Thursday, March 27, 2008

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.Link

Saturday, March 22, 2008

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?

Saturday, March 1, 2008

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!!!!)?