Tag Archives: Coronavirus

Questions about September 2020

I was speaking to a friend that teaches at a university and she said about 30% of students that would normally come to her university next year are requesting a one year deferral, and taking a gap year. If that’s happening at universities across the province, and the country, that’s going to have a devastating impact on universities. Also, what are these students going to do next year? The two most productive things that students do in a gap year are work to save money, and travel (get some life experience). The job market is not going to bounce back quick enough, with unemployment at some of the highest levels in years, and most countries aren’t going to lift travel bans any time soon.

So what are all these gap year students going to do?

I wonder about the mental well-being of students who are not going to school, can’t get a job or travel, and are home and idle?

What can we do to support these students?

I also wonder if all of our colleges and universities will survive financially with such a decrease in students and revenue?

Will a percentage of high school students also stay home? Will there be a spike in high school students wanting to take online courses rather than try blended courses with teachers unfamiliar with this form of delivery?

Will private school students and their families decide that they should just go to public school rather than pay expensive tuition for an online experience?

We are headed into some very unknown territory and the impacts to what schooling might look like for September 2020 and beyond may not unfold in ways that we are expecting.

School 2020

I used to think I had a good handle on where things were going. What does the end of the school year look like? What will September start-up look like? All this is out the window.

An online grad/annual celebration in June? Never would have guessed that was coming, I had a theatre booked for the occasion.

Students sitting socially distant from each other? I don’t have more than 4 single desks in the whole school.

There is a lot to think about with respect to the coming school year. How will the year start? How often in a week will students attend? How much will be taught from a distance? Who will struggle and who will thrive in this new environment?

We will adapt. We will make it work. But making it work isn’t enough over a sustained period. It’s one thing to ‘make it work’ for the last 3 months of a school year, and yet another for that to be your plan for a full year.

As busy as June is, it’s also a time to be creative. September 2020 will be here sooner than we think, and school will not be what it has been in the past. We need to create opportunities for students not just to survive the year, but for them to thrive.

One December 31st, 2019 I picked my #OneWord2020 to be Resilience… I don’t think I could have picked a better word!

Feeding the rage machine

It’s really hard to avoid rage as a driving force in the news today. Article after article, video clip after video clip, there is anger, upset, and rage. There is a link between what we think and how we feel, and that used to be determined by us. Now it is determined by the headlines we read and the videos we watch.

Cognition used to drive emotion, now emotion draws us towards information and that information caries a bias that fuels anger in one of two opposing ways:

1. Disgust: How can this happen in our society today? What kind of world are we living in? This is so wrong!

2. Rebuke: This is not a crisis. This is overblown! Everything is sensationalized.

These two reactions towards the same topic fuel even greater rage. If you think something is completely unacceptable and I ask you, ‘what’s the big deal?’, how does that make you feel?

Anger does not invite clear thought. It does not invite discourse that we can learn from. It does not foster a healthy environment.

It upsets me that headlines are so geared towards rage and anger. It saddens me that I still follow the headlines, clicking links and watching videos. I’m not impervious to the emotional draw. It’s similar to slowing down on the highway to see why emergency vehicles are pulled over in the oncoming lanes… we are pulled in by the macabre.

It can not be healthy to draw our attention to the world through rage. It clouds the truth, hides it in bias based on anger. This is not how we should be learning about the going’s on in our world. This is not news.

Shifting winds

Most school years are like prevailing winds. You know which way you are sailing and you adjust your course a little and keep going.

This year, and especially these past 4 months, have created shifting winds that keep altering the direction we are going, outside of our control.

If you’ve ever watched a sailing race, the most important aspects of a boat being successful are leadership and teamwork. That doesn’t just mean working together when everyone agrees with the captain. In fact, the test of a true team is how well they work together when there is disagreement.

In the coming months there will be some metaphorical rough seas, and blustery winds. To sail through safely we will need good leadership and great teamwork.

In our Province, we have leadership worth following and listening to. It is sad to see a team crumble under good leadership.

In other jurisdictions people are not as lucky. It is equally sad to see a team crumble because of poor leadership.

What we have to remember is that we are all in the same boat. How well will we sail through this rough patch? Calmer winds and seas will come eventually, until then the shifting winds are testing our resolve to work together.

Wanting to connect

This is one of the headlines that came across my news feed several times yesterday, “Ontario to maintain group size restrictions amid rising COVID-19 cases, crowded parks”

It seems that many people wanted to take advantage of the great weather and social distancing took a back seat to social gathering, despite an uptick of COVID-19 cases in southern Ontario.

This isn’t unusual behaviour, with similar things happening in parks and on beaches across North America. It isn’t something that bodes well when considering that economies are opening up and people are beginning to be exposed to more interactions with others. Social distancing needs to be something that we continue while things open up. So, why are people behaving like this?

We have a natural affinity to want to spend time with people and to be social… well, most people do, definitely not everyone. This is the typical overreaction we see with teenagers, when they get new freedoms and want to push the line. How many times have you heard a phrase like, “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.” Well, seems like this is as true for adults as it is for kids.

People want to connect. They want to congregate, they want to celebrate.

I know many people that have had to cancel travel plans. My own summer plans with my wife and two other couples is no longer going to happen. I know of two cancelled weddings, one was a local celebration and one was a destination wedding. These are big events to change! These are celebrated gatherings that will not happen for a while yet. This is tough to miss out on.

But it’s not as tough as not being able to visit another country to say goodbye to a loved one who is dying, it’s not as tough as knowing you are the one that spread a virus to someone that didn’t recover like you did. It’s not as tough as shutting down the economy a second time, when the curve isn’t flattened enough and there is a fear of hospitals being overwhelmed.

The economy has to be opened up. We need to be returning to some sense of normalcy, we need to create opportunities to connect with others in our communities, to work along side each other, and to do things that are more social than they have been. But we need to do so in recommended and respectful ways.

We need to accept some risk, but not be risky. We need to connect, and not crowd each other. We can’t wait for a vaccine, and we can’t stay shuttered in place indefinitely. We need to connect responsibly, and in ways recommend by experts. We can’t ignore the need to engage in our society, but we also can’t be reckless.

Trying to find the Truth

I enjoy seeing funny quotes attributed to the wrong people. Like these two examples:

Abe Lincoln fake internte quote

Use-the-Force-Harry-Gandalf

The second one is an assault to the senses of fiction and science fiction fans. When the joke is obvious, there is comedy in the creation of these fake attributions. However, we are living in an era where Truth seems more and more subjective.

What’s scary about this is that I consider myself fairly objective, but I’m finding it harder and harder to know what to believe. What I do know is that newspapers today come with tremendous bias, and something as simple as this chart from two years ago is even more exaggerated now, with papers moving further towards the extremes:

News-Bias-MarketWatch

Here is an example of something that I know little about, and feel that the more I read, the further I am from having a clear understanding of where to put a value on what’s true: Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19.

The first article I read was from the Washing Post (dated May 17th, 2020): The results are in. Trump’s miracle drug is useless.

Excerpt: THE HYPE over the drug hydroxychloroquine was fueled by President Trump and Fox News, whose hosts touted it repeatedly on air. The president’s claims were not backed by scientific evidence, but he was enthusiastic. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked. In desperation, the public snapped up pills and the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization on March 28 for the drug to be given to hospitalized patients. On Thursday, Mr. Trump declared, “So we have had some great response, in terms of doctors writing letters and people calling on the hydroxychloroquine.”

Now comes the evidence. Two large studies of hospitalized patients in New York City have found the drug was essentially useless against the virus.

Next I read an Article from the Washington Times (Dated April 2nd, 2020 – about 6 weeks before the article above): Hydroxychloroquine rated ‘most effective therapy’ by doctors for coronavirus: Global survey.

Excerpt: Drug known for treating malaria used by U.S. doctors mostly for high-risk COVID-19 patients.

An international poll of more than 6,000 doctors released Thursday found that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was the most highly rated treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The survey conducted by Sermo, a global health care polling company, of 6,227 physicians in 30 countries found that 37% of those treating COVID-19 patients rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” from a list of 15 options.

Of the physicians surveyed, 3,308 said they had either ordered a COVID-19 test or been involved in caring for a coronavirus patient, and 2,171 of those responded to the question asking which medications were most effective.

So, the ‘evidence’ presented in the second article came well before the the first article was printed. Which article holds more ‘Truth’?

First, if you had to guess, which of these newspapers is more Left-of-Centre – Liberal and which of these papers is more Right-of-Centre – Conservative?

Let’s have a look at the sources on MEDIA BIAS/FACT Check. (Full disclosure, I have not checked the reliability of this website.)

Here is the bias of the Washington Post:

Washington Post MediaBiasFactCheck

Compared to the bias of the Washington Times:

Washington Times MediaBiasFactCheck

Take a moment to read the final, bolded comments that I clipped from this fact check website about each paper. They would suggest the Post being more reliable than the Times because of a lack of fact checking at the Times. That said, the source for the survey linked to in the Times article checked out when I looked into it. The same source, Sermo, is now toting Remdesivir use more than Hydroxychloroquine, and even then stating that, “Remdesivir Seen as Only Moderately Effective”.

I don’t have the time or mental energy to go fact-checking every article I read, but I do find myself evaluating the source of the information a lot more. However, quite honestly, even when I do that it has now become blatantly easy to read the bias of the reporter woven into almost every news article that’s based on a ‘hot’ topic. How can you look to the news for objectivity when that objectivity is blatantly disregarded?

I’ve now started reading headlines with the following ‘BS Filter’ as a lens: “Does this article headline anger me, or try to anger me? If the answer is ‘yes’, I either ignore the article, or I open it with my ‘BS detectors’ fully engaged. Click bait articles tend not to be focused on sharing any kind of ‘Truth’.

In this day and age of abundant information, I thought Truth would rise above the BS, but that hasn’t been the case. Neil Postman said,

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

It seems that there is an information war on both our capacities to think, and our capacities to seek the Truth.

Is it just me?

How different things are now than they were just 3 months ago!

You would think by now I would have figured out some good routines but I really haven’t. I feel caught up at work, then not two days later I feel swamped. I have a morning ritual I follow, then suddenly my whole routine feels up-side-down. I eat well and take care of myself, then I binge on junk and miss a workout.

I work best when I am a creature of habit, when I follow set routines and focus on the task at hand. But right now I can’t find a rhythm. I set things up and follow the plan for 2-3 days then I’m doing something completely different. My systems are temporary. My plans are not realized. I set a goal, then I do tons of things related to that goal, but somehow avoid the work that needs to be done to meet that goal.

It’s not like I’m falling apart. It isn’t that I’m overwhelmed and struggling. On the contrary, things are going well right now in many ways… it’s just that my routines are out of sync. My habits are an effort.  Is it just me, or are others feeling like they just can’t get into a good groove?

Any colour

“A customer can have a car painted any color he wants as long as it’s black”– Henry Ford

There is a lot of folklore about this quote, but if I were to summarize it in a sentence: Henry Ford wanted to minimize options and maximize production, and every choice reduced efficiency.

Today our schools are all about choice. And our universities are all about differentiating themselves from the competition. People don’t just go to MIT Media Lab or Stanford d.school for the name, they go for the reputation, the proven success, and the opportunity to collaborate with other elite students. They go for the experience. People want to walk the halls of Yale or Harvard.

I know a family in the US who pay as much as my yearly salary for their two kids to go to University every year… And those kids are home taking online classes. It doesn’t matter what car people bought in September, they are all driving the same colour now.

How will this change people’s view of these schools? How much value do the hallways have? The Ivy schools will survive, even in a depression there is always a market for luxury items. But not all universities and colleges will survive post pandemic. Some schools will become fast food chains… All online year-round service, or half the price and double the students. Others will specialize. Others will partner with big business.

Universities are having a Henry Ford moment. They’ve been reduced to the same choice for all. It will be interesting to see what options come out of this.

Attention in online delivery of classes

There are some pretty funny and creative ways that students are avoiding class now that it is online. Here are some fun examples:

1. A video of a student using a video of himself on his phone, ‘paying attention’, set up with a tripod in front of his laptop’s camera.

2. This kid has different priorities:

3. And Zach, who is known for his video magic, has fun with Wi-Fi challenges.

All joking aside, it’s harder to hold a group’s attention for too long in an online setting, compared to having a ‘captive audience’ face to face. It becomes a matter of thinking this through thoughtfully, or literally ‘losing your audience’. Remember Bill Nye The Science Guy? I don’t think he ran any segment of his show for longer than 3 minutes. There were quick lessons interspersed with flashy examples and experiments. Compare that to a 40 minute lecture with a teacher, and compare that to a 40 minute lesson online?

Here are two simple questions to ask:

1. What is being done to engage the learner?

2. What is the learner’s experience?

I’m not saying we need to entertain like Bill Nye, but I am saying that if we don’t think of the end user’s experience, we are going to see our audience’s attention dwindle.

Learning Experiences

Last month I wrote, ‘Just shifting online or shifting the learning?‘. This post looked at how to effectively shift engaging learning online, from a distance, as we moved to remote learning. Now we need to think about what we’ve learned, and what we want to bring back into our schools.

There will be limits that social distancing will challenge us with. But when we final normalize what school looks like, how will this global experiment in teaching remotely change what we do in schools post a Covid-19 vaccination? What lessons will we take from this?

Six years ago, I wrote,’Flexible Learning Opportunities‘

In this post I said,

“Blending won’t be something done to classes or students, rather it will be the modus operandi… the way teaching and learning happens. In fact, even ‘distance learning’ could have synchronous ‘face-to-face’ meetings in virtual worlds. It will be an exception to the norm, in a very short while, to have a class that is strictly face-to-face or solely online/asynchronous.”

I got timing of ‘a very short while’ wrong, and it took a pandemic to make it happen, but now I think we are approaching this. When students return to school are teachers going to just revert to old ways or will they rethink how they spend their time in class?

One of my schools that I’m the principal of is the district online school (Coquitlam Open Learning). For a while now, I’ve been talking to my teachers about the fact that over 95% of our online students are local, and asking how we can leverage this? Here are a couple examples:

1. Math teachers running a Numeracy event, where they brought students from many different classes together to solve numeracy problems and help them prepare for the provincial numeracy assessment.

2. The Biology teacher running fetal pig dissections to teach about the different body systems. Second year university med students taught our online & Inquiry Hub students about the different systems and did rotating demonstrations, then our students taught gifted middle school students in the same format later that day, with the university students assisting.

In both these cases, when the online students came together, it was for an ‘experience’, not just a lesson. How can we think about this as we bring some of the asynchronous learning to our synchronous classrooms? How can we rethink the experience of school when students all have access to resources, digital conversations, and videos and lessons that they don’t need to be together to see and do?

How can we leverage the digital access and connectivity to change what we do when we meet kids face to face?

Can we give them more guided time to work independently, with teachers providing just-in-time support?

Can we focus more on learning experiences, rather than lessons?

Are we just going to shift the learning back into classrooms, or are we going to start thinking more about how we can shift the learning experiences we provide while kids are in our schools?

A concrete example of this is that students at Inquiry Hub Secondary have about 40% of their day when they are not in front of their teachers. During this time, they work on assignments teachers give them (imagine group work where students never need to meet outside of school), they work in digital components of their courses (like video lessons), and they work on some pretty interesting student-designed inquiry projects (that they get credit for). You can learn more about how we make Inquiry Hub work here.

Are we just shifting the learning back into schools or are we also shifting towards different kinds of learning experiences?