Understanding Student Ability

Today at Incredibly Amazing HS, all the Grade 9 Applied teachers gathered together to discuss the students each felt were at risk academically.

In the first place, that's a cool thing that teachers were given the time during a regular day to meet and figure out who was at risk. Certainly, nothing like that happened at my previous school even though that school had a reputation (deserved, I think) as a good school. There's an unusually strong focus here on identifying kids who are at risk of failing and taking steps to keep that from happening.

But what I want to reflect on here is that the real bonus for me as a newbie teacher was the opportunity to see how other teachers - particularly more experienced ones - understood the strengths and weaknesses of students. I had a couple of "Aha" moments (at least) in which I listened to a teacher's take on an at-risk student and went to myself "Yes I should be looking at that aspect of a student's performance." Or that I should understand this aspect of learning in this or that particular light.

Categories of Strength/Weakness

Abstraction - How difficult is it for the student to deal with abstract material?
One on One Attention - Does the student need an above average of one on one attention in order to understand what's going on?
Organization - an obvious one but particularly important for weaker students who don't need the extra challenge of trying to track miscellaneous bits of information and paper. Kids with organizational difficulties are obvious candidates for a learning strategies mini-course that Incredibly Amazing HS is going to run after Christmas.
Tolerance of routine change - Lots of kids are really sensitive to changes in their routine at school and at home. Sometimes they need to be able to chill out when they get hit with a change. It helps if you know a kid's in this category.
Information retention - how long can the student retain information that they've studied? Obviously, if this is aproblem for them, exams will be a challenge. The eye opener for me with this one was to conceive of a student's exam performance as being a function of the amount of time for which they could retain the information. It's productive to look at it in this light.

Tim Brown's Key's to Creativity

Tim Brown had a really interesting vid on the TED website. He was talking about the links between creativity and play. The entire video (below) is worth your time but these are the three points I took out of it.

Exploration: Go for quantity.

Building: Think with your hands.

Role Play: Act it out.

Being a beginning teacher is like having to show up for an exam you haven't studied for every day.

Motivational Sayings (sort of)

A collection of saying for new teachers. It's billed as being anti-motivational but there are some nuggets in there.

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A teacher’s power isn’t nearly as cool.


One day when you realize that you’re really teaching something well to a kid who really wants to learn, you’ll feel like the hero of a story. But, if there’s a story at all, the kid is the hero.


I was hired to teach high school when I was twenty-two. The teacher I replaced had died on Thursday. She was at a restaurant alone, reading a trade paperback and collapsed right at the table. Heart attack. I came in for an interview on Friday and started on Monday. I showed up ten minutes early. The school secretary gave me a map of the campus, a key and said, “Good luck.”

Preparing for Parent-Teacher Interviews

Suggestions for preparing for Parent-Teacher interview from my informal mentor:

1. Ask for the student's notebook if their parents are coming to the interview. This should provide you with some support for whatever issues you might have with the student or that the parent might have with you.
2. Have a marks printout for each student handy.
3. Initially, at least, don't talk too much. Let them take the lead and see where they go with it. It's their interview in a (n important) sense so let them set the agenda.
   
4. Make sure that they're aware of Desire2Learn and that you post the homework there.
5. Post the interview schedule on the door and make sure to indicate that they should knock on the door when its their time.

Are Schools Redundant?

The (almost) always provocative Bob Cringely has a must-read post up on his site about how technology is de-legitimizing the very foundation of schooling.

"...we've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools."

This has a ring of truth to it and ties in with an insight delivered recently by (I think) Stephen Fry: academia has been based on the notion that facts are scarce. Hence they must be memorized and otherwise preserved. But in an Internet world facts are easily copied and aren't scarce anymore. Google makes them easy to locate. As Cringely puts it farther on in his posting it's not longer a knowledge economy, it's a search economy.

The big question is (i) is this true and (ii) if it is true, what does it mean for us as teachers?

In theory...

...there's no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is.

The tension between my high level goals and aspirations as a teacher and the down and dirty fundamentals of life in the classroom 75 minutes at a time remain. I don’t want to be a cop, to be coercive and to use reward and punishment as a mechanistic tool to get students to learn (I want to be more Alife Kohn-like) but feel that I am forced back into that mode by the day to day reality of what I’m encountering in the classroom. Students are talking about their personal stuff at the same time as I’m talking or at the same time as another student is talking and being generally so disruptive as to make them impossible to ignore. So I threaten them and occasionally follow through on my threats and occasionally lose my cool in a visible way.

The key, suggests Bob Sullo in Activating the Desire to Learn, is to make the content interesting and relevant. Then students will want to learn. Sounds right to me. But that challenge seems way, way, beyond me. I struggle just to come up with and organize the stuff to fill the time at this point. That kind of meta-effort, devoted to establishing its relevance and to making it connect to them at a personal level seems like too much when it’s 9.00 PM and the kids are finally put to bed and the supper dishes are put away and I’m sitting down to figure out what tomorrow’s class is going to look like.

How can I get out of here (Mr. MacDonald - GRRRR) and over to there (Mr. MacDonald - great class!!!!)?

The Psychology of PowerPoint

Science Fiction blog io9 reported on a presentation by cognitive scientist Stephen M. Kosslyn at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston on 15 February, 2008 about using cognitive science to improve your powerpoint presentations. There are, apparently, four basic rules:

• The Goldilocks Rule
• present just the right amount of data
• never include more information than your audience needs
  

• The Rudolph Rule
• make key information stand out like Rudolph’s nose so that you guide your audience’s attention to it
• “The human brain is a difference detector.”
  

• The Rule of Four
• Generally, the brain can hold only four pieces of information at once so limit yourself to presenting four things at a time.
  

• The Birds of a Feather Rule
• if you want to indicate that certain things belong together, group them by giving them a similar colour, shape, or location in the visual field.
  

The goofy rule names? It’s always easier to remember something unfamiliar if it’s named for something familiar.

New Yorker Does Short Fiction Podcasts

The inimitable Boing Boing reports that the New Yorker (best magazine evah!) is publishing podcasts of some of its short fiction. Each month the mag asks one authour to pick a favourite from the NYer archives and then read it.

I'll be signing up.

10 Rules for Creativity

Never underestimate a nun (in this case, Sister Corita Kent).

Immaculate Heart College Rules (art department):

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

There should be new rules next week.

Courtesy of Michal Migurski

The Professional versus the Inspired Amateur

Great article by Steve Martin in February issue of The Smithsonian magazine. It occurred to me on reading it that there's a lot of overlap between stand-up comedy and teaching. Here's something surprising that he has to say about the difference between being great and being good:

The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances. Performing in so many varied situations made every predicament manageable, from Toronto, where I performed next to an active salad bar, to the well-paying but soul-killing Playboy Clubs, where I was almost but not quite able to go over. But as I continued to work, my material grew; I came up with odd little gags such as "How many people have never raised their hands before?"

Well, that difference between being great when inspired, when the spirit moves you, and being consistently good is precisely what it means to be a professional, isn't it? Amateurs can be great at what they do because they can be inspired but that's something that's outside your control - by definition. You have to depend on the muses to be inspired and they are...fickle. But a professional has honed his or her craft to the point where he or she is at least good pretty much all the time.

Someday, when you're really a professional, all your classes will be good and, when inspiration does strike, you'll be great.