Mar 07 2013
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Teaching and Education

On Office Space and Passion-Driven Learning

In a scene from the brilliant cult-hit movie Office Space, the main character, Peter, is describing to his coworkers a memory from high school.

PETER
Our high school guidance counselor used to ask us what you would do if 
we had a million dollars and didn't have to work. And invariably, 
whatever we would say, that was supposed to be our careers. If you 
wanted to build cars, then you're supposed to be an auto mechanic.

SAMIR
So what did you say?

PETER
I never had an answer. I guess that's why I'm working at Initech.

MICHAEL
No, you're working at Initech because that question is bullshit to 
begin with. 
[...] 
If that quiz worked, there would be no janitors, because no one would 
clean shit up if they had a million dollars.
Source: awesomefilm.com

Sigh. Michael Bolton, we feel your pain:  life is frustrating. When we first meet these people (caught in early-morning rush hour traffic), we immediately understand that they aren’t exactly happy to be driving into work.. especially since it’s no more than a couple hours from when they get into the office that Peter decides he’s had enough and needs to leave for coffee.

For the longest time I agreed with Michael. Not the hating my job part, but with the idea that if money were no issue, there would no one to be janitors, garbage collectors, or, heck, roadkill-shovellers (for lack of a more PC term). I never wanted to fully believe it, though. I thought to myself that there must be some people in the world that wouldn’t have life any other way. Hey, sanitation works do make a decent amount of money. And it’s good exercise, and you work outdoors. What’s not to love?

Ultimately, though, Michael’s right. Even if those types of people did exist, I would be hard-pressed to think that there would be enough of them to sustain the sanitation program. But by claiming that nobody would want to pick up garbage, he’s effectively holding firm to the system that’s already in place.

Who’s to say that, if individuals were backed with time, thought, resources, passion, and creativity, sanitation removal would look the way it does now? In an alternate universe where humans stepped back for a second and used a little imagination, how we take out our garbage would be radically different. Perhaps no one would opt to haul trash to the city dumps, or drive rancid trucks around at the height of a muggy summer, but who’s to say that city dumps, in the way that we know them now, would even exist?  With individuals motivated by passion and creativity, rather than a sense of conformity and obligation maybe they’d be replaced with an underground system of conveyor belts that connect to each one of our sinks? Maybe helicopters with the help of giant cranes filled with garbage fly into the sunset three times a week? Maybe they wouldn’t even need to?

 

Of course I’m just steam-punking and sci-fying in my own head here, but the fact is, in pursuing their passions and interests, individuals would produce radically different models for how we live our lives. Whether by accident or necessity, over time a better system would emerge. You might be thinking, that’s preposterous, if we were at a town meeting and someone suggested flying garbage cranes, no one would buy into that idea. How would any of it get done? But I want you to think back to the last time you heard someone speak with conviction and unwavering passion. Regardless of the subject, how tempted were you to support them?

When we witness authentic passion, we’re more likely to buy in to what that person is selling. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be failures and mistakes. There would be many failures and mistakes. But innovation doesn’t happen without failures.

Now for the pitch: What better place to test something like this than in a high school, where we could see the effects of passion-driven learning tried and tested with relatively few consequences? (Meaning, not having miles and miles of rusted underground garbage conveyor belts and millions of incensed taxpayers.)

Let me introduce to you, The Independent Project, which in my mind, is doing just that. Take fifteen minutes to watch the above video, and get ready to see what I would like to be the future of secondary education. Overall, if we were each given a project like this in high school, I think the world would be filled with a lot fewer frustrated Michael Boltons.

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Feb 10 2013
2 Comments
Teaching and Education

Teachers are (not) people, too.

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If I had my way, this article would be put on every work desk and fridge, in every briefcase and on the passenger seat of every car, of every parent that sends a child to school–especially secondary school.

In 1,500 words Freda Lewkowicz describes only three of the problems facing teachers: the new unwritten ethic of teaching, parents, and students. And if 1,500 sounds like too many for those measly three terms, the sad reality is that she only scratches the surface.

What jumps out immediately to me is how long she has been teaching for. a courageous 39 years. She has seen first-hand the paradoxical progression and declination of the state of teaching. Compare that to someone just entering the profession, who sees these facets as the only reality they’ve ever known.

It goes without saying that when we’re five years old, every single year seems like an entire lifetime. We’re awestruck and fascinated and curious by and about everything. Every sentence of our lives has an exclamation to it! Or maybe a question mark? And our elders encourage us to be that way! As we get older, our years get shorter. We catch ourselves saying “where does the time go?” Teaching works the same way.

Now imagine if the childhood of our teaching careers was replaced by multiple lifetime-years of doubt, fear, agony, stress. and expectations we could never meet. And all of this behaviour was either reinforced by our elders, or flat-out ignored.

At least Mrs. Lewkowicz has the hindsight to understand and be comforted by the thought that what teaching is today is not what it was. There is, was, another way. Compassion did exist. Trust in teachers did exist.

Not anymore.

Teachers entering the profession today ONLY know mistrust. Abuse. Fear of doing something wrong. Lack of support. Lack of resources. Unfair expectations. The list goes on. When you put that list in front of you, take a step back and really look at them, the question “Is this what teaching really is?” is immediate. No wonder why so many are leaving. But why aren’t newer teachers speaking out?

As hard-hitting as this article is, it could have never been written by someone just entering the teaching profession. Yes, this is what our lives are, yes, we experience these stressors every day, but one thing not explicitly mentioned in Mrs. Lewkowicz’s article is that us new teachers? We’re replaceable. Despite 50% of teachers leaving the profession in the first five years, jobs for many are scarce. Don’t teach math or science? Get in line. Just because you’re at a school one year doesn’t guarantee you’ll be back the next, regardless of whether or not you’re in the public or private system. New teachers are “declared excess” — a phrase that bespeaks our uselessness as though it were touted over the intercom. Or maybe we’re not on the VIP list known as “priority.” In other words, despite our burning desire to be part of a collective of people who want to change the future, we are simply not important enough.Never mind the amount of time we actually have to spend planning, preparing, and developing our own teaching personalities and all the existential strife that comes with it.

Good teachers are teachers first, and people second. We are teachers who are individuals, not individuals who are teachers.The identity of a teacher is molded to their DNA. Our jobs are inseparable from who we are. Why would we open our mouths and risk the axe? We’re apparently already failing society, why speak up and run the risk of failing ourselves?

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Jan 29 2013
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Teaching and Education

Fiction and Non Fiction in the English Curriculum

My English students have just finished presenting orals on books that they read over the Holiday break. They each chose a book based on their interests, it wasn’t assigned by me. I wanted them to read, and I wanted them to read what they liked. In a wrap-up discussion I mentioned that I noticed the majority of them chose non-fiction books to read. Books like how-to guides for money management, encyclopedic texts on different sciences, an introductory book dedicated entirely to knives and how to use them in the kitchen. All interesting stuff. All not what you’d expect a student to want to pick up. (The-”vampire”-that-will-remain-nameless need not enter this conversation.)

Happy days in hell

This isn’t the first time that I’ve noticed this. In fact I find that the majority of students in their mid-teens, when left to choose a book on their own, will more often than not go after non-fiction. So I asked them the question that comes to my mind pretty quickly: why then, do schools use so much fiction in the classroom?

A lot of them said it was because fiction fits the curriculum better. They said the curriculum wants students to develop their own ideas about what a text means, and wants them to interpret the text, and non-fiction mostly tells you a factual account of something that isn’t to be interpreted. Great answer… I was just proud that they were out of the box enough to think of the curriculum as separate from what they actually learn, but I digress.

It strikes me that there might be another reason, though, albeit perhaps a subconscious one. As adults, we’ve already been faced with making tough decisions in life. And a lot of the time, those decisions may have been the wrong ones, ones that we’ve come to regret and that consequently have led us down a long and winding road we didn’t want to be on in the first place. Many of us aren’t living the lives we want to be living. We yearn for something more. Fiction, then,  presents stories that we can escape to, characters that are relatable faced with exciting circumstances that probably wouldn’t happen to us. Characters who overcome their shortcomings instead of not taking the risk of losing everything their lives have previously amounted to.  And because us adults like that kind of fairy tale, because we like to interpret, pretend, imagine what it would be like to be different, we want to share that experience with students and hope that they enjoy it too.

Teens, though, don’t all need that kind of escapism. A lot do, and a lot love it, but not all. Teens seek answers about life. They want to know what it’s like out of high school, what it’s like to really live. They want to know what success is and how to get it. What makes a millionaire? How did that mountain climber ever survive without oxygen for that long? Can humans even do that? They want to know how the world sees other people, if even the world’s leaders get scared some times (whether they’ll admit it out loud or not), what potential is, what expectations are. They want reassurance knowing that you can in fact overcome those things, your life’s biggest demons, and give them the finger in true teenage rebellion. If they want escapism, they want to escape to a place where a teacher isn’t trying to pin them down with headache-inducing questions like “how does this passage make you feel? What do YOU think this means?” They want to escape to a place where mom and dad aren’t telling them “you can be anything you want in life.” They want to know what it’s like to just be. What better place to do that than a work of non-fiction?

Teens want the facts. They want to lift the veil on the world and see if who or what’s under it resembles them in any way.

The great part about reading non-fiction, for a teacher, is that you get to trick students into making interpretations and inferences all on their own, simply because they’re enjoying what they’re reading and want to know “the truth”. Got you again, students!

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Jan 27 2013
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Teaching and Education Video

Motivation for the 21st Century – Daniel Pink and some Questions to Think About

I’ve watched this video plenty of times but still find it fascinating. Here are your guiding questions:

1) Do the same theories apply for education as they do to business? Why or why not?

2) Assuming they do, how can we adjust motivation in the classroom to remove the “carrot-stick” model from our lessons? What can we replace them with?

3)Is it possible that a contained institution like the schools we currently see intrinsically motivate each student? What changes would it take for that to happen?

4) Which structures and supports (that students need in order to grow into responsible citizens) change? Which would stay the same?

5) (Indirectly related) Is it right that we continue to tell some students “you just need to get out of high school so you can get on with the rest of your life and find out who you really are”. Is that something they should learn outside of secondary school? Is it something secondary schools should even approach? Should teachers encourage that kind of existentialism in 15 year olds?

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Jan 23 2013
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Uncategorized Video

Teachers Care

First post of the new year, and that’s not for lack of anything to say. This was done by a local teacher and its message speaks to itself. Brilliant.

Please consider sharing it, if only for all those students who are currently struggling, or if you have ever struggled through school in the past.

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Dec 04 2012
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Teaching and Education

Notes to Myself: Philosophy of Education

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Frank McCourt, teacher and author.

“What’s your personal philosophy of teaching” has been a question I’ve been asked for years, since my first Education class at University, Philosophical Foundations of Education. (Seems fitting, yes?) It’s been asked dozens of times since, from other professors, teacher-mentors, school boards, colleagues, and employers. It’s been cautioned by all of those stakeholders as one of the most important questions for every teacher to consider. One that we all must have an answer to. From my experience, though, no one ever explains why you need to have that answer.

As a new teacher there will be days where you will hate yourself. You’ll spend full periods, hours, feeling as though your job is worthless. And since you’ve always considered yourself a teacher first and a person second, you will feel as though you are worthless. You will be walking on eggshells in your classes, with parents, with colleagues, and with administrators because of how unsure you are. It’s part of the job. It’s normal. You’ll be told this, too, but hearing it doesn’t make the experience any easier.

You’ll call everything into question, but one of the most recurring questions will be, why the hell am I doing this?

That is what a teaching philosophy is for. If you don’t have a clear, strong reason for wanting to be a teacher, you won’t have anything to fall back on during those existential crises. You will feel as though nobody trusts you to do your job, that you are insignificant, that you are wasting your life and your students’ lives, and that they surely would be better off taught by someone better capable, say, a mime. Without answers to the philosophical questions, why am I a teacher? Why do I believe in teaching? Why do I believe in education? What the hell is education, anyway? there is little to no reason to keep a new teacher going.

Look. If you want to build a solid house the first thing you need to do is dig a hole. Then you need to lay your foundation. If you want to be a teacher you need to dig a hole inside yourself. The deeper and darker, the better. Don’t be shy to stop and look for worms.

You need to create that space for questions and answers. Once that space has properly set, lay your foundation. Make it solid. Ask some questions and demand honest answers. Only you know the right ones to ask. Only you know the right answers.

A crack in your house’s foundation will cause your house to fall on top of you. A crack in the foundations of your learning philosophy may not cause your life to fall on top of you, but having one in place will surely help you weather the storms.

And if by asking you find the answers coming back are “I don’t know,” or “I’m not sure,” that’s no reason to abandon your lot and move on. It means you didn’t dig you hole deep enough to begin with. Go back. Keep digging.

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Nov 21 2012
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Teaching and Education

We’re Forcing Fish to Climb Trees

Last week I took a glimpse at what some teenagers thought about religion and God. This week the topic is creativity. In speeches and interviews Sir Ken Robinson often mentions that if there’s anyone who has an opinion about the crumbling education system, it’s everyone. And he’s right. It doesn’t matter who you talk to, you’ll always find enemies and friends when you bring up how bad our schools are right now.

…Except, you know, the students… who actually have to attend them for eight hours every day. We don’t want to know what they think. If you can name another service industry that doesn’t give a rat’s about its clients, and still provides an essential service day in day out, please let me know.

Last week I had my students identify and list what they thought were problems with the school system; all the things that they felt killed their creativity.

Their biggest criticism (among a few dozen) was that school killed students’ creativity by the amount of unfair expectations that were placed on them. That was a virtually unanimous answer. Whether the students that I asked were in a regular learning stream or an advanced one, all felt that the expectations placed on them were too many. Students in the regular stream thought that they were constantly being compared to and had to live up to those in the advanced stream. (In our school that’s the International Baccalaureate program, or IB program). In other words, the regularly-streamed kids were stupid and the IB kids were the smart ones. Regulars had nothing to offer the world, the IBs did. Regulars were streamed for mediocrity whereas the IBs were eventually going to rule the world. Doesn’t exactly sound like a very inspiring future, does it? I wouldn’t be too happy if I had to conform to a “regular” existence.

Perhaps not surprisingly, those in the IBO stream, when asked the same question, also felt pressure. According to them, the world is on their shoulders. They hate being labelled the “IB kids” because it means that they have an impossible set of expectations to live up to: if they don’t live up to an intelligently-superior standard–which no one properly defines for them–they’re seen as a generation of failures. And since no one ever clearly defines what makes an IB student different from another student (or, put in a better way, why an IB student isn’t different from any other student), these students have an impossible task ahead of them, being held up against a phantom archetype of a superior breed of student that does not exist. The smartest minds of our age couldn’t tell you what intelligence really is, but students in advanced streams are being told or coerced that they have more of it. Those stereotypes have existed for years any come in different forms. I’ve lived through them myself.

It may be outdated, but if there’s anything that The Breakfast Club quietly teaches us is that every student has to deal with pressure in all its forms. Peer pressure, parent pressure, administrator pressure, and pressure they–sometimes unknowingly–put on themselves. When teachers remind their students of those pressures–also sometimes unknowingly–they aren’t doing themselves or the student any favors.

It’s easy to slip into that behavior. You have a plan. An agenda. You have stuff that you need to do. English to teach, the exam to prepare for.

That attitude can polarize a classroom when teachers forget that it’s not only about what we need to do for students, but what students need to do and believe for each and every one of themselves. Do we really think that our lessons are their priority? Our classrooms become battlefields.  Me vs.Them. For a student, though, school becomes drastically more polarized. Instead of me vs. them, it becomes Me vs. ME vs. Them. They have to fight off not only their peers trying to kill their creativity, motivation, and budding independence, but their teachers, who are supposed to be on their side, and on top of that, they need to fight themselves.

If there’s any irony here, it’s that as adults we’ve been known to say that today’s youth are the most apathetic generation to come along. How can it be possible that hundreds of thousands of young people be both so lazy and yet so stressed out at the same time? I’ll look at that in a later post. I’ll leave you with the above quote from Einstein, and with the thought that maybe it’s time once again to let the fish swim in the ocean.

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Nov 12 2012
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Teaching and Education

When Teachers Make “Respect” Their Ultimate Classroom Management Tool

Rule number one in my classroom: You respect me, and I’ll respect you.

…that’s how I thought I should start the year off in order to reap the rewards of effective classroom management.

Hey guys and girls, listen close. (I’d most likely sit up on a desk at this point, and then smirk a charming smirk.) We’re all people here, right? You all know what it’s like to be a student. You’ve got practice, heh. And you know what? You’ve all got a pretty good idea what it’s like to be a teacher, too.You’ve seen them all your life…

Now I don’t like being mean…

Now I don’t like yelling…

Now I don’t like giving detentions…

So let’s all just respect each other. Cool? Cool. 

…I don’t think that way anymore. In fact I was an idiot to ever say crap like that. Consider this my promise to never utter those words again.

Here’s a could-be conversation between a rookie teacher and a veteran teacher that puts this idea into context. Let’s see what happens when the rookie teacher tries to defend himself with respect.

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Nov 11 2012
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Teaching and Education

Your Kids Aren’t Different From You – Religion and God

When we were young, every view was as valid as the next. Differences categorized, they didn’t discriminate. Adults were the big people who knew better, but still people, like we were. We didn’t see skin color, we knew friends or not friends. Song lyrics weren’t to be looked into. We liked the way the song made us tap our toes.

As we age there was a shift in thinking. It was subtle, not like a light switch but more like sounds and noises raising into a crescendo. Others become gradually more different from us. People aren’t people any more, they’re opponents. Me versus mom.

As adults, teenagers become different from us. Some even say they’re a different species. (I sure as hell have been tempted.) There are entire professions that adults go into to try to make sense of them. Millions of books are sold every year on the subject of the dreaded adolescent. This wisdom and experience that we have and they don’t puts us on top.

Last week I asked my grade 10 students, fourteen year-olds, what they believed about religion, about god. Two of life’s big questions that adults chew on all the time. Here are some of their answers.

  • Moving from the eastern part of the city to the west has changed my view of the world. I now see diversity more than I ever did, how much people mirror their surroundings. I’m honoring my family tradition of Catholicism but believe personally there are no higher powers. We all rely on reach other.
  • I often rely on my faith to get me through rough situations and I love being able to speak to a completely reliable source.
  • Though some people find peace in religion, I have seen so much destruction and chaos.
  • I believe that there is a force greater than what we can comprehend.  I believe that god is something we need to have faith in because if life is only what we see, it would be dull.
  • “God” in the way I was brought up, as a Catholic, was some kind of sexist, manipulating, stuck-up jerk.
  • I believe that there is no god. No one watching over us, no one waiting for us to make a mistake. We have nothing to prove, but everything to live for.
  • Of course I have my doubts, but overall I believe. Maybe, even if there is no God, just the mindset that there is someone helping you through tough times can help you to become more optimistic.
  • I believe that there were once some very intelligent philosophers who created religion as a way to make people feel guilty for their immoral behaviour. I think that everyone has a right to their beliefs and I think that one should have whatever faith that will make them a better person.
  • I’ve prayed a lot as a child as well as in my teens, and there are many that come to mind that seem to have been ignored. There have definitely been some things that make me question my faith, like the passing of a friend on his birthday. But there have also been things to strengthen it, like my mother surviving breast cancer.

Teenagers are not different from us. When it comes to the universality of questioning our existence, the big things, the important things, they know as much as we do. Let’s hope this evened the keel a little bit. I’ll let you know when a publisher picks this “sage advice” up. (Please don’t steal this sage advice, publishers, Thanks.)

What did YOU believe in when you were a teenager? Was there a God? Was religion a good thing? Are you more skeptical now, or less?  Answer in the comments section below!

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Nov 03 2012
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Teaching and Education

An End of Term Gift

It’s been over a month and a half since my last blog post. In that time, the steel wheels of the public school system have been increasing speed and are now, at the end of the first term, glowing bright red. Perhaps it’s time to look back on successes and failures.

Failures? Well, what of them? They’re too many to innumerate, and inconsequential, anyway, in the grand scheme of things, other than to provide the blips on the radar of where near-daily breakdowns provided opportunities to change directions and learn something new.

Instead, let’s both of us sit together on soft chairs with open thoughts, and talk about something that teachers find really hard to pin down, so in that way it is often not discussed.Feel free to add your input, what you think, and how you experience this.

Remember to check your desk for resiliency, first.

This thing that doesn’t and shouldn’t have a name, is  a testament not to why teachers become teachers, but why teachers stay teachers. Why they work through burn-out and depression and seventy-hour weeks. It happens on a day when students believe in themselves enough to believe in you, too. It’s the class when you find yourself connected with your students. When, after months of struggling through assignments and missed deadlines, apathy and lethargy and watching students rot away their chances for success.

That’s never easy, by the way, for a teacher. Having to watch another wither and diminish, trudge by opportunities that would otherwise be useful in clearing roadblocks in their life, but that now pile obstacles even higher. Even the most cynical teacher who can be heard in the staff room saying, “it’s not my problem if so-and-so wants to throw their life away, I’ve got other things to worry about” probably also feels like they’re letting that student down. Passive-aggressiveness and cynicism are the destroyers of good teachers, but they’re everywhere, after all. After trying to do so much for students on the brink of self-destruction, it exhausts you. And it hurts with you both lose the fight.

If you’re lucky, there comes a day, maybe two or three a year, where you find yourself and each one of your thirty-plus students occupying the same headspace. The same clarity of thought. It’ll sometimes happen at the end of a class, when you’re reaching an important conclusion. As a teacher you’ve stood in front of them for weeks and watched their expressions slowly melt from beginning of the year excitement to complacency and boredom. They don’t say hi when they come into your class anymore, they stare at you with half-open eyes that read let’s just get this over with. It’s horrible to witness and accept, because it means you aren’t doing your job as well as you need to to keep these kids interested, and sometimes there’s just nothing you can do about it.

On that lucky day, though, you feel as though you’re standing next to each one of your students at the same time, and you’re all smiling. Your arm is around their shoulder, or comforting them because they might be crying, or you’re slapping them on the back, or giving them a high-five, and you’re overwhelmed with pride for them. You’re proud of them because they get it. They understand now what the struggle was for. They understand why they suffered. The weeks of crap days, the day to day stressors, the time they wouldn’t shut up while you were talking, or when they fell asleep because they didn’t sleep the night before, none of that matters because the message you’ve been trying to get to them is flowing through with bright radiance.

What’s more, they’re proud of you, too. Their teacher! They can and want to call you that. They want to tell their friends that. Their parents: this is my teacher.  The individual that believed in them in the first place, that knows better and that put up with their shit for weeks on end. They’re smiles are thank yous, their breaths fill the room and there’s a feeling that the four walls of the room are holding in all the trust, all the sincerity that each person can offer.

This is what it’s like to be finally taught something.

This is what it’s like to teach.

And it doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s reason to write home about.

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