Edtech – Page 16 – Mechanical Sympathy

Stretched Thin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Mediocrity Virus

So I’m sitting there with a room full of people who have just won the bronze medal world-wide in the most recent round of ‘who’s got the best education system’. After years of diligent effort and insightful leadership, Canada is ranked third worldwide in educational performance, and is very close to toppling the two leaders. In every metric you care to apply, we are awesome.

We’ve applied differentiated instruction, we push technology as far as our budgets will let us, we professionally consider every angle that we can to improve student achievement, from student centred learning to expanding non-academic stream programming in order to meaningfully serve our entire student base.

Are there still problems? Certainly. We still have to work to get every member of our team to produce a peak performance, but this too is happening. Our professionalism, our dedication and our society’s values allow us to compete at the highest level.

Into our victory celebration comes a guy from a team that didn’t even make the olympics. They’ve suffered a precipitous drop in performance, dropping from the mid-teens (the highest they’ve ever been) to thirty-third over all in terms of student performance. Their teaching profession is in shambles, and their society generally views educators as over paid loafers who take summers off. Their public education system (like their prison system or their military) is being taken over by private contractors who are more focused on simplistic metrics, like their own profitability.

He tells us that we have to drastically simplify what we’re doing, go back to drilling students on facts, strictly limit teachers to curriculum and install discipline back into education; this is the only way we will get them all back on a college track. He exemplified teachers who drill their students and run their classes with a simple, military efficiency. He floated odd statistics like, students who already know a lesson will learn 400% better if they are made to repeat what they already know over again, rather than differentiating and enriching their specific learning.

He was statistics driven and awash in his country’s educational expertise (almost exclusively driven from privatized schools). He suggested that we might be ‘a bit ahead’.

The coach in me suggests that if your team is performing well, you keep doing what you’re doing. Certainly you tweak it here or there, but when you turn in a world class performance, you don’t bring in a coach from a team that didn’t even make the show to give suggestions, but we did, because we’re Canadian, and the one thing we have even more than an awesome education system is a giant inferiority complex with our big cousins to the south.

Pandemic Reflections: F2F Has Way Better Bandwidth

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

All that to say, I’ve spent a great deal of my career exploring how digital technologies might augment our teaching, but I’m also well aware of the shortfalls.

The recent pandemic shutdown has driven a lot of teachers and students online, and the framing by our Ministry early on was very elearning focused, but a colleague in our first ever staff video conference said something that resonated for me: this isn’t elearning, it’s isn’t business as usual, this is emergency response remote learning – we’re not ‘going online’ we doing everything we can to keep education alive at a time when it’s too easily dismissed. This might sound like an arbitrary distinction, but it isn’t. Not everyone needs to go online, and in many cases (as in the 2011 career studies experiment above), we have a sizable portion of our student population who cannot learn effectively in that space. When you also toss in the inequity of online learning, it leaves option looking like a very poor go-to. As educators, whenever we see the system roll out an undifferentiated, blanket response to an issue (like EQAO), we should take a hard pedagogical look at it. Uniform responses that don’t honour our student (and teacher’s) individual approaches to learning and teaching are, by definition, unresponsive and ineffective.

Since the school closures happened, I’ve been very conscious of the economically disadvantaged students who have been cut off at home. This may very well be a home that isn’t safe, isn’t providing adequate care and isn’t where the student wants to spend their time. The “stay at home” message that started this off is couched in privilege. For many students home isn’t a nice word. I’ve been frustrated by the lack of initiative shown in this crisis, but the digital divide many of our students face was something we could have addressed before, but didn’t. Some leaders are now using that lack of equity as an excuse to do nothing, which strikes me as the worst kind of hypocrisy. If we messed it up before, we’re messing it up now for even more people because what we didn’t do before is an excuse to do nothing now? Wow.

I’m also staggered that there is evidently no one in the largest school system in the country who is responsible for emergency response planning. We seem to be making it up as we go and delivering planning by press conference, and we’ve already lost three weeks to plan something that should have been in place from the go. You know what’s harder than teaching remotely? Teaching remotely using constantly changing expectations.

So here we are, in a pandemic situation that people have been warning is coming for years. Our solution is to throw elearning at it, and (so far, 3 weeks in) do nothing to address the fact that thousands of Ontario students don’t have the devices at home and/or the internet connectivity to access it – and those are the students who most needed education to support them from the beginning.

There is a reason why we truck in students on diesel fume spewing school buses each day to a face to face learning environment; public education is the great equalizer. More than anything else it helps us find the best in our population and enable them to achieve beyond the socio-economic situation they find themselves in. For wealthy students school can feel like a step down from a life of choice and excess, but for others it is a bastion of reliability; the only time in their day when they’re talking to dependable, capable adults. For some it’s the only time when they aren’t hungry, and our solution in an emergency situation that demands isolation is to ignore them?

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Level 3 means you can take a time and date out of an email
and put it in an online calendar, this isn’t rocket science,
and yet most people aren’t even there.

Let’s say we get the digital divide under control and manage to get everyone connected (we haven’t and we wont’, but let’s imagine we did). Now that we have everyone online and using an appropriate device, we need the majority to leverage digital skills they haven’t developed and get them learning remotely. Ontario doesn’t have a digital skills continuum, other than some vague language dropped into other subjects here and there, yet we were increasingly expecting students and teachers to use digital tools in school and now they have suddenly become a necessity. I teach computer technology and have a well developed program, but I only reach about 100 students out of the 1300 in our school. If you count the business tech courses and media arts that also build digital fluency, all together we’d be lucky to reach a quarter of our student population, the rest have basic, habitual digital experience – like most of the population. What we’re doing with elearning is akin to handing out books to illiterate people so they can learn at home with them.

Could elearning work? It has in my experience, and I’m seeing some of my very digitally fluent seniors doing outstanding work online now. I’ve had some very positive elearning teaching experiences where we leveraged technology and created a remote learning environment that was rich and responsive. When it’s happened it was with a digitally focused and experienced teacher and voluntary students who also had the resilience and technical expertise to make it happen. When you teach online it feels like you’re looking at your students through a wrong-way-around telescope. I described this recently in terms of bandwidth. When you’re face to face with someone you’re able to read their body language in fine detail. The tone of their voice isn’t a dimensionless thing coming out of a tiny computer speaker, but it doesn’t end there. I’ve had students with obvious (when face to face) hygiene issues that I’m able to notice and subtly address by getting our councillors involved. I’m able to leverage the fantastic food school resources our school offers to get hungry students fed when we’re face to face. I’m able to overhear student conversation in class that gives me the context I need to connect with them more effectively. I’m able to present body language and nuance of voice that develops trust and a human relationship. I’m able to differentiate instruction with students quickly and effectively while face to face. I’m able to close the digital divide for all my students when they enter my lab. There is a reason we learn best face to face, it has way better bandwidth than any digital option. Even if you and your students are digital ninjas, remote/online learning is always going to be a lower bandwidth, less effective option that face to face learning.

In a perfect world we’d develop our staff and student’s digital fluency and engage in augmented 21st Century learning using digital tools and connectivity to enhance our ability to collaborate and communicate (and be ready for bizarre emergencies like this one), but it makes for a poor replacement; educational technology for augmentation is a worthy pedagogical goal. Educational digital technology replacing face to face learning isn’t pedagogically motivated, it’s usually tied to scalability and the resultant monetization of a platform, usually with an eye to reducing costs. The elearning push by Ontario’s current government was entirely focused on this without any thought given to the digital divide, dearth of digital skills and pedagogically reductive nature of remote elearning.

This pandemic has shone a harsh light on the inadequacies of our system in terms of emergency response and digital skills training, as well as highlighting the ongoing digital divide. A good that might come of it is that we begin to address all of these issues and build a more resilient and effective education system that is able to take initiative and respond to an emergency situation without taking a month to think about it.

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Secondary Like We Mean It

We’re getting squeezed for sections this year because bankers and multi-nationals wanted to play silly buggers with the world economy. Watching my school cut English sections down to the bone is making me question the validity of requiring mandatory English throughout high school.

Academic English is very university focused with the almighty essay as the be-all and end-all of high school writing. I’m an English major, I love essays, but I recognize that the vast majority of our students, even the university bound ones, will never write another essay in their lives after high school. Asking senior academic English teachers to consider reports, or labs, or articles, or any other writing output is an uphill battle. They don’t want to water down their subject; the essay is sacred.

I get that, so perhaps it’s time to water down their population. Instead of dragging all senior students through years of mostly irrelevant English skills development, why not separate the vital from the overly specific? Literacy is a vital skill the general population needs to have, regardless of whether they major in English in university or work at a cash register.

http://prezi.com/o3bt2rpkzl5f/reconfiguring-for-21st-century-education/

One of the biggest challenges in English is facing an always packed class (never off the cap) full of an astonishing range of students. A typical academic English class will contain barely literate non-readers whose parents don’t want them to give up academic options (and who may be more than capable in numeracy, science or technology). Academic English bludgeons them with essays and Shakespeare. The solution is to pare off literacy from what is really a specific skill set needed only by advanced students of the arts and humanities.

The idea for mandatory grade 9 and 10 literacy and numeracy courses comes from this logic. The grade 10 course is a survey/review course that works to assess students literacy skills in a granular and meaningful way. The opposite of a standardized test, these courses challenge students in order to accurately assess their skills in numeracy and literacy in detail. The end result would be a certification in two important foundational skills.

Students who are able to demonstrate these foundational skills are able to continue in high school in which ever direction they choose with a clear idea of their strengths or weaknesses in fundamentally skills, or move beyond the building and into apprenticeships or the work place knowing that they have displayed an appropriate level of literacy and numeracy. Their proven ability in these two vital skill sets will resolve many of the fears surrounding letting students leave school early. Those that stay in high school are offered a plethora of courses, local, remote or a hybrid of the two, that allow them to develop interests and abilities that are flexible, encourage their strengths and change with the times.

Those interested in post-secondary can still take advanced English and mathematics courses, but these are entirely optional. They may also be specific to future needs. Science and technology students may take English that focuses on report writing and presenting analysis in clear and concise ways. Arts and humanities students may focus on more traditional English, such as literature and essays.

If we’re not going to do literacy and numeracy properly by underfunding it into oblivion, perhaps it’s time to separate the vital skills from overly specialized, academic English and mathematics and reconfigure for flexibility in our curriculum.

Forming an ECOO Presentation

Originally posted on Dusty World in October, 2012…

There were three key books I read in the past year that have clarified for me a direction we could head in educational technology. Ideas from each of those books, which at first appear to be in direct odds with each other, helped form the content of my ECOO presentation this year.

After reading The Shallows, Nick Carr’s carefully constructed argument held a lot of weight – the internet and how it is being adopted by the general public is actually making people less effective as both thinkers and doers. As educators, we should all be concerned about this result. At a conference this year a frustrated, thirty-something CEO said of the twenty-somethings she’s tried hiring recently, “I just wish they could finish a thought! I can’t even get them to close a sale because they are checking Facebook!” This problem goes well beyond education (where any teacher can tell you it’s an epidemic). Everyone involved in education should read this book, especially if they are trying to implement technology in the classroom.

From The Shallows I took a serious concern about technological illiteracy and habitual use of computers actually injuring people’s ability to think.

I read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularlity is Near as a counterpoint to Carr’s very accurate, and very depressing Shallows. Kurzweil’s giddy optimism in our engineering skills verges on evangelism. He is a wonderfully interesting and eccentric character. His belief goes well beyond merely living in a time of transformative change. The singularity he refers to is a moment in the near future where we are able to develop a greater intelligence than a single human brain, or even a group of them. He goes into mathletic detail about exponential growth and how this is occurring in computers. Very soon we’ll understand things in finer and more complete detail than we’ve ever been able to before and our management of the world will take on omniscient proportions. Technologically enhanced humans exist beyond the technological singularity – living in a world that looks as alien to us now as ours would to someone from the middle ages.

From Kurzweil I recognized how technology is evolving in increasingly personalized ways. This is an argument Carr makes from the other side too. From external machines, we are on a journey to technological integration. This integration is going to well beyond smartphones, that’s just the latest step in an inevitable trend. If education does everything it can to present technology as generic and impersonal, it is failing to notice a key direction in technology, it’s failing to produce students who will be useful in their own futures. This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of my BYOD/differentiated technology argument, but I believe it’s a fundamental part of our technological evolution. Computers want to become a part of us. We’re not going to develop a Skynet or Matrix that will take over. Our technology IS us, and it wants a more perfect union. This probably scares the shit out of most people. My argument to that is: if you’re going to amalgamate with other systems, make sure you the one directing them effectively.

Matt Crawford’s wonderful philosophical treatise on the value of skilled labour goes well beyond simply being handy. He argues that skilled labour psychically protects you from consumerism and makes management doublespeak and creative economies an obvious joke. The value he places on objective, quantifiable skills development often savages the feel-good ethos of a lot of educational theory which then sounds like management double-speak nonsense. I read the book after taking my AQ in computer engineering, and it made me re-evaluate (and recognize) the value of my skilled labour history – something I’d walked away from in becoming a teacher. I’m loving being a tech teacher this year and working with my hands again.

From Shop Class For Soul Craft I took a recognition of the importance of hands on, skill based learning. It brings real rigor to learning, and should be a vital part of developing past the poor digital literacy I see around me. One other experience kicked this up a notch. In the summer we visited the Durnin farm and Heather talked about how her husband teaches people to use the farm equipment. He gives them the tools, and expects them to figure it out and get it done. It’s a high expectation, immediate result environment that puts a great deal of expectation on the student; Crawford would approve. I tell my students, “no one ever learned how to ride a bike by watching someone else riding a bike” – it’s an experiential thing that offers real (often painful) immediate feedback… what effective learning should be.

Into that mix of big ideas of warning, optimism and rigor I also mixed in the standard PLN secret sauce. Concerns over BYOD abound with teachers online. The idea that BYOD should just be thrown into curriculum struck me as simply wrong. As Andrew Campbell suggests, it’s more about stretching a divide (or Carr would argue intellectually crippling idiots) than it is about increasing digital fluencies.

Teaching competency, flexibility and self awareness on digital tools should be a primary goal of current educational practice. We’re graduating students who are dangerously useless to employers. The idea of a continuum of digital mastery based on objectively developed skills linked to a gradual loosening of restrictions and access to increasingly diverse tools and online content was the result.

I present on Thursday, and I’m more interested in the discussion that ensues than I am in telling anyone anything. ECOO is a wonderful braintrust, and usually super-charges my educational technology awareness. I’m looking forward to the brain soup we create out of this!

Diversifying Edtech: the key to a digital skills continuum

Copyright is sticky business

I read this which led me to this, which made me want to write this: (!)

Copyright is a sticky business. More often than not it isn’t the artist that is being protected by copyright so much as the distribution company that owns the rights. The music industry is still trying to get itself out of being a manufacturing and distribution concern, which is where the copyright habits we’ve developed with music started.

When you’ve got to justify stamping millions of CDs to make music financially viable, the focus shifts from the artist to the manufacturing/distribution system (where big infrastructure costs exist). In order to protect this distribution system, a robust, aggressive and quite jackassey legal specialization developed that has nothing whatsoever to do with the art it claims to protect.

It seems we’ve arrived at an age where an artist can be stimulated by influences and then effectively prevent anyone else from evolving ideas out of them. The Beatles, perhaps one of the biggest offenders in this, freely stole ideas and even whole pieces of music from the black R&B musicians in the US that proceeded them. Later in their careers they made art by evolving influences from Indian and other world music as well. They then aggressively locked down the rights to the art they freely took from other people.

It seems that Boomers are unique in many ways, not the least of which is their self-claimed right to take everything that came before them and own it entirely forever. US copyright has led this erosion of artistic license for many years, continually expanding and pursuing the entertainment industry’s right to own a piece of music, eventually (they hope) forever.

One of my favorite cautionary tales is Sita Sings The Blues. An artist going through a breakup creates an animated piece that integrates the 1920s music she is listening to at the time with an ancient Indian myth and her own relationship disaster. It’s very thoughtfully done. Give it a look if you’ve never seen it before. The details are on the website, but here’s the summary: when she went to get the copyright for the 1920s recordings (long out of copyright) that she wanted, she discovered a copyright law firm (one of many that buy up copyright-passed, older material) contacted her back and wanted a quarter of a million dollars for songs they didn’t own by an artist they never represented.

This is the state of copyright nowadays: a savage wasteland of corporate vultures looking to pick the bones clean of any work of artistic merit. It’s a completely unsustainable system that stifles art and kills creativity. Had Shakespeare been alive now, he would not have been able to publish any of his work (almost all of which borrowed heavily from proceeding material). Corporate vultures would have swooped in and killed Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth or Hamlet stone dead.

I make no bones about artists being able to make a living from their work, I’m an artist myself. My hope is that digitization of the workflow will free us from the vultures that have been feeding (and killing) the artistic process for the past 60 years.

Many artists are beginning to push content directly to fans. Courtney Love famously once said, “I work for tips” when she was talking about how little she made from CD sales. Doing tours made more, but even live performance requires covering a lot of hangers on.

The irony in all of this is that the music industry claims to be the protector and savior of music, yet it is the very thing stifling creativity, and it’s doing it to protect an archaic manufacturing system that barely exists any more.

Ok, so after all that? I think NerdyTeacher’s blog is a great opportunity for Taylor to step into a new era and develop fan based appreciation through Twitter and social networking. Those students, and the people who see the performance will know of her willingness to share her art. What I fear is that she isn’t the one to make this decision. A legal firm representing her music industrial complex will make that decision, and it won’t go well.

Thanks to @dougpete and @TheNerdyTeacher (and twitter) for the impetus to write!

National Skills Competition Reflection

We’re back from Skills Canada’s National Competition. It was my first time as a Team Ontario coach and it was a spectacular six days in New Brunswick. The sight seeing was frenetic and then the opening ceremonies astonishingly loud and boisterous. To say we were revved up would be an understatement.

After a weekend waiting for competition to start we were finally able to do what we went there for (compete), except we didn’t. I’d hoped for a top half finish. Ontario’s provincial skills are much more competitive than most other province’s simply because we have the biggest population and therefore the most contestants; we had to beat more people to get to Nationals. Aiming for a top half finish didn’t feel like a long shot, especially when we’d done so well in provincials (a gold medal and one of the highest technical scores in all competitions). I fear our good provincial results meant we didn’t drive at Nationals like we should have.

I prefer Bull Durham’s
dissonance over the pat
just be humble quote.
There is a place for
swagger in competition
as long as it doesn’t blind
you to what you need to do

You need a bit of arrogance when you walk into a competition because, despite the platitudes, everyone isn’t a winner, in fact the vast majority are losers. When you dangle yourself out there in competition you need a bit of cockiness to survive the failures. There were a steady stream of people bursting into tears and running out of the awards ceremony when they didn’t medal. Humility wasn’t helping them keep their composure when they lost. If you don’t think composure in the face of failure matters you probably haven’t competed much.

IT & Networking came up early and because of a screw up on the screen I’d realized we hadn’t medaled before they actually made the announcement. In that moment all that hope evaporated and I was struggling with disappointment. As a coach, I felt protective of my student who wasn’t happy with the result but didn’t run out of the room in tears. Since we were announced so early we had another hour and half to sit there watching others succeed. It certainly set a reflective mood.

Our approach to Skills all along has been one of the long game. Each competitor returns and brain dumps everything they can remember into a document that we can use to prepare better next time. Our current competitors are often able to get in touch with alumni (the benefits of a small town) and get additional support and advice. That’ll happen with our first go at Nationals as well, so when we get there next time we won’t be going in blind. The three who did medal in this national competition had all been there and seen the scope of competition before. Knowing what to expect is a key to success.

But there is another side to this that I need to consider beyond the long game. I was very hands off with training my competitor after our successful provincial run. He asked questions about subnetting and IPv6, and I provided him with material on it, but didn’t follow up to see if he’d looked at it. He hadn’t. I’d assumed he’d grabbed this opportunity with both hands and put his training into overdrive, but end of year distractions and a very successful provincial run had shifted him to glide. After a long, exhausting first day of competition we were both sitting there going over material that should have been second nature instead of resting up for day two. At that point hope replaced confidence for me. I hate depending on hope.

I’m a big believer in students, especially seniors and even more especially competitors, being self driven. I have no interest in hand puppeting students to a win, I want them to feel like it’s their’s because they are the prime movers in their own skills development. I don’t believe in moulding students in the likeness of my own learning, I want them to internalize it in their own most effective manner. My job is to do backflips in the background making sure they have the information and tools they need to efficiently and effectively develop their own skills.

High school seniors on the verge of post secondary work in technology should have a developed sense of professionalism as a part of their skills formation, which means not off-loading blame when you fail, and taking on responsibility for fine-tuning your own expertise (I drive this home in class constantly). Because these things didn’t happen I’m at peace with losing – we didn’t deserve the win – though it still irks me and has me wondering what I could have done differently.

Another reflective piece for me was remembering all of the curriculum I ditch in order to serve the relatively digitally illiterate students I get in computer technoology. As we were going over subnetting I remembered how doing this used to be second nature for me as a technician, but I can barely get basic IP addressing across to the majority of my students let alone binary subnetting. Dumbing down curriculum might make my program more palatable, but it didn’t help us get ready to compete at Nationals. That one’s entirely on me. If this experience means I’m not shying away from expected curriculum in the future, it might cripple my program’s ability to take in the digital dilettantes and guidance refugees I’m expected to serve, but at least we won’t get pwned again in competition.

When the lights come up and judgement begins, you don’t want
to be hoping you might squeeze out a medal after missing
questions and going in unprepared. Hope isn’t how you win.

After losing for years (see below) and putting a good face on it (I don’t like losing, I’m competitive by nature), I suddenly found myself, on only my third attempt, on Team Ontario, coaching my strongest Information Technology student yet. That we didn’t perform like we could have is the most disappointing part of this experience for me.

I don’t care if questions are repeated so students who have been there before have an advantage, I don’t care if the environment they put us in seemed intentionally designed to produce poor results (we were placed between an amplified loud speaker job presentation and millwrights hammering metal and running power tools) because everyone had to suffer through it. What I do care about is approaching Nationals with a self-driven, professional mind-set, and I think that’s what I’ll focus on next time around. Not shying away from complex material in my courses and keeping a focus on being properly prepared will help my competitors to do more than hope for a medal. The valuable information we gathered this year on how Nationals are scoped means we’re not going in blind next time either.

Losing for Years…
I stopped coaching soccer at my high school after a number of years because it was a constant hassle trying to get players out to practice (the fact that our talent pool was desperately shallow and we lost almost every game wouldn’t have shaken me off like indifference did). The time the student players decided (after losing another game) to just not show up at 7am the next day for the practice time they told me they had to have broke it for me. I’d paid for daycare, put my own child into it at 6:30 in the morning and was standing there alone on the pitch in the pre-dawn light when I decided I’m done volunteering for this kind of abuse. I’m glad I was able to find Skills Ontario/Canada as an outlet for competition that also helps improve my own program.

The New Literacy

I recently became the head of Computer & Information Technology at my high school. To many this might cause confusion, not many schools appear to have a head of digital technology. When recently asked to join up with the other two heads of Comp/Info tech in our region I discovered that there aren’t any, I am the sole head of digi-tech in my area.

A day in the life of that rare creature: the head of info-tech

I was supposed to be meeting up with them to plan our upcoming PD day. Being the resourceful fellow I am, I started putting together ideas for the pd on prezi. In thinking it through, I want to go after three ideas: how we administer computer studies, how computer studies are presented in ministry curriculum (and the problems around that), and what the future of computer studies holds.

The general response I get from teachers around digital technology is that very few know anything about it, but they’re all expected to be comfortable with it. The other response is that the digital natives won’t learn anything from us because they already know everything.

The myth of the digital native is just that, a myth. Student digital fluency is pretty much the same as the general population, except they spend a lot more time doing the same, limited activities in digital space. The digital native is, in many cases, actually the digital serf.

After working my way through thinking about computer studies and how it’s taught in my school (and board), I want to try and change the way computer studies are delivered. The current state of curriculum is that of a still maturing discipline, hogtied to its past. In talking to other computer teachers, they find themselves (variously) under math or business headships as a sub-department. On top of that computer studies are divided into two sections: computer engineering (hardware) which falls within the tech department (along with carpentry and automotive repair amongst others), and computer science (programming), which tends to get swallowed by business or math.

It’s common for computer science teachers to have nothing whatsoever to do with computer engineering teachers. This makes it tricky to develop coordinated curriculum, share resources, plan field trips or even just advocate effectively to hire the vanishingly few qualified computer teachers there are out there.

As I mention in the prezi, this is the equivalent of us teaching music by having a course on maintaining, tuning, building and repairing musical instruments, and then having a completely different course on how to read and write music; theory separated from mechanics. In the case of music, an ancient discipline that has evolved over millenia, we recognize an obviously unified course of study. Computers do not have the benefit of these years of evolution. We need to start unifying these skills.

The division of the discipline results in crushingly small numbers in computer science. When I was in computer science in the 1980s, we ran six sections of senior computer science a year… on card readers! Last year my high school (roughly the same size as the one I attended back in the day), ran a single, mixed (academic/applied) section of computer science at the grade 12 level, and it wasn’t full. Did computers hit a high point in the 80’s and become a less relevant part of modern life? Why on Earth would we teach fewer people how they work now?

Computers are a part of everyday life in 2012. We have come to expect a level of competency in our population equivalent to the universality of literacy or numeracy, but we don’t teach to this need, and it is largely unmet. We are instead producing graduates who teach themselves bad habits on computers and then we fear their apparent familiarity; we wouldn’t dream of teaching literacy or numeracy like this.

A coherent push to unify computer studies would reduce staff technology fears, improve digital pedagogy, build digital fluency in both staff and students and actually prepare people for the digital world that is being built around them. Failure to do this is sending our students into the future without addressing an increasingly urgent and important skillset.

Education Will Never Become What It Should Be Until It Is Freed From Politics

Education is a leaky, old boat. It limps forward, year after year, attempting to do a difficult thing: raise everyone who darkens its doors toward their intellectual potential. It does this with as few resources as it possibly can. Students in the system span the full range of human society, from future astronauts and doctors to serial killers and drug addicts. With the same simplistic, systemic process, education attempts to meet each of them where they are, which can range from years ahead of the curve with loving support from parents, to intellectually challenged and abused children who don’t know what a safe home is. Those two students often wind up in the same class.

To further complicate things, education is run by politicians. These are people whose first inclination is to ensure their own re-election, regardless of how cruel they need to be to satisfy their angry, ignorant, myopic supporters. The education system knows nothing of long term planning or sustainability, which is why it struggles to keep up with societal shifts such as the evolution of technology. Depending on the vagaries of Canada’s outdated first past the post system, a small minority of Canadians can vote in a ‘majority’ government that has four years of free reign with no checks or balances. Plans and programs can disappear in a single election cycle to be replaced by whatever self-serving project the sitting government decides suits it. The Ministry of Education isn’t really about education, it’s about governments exercising unchecked power.

The rubber hits the road in the classroom where teachers attempt to ply their trade under seemingly random changes of management. As a teacher your goal isn’t to cherry-pick the best students and forget the rest, as in business, though that is what many teachers fall back on due to a lack of training or support in our changeable system. The true goal of public education is to have everyone finish their year better than they started it. That alone would be a difficult ask, but in the lost world of public education teachers also have to force students with a wide range of socio-economic and developmental disparities through standardized testing that demands all students of a certain age, regardless of their personal circumstances, perform similarly in reading and mathematics. Privilege is systemically rewarded in public education.

A worthy long term pedagogical goal would be to ensure every student ends the year better intellectually equipped than they began it, and a viable graduation requirement would be for every student to have attained a proximity to their own specific developmental potential, but none of this is the case. Grades are a fiction designed to compare students to an average that doesn’t exist. If every graduate was operating close to their specific potential, society would benefit greatly and we wouldn’t wound students by educating them as we do. Instead, as in society at large, the education system rewards privilege and exacerbates social inequities on a massive and meaningless scale. No wonder so many students and the adults they become hate the education system, but in fairness, our education system is merely a reflection of the shittiest aspects of our society.

At times of stress, such as during a pandemic, education’s low resolution, stigmatizing approach to learning is cast into a clear focus. When suddenly asked to learn from home, it becomes apparent that many children don’t live in home that can or does focus on maximizing their potential. The most obvious examples are socio-economic in nature. You can’t be a student in a home where you have neither the space nor the resources to use the digital tools needed to continue your learning remotely, but these students never had these means of enrichment, though they’re expected to be fluent in them. Academic students go home to stable, literate and enriched home lives, applied and essential students go home to intellectual deserts. This isn’t always socio-economically driven. A student can be just as intellectually impoverished when their parents decide to buy them game systems and toys instead of multi-purpose computers and other tools capable of something other than mindless entertainment.

The stigmatizing nature of our education system also produces its worst outcome: school is something that is done to students against their will. They are passive victims of their own education – a dehumanizing process that they are dragged through unwilling and something they come to despise as a great injustice in their lives. When an emergency prompts remote learning, this culture sees students walking away in droves the moment the Minister of Education tells them marks don’t matter any more. Marks never mattered. These same children, disenfranchised from their own potential, grow up to vote in anti-education politicians who gleefully eviscerate the system further, usually by instituting punitive standardized testing that moves education ever further from its primary duty of helping everyone attain their potential.

Our society is broken in so many ways, and our education systems reflect that dysfunction. Individual pedagogical needs are subsumed by systemic processes driven by the punitive aggregation of individuals into dehumanized, simplistic levels. The system divides children into Brave New Worlds of academic, applied and essential levels of learning based as much how a child’s social circumstances have influenced their intellectual output as what they are actually capable of. If you don’t have to work thirty hours a week to help your single parent keep a roof over your head, you have much more time to put a shine on your school work and enter the rarified academic stream. That also happens to be the stream that the instructor at the front of the class wants to teach.

Imagine an education system that is considered an essential service and exists to meet a rigorous set of requirements based on scientifically demanding best pedagogical practices. This system exists beyond the reach of callous politicians and the angry, bitter people who put them in power. Its only function is to raise everyone in it year over year and graduate them as close to their human potential as possible. This imaginary system does this as safely and progressively as it possibly can. It embraces change and works continually to develop the science of pedagogy. Adults working in the system are held to the highest standards and success in it takes more a privileged home life. Imagine an education system blind to privilege that can see a student’s potential clearly, wouldn’t that be something?

By refocusing on individual student needs this imaginary education system would radically differentiate itself. The idea of a ‘standard’ classroom would fade away to be replaced by responsive learning spaces that can adapt to individual learning needs. Engagement would play a role in this, but it wouldn’t be the cart-before-the-horse that it is now. Education would come into a high resolution relationship with each student. Standardized testing might also play a role, but only insofar as it helps direct system efficacy, never as a punitive outcome for the students taking it, or the teachers who have to administer it. Imagine testing that helps a compassionate system recognize the need for more support in a low-literacy neighborhood instead of one that just lowers real estate values.

The backwards class size arguments made by people who know nothing of the science of instruction would also disappear in this system. There are class sizes that produce optimal learning outcomes. That is how big classes would be. In a class where a number of students have learning challenges, the class size would be smaller. In a class full of capable senior students, classes would be bigger. The idea of a simplistic cap that ignores who is in the room would no longer exist.

Graduation would fall out of its yearly lock-step. Instead of low-resolution grading and group assessments leading to a fictionalized grades, students would be required to individually demonstrate mastery and would then move on individually. Students may still find themselves in loosely grouped cohorts by age, but their learning is individually analyzed and advancement is based on mastery rather than the year they were born. In this way some students might graduate high school when they are fifteen, while others may do it when they are twenty. The stigma we apply to age and grade would fade away in a system when individual student mastery was what defined advancement.

This fictitious education system as an essential service would be lean. Its main focus would be on student learning. Positions in the system that did not directly support differentiation and personalization of learning would be rare and only filled by peer reviewed experts. The moment such a position had met its goals it would release the teacher back into teaching. People who didn’t want to focus on teaching wouldn’t exist in this lean system. The current bureaucracy in education that insulated privileged people from the harshness of the classroom would blow away. In Canada’s essential education service everyone is in immediate proximity to teaching. Non-teachers are hired to manage administrative details, but these specialists have no financial or administrative control over pedagogical decision making.

Massive secondary education factories would give way to smaller radically localized schools that embrace immediate community connections. The walls of schools would be much more permeable than they are now and the concept of school would seep out into community centres, old age homes and local businesses. Students would work with peers of different ages and these localized schools would be connectivity hubs for their areas, providing digital literacy to both students and the community at large. The majority of students would walk to these localized digital school houses rather than being herded on busses to age specific, remote locations. Canada’s education service would also be a green revolution with a radically reduced school busing system no longer spewing diesel and making our roads less efficient in order to benefit an antiquated, age based school system.

Virtualization means that some teachers would spend the majority of their time providing their expertise through specialized instruction to a wider audience in cyberspace. Augmented and virtual reality would have students and teachers meeting in immersive, meaningful ways not based on geographic proximity. Advanced experiential simulations would offer students learning opportunities that today’s analogue, geographically limited systems can only dream of. Rapid development of these systems and home connectivity provided by radically localized schooling means that remote teaching in a pandemic isn’t a disaster but an opportunity for enrichment. In such a culture of learning, students and teachers wouldn’t find reasons not to learn and teach during a crisis.

The various bureaucracies that have attached themselves to the current school system in order to defend it from politics would fade away in a this essential service that self organizes around individual learning needs and instructional effectiveness. As geographic groupings became less relevant and the benefits of wider networks of distributed expertise came into focus, the service would have an increasingly wider focus, eventually eclipsing national boundaries. At some point in the distant future, a student in Ethiopia would be able to participate in a virtual class happening in Ontario, Canada, all of them operating under the same best pedagogical practices. Education would finally become the great enabler in an interconnected world.

Until public education is unhitched from our increasingly myopic and self-serving political system and placed in a protected category of an essential service focused on maximizing individual potential, it will continue limp along as a broken reflection of a society in distress, augmenting societal inequalities rather than mitigating them and graduating generation after generation alienated from their own potential.

Ewan McGregor after visiting a school in Ethiopia on Long Way Down. In places where education is still recognized as the opportunity it is instead of an expected government service that aggrevates privilege, students approach learning in a very different manner.

NOTES

The UN describes education as enabling “upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty”, but it’s the first thing cut to support ‘financial experts’ intentionally destroying the economy in western democracies.

Schools are poorly maintained on radically cut budgets, and classrooms limp along on equally eviscerated budgets (my program is enjoying a budget one-third of what it was five years ago, while trying to serve 25% more students).

Ontario pays less than the Canadian average per student in public education, while also running the largest and most diverse (Ontario takes in as many new Canadians as the rest of the country combined) education system in Canada. Canada itself pays significantly less tax per person than any other G7 country for education and other government services, but produces some of the highest education results in UN testing, beating all those other G7 countries that pay more for less. And still, education is a political scapegoat.

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emotional intelligence

How we remove life experiences from life

I’ve had a tough week. Whenever I thought about a parent dying, I figured I would rationalize my way through it. It turns out you can’t do that at all. The emotional journey I’ve been on has been as rich, complex and valuable as any rational mental exercise I’ve ever experienced, and it’s only just begun. Not having a rational solution has made me realize how much we’re driven to that single mode of thinking. No where is that more evident than in education.

Emotional intelligence is more than ignored, in fact, it’s actively discouraged in school. Curriculum and bureaucratic process do everything they can to take the personal, emotive elements out of education; the fact that we teach kids in factory-like rows demonstrates clearly the singular approach we take to learning. Emotionality is an embarrassment when it happens; it certainly isn’t a a form of human knowing we develop and nurture in modern education. In fact, about the only time we do acknowledge emotional intelligence is when students don’t demonstrate it, then we tend to suspend them.

I went in to school last week for a day in between trying to sort out cremations, services and Byzantine government requirements, not to mention storms of crying, because a senior academic class of mine where contacting me directly asking for clarification on year end assignments. Empathy wasn’t something that could (or should) have been expected. If students aren’t expected to develop it in school, we shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t display it.

The class I was most worried about, a primarily applied level media arts class, were fantastic. They responded to my request for them to get their work done on their own and were empathetic to my situation. Their response seemed genuine and we all felt better for the talk. The academic classes sent condolences, but weren’t, for the most part, willing to help me by helping themselves. The game they’ve learned to play so well is between them and the system, and their teacher is just the delivery man who should be delivering, regardless of what might be happening to him.

If we defined learning effectiveness in terms of emotional intelligence, I wonder what schools would look like. I suspect a number of teachers wouldn’t be teaching. I suspect a number of teachers who found themselves in trouble for being too passionate in school wouldn’t be suspended for it. I suspect a number of academically proficient students would find themselves disadvantaged. I suspect student engagement wouldn’t be a problem.

Unions are terrified of emotive responses in teachers, and actively discourage them because students aren’t the only ones to lack a developed emotional intelligence. We’re developing a society that is emotionally bankrupt while entirely focusing on rationality. We want students to engage, but be impartial with the process, then we complain when they don’t seem to care enough. We want learning to happen, but we don’t want to let it be messy. We want rational control over emotional engagement.

Boards come at it from the other side, driven by lawyers to reduce lawsuit visibility with their employees. The whole affair is sat upon by societal expectations that press teachers to hold to professional standards (code for do everything at a distance) in all aspects of their lives, whether at work or not. And ultimately to uphold that pinnacle of modern thought: rationalism. If it can’t be measured or calculated, it has no real value, and is dangerous. Modern society won’t create any Picasos or van Goghs or Shakespeares, we’re too busy building data and temples to it, like Google and Facebook.

The whole thing leaves me feeling like, as a teacher or even just a human being, I’m left unable to express my grief, or even expect basic levels of dignity when I try to take time away to deal with my loss. Between the needs of my students, some of those same students yelling at me while I sit grieving in my backyard trying to write a very difficult eulogy on a Friday night, and the calculations of grief in my absences, I feel exhausted by my professional obligations. I can’t even respond as a person when rudely interrupted.

All sides go on and on about the power differential, about how you as a teacher have all the power. I don’t see it. I’m a minor paper pusher in a massive bureaucracy that seems intent on minimizing any professional latitude I once had, and diminishing any opportunity for emotional development with students in order to ensure a clinical and generalized success. Students are distanced from their learning, I can’t blame them for treating me like a thing, they are encouraged to see me as such.

Education has, like everything else, passed through industrialization and been changed into a Tayloresque production line. What used to be a master/apprentice form of learning that was intensely personal and developed over years has turned into a bureaucratically driven production line focused on getting as many people through it in as antiseptic a manner as possible.

Every one of us will face death in our lives, yet everyone seems profoundly uncomfortable with it… like a room of children being expected to figure out calculus. Shouldn’t education be a key part of learning empathy? And anger? And grief? And then learning how to best express it? Emotion ignored doesn’t disappear.