Well, I haven’t blogged since 2012. In the past 9 years I have moved between schools and grades. Built strong teams and friendships, suffered loss and hardship. Through it all I have tried to maintain a focus on my students. Recently that has become harder.

The United Conservative Party (UCP) came to power on April 16/2019. Since then, the government has tried to systematically destroy an education system that was ranked in the top 10 in the world.  They have been spreading misinformation and gaslighting the public about the “failures” of the education system and how “political” the current curriculum is. What they fail to mention is that it was the Progressive Conservative government that brought the current curriculum in back in 1991!

I do not deny that the Alberta Curriculum needs to change to reflect the world we live in now and to prepare our children for a future we don’t have a clear vision of. What I disagree with is that the proposed curriculum will do neither of these things! It is like the creators of this proposed curriculum never left the 1950s! Also, they have no ability to scope and sequence knowledge appropriate to the age of the students! To add the cherry on top of the shit sundae, the proposed curriculum focuses almost exclusively on knowledge, ignoring skills (almost) completely! Now I know that knowledge is important, but in a world where we have access to more knowledge than anyone in history, wouldn’t it be better to teach the skills of how to find information that is reliable and accurate? In a world where people are changing jobs and careers rapidly, wouldn’t it be better to learn about how to learn new things quickly and thoroughly? Even if you are going to train people in the trades you have to teach them the skills of working with the tools and the people around them! These are the things that the new curriculum should be focused on! Memorizing old European history is not going to be helpful in the workplace. I don’t see a lot of employers demanding knowledge of Charlemagne as a necessary part of their employees skill set!

I guess what I am trying to say is, please get involved in your child’s education. Demand the government involve all stakeholders in the curriculum design process. That includes experts in curriculum design, teachers, professors of education, students, and parents! Join up with organizations like SOS Alberta. Write to your MLA, the Minister of Education, and the Premier. Let them know that what is happening with education is unacceptable! These are the people who have allowed the COVID 19 situation to explode in our collective faces by declaring the pandemic over and the province open for ever for the “best summer ever!” If their handling of the public health system has you worried, why would you think they will do any better with the education system.

Please, stand up and support the students, parents, and educators in our province. Tell the government that their handling of this file is unacceptable and they need to start over!

Well it has been another whirlwind start to the year! I moved from the high school to the middle school in the middle of construction. None of the grade 8 rooms were really ready for the beginning of school so decorating and all that stuff didn’t happen very much. It is neat but somewhat boring! Our double room is still not finished, there is only a temporary wall in the back of the room and it is way smaller than it is going to be when actually finished. This is cramping my (and my colleagues) style! We are making due with the physical limitations of our space but it will be nice to have it actually finished. The time line for completion is Christmas this year, but I think it is more likely for about a week after never!

This has had a profound effect on the students. This is the first year that grade 8 has stayed at the middle school, so they have a chip on their shoulder about that. The noise and disruption of the construction is setting them off. The fact that their new classrooms are actually in a wing of the High School that has, on paper, been transferred to the middle school but in reality looks like it is still part of the High School is causing more disruption.  Needless to say, the student’s have been a handful to try to keep focussed so far this year. The grade eight team, along with the administrators in the school, have had to go to extreme lengths to try and reign in the grade eight students. We appear to be making progress but it is incremental.

What are some ways that you have used to try to refocus and reign in your “out of this world” classes? We are looking for help and ideas, because we are running out of our own. Lend us a hand and feel good about helping other teachers to keep (or regain :)) their sanity!

Why is it that I am so lazy this year? I have been building my personal learning network for the past couple of years. Working on integrating technology into my classroom. Working on having a more passion based learning style in my class. Working on Masters courses. Working on new curriculum and teaching new classes. Wow, that is a bunch of working! But now, this year, I am feeling tired. I find it hard just to get all the work done I need to get done to teach my classes. Doing extra learning outside of the classroom is to tiring to think about. Now that I was actually starting to make headway, begin to perceive the seismic shift that is coming in education, I am loosing my motivation to prepare myself and others for it. Why?

Maybe I am just burnt out. After years of struggling with administrations that were not (in my opinion) student centered, focused on improving student achievement, and/or looking at ways that technology is going to change education, I am tired. Now that my school district has chosen not to participate in the second year of PLP, and our technology commitee has let things slide at the school, I don’t  have the drive to push forward.

I wrote a blog last year about the revolution in education. In that article I mentioned that I am an old revolutionary from way back. I have been trying to change the world since I was 14 years old. There is little to show for it. The world is way different now than then, so maybe there are things to show for it, but the progress is incremental and it is tiring.

Maybe I just need some time to refresh and regenerate before I get back at it. If you have any words of wisdom or encouragement I would love to hear them.

I was reading a quick blog about the 12 genius questions here http://12most.com/2011/11/07/12-genius-questions-world/ It made me think about some of the assumptions that we hold as a society and that I personally hold.

I think that one of the basic assumptions that we hold is that smart people know lots of stuff.

Is that assumption true?

The more I think about it the more I think it is not. Smart, intelligent, bright, and or genius people are people that know how to find out things! This means not that they know stuff already, but that they know how to ask questions in order to discover something. This implies curiosity. Who is more curious than young children? Does that mean that young children are the smartest people in our society? This is certainly a view of the world that is unconventional.

If we agree that curiosity and questioning are skills that demonstrate inteligence, what happens to kids when they are in school? It doesn’t take long for students to learn that correct answers are valued and that asking quesstions and being curious lead to incorrect answers and negative attention. They stop being curious and asking questions? Are we making kids dumber in school? Can we instead value the questions they ask and teach them how to discover the correct answer? Is this not the way to teach people to become smarter?

The old saying is that if you give a man a fish he is hungry in a day but if you teach a man to fish he will feed himself for a lifetime. If we extend that metaphor to the classroom, then we should be teaching students how to question and discover the correct answer. Teaching them the answer is like giving them a fish.

All of us who are teachers know that new year’s day is actually the first day of September. It is a time of new beginnings, planning for the future, shopping for new clothes, and reflection on what happened in the last school year and how we can improve for the new one. We make resolutions to change the way we do things. We start out with optimism that the new year will be a “good” one.

This year I have hope that things in our school will change for the better. We have a new principal and he appears to have a vision of what he wants our school to be. He envisions us as the best high school in our division. He has high expectations of the students and the staff. If we are not living up to those expectations, then he will have those difficult conversations with us to make sure we are on board with the program (or there will be trouble). I believe that this is exactly what the school needs at this point, as do many others. What I don’t think people are ready for is to have the discussions with our principal when he has questions about how we are doing things now. Everyone sees the need for him to talk to someone else, but are mostly blind to our own weaknesses and shortcomings. Herein lies the problem! Everyone applauds the idea of change for the better until it affects them directly; then they get defensive. How do we maintain an open mind in order to be open to the ideas of change that we may need to embrace? How do we stop ourselves from becoming defensive and entrenched in our present viewpoints?

I think that I am very open to feedback and integrating it so that it improves my teaching. I think that I am not going to have a problem with that, but isn’t that what we all think? What happens if a person or group of people feel threatened by change and become a road block to what everyone else sees as improvement? How do we deal with that? What happens if I am one of those people?

As you can see, a new year brings hope, and fear. I feel the hope, but am anxious about many things. Here is hoping that this new year brings better learning to the students, better learning and teaching to me, and an improved culture to our building!

I don’t always agree with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, but I really enjoyed this post of her blog and thought I should share it with you. I know that I don’t have many followers yet, but the ones I do have I want to address you personally. So read through Sheryl’s post and pay special attention to the post she includes from Wendy. I’ll join you again at the end.

DO IT YOURSELF (DIY) PD from Powerful Learning Practice, LLC by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach

I am currently working on a leadership course within my school division and we have been reading the book Fierce Leadership by Susan Scott. Here is what I have added to our discussion on Squid Eye and Fierce Conversations.

Ok, I need to have a fierce conversation with everyone, because I think we are missing the point on squid eye a bit here. These everyday activities that we are discussing as using and exercising our squid eye are really the things we do to be “good teachers”. Is this squid eye? I don’t think so. Detecting when one of my students is misbehaving or not acting truthfully does not get to the point of squid eye for me. Squid eye is about the bigger things; the things that exist without our even thinking about them or questioning them. These are things that are so ingrained in our lives that we take them for granted. They surround us in the culture of the workplace, the home, and the society without us noticing them. They are the walls that hold us in our boxes without us realizing they are there. (Wow, this is getting existential!)

Let me give you an example of using squid eye on our own profession. How do you teach someone to read? Some time ago we used basal readers. With this method about 70% of people learned how to read and 30% did not. As teachers we thought that wasn’t good enough and we came up with another way; phonics. Guess what happened. About 70% of people learned how to read and 30% did not. Ok then what to try next…. how about whole language. This time only about 60% of people learned how to read and 40% did not. So what did we do then as a profession? Did we do some scientific studies to determine how best to teach children (or adults) to read? No we did not. We sort of mashed up the three less than successful methods we have been using for the last 50 years and said to individual teachers, hey you figure it out.

Meanwhile in another profession, namely Linguistics, linguists were studying how people actually learned how to read. They punctured the myths of reading as set out by the teaching profession and proceeded to develop a system of instruction that works for between 85% to 95% of learners depending on the published scientific studies! They call the system Phonemic Awareness and it not only can teach more people to read than we ever could, it can also teach them to spell more accurately. Why is it  we don’t teach our reading teachers how to used this method?

That is Squid Eye. We say we want Kids to learn to read and yet we do not use the only scientifically studied method developed to do the job. Instead we stick with the old and familiar. Identifying this contradiction is Squid Eye. Talking about it is a Fierce Conversation.

Dealing with the everyday issues that confront us when dealing with administrators, parents, students, and colleagues may indeed be using some level of Squid Eye but I think of these things as setting off my B.S. detector. Many people notice these things as they happen around us, Squid Eye is for those things that most people don’t notice. Once you have detected the “Big Thing” with Squid Eye, then you have to have the Fierce Conversation because most others won’t agree with you. You will have to convince them that there is a “Big Thing” that needs to be addressed.

Thanks, I feel better having gotten that off my chest. I hope I haven’t confronted anyone too strongly and feel free to push back. This is, after all, a Fierce Conversation.

So, I have started following 4 0r 5 people who are talking about the use of social media and technology in schools and I am already overwhelmed. I could spend my entire day just reading about the ideas people are presenting and writing about. I haven’t even gotten to the commenting and writing myself. This could be a full time job in itself! I am going to have to set some personal guide lines around how much time I spend on a daily basis reading and commenting so that my students (you know, those people I actually work for) get to have their work marked and the odd prepared lesson!

I’ve just signed myself up for some RSS feeds. I have experimented with Google reader and it seems great, but when am I going to get time to read all these important things that all these people are writing? I already don’t have enough time in the day so when do I do this?