What do working poor right wingers hope to get out of slavishly supporting the ultra wealthy?
The move is well under way here in Ontario to dismantle unionized skilled labour.Teachers have had bargaining rights stripped and contracts made irrelevant by a cynical government willing to do anything to chase votes. It’s the votes that they’re chasing that have me baffled. What do working poor conservatives hope to gain out of supporting right wing positions that seem intent on wiping out the middle class?
I’ve been trying to understand the thinking of the working poor conservative in this. They think that supporting the rich will pay off? It never has historically. The middle class has a much better history of opening its ranks to up and comers than does the aristocracy. If you’re smart and hard working and able to see things through, you’re almost guaranteed a place in the professional classes.
I don’t mean to sound elitist when I say professional classes. These are skilled laborers, everyone from surgeons and teachers, to nurses and mechanics. Yet these accessible, skilled groups are the very people under attack by right wing interests who seem intent on racing to the bottom in a global market in order to make Ontario competitive. Competitive? With what, China?
Nothing short of a miracle will get you into the 1% who are intent on taking everything for themselves, yet poor conservatives seem unhappy with anything but the complete dissolution of the middle class. I don’t get the thinking. There is a reason why the ultra-rich who are too big to fail are only 1% of the population.
Wouldn’t you want to keep the working, skilled, professional levels of society as healthy as possible in order to eventually join them? Holding out for a place in the 1% feels like desperation, the kind of thing an idiot would do. It seems like the story of a house slave who has been up to the big house and now puts on airs, acting like the plantation owners, thinking that there is empathy there. The rich-poor gap is wider now than it was then. Just because you like their big houses and how they act doesn’t mean you’ll ever see one, or be considered one of them. You’re a tool they use for their own ends, but you’re content to be a tool.
The working poor often battle one sided upbringings that make it difficult to effectively access the educational opportunities they are given (GIVEN!) by public education. I suspect this failure grates on them as they get older, and rather than accept their own failure to grasp opportunities, they would rather dream of ‘being rich’, and nurture an ongoing hatred for the teachers and education workers who they feel put them in their place. It makes for a handy target for a cynical government looking to raise right wing antipathy of public workers. You have to wonder how far that cynicism can go.
The ‘I identify with Donald Trump more than a paid professional’ thinking speaks to an idealized vision the poor conservative has of themselves. One day they’ll be rich and at their ease through no effort of their own, just like all those rich people they so admire. They’d rather dream of being like the aristocracy than roll up their sleeves and make something of themselves. It’s a lot easier to fantasize about being rich than it is to realize you don’t rate as a capable skilled labourer.
Those skilled workers contribute to society, paying taxes, producing educated citizens, protecting people and property, and maintaining its infrastructure. Only the rich selfishly leech from it, hiding their wealth and avoiding paying taxes at all costs. The idiot sub-class of right winger worships them for this and thinks it’s an ideal they should aspire to.
The professional classes are the engine of the economy. Shop clerks, manual laborers and other script followers don’t depend on their own competence, or care for standards, or invent new technologies, or work to improve their profession and society as a whole. The incompetent working poor grumble, complain, whine, and then vote for the right wing government that looks like it supports their own myopic self hatred. They swing democracies by the tail, bringing back a rule by idiot mob that any Roman would recognize. These asinine people support the ultra-rich, who consist mainly of people whose money works for them so they don’t have to be capable of doing anything at all.
I guess I can see why an uneducated, lazy jackass would sympathize with greed, self-interested and short shortsightedness. These are traits that the working poor conservative share with the one-percenter. How could the poor, unskilled right winger have anything in common with a firefighter, doctor, teacher or engineer who performs skilled labour that demands continual effort, improvement and expertise?
The Connie is off getting safetied, and the Ninja has found a new home. I’m bikeless!
One of the things you learn about motorcycle culture is that it tends to exist underground, out of sight. For example, this week I discovered that there is a bike shop in the small town that I’ve lived in for five years. I had no idea that down the back of the industrial mall behind the country market is a specialist motorbike shop. This reminded me of our trip to Old Vintage Cranks a couple of summers ago. I’d contacted the owner, Lloyd, over the phone during the week about getting the Concours safetied. He doesn’t usually work with ‘metric bikes’, but he was willing to look after me. Mostly Ironheads is a full service shop that, in addition to offering everything you need to maintain your bike, also offers you some genuine historical motorcycling perspective. While chatting with Lloyd he showed me a 1934 Harley Flathead engine that he was in the process of rebuilding. In the front of the shop you’ll also find a collection of customized Harleys from various decades. I’m going to bring the 3d-scanner when I return for the Connie next week and get some models of this classic American iron. It’s convenient to wander around department store styled dealerships and bike shops, but it isn’t all that interesting beyond what you’re shopping for. Places like Mostly Ironheads run at a different speed. The proprietors are always happy to spend some time chatting with you and the chances of seeing something genuine and learning something about motorbiking are much higher. If you’re travelling through Elora, Ontario on two wheels (and many people do to have lunch by the river in the summer), be sure to pop down behind Dar’s Country Market to Mostly Ironheads and have a look at a hidden piece of Ontario motorcycle culture. Mostly Ironheads Website Mostly Ironheads on Facebook 3d models of some historical Harleys
I stumbled across this interesting article on curiosity and the neuroscience associated with it:
“Encourage students to chase their own interests, cultivate curiosity. It fires up brains and makes them better at remembering new information. It also engages students in the best possible way.”
“When we’re hungry for answers, our brain activity changes in ways that help us retain new information. For one,the curious mind engages processes and brain regions associated with anticipating a reward. We want to learn more because the answers are satisfying. In addition,the hippocampus, a memory hub, ramps up activity, preparing to store information. The more we want to know an answer, research suggests, the more memorable it becomes.”
If you’re not a teacher and are a big fan of the new Ontario government’s ‘teach ’em like we used ta‘ approach to learning, this is what we call pedagogy. There is a lot of neuroscience that directs modern pedagogy in the classroom. Put in simple terms, we don’t just make this stuff up; the education system spends a lot of time and effort understanding how learning works best and then training teachers to work with that. Scientific research guides modern curriculum building, at least until right wing populist ideology dislodges it in Ontario.
Showing a teacher how curiosity can be used to amplify retention and encourage a focused approach to new knowledge acquisition is pure gold. I fear the ‘take it back to basics‘ stance of our new government means this neuroscientific research is ignored in favour of the conservative reductive approach of rote memorization and zero differentiation of instruction. It’s a common conservative belief that everyone (especially in the public sector) needs to suffer in order to show they are trying, but don’t expect anyone to learn anything in an environment like that. Contrary to this grossly simplified view of education (in that case advocated by an American with no teaching experience), we’re not in it to punish anyone. You don’t learn well when you’re being subdued. You don’t teach particularly well in those circumstances either. Some other gems in from that article: “teachers can be models of how to be comfortable with uncertainty”
“When we’re hungry for answers, our brain activity changes in ways that help us retain new information. For one, the curious mind engages processes and brain regions associated with anticipating a reward. We want to learn more because the answers are satisfying. In addition, the hippocampus, a memory hub, ramps up activity, preparing to store information. The more we want to know an answer, research suggests, the more memorable it becomes.”
***
An interesting connection with that piece on curiosity and information retention was this article in The Guardian about the age of skim reading. The author draws some interesting connections between Western society’s rise of populist regimes and the new lack of empathy and critical analysis in the population:
“The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.” If you’re wondering why we’re suddenly faced with these shocking politicians who seem out of sync with the world around them, it isn’t them that’s out of sync, it’s you (if you’re reading this you aren’t the new normal). The conservative ‘you must suffer to pay the private sector’s bills‘ thinking plays nicely with the lack of patience, empathy and curiosity we’ve been cooking for the past fifteen years in the incessant digital noise of the attention economy. It’s easy to blame this on information and communication technology, but the tech itself has allowed us to make enormous scientific and technical advances. Smart people have leveraged it to great advantage It’s the attention economy that grew out of it that is causing problems for everyone else.
I’m a big fan of digital tools, but we’ve done almost nothing to actually learn how they work so we can use them effectively and without compromise. In the past decade education systems around world have handed off control of our online learning environments to advertising companies like Google who have monetized everyone’s attention. You don’t get the same return on investment if you don’t keep your users in a permanent state of data churn. You do that by designing systems that encourage short attention data churn. Every time we accustom a student to that environment we’re training the attention economy’s future users, whether they’re actively advertising to them or not. As education systems become complicit in preparing our children for the vapid attention economy, many of their parents don’t notice because their noses are in a phone too. Our political circumstances are a direct result of us all being immersed in this nasty mess.
One of the first casualties of new media has been long form reading:
“We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment’s requirements – from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. If the dominant medium advantages processes that are fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large volumes of information, like the current digital medium, so will the reading circuit. As UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield writes, the result is that less attention and time will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like inference, critical analysis and empathy, all of which are indispensable to learning at any age.”
Alanna is teaching a senior creative writing class for the first time in a long time and she is shocked by what the new normal is. You can expect grade twelves, even academically focused ones intent on university, to have never read a book for pleasure. In some cases they’ve never read a book at all. Their days are spent in the bite sized, simplistic cesspool of the internet. They don’t have the patience to let a narrative develop. The building of suspense frustrates them. They live in a world of fleeting introductions immediately followed by puerile climaxes designed to hold on to them for a moment before their attention wanders to the next distraction.
Many students can’t even sit through a film anymore, let alone read a book. Watch current high school students sneaking out their phones the minute a film starts and squirming if can’t find their digital churn fix; see if I’m not wrong.
Long form reading isn’t impossibly difficult, but it isn’t a natural human skill, we have to learn it. In doing so we enjoy a richness of shared experience impossible to get any other way. This leads to the empathy we’re struggling to keep alive in modern society. It also leads to a richer internal world where you have the vocabulary and shared experience to express yourself succinctly. If you’re reduced to expressing your deepest thoughts in internet memes, what a sad and dimensionless mind you must feel trapped in. How much curiosity can you generate if you live in a world of instant, short term satisfaction?
In our ongoing social experiment I’m curious to see how this all plays out. We introduced digital technologies that have revolutionized science, education, finance and communications, allowing us to take huge steps forward in terms of efficiency and collaboration. A small group of sociopaths then used this technology to create an attention economy that has actually damaged our democratic institutions and the minds of the general public itself. We find ourselves in a place where improbable governments suddenly have power and the people who voted them there have neither the ability nor the inclination to actually learn about why this is a bad idea. We’ve weakened our ability to empathize and connect with each other, all ironically under the name of social media. It seems this reductive process isn’t finished yet. With short sighted apathetic government being put into power by an increasingly illiterate, distracted and stressed populace, I’m left wondering just how low we can go.
Just a reminder, Ontario is Canada’s largest education system and Canada is consistently near the top of the world in terms of reading, science and maths.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/07/us-education-spending-finland-south-korea “In Ontario, which educates 40% of Canada’s students, nearly 30% of the province’s population are immigrants. According to the 2015 Pisa exam results, Ontario scored fifth in the world in reading. Children of immigrants perform compatibility with their peers with Canadian-born parents in educational achievement.”
Ontario’s education systems is one of our most successful exports, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to the new government. Private schools around the world use the Ontario Curriculum that they just started dismantling. Ontario trained teachers are teaching across the planet because they are Ontario qualified. If our education system were a private enterprise it would be held up as a paragon of success. Remember that in the coming months.
Our school is the only local high school in the area. If students want Catholic or special education, they get on a school bus for over an hour a day of commuting down to Guelph. I’m a big fan of choice so, while I think it mad, I don’t have much to say about a student who wants to spend over 194 hours a year (that’s over 8 full days of riding 24 hours a day) on a bus to Guelph and back for specialized education, as long as it’s a choice they’ve made.
Ontario’s high school streams seem pretty straightforward, they are anything but in practice.
Our public board think it wise to ship our essential level students down to Guelph for special education. This isn’t a choice, it’s a system driven process. The Guelph school for this doesn’t fill up with locals so the surrounding community schools are expected to ship their most at-need students out of their home communities every day. This is an ongoing pressure in our community. At our recent heads’ meeting there seemed to be support for the idea of our school being a comprehensive, community school that serves everyone, but we struggle to run essential sections because parents resist putting their children into it, the board doesn’t section us to run smaller essential classes and many teachers in our school would rather be teaching academic students. It’s an uphill struggle to create a comprehensive local school that supports everyone in our community. Because we aren’t sectioned for essential classes (those smaller sections are given to the specialist school in Guelph), we end up populating applied level classes with essential students. It is so difficult to align parent perception, board support and student ability that we place all non-academic students into the same room. This is where the proliferation of fifties comes in. A teacher in our school recently said, and in retrospect I agree, that we place essential students into applied classes and lower course expectations to accommodate them. This not only does the essential students no favours, it also dilutes applied curriculum goals. The people running the education system tend to be successful professional educationalists; very experienced with the system having spent little time outside it. These educators see kindred spirits in academically streamed students who are successful in school and make effective use of the system. These teachers want to teach students like themselves. Asking them to work with students who find school a challenging environment or aren’t on the same academic trajectory they experienced is difficult for them. The predisposition of teachers makes academic curriculum somewhat sacred, but applied classes aren’t. Applied students should be on apprenticeship and college skilled labour tracks that demand hands on (applied?) skills. While less theoretical in approach, applied classes are supposed to be rigorously skills focused. When you put students who lack basic literacy and numeracy into a grade 10 applied class you make grade appropriate learning nearly impossible. How do teachers manage this? If you fail a student, you get called into promotion meetings at the end of the semester where the grade you’ve given becomes the starting point for an inflationary process that floats fails up to passes. The best way to avoid this is to simply award a 50%. What is a fifty when it’s really a 42? At its best, a fifty means a student has not reached minimal expectations for a class. Would you want the mechanic working on your brakes to have gotten there with fifties? The teacher I was talking to suggested that the number of fifties being handed out has mushroomed in the past few years. Those statistics aren’t made available to us because they would make a travesty of curriculum expectations, but I suspect he is right. A fifty means the government gets to say graduation rates are up. A fifty means the ride ends at graduation because no secondary program would accept a student with a D average. A fifty means you’re not sitting in promotion meetings watching your semester of careful assessment being swept away to support policy. The range of student skill in my classes is astonishing. My current grade 9 classes range from students who could comfortable complete grade 11 computer engineering curriculum next to students who appear unable to read, yet I’m supposed to address that range of skills in a 50-100% range in a single course. Perhaps we will find a way to reintegrate Ontario’s carefully designed secondary school streaming system, but considering the various pressures on it in our area, it’s going to be an uphill struggle. NOTE Re: school busing children… Time isn’t the only resource being spent. School buses get6-8mpg, Guelph is about 15 miles away. A (very conservative) 30 mile round trip (it’s much higher if you want to consider all the pickups and drop-offs) is a (very conservative) 15 litres per day of diesel (probably double that for your typical start/stop run), per bus, and we have a number of buses making that trip 194 days per year. Someone better than I can calculate the overall environmental impact (how many other vehicles are also held up burning fuel while these buses grind down to and back from Guelph every day?). Making an economic (let alone moral) argument for shipping our essential students out of their home communities seems impossible.
I’m watching the new season of my current favourite sci-fi show, The Expanse. It’s about the next couple of centuries where Terrans develop the technology to move out into the solar system, but rather than the Star Trek angle that completely ignores the nastiest aspects of human nature, The Expanse imagines a near future with technology advances but none of the social evolution of the Trek universe – it’s a politically messy, self-serving future, much like our present. It’s something I’m starting to think we’ll never get to.
I’m also spending the day today putting our yard and house back together after a wind storm swept through here, and that got me thinking about all this technology we’re so proud off. If it gets a bit windy, it all goes away. After a couple of big gusts yesterday there was no internet and no power. I was unable to deliver attendance data for my classes at the end of the day, let alone get information on what was happening.
We ignore data and facts.
At the height of the wind the local cell tower was down, meaning no information or electricity at all. In the meantime (and when it works), I’m watching the news closely as the competition we’re supposed to be travelling to in a couple of weeks in Fredericton is in peril because the city is under water. We’re ever so proud of our vaunted technology, but if it gets windy, or if waters run high, everything stops. The real irony in this is that our fossil fuel powered society is what’s prompting all this extreme weather. Even our supposedly green tech is manufactured using fossil fuel based manufacturing. Our technology doesn’t allow us to control our environment, it provokes it to attack us.
There is this thing called the Kardashev Scale. If you’re ever thinking how smart the bi-pedal apes are on the third rock from the sun, this scale will give you some perspective. A level one society is one that harnesses the resources of an entire planet. We’re not even close to that. Carl Sagan suggested human society is at about a 0.7 on the way to being able to harness planetary power, but I think that’s wildly optimistic. Our technology isn’t on its way to managing planetary processes, in many cases it’s prompting the planetary environment to violence – it’s the opposite of control. There are some cases of sustainable (ie: non-aggravating) human technology, but since we base most of what we produce on fossil fuels and unsustainable manufacturing, it’s hard to say much of any of our technology is actually on its way to sustainable global resource management. Our stubborn unwillingness to orientate ourselves in that direction is the problem, not our intelligence or technical capability.
When you get up into level 2 your society can manage the energy of an entire solar system. We’re millennia away from that even assuming we pivoted today and actually worked toward sustainable global management that would allow us to thrive as a civilization long enough to develop it. The way we’re currently going, we’ll probably cause global environmental upheaval before we’re likely to even establish a foothold in space (by that I mean permanent human habitation off-world, we haven’t even done that yet). The environmental problems we cause now will eventually produce resource depletion that will result in war. We love a good war to cap off our own bad habits. Level 3 (effective galactic resource management and level 4 (universal/pan dimensional resource management) are so far beyond our short sighted, barely evolved minds that they beggar belief.
Meanwhile, here I am about to nail unsustainably manufactured aluminum siding back on to my wood framed house that was built with unsustainable lumber. We have more in common with squirrels building nests than we do with even a level one civilization, except what the squirrels build isn’t burning a hole in the world. They’re closer to a level one civilization than we are.
All the other unsustainably built, fossil fuel powered houses in my neighborhood are also missing bits and pieces. Shortly crews of people will arrive in gas powered trucks to fix these problems. That very process will further heat up the only world we’re capable of living on at the moment, making future weather violence even more inevitable. We’ll be lucky to get out into the expanse at all.
Wind storm freak you out? Don’t worry, it’ll be back to business as usual on Monday…
We were recently told that our board is moving to a formal exam for every course model. We’re told that this needs to happen because if we don’t use formal exam days for formal exams, we’ll lose the days. Perhaps we should lose the days. Formal exams are an echo from the past. Desperately trying to ‘keep’ them by forcing them on everyone isn’t the best approach to learning, it never was. Clinging to status quo thinking seldom produces outstanding results in anything. This conundrum once again has me feeling the friction between academic and technology classrooms. To the majority of subjects in our school, an exam for every class simply means setting up more desks and running off more photocopies.
One of our auto-shop teachers tried running a ‘formal’ exam this semester. He had tinkered with a car and then had students diagnose it. Since he doesn’t have a 24 bay garage, he has to have students approach the car one at a time in order to diagnose it. Because he is expected to have all students in the room at the same time (exams are blocked into two hour scheduled time periods, one per day), he had students come up one at a time to diagnose and resolve the problems while the rest wrote written tests that did not reflect how students had learned in his class during the semester.
Cookie cutter exam schedules for cookie cutter learners.
The formal exam structure didn’t work at all in the shop. The first kid up shouted out, “do you want me to change out this fuse?” and suddenly everyone in the room knew an answer. It then kept happening. When you’ve been teaching students to collaborate on diagnostics all semester, why would you suddenly have a summative that demands they don’t? Even if that’s what a ‘formal’ exam is? All that effort to create a genuine assessment within a standardized exam structure was wasted, but that doesn’t stop us from being expected to bring meaningful assessment to all our technology students in this cookie cutter final exam format. How meaningful can this two hour window be when our courses are tactile, stochastic and experiential? In a class where there is a linear progression from question to answer, and were the skills are assessed on paper this works a treat, but not in tech. Coop avoids the exam problem by creating individual summatives (each student has an interview). Of course this means that each teacher is handling 25+ hours of assessment for each class they teach. I’m surprised that they can stuff all that meaningful assessment into a single exam week. While this resolves the problem of trying to fit individualized exams into cookie cutter academic schedules, it doesn’t address the complexity of creating an entire class set of experiential problems of equal complexity (you couldn’t have the same problem because the first student out would happily tell the rest what they are about to face). Creating individualized, immersive simulation for each student might be the ultimate in summatives, but a factory styled school system isn’t remotely designed to produce that kind of individualized learning opportunity.
Is this what an exam for every course looks like? Kinda like
the floor of a very serious factory, or a university…
Would I like to create a ‘formal’ exam that offers my computer students real-world, immersive, experiential computer technology problem solving? You bet, but expecting me to do that in a two hour window for dozens of students at a time suggests that the actual goal here isn’t meaningful and genuine so much as generic and formulaic, like most ‘formal’ exams. ‘Formal’ exam is code for a university-styled, written, academic assessment. It typically involves lots of photocopying and students sitting in rows writing answers to the same questions. The teacher then spends a lot of time trying to assign value to this dimensionless form of assessment. Like many other aspects of high school, formal exams are high school teachers imitating the university professors they wished they could be.
For hundreds of thousands of dollars with corporate sponsorship
and post-secondary support, Skills Ontario championships
create meaningful, experiential tech-assessment.
If you’re looking for an example of an immersive, complex, skills based assessment, we have a fantastic home-grown example. Skills Canada does a great job of creating experiential assessment of technology knowledge and tactile abilities, but with million dollar budgets and support from all levels of government, private business and post secondary education, they exist in a different world from my classroom. They’re also catering to the top 1% of 1% of technology students. I have to cater to the other 99.9% with nothing like that kind of budget. I’ve been mulling over how I’m supposed to create meaningful assessment for my technology students in that two hour time slot and I’m stumped. No budget is forthcoming to purchase equipment and tools so that I can have every student doing the same thing at the same time – I don’t even have enough screwdrivers for all students to be building computers at the same time, let alone the computer parts needed to build them. Those would be computer parts that some students would not ground themselves properly when installing. Funding wouldn’t just need to be there for tools, it would also have to be there to replace breakage due to incompetence. Technology teachers already struggle trying to explain technology costs to academics with only a vague understanding and little experience in apprenticeship and the trades. When students are heavy handed or absent minded it costs us money to replace what they break, yet we struggle to get funded on par with academic courses that do most of their work on paper. Now we face the prospect of being forced to reduce our tactile, experiential, immersive learning into cookie cutter summatives that jive with the pre-existing academic scheduling. Just when you think we might be evolving beyond the 20th Century factory model of education it rears its ugly head and demands reductionist assessment for all. Wouldn’t it be nice if we were looking to diversify summatives instead of cramming them all into the same schedule that existed fifty years ago?
It’s getting to be that time of year again – months of snow bound Ragnarok motorbike hibernation are making me twitchy. I like winter generally, it offers a very different and sometimes beautiful view of the world, but when motorcycling has become your go-to stress reliever, being out of the saddle for months is a source of pressure. If you look at the seasonal leanings of this blog, you’ll see winter generally leads to yearning.
This time around the fixation is on the Mercedes Metris Van. I’ve previously looked at Ford Transits from a Guy Martin point of view, and other small van options for moving bikes to where I can use them. The Metris has the benefit of being as efficient as the little vans but can swallow the Tiger with room to spare. The other little vans would required a tight squeeze if it’d fit at all.
Another benefit of the Metris is that you can customize it to your needs and it’ll still go everywhere a normal vehicle will. It’s also surprisingly competitive in price to the Ford and Dodge/Fiat options. So, what would I do with the only Mercedes I’ve ever been interested in buying?
Last year at pretty much this exact same time I was mapping out waterfalls in Virginia. The drive down to Roanoke is about 11 hours. With the Tiger in the back I’d have left right after work and been in Roanoke by midnight. After a good sleep and breakfast and I’d be out all weekend making use of those lovely temperatures while chasing spring powered waterfalls across the Appalachians. After a good ride Sunday I’d have a big dinner then head back into the frozen wastelands of the north getting in after mid-night, but I’d have the Monday of the long weekend to get back on it again.
All told that’d be about 2000kms in the van and another six hundred or so miles riding in the spring blooming mountains. If I could convince the family to come along, they could crash in the hotel or jump on the back and come along.
I’ve been reading Guy Martin’s autobiography and his van powered wandering to motorcycling events all over the UK and Europe seem entirely doable, if you only have that van. He seems to be able to fit an improbably amount into a very limited amount of time simple by getting himself there and then getting himself home again.
It’s a good read that trips right along. I enjoyed the narrative flow of the follow up book When You Dead You Dead more (I read it first), but you quickly fall into Guy-speak and feel like you’re sitting in a pub with him hearing the tale. If you like motorcycles and racing it’s brilliant. If you just like a good story well told, it’ll do that too.
I’ve been finding out the history of Triumph Tigers from various places on the interwebs. The first Tigers were born just before World War 2 and were quickly put on hold when the war started. With rigid rear frames and girder front suspensions, these were 1930s bikes in every sense. Tigers followed the steady evolution in motorbike technology throughout the Twentieth Century, and also followed some rather silly styling trends, like shrouding the mechanicals in 1950s aero inspired nonsense.
’69 Tiger made in the UK the same year I was! Nice high pipes!
Things get interesting again in the 1960s, with late ’60s Tigers, along with the British motorcycle industry in general reaching a zenith before being crushed by their own weight and a lithe, hungry wave of Japanese imports.
Pam Anderson riding a Tiger!
Through the long, dark tea time of the soul in the ’70s and ’80s (and while my parents and thousands of others fled the country) Triumph went down in flames along with much of British manufacturing. In ’83 John Bloor, a building contractor who was looking into the purchase of the derelict Triumph factory to build more homes ended up buying the brand. After sitting on it for a while he rebooted it and built a new factory. It’s one of the best examples of British manufacturing rising out of the ashes of old money and old ideas and embracing a more effective approach to manufacturing. Without the conservative establishments of aristocratic ownership and unionized labour Bloor was able to reignite British engineering and give it chance to shine again. You might think that it isn’t properly British if it isn’t mired in limited social mobility and the kind of Kafka-esque bureaucracy that makes building something well next to impossible, but that was only a moment in Twentieth Century British history and doesn’t speak to the engineering prowess of our little island.
We’re moving into poetry in the senior academic English class I’m teaching. Poetry is one of those things that can seem a bit pretentious, especially to high school students. We looked at contemporary lyric poems to begin with. After some Practical Magic and other free verse I thought it might be time to take a swing at it ourselves. I’m curious to see what students bring to class today. Hopefully writing about something that interests them will remove that pretension and let them get some ideas on paper in the relatively unencumbered contemporary lyric format.
In My Pocket
あ and ん
alpha and omega
binary beginnings and silent ends.
ones and zeroes?
no, math is an abstraction but certainty is in the machine.
Doesn’t matter how experienced you are in unprecedented times…
This reflection might come out as a firehose of frustration, but this year in Ontario’s public education system has been one for the ages. After a springtime of flat footed confusion nothing seems to have happened in the summer as the government kept moving the goalposts on what school openings would look like. School boards have been left to scramble. We start tomorrow and I have no idea how it’s going to go. Some people are hanging on so tight their fingers are going to break while others have already taken a big step back. My magic powers are bloody-mindedness and empathy. I’m not particularly brilliant or erudite, but I can take a hit and always get back up again, and I care, which is good because we’ve been pummelled senseless in the past few weeks by chaos and the attendant system think that has arisen to try and control it.
With the meta-framework of Ontario’s public education system being held hostage by a government intent on privatizing it, it’s a wonder the system works locally it all. It has certainly struggled. With the COVID19 pandemic piled on top I can say, hand on heart, that this has been one of the worst years to teach in Ontario in its history, but we persevere because education matters. The only people telling you otherwise want to use and abuse you.
At the local level setting up for this school year has been like running a marathon where they keep changing the course and making it longer, while handing you bricks to carry; it feels like running a marathon no one wants to see you finish. I know what I’m being asked to do is for the common good, but at some point (which we may have already passed), so much will be piled on that the basic functionality of the classroom (teaching, remember?) won’t be any better than in remote/elearning.
After six months of lockdown everyone is longing for face to face interaction. I’m feeling it too, but in the drive to do that we’ve lost the plot. When we started back we were told not to worry about curriculum and just make sure the kids are OK. I understand the sentiment but the places that do that are called daycares and I didn’t spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of my life to become qualified to work in day care. Public education is one of the most powerful human being enhancers we’ve created. Along with publicly funded healthcare it’s the beacon a society sends out to show that it is enlightened. When our citizens are healthy and educated our country benefits in every way. This isn’t anything as shady as economics which thrives on disempowerment and privilege, though health and education powers our economy too. Strong public services that maximize our citizens’ potential is what civilization means. All the other things (art, technology, medicine, economics) grow in this fertile soil. We so often get this backwards.
The pandemic has cast a harsh light on the many social mechanisms that cause inequity and in the past decade Ontario has constantly chased economic gain while cutting the public systems that enable it. Since 2010 Ontario police have experienced double digit pay raises, they are the only public service to see this kind of funding. Meanwhile defund the police has become a cry to action during the pandemic because police are the hand of systemic racism and inequality in Canada.
Our board has since relaxed the hangout and chill stance and is encouraging curriculum and skills development but any teacher worth their salt knows how Maslow would feel about this.
Knowing that basic needs have to be met before we go after the higher cognitive functioning needed to learn effectively is probably why people at the board office were pushing for a relationship focused quadmester. Schools have always tried to fill that gap between how poorly a society treats its disenfranchised citizens and the privilege others benefit from, but COVID19 has widened that breach to such a point that it’s impossible for a headless, underfunded public education system to come close to crossing that bridge in this crisis. I’m starting to feel that the people in charge want to fill that gap with our bodies.
We’ve been buried in wordy presentations and piles of emails dictating our new normal which isn’t normal at all. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it you can expect it to change. Admin are as exhausted as everyone else as we all madly dance to this insane tune. While the onslaught of instructions, signs and rules continues from on high I’m actually expected to be face to face with students (but not really, we’re all socially distanced and behind masks) all day every day. While that’s going on I’m also supposed to be monitoring and running elearning for the other cohort because our board’s solution to massive class sizes was to have every teacher being in two places at once.
There are stories of classrooms stuffed full of students in Ontario this fall during a pandemic. Since the Ministry left it to each board to decide how they would proceed, each has gone in a different direction. Each plan has its own benefits and disadvantages based on no central planning and inconsistent funding support. In our board they’ve cut any class over twenty students into two cohorts. The students who are bussed come in in the morning and the walking students come in in the afternoon, but while I’m face to face with my half classes I’m also supposed to be providing material and managing elearning for the other half.
This approach has the benefit of not overloading classrooms with bodies and so takes steps to mitigate the health risks we’re all facing, but it has its own problems. I’m now trying to be in two places at once. They given me a teacher who was on prep to oversee the online work, but this teacher is unqualified to teach my subject, knows little about it and isn’t expected to do anything tangible. What it comes down to is make-work because we’re not trusted to help the school function without being over scheduled and micromanaged into the ground. I understand the impulse as a few people will use not being in class as an excuse to do as little as possible, but the vast majority would be able to fill these gaps much more effectively using their own initiative, as I’ve already seen many teachers do. But initiative, like differentiation, is dead in our micro-managed pandemic classrooms.
Our prep time was also cut in this format where we’re teaching face to face (kinda) all day, so now another teacher is coming in to cover us while we take our prep, except that teacher isn’t qualified to teach my subject either. They aren’t even tech qualified so students can’t keep doing hands on work when face to face (which is the whole point of being face to face) unless I let my prep go and just stay in the room, which was what admin suggested our entire tech department do. So, downloading work onto classroom teachers with no prep time and twice the planning is the solution – it’s actually the answer to every question: download anything that comes up onto the already crushed classroom teacher. One of my grade 9 parents won’t provide internet when she isn’t home so her son can’t do elearning even though they have all the tools. The solution was for me to print out a special course of study for this one student on paper to study computer technology on paper, which he then takes home… during a contact tracing pandemic. Don’t expect flexibility this semester, but do expect absurdity. They’ll tell you all decisions are based on reducing the risk of transmission, but that one wasn’t.
This situation raised another point: because students are only in half days, parents working in essential jobs all day are stuck trying to decide how to make that work. We’re a high school and we’re all having to grow up quickly in this ongoing crisis, so I’d hope that a high school age student could provide some self direction and work from home, but not in every case. A system response that honours equity and tries to help those families that need the extra support would be to direct those students in need to a socially distanced resource for the afternoon when they can’t elearn at home, but our spec-ed resource room has been cut and the experts in there are all teaching instead. It’s important to treat everyone the same in an emergency. Our split day schedule assumes that all students have connectivity and technology at home – it’s a system predicated on privilege that ignores home circumstances. While all this is going on we’ve been getting PD about how unfair systemic privilege is.
Looking at how messy some of the other reopenings are in the province I think our board has done an exceptional job with no direction and inconsistent funding, but the two hidden mechanisms that make it work are downloading extra work on classroom teachers and assuming privilege in terms of the digital divide. We took drastic steps to get technology and connectivity out to students in the spring but that has since been returned (kinda) and that capacity has dried up. I dreamt that we’d be building capacity and reducing the digital divide over the summer because you would have to be oblivious to this situation to think we won’t be fully remote learning again at some point, but none of that has happened in the chaos of a mismanaged face to face reopening.
We’re unable to climb Maslow’s hierarchy and do our jobs (developing students’ cognitive skills at the top of the pyramid, remember?). In the case of such a catastrophic failure of Ontario’s political responsibility to its citizens perhaps all that is left to us is to make sure the kids are ok, as long as we’re all happy living in a less literate and numerate future. Part of this new < normal is ensuring that you as an educator are still functional physically and mentally. The ECOO Virtual Conference a few weeks ago kept emphasizing this advice which is inline with what you get from an airline when you get on a plane (remember when we used to do that?).
This past week I’ve been putting my lab together solo because students can’t come in to help me as they usually do. Even my own son, who is well within my bubble, isn’t allowed to come in and help. The thick blanket of rules we’re buried under are as much about managing liability as they are about medical safety. I’ve also been running all over the building helping dozens of teachers, including the many new ones, get their rooms sorted and operational from a digital perspective, all with the usual lack of acknowledgement from administration, though they’re sure to thank everyone at the board office who have been busy making two hour powerpoint presentations that are contrary to our inequitable school opening plan. A lot of that technical support has also included emotional support because my reflex when I see someone drowning in panic is try and help.
A fine example of this over management was to order all teacher desks to the front of the classrooms. This was done (presumably) to facilitate better management of people coming and going from the room, but since that isn’t happening much and our face to face class sizes are smaller anyway, I have to wonder which curriculum expert who hasn’t been in teaching in a decade made that decision. The digital projectors in most rooms are plumbed in to where the teacher desk is so this dictate meant that dozens of rooms were suddenly disconnected from a vital teaching resource.
Another baffling choice in the chaos has been to cancel student safety agreements for science and technology classes. The board has always vigorously demanded absolute compliance with these documents. When you’re working on dangerous equipment with legally not responsible teenagers with undeveloped frontal lobes that prevent them from forecasting the results of their poor choices, a signed legal agreement with their legally responsible adult parents or guardians puts everyone on the same page in terms of safety expectations. These are common sense safety expectations, but common sense and teenagers don’t often occupy the same room, so it’s important to have their parents aware of the weight of this responsibility. It’s also vital for liability. When a student ignores the agreement they and their parents have signed and an accident results, it produces a better outcome for everyone, except it’s been cancelled during the pandemic because they don’t want us using paper. Then in our last staff meeting (which is really a litany of what to do with little collegiality or interactivity) we were told that using paper is fine. Do try to keep up.
I’m usually able to reflect my way out of a negative place with these blog posts, but I’m still in darkness here. I’m terrified of bringing home a virus that could be fatal to my partner. I’m worried about my students’ well being and frustrated that climbing Maslow’s hierarchy is simply a bridge too far this year. I’m also frustrated by the provincial system’s inability to show any vision or organization in helping us succeed in this crisis. Finally, my own board’s efforts, while exceptional in terms of what else I’ve seen in the province, are inconsistent, undifferentiated and predicated on assumptions about the digital divide that we’ve already shown to be untrue.
There are glimmers of hope in the chaos. I’ve seen cunning and cheap solutions to common technology problems that could expand the functionality of our laptops by turning them into document cameras, and I’ve seen local teachers jump on it and make it happen (I hope to have these churning out next week).
I also keep finding myself in other people’s ewaste that could be turned into remote learning tools, but being buried under two simultaneous classes a day all day, and having one of my senior sections cancelled by our previous principal, I don’t have the time or the senior student expertise to make this happen. So much could happen if we depended on teacher initiative and expertise instead of spoon feeding them hours of powerpoint and pages of step by step instructions. I fully expect to be told to sit in a French class next semester to cover someone else’s prep (I don’t parlez the francais). Such is the resolution everyone is running at, when it runs at all.
Give me a little latitude and I could perform (bigger) miracles, even in this monstrous circus, but latitude and professional trust was the first victim of this pandemic. Given a minimal budget and some space I could all but resolve the digital divide in our board and prepare us for fully remote learning that seems inevitable, but they’d rather me just follow the plethora of signs. Whoever is making those signs seems to have infinite resources.
I just got handed this cart of old netbooks that were headed for ewaste. With a Linux install they would provide dozens of students with remote learning devices they could keep in a pandemic. With more latitude I’d be picking up #edtech from RCTO’s Computers For Schools and providing desktops and portable devices for staff and students (as I did in the spring and all summer) across the board. Give me even more latitude and I’d be in touch with Google’s Loon to see if we couldn’t provide local free school internet to all students who attend a school regardless of the urban/rural digital divide. But initiative and individual responsibility and expertise are atrophied by a panicked system operating in a pandemic.
Alanna’s been channelling Simon Sinek. Perspective helps:
