The Power of Politeness

I feel very strongly that there is great value in propagating the use of social conventions such as using the "magic words". My adherence to the use of these “silly” words is rooted in my belief that words really are magical. Words have power: latent, raw, mystic power. It is this power that fuels self-fulfilling prophecies and predictions (positive as well as negative). When we incorporate these silly words into our everyday vernacular, we improve the chance that their sentiment will be imbued in our daily interpersonal interactions and become a part of our paradigms. Some argue that using these words do give you the power to "manipulate the responses" of people whose values are rooted in the Canadian culture. We are a proudly polite (and some other cultures might argue pretentiously polite) people. We love that about ourselves and I for one hope that we never let this virtue be taken away from us. When you employ these social contrivances you tell other people that you have enough respect for them and empathy for them as fellow human beings to adhere to these somewhat cumbersome conventions. And when my two year old son tells the bakery lady at Safeway "tah tu", he has just manage to earn huge social currency in that interpersonal interaction; social currency that will earn large dividends someday when he interacts with other "more traditional elders" who hold the balance of power in our society. Is this why we do it? Hopefully not. But it sure is a nice perk. In this age of globalization we have to decide which uniquely Canadian qualities we want to keep and defend. I believe that our adherence to this Canadian value is one of our great gifts to the world and all of the other cultures that come to be part of our great experiment. Pleases and thank yous are important. Magic words are magical after all.

Why do we continue to make it so hard to become a teacher?

The learning that I have done in this past 12 months eclipses most of the learning that I have done in the preceding 33 years. I learn about my students and my self every day in the classroom but I have been off site many times during the course of this year attending professional development opportunities around mathematics. This has stretched me and challenged me in ways that I had never anticipated. I remember writing down on one of the exit surreys that I wondered if there would be anything left of me mathematically by the time that I felt like a "real" math teacher. I'm not there yet but I can tell you that the old mathematical me would probably feel the need to introduce himself to the new mathematical me.

In the spirit of feeling like you need to know everything about anything as a new teacher, I have continued to seek out new learning and growing opportunities. I am a part of a Professional Development Consortium's Math Cohort for new teachers. As a part of this pilot project I have been experiencing digital learning in the form of webinars.

http://canadianveggie.livejournal.com/

So far I have been disappointed in the product that has been offered to us and I'm not sure why. For the most part it has been a bunch of open ended questions that people feel silly answering because they really elicit no imagination to answer in the 45 seconds of dead air that is left hanging there. "Now that you have been reminded of Gardner's eight intelligences, how might this help you create a learner profile in your classroom?" Now, I am a graduate of the Master of Education at the University of Calgary so you would think that I should be socialized to this, shall we say, idealistic approach at "inviting" learners to "inquire" into their own constructed knowledge but when the moderator is saying things like "I knew that I could out wait you!" when someone finally answers, this is no longer inviting. It has become something completely different. And does it sound like it is engaging or compelling?

This has been a common theme in teacher education as far as I can tell. I would suggest that it's a problem. I have heard anecdotal reports that in some divisions a new teacher has about a 50% chance of surviving in the business to their fifth year of teaching. That means that a significant portion of the new teachers that graduate from the various universities this year will not be teaching in five years. Is it because these other folks didn't have what it took to be the martyrs that many teachers become? Should that be the main criteria for having the privilege of being a teacher? Here I have to reel myself in a bit because it won't do much good to go into a big philosophical rant about how we are shifting our pedagogical approach for students but not for teachers and how this ritualistic and punctilious thinning of the heard is a vestige of a hierarchical society that treated information and knowledge as a currency and did not truly appreciate the power of collaboration. I know, preaching to the choir won't get any converts.

Now, I don't think that I would be much of a teacher if I just tore this experience to shreds without at least coming up with some suggestions. If I was running a little webinar on creating learner profiles for differentiated learners I would find some way to provide some authentic case studies. We're doing this over the web so it could be done by video of real or acting students, in comic form, or even just boring old typed out narrative but at least now we have something to sink our teeth in to. Next I would give the learners some tools to start to organize their observations and impressions. After we had shared with one another, I would provide the learners with two or three different exemplars of how successful, seasoned veteran teachers would gather, organize and utilize the pertinent and salient information. At the end we would all take turns sharing with the group any "Ah ha!" moments we may of experienced and what we will change in our practice in the future as a result of our newly constructed understanding.

It is this exemplar bit that I really feel is missing for increasing our proficiency and efficacy as teachers. I never have understood why supplying templates and examples to beginning teachers is such a taboo. If you have made it this far then please take the next step and let me know what you think. Why do we continue to make it so hard to become a teacher?

If it was easy everyone would be doing it!

As you can tell, I still have not got the hang of this whole blogging thing yet. Like most of us I'm sure, I do have good intentions but I just have not found a way to make this mode of communication fit into my paradigm. But those paradigms are always a shifting so I am still hopeful.



One thing that still makes me a little leery about this whole process is that I am afraid of the permanency of this artifact of who I was. Probably a year from now I will look back at this and wonder who that dim wit was that was impersonating me on this blog. The real problem is that I really am quite opinionated and when you compound that with the fact that I am quite passionate about my beliefs, you get me traipsing over lines that I only set out to explore the boundaries of. So if you happen to stumble across any of my meandering missives please keep this caveat in mind: I question because I care. It is this quality caring that is the head water from which all of my other worthwhile capacities are derived. These are what I will bring with me to the classroom each and every day.

Oaks, Linda. canada_9.jpg.

Pics4Learning. 8 Apr 2010

http://pics.tech4learning.com/

Now Where Was I?

Well, here we are a year later and I have learned a thing or two. One thing is that getting started is not necessarily the hardest thing about blogging. Obviously I have yet to "buy into" this whole process seeing as I am currently averaging one post per year. This has not been the end of my learning though.

This last year was full of professional learning opportunities. There was most likely a day or two that I spent feeling sorry for myself last year but now there is a sufficiently large temporal space between here and there that I can take pride in surviving that first year. I was teaching seven core courses at a small school with very unique demographic. Did I mention that all of these courses were middle school math and science? But now I have climbed my Everest and the view from up here is very different than what I expected. Now I know that I'm on a mountain and I think that I can see the summit! This will undoubtedly be an entirely different yet comfortingly familiar experience. I can't wait.

I am still at the same school but I have a couple less classes. I will only be teaching Math 5, 6, 7, 8, and Science 8 to two groups of kids. I even have a prep this year!!!

How will this year be different? Well last year I did not have a plan, that's for sure. I had no idea about planning and the planning that I thought that I was doing was more reactive than proactive. This year I have full year plans for each of my courses. I have some unit plans from last year but they are just a starting place.

I realized that one of my biggest weaknesses last year was my hodge-podge assessment. It was a nightmare for me and confusing and frustrating for my students. This year I'm going in with an assessment plan. A regiment if you will. I've been reading some Anne Davies over the summer and I can see now that I was killing them with assessment last year and at the end of the term all I had was a bunch of marking and numbers.

This year I will have a four pronged approach. The first three prongs will be based on a rubric that we will flesh out together. I'm aiming for a gauge of procedural knowledge, ability to communicate mathematically, problem solving skills and conceptual knowledge. These three prongs will be Work Samples, Unit Projects, and On-going Observations. The last prong will be straight up summative assessment in the form of a Unit Final Multiple Choice Test. I sure hope that this is closer to a winning combination. Time will tell and then I will try to remember to tell you.

A beginning.

It seems to me that I heard somewhere that the hardest thing about blogging is getting started. I really hope that this is true. I have been working on this process for the last month and I still have not been able to put pen to paper as it were.

I suppose that there were a couple of barriers that I have had to overcome in this process. The first was my preconceived notion that bloggers are pocket-protector wearing introverts that are not very adept at face-to-face communication so they pour out their souls on cyberspace in hopes that some one is bored enough to read it. I have recently had to reevaluate this latent belief as I have witnessed the power that uploading or contributing to the online community can have.

The other barrier that I have had to struggle with is a peculiar shyness that I am experiencing about having my digital voice heard. This is peculiar for me because I am not shy about having my voice heard in face-to-face interactions. And since I believe that being a teacher and being shy should be mutually exclusive, I need to overcome this barrier. I suspect that the main issue is that when you let your digital voice be heard, you are putting yourself out there in an uber-public and permanent sort of way. From this point on, every employer that I will potentially have will have the opportunity to develop a first impression with out ever meeting me. So instead of proceeding with caution, I think that it is important that I proceed with prudence and purpose.

With that in mind, now it is time for the bit about what I hope to accomplish here. Well, it all stems from my feelings of dread and confusion around the process of finding myself and my way as a teacher. In a lot of ways, I feel like my particular teacher prep program left me totally unprepared. But on the other hand, my teacher prep program gave me tools which I am only beginning to become aware of. The primary goal of my teacher prep program was to turn me and my colleagues into reflective practitioners who are able to deal with all of the grey areas of our beloved profession. So through this reflective exercise, I hope to glean as many insights and as much wisdom from my experiences as I can. It is also my sincere hope that other becoming and beginning teachers might find something of worth as they follow this, the last leg in my journey of becoming a teacher.

So with out any further ado or fanfare, let us begin...