging ATSM1 medical masks at a time when they are vitally needed by people who would be wearing them with a complete set of PPE in an appropriately controlled environment is problematic.  The education system seems incapable of understanding or providing a masking solution that aligns with masking requirements everywhere else.  We need to stop acting like this is a marketing gimmick and start acting like it’s a medical emergency.

PLANNING: RESEARCH:  LACK OF CLARITY AROUND EFFECTIVE MASK USE

 

All medical mask directions stress a smooth seal with your face to ensure effectiveness, but another wildly inconsistent piece of Ontario education’s approach to mask adoption is demanding ATSM1 medically compliant masks with no direction around facial hair.  A beard or moustache that prevents a seal around the nose and mouth makes the mask all but useless, but there has been zero direction on the mandatory removal of facial hair.  The CDC as well as other health groups have made suggestions on facial hair that allows for a proper mask fit, which is a challenge.  CBC’s piece on it suggests a larger cloth mask would actually be more effective than smaller medical grade mask that won’t cover the beard. Another piece suggests COVID19 droplets spat onto your beard from a virus carrier can live for hours, but wear an ATSM1 mask incorrectly and the powers that be are happy.  The only conclusion that can be drawn is that ATSM1 mask usage by Ontario educators is a marketing move and not a medically viable choice.  That so many teachers seem to be buying into it is astonishing.

 

You’ll find a lot of panicky accusations saying this is a conspiracy theory from early in COVID19, but it should be fairly obvious that a beard would prevent a ‘tight seal’ as required in any surgical mask directions.CDC has always recommended shaving for medical professionals wearing medical grade gear.

 

CONCLUSION:

 

It appears Ontario public education is using ASTM1 level masks to produce a sense of false protection in the education system.  By ignoring the more difficult and expensive medically proven ways of preventing COVID19 spread, such as resolving decades long HVAC issues in schools and not providing the full range of PPE required to provide medical levels of protection, Ontario’s pick-and-choose safety approach with an emphasis on medical mask use without any other criteria is both ineffective and misleading.

CREATE/EXPERIMENT/IMPROVE: FINDING A MORE EFFECTIVE MASKING SOLUTION

For staff with breathing and size issues the Chinese manufactured disposable ATSM1 masks are all but ineffective.  A policy that allows for public health/Health Canada compliant masks would not only produce staff in less physical distress, but also provide greater safety for everyone at this difficult time.

 

SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS FOR MASKS:

1.  Must fit the wearer’s face (current one size fits all masks do not fit all user faces)
2. Masks must be comfortable enough for 150 minute continuous usage scenarios
3. Masks must be breathable enough that users aren’t constantly pulling them away to breathe

EXPERIMENT:

Purchase a variety of mask types and sizes and experiment with them to find effective fit and duration results.  In a  medical situation professionals choose a mask from a selection of sizes and types.  They aren’t all handed the same sized and shaped mask as educators have been.  By experimenting with appropriate fit and breath-ability options a more effective masking solution would reveal itself.  None of this happened in preparing for the new school year.  This doesn’t appear to be happening now either.

IMPROVE:  COVID19 IS STILL BEING UNDERSTOOD SO RESPONSIVE CHANGE SHOULD BE BUILT INTO ANY PLAN

 

With COVID19’s transmission still under review by major players like the CDC, the safest route would have been to provide remote learning for the majority of families so that social isolation bubbles could persist.  Schools should have only been opened up to students in need or for specific classes that require face to face instruction.

A more cautious and medically researched approach to this school year would have prevented the current increases in cases, but the provincial government picked what it liked in terms of medical advice and ignored the rest, while using medical mask usage to whitewash any questions of efficacy.

 

The latest data suggests that droplet transmission happens when people are in close proximity to one another.  In this scenario it is much more important that staff and students have properly fitted, comfortable masks than it is to have a splash ready ATSM1 medical grade mask.

Beyond a metre the droplets tend to fall out of the air, though this is in question too.  If airborne transmission can happen from infected droplets that hang in the air for hours, the only logical choice would be to shut down face to face schooling again as a single infected person in any school would be spreading COVID19 indiscriminately anywhere they travel whenever they remove or incorrectly wear their mask.  Even a properly fitted mask is up to 95% efficient so COVID19 transmission would occur anyway with enough exposure.

Following WHO’s current understanding that COVID19 is most easily spread in close quarters, it’s vitally important that staff and students have comfortable, properly fitted masks that they aren’t constantly touching and making ineffective.

IMPROVE: A FLEXIBLE, MEDICALLY DRIVEN MASK POLICY FOR ONTARIO SCHOOLS

By experimenting with a variety of sizes and types of masks Ontario education could create a more effective masking policy that better protects its staff and students.

 

By closely following medical research on transmission and management, Ontario education could provide timely updates to its masking and PPE policies that keep people safe.

Larger, systemic issues like poor classroom ventilation and class sizes will have far more efficacy than a simplistic and misleading one-size-doesn’t-fit-all masking policy.  Some boards (mine included) have taken steps to reduce class sizes but in some cases the Ministry intervened and prevented boards from creating smaller class sizes.  In our case the cohorted solution to class sizes has downloaded all of the effort in making it work on classroom teachers which is creating marathon sessions of face to face classes while teachers are simultaneously expected to manage the other half of the class online.  This is twice the preparation and work along with the impossible expectations of being in two places at once – all day, every day.  Doing this while wearing an ill-fitting mask with breath-ability issues in a poorly ventilated classroom is a combination that will hurt many employees.  Rather than enforcing a misleading, half-finished medical masking policy, a focus on these other urgent matters would produce better outcomes for all involved.

NOTES & LINKS:

Advice on the use of masks in the context of COVID-19:  https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/advice-on-the-use-of-masks-in-the-community-during-home-care-and-in-healthcare-settings-in-the-context-of-the-novel-coronavirus-(2019-ncov)-outbreak

https://news.lvhn.org/fact-or-myth-facial-hair-and-covid-19/

https://nymag.com/strategist/article/face-masks-for-beards.html 

https://virologydownunder.com/flight-of-the-aerosol/

A well written article by a pile of doctors that explains how viral transmission happens.  An airborne virus is a terrible thing.  Whether or not COVID19 is airborne is still in contention, but the latest from CDC suggests it is. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-coronavirus-spreads-through-the-air-what-we-know-so-far1/

“Currently, WHO guidance
considers surgical masks to be adequately protective for healthcare
staffers working with potential COVID-19 patients, and advises using N95
masks in limited situations, such as when intubating patients, which is
known to generate small particles from deep in the lungs. Healthcare
workers who follow these recommendations have been generally protected
against the virus, WHO notes.”

Medical masks for medical work…

 

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This is a WIRED story about tech software startups in the Denver area.  In it a man who has an idea about buying insurance online has become a ‘TECH CEO’ even though he has no idea of what it is he is actually building.  With no background in technology hardware or software development, this guy is trying to launch a tech-startup with an idea and little else.


The quotes below are from the article.  The bolding is mine…

ROSS DIEDRICH HAD gone pale and raw-boned. The CEO of a year-old startup in Denver, he’d stay at his office until the middle of the night, go home and sleep for about five hours, then chug a spinach smoothie and start again. He was just 27 years old, but he felt wrung out.

He still didn’t have even a basic version of the software that he could demo—an “MVP” in coder parlance, for minimum viable product. Chris was still holding down his full-time job; he didn’t want to quit until Covered had some funding in hand. The lead development engineer that Ross had brought on, a big, quiet nerd named Jonathan Baughn, was juggling a bunch of projects and wasn’t as available as Ross had expected. But Ross didn’t want to put too much pressure on Baughn. As a contractor, he was within his rights to work for others. A junior software engineer Baughn had brought to the project, Reyna DeLogé, tried to manage on her own, but they kept blowing past their self-imposed deadlines.

He navigated to the demo site, typed in his password, and tapped on the mousepad. Then he tapped again. Nothing happened. The demo was broken. “What the heck is going on here?” he murmured.

Where Jobs diverges from the disaster described in the WIRED article above is that he surrounds himself with the most knowledgeable engineers – an orchestra of expertise, and then focuses on having them produce their best possible work.  An argument could be made for a manager like this, but not at the expense of engineering, never at the expense of engineering.


Your ideal manager must have some technical background if they are to work with skilled labour.  In the clip above Woz tells Jobs that he can’t do anything, which isn’t really true; they met and bonded over their shared knowledge of electronics.  Jobs may not have been able to engineer the devices he helped create, but he was very aware of the technology and how it worked.  With that knowledge he was able to gather experts because he could appreciate their expertise.

A manager who is only an expert in management is best when not managing people who perform skilled work, whether that be engineering or teaching or any other complex, skills based process.  Matt Crawford does a great job of examining this in The World Beyond Your Head.  In the book Crawford distinguishes between the skilled labourer who modifies or ‘jigs’ their environment to better perform their profession and the unskilled script follower who does what they’re told in a prefabricated production line.  Being free to manipulate the physical environment in order to perform your expertise is a foundation stone of professionalism in Crawford’s mind.  A lot of the downward pressure you see on worker valuation in education and employment in general is because of the Taylorism of workplaces into script following routines.  Making the end goal of education a result in a standardized test plays to this thinking perfectly.  In those prefabricated and abstracted workplaces skill isn’t a requirement, obedience is.


An effective manager of skilled labour acknowledges and cultivates expertise in their people.  You can’t do that without having some kind of handle on that skillset.  Being oblivious to how reality works and managing complex, skilled labourers who work in that demanding environment like they are a production line is the single greatest point of failure in management, unless your goal is to chase out skilled labour and turn your organization into a mechanical process where the people in it are little more that scripted robots.  There are financial arguments for that, but they aren’t very humane.  We might not perform as many repetitive job tasks in the future, but if we remove human expertise from the workplace it will damage us as a species, and any financial gain from it would be short lived.


Related Readings:

Shopclass as Soulcraft: IT Idiocy, Management Speak & Skills Abstraction
Taylorism in Edtech
Implications of a Situated Intelligence in Education
A Thin and Fragile Pretense
How We’ve Situated Ourselves

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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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