It’s yet another Friday and a chance for me to share some of the excellent thinking from Ontario Edubloggers. Please read on and show some online affection by clicking through to read the entire posts.
Why we Protest…Class of 42 students (My Story)
In every round of collective bargaining, the members have a chance to speak and offer suggestions for improvements to a collective agreement. Of course, what hits the main stream media is the demand for more money if it’s included in the list. In my time working on the Collective Bargaining Committee, I had the opportunity to take a look at what members would suggest as things to bargain for. I do remember one person who always submitted humorous suggestions and found out later it was done to see if anyone actually read the ideas. Well, yeah, we did read each and every one. What remains stuck in my mind is that very seldom did the requests focus only on compensation. By and large, the suggestions were about improved working conditions.
The current two layer set of negotiations makes things different but that shouldn’t stop the desire to improve things in schools.
In this post, Zoe Branigan-Pipe tells a story of having a class of 42. That sounds like a double class and I can empathise, having had a Grade 9 math class with 35 students in a room that comfortably sat 24. It’s the educational version of sticker shock.
Please read and share Zoe’s story.
Jamie Weir’s post should be required reading for those who write the Fraser Report that generate those School Report Cards that allow parents, students, and sadly uninformed newspaper reporters to compare schools. There’s no consideration in those cards for the fact that the carbon units within each are human with various needs. Somehow, they can all represented by a number.
It’s a great read. Find out how she views each of her students as more than a number.
This is a nice post by Eva Thompson who I think has indeed made a concerted effort to shift gears and, I suspect, will be far better off afterwards.
I can actually put faces to the type of person that she describes here. I will always remember my father’s advice “you do well when you make others look better”. It’s unfortunate that there are some that fit Eva’s description and have succeeded in elevating themselves (at least in their own minds) within their own organization. Behind them are trampled individuals, others with knives in their backs, and they truly are looked at with suspicion by sensible people when they visit schools. As a new teacher, I got good advice – they’re just climbers – nod and smile and they’ll go away because there are others that they need to suck up to.
The true leaders are those who know their own abilities and shortcomings and work to address them and, along the way, work with others to share their learnings. Those are the people to which you need to align yourself. It sounds like Eva’s approach to her students will be terrific.
Just another quote and I wish I knew where this came from but it’s stuck too. “An expert is someone who knows more and more about everything until they know nothing about anything”.
This is one of those posts that make me proud to say I know Colleen Rose. How many teachers would use their own personal blogging platform to celebrate the words and thinking of their students?
There’s not more that I want to say about this – read Colleen’s words and visit the blog to celebrate the student thoughts.
3 Things my Blog Titles Need to be Better
I know that Ontario is a big province but I never fail to be humbled by the smallish community of bloggers and connectors that we have here. Recently, I had gone on a tangent about blog titles wondering if I could do better. Sue Dunlop did a far better job in analysing her own work and offers her own ideas.
In this post, the title which got an A+ by the way, Sue explains her thinking.
It’s hard to argue with any of those points.
I was mindful of this while doing my morning reading. I love the randomness that Flipboard provides for sources all over the digital world. I certainly skip over way more stories than I actually take the time to read. The ones that I do read absolutely fall into the guidelines that Sue describes. To that end, I think she’s nailed it and that is what drove my reading. Stepping back, I just wondered – how many absolutely wonderful resources did I miss because of a lousy title?
There’s also another side. There are awesome bloggers that I know are always good for a thoughtful post. They could type the alphabet in the title box and I’d still read it because I know and appreciate their abilities.
As an aside, I see that this topic was great for a conversation among some Hamilton-Wentworth educators last night on Twitter. Sadly, I had gone to bed but I did catch it this morning.
When the Pupil is Ready, The Master Will Appear
I wish I could recall when I first heard this but I can’t. Tim King shares his own thoughts about 8:35-2:34 education and the allotment of students and teachers to time slots.
The option to be formally uneducated isn’t available in Ontario nowadays, we’ve institutionalized education into a mandatory process. This regimented system reduces student readiness to engagement and throws the concept of patiently waiting for student readiness out the window. That patience suggests a process where student learning is the main focus. Have we lost the freedom to patiently wait for student readiness to the systemic efficiencies of regimented grading?
Maybe we should take this as a challenge. Can this philosophy fit into Ontario’s “institutionalized education”? If so, how?
Responsibilities of the Primary Teacher in Ontario
Maybe Tim and Muriel Corbierre should get together and see if there’s a common ground. In her ABQ course on Primary Education …
In the balance of the post, she elaborates on Planning, Teaching, Curriculum, Assessment, Classroom Environment, Management/Discipline, Professionalism, and Leadership in the Community.
Does the concept of readiness fit?
Where? How?
Is it different in the primary grades versus secondary school?
Wow, what a wonderful collection of recent thoughts from Ontario Edubloggers. I hope that you can find a few minutes to click through and read the complete thoughts on these blog posts.
doug --- off the record 