Due Dates and the Clarity of Expectations

BTT1O were to hand in their summatives today. I'd told myself to be ready for some students not to be done. I was trying to psych myself up to be a tough guy about it. I was not prepared for almost everyone not to be done. This included a couple of my star students.

On reflection, I did not lay out the tough guy, hard ass expectations all that clearly up front and I have, in general, not done a clear and explicit job of handling due dates. (Which are a mess in the Ontario system, now.) In fact, I need to generally do a better job of being explicit in my expectations with both BTT1O and ICS3M.

I thought that the expectations in terms of what to hand in were well laid out in the summative assignment this time around. I got that part right. But I should have spoken to the importance of meeting the deadline and that the deadline was the beginning of the class.

Attention, Attention

We're fully in summative mode in ICS3M. E/one is working on it in class. One thing that all levels of the summative can use (as a bonus) is the ability to write text to files. So, I spent about 10 mins in class today going over how to do this. What surprised me was the number of students who didn't even bother to pay attention and this was even though I'd told then that it would only take about 10 minutes and that they would need this if they were to go for the bonuse marks on any of the summative levels.

What is perplexing me about this? That it is so clearly in their interest to listen so that they know how to do it and that they aren't? Is it the case that it's not clear to them that it's in their interest?

I'm inclined to think that they are assuming that they don't need to listen now. That they'll be able to get this info from me later when the information will be immediately useful. If I thought this behaviour just came under the heading of general rudeness, that would be one thing. But one student that I particularly singled out for not listening was quite open and nice with me afterwards. It's not intentional rudeness however much it might incidentally be rude.

Perhaps it's the internet generation (Gen I) thing. They're used to information on demand so they just assume that that's how it will be with what I was giving them today.

Alfie Kohn on reform and a Secretary of Education

Kohn, who is surely one of the most interesting and provocative educational theorists out there today, talks about who Obama should choose for Secretary of Education in the U.S. Along the way, he speculates that much of what passes for school reform is actually a retrenchment of the status quo - stateside, at least. Since what happens there often shows up here as at least an influence, I present it for your delectation.

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.”