Tag Archives: metaphor

Teacher as compass

I love the metaphor of ‘Teacher as compass’; helping students navigate their own learning journey.

Last night I read this tweet from Will Richardson:

I quoted his tweet and responded:

This made me think about the first time I used this metaphor? I went looking on my Pair-a-Dimes blog and it turned out to be 13 years ago: David Warlick’s K12 Online Conference Keynote 2006. David used a metaphor about trains and ‘riding the rails’, and I decided to create a different metaphor:

“A great metaphor here, on the theme of learners navigating on their own, is the teacher as the compass. We point in a direction, (not necessarily the direction that the student is going), and we are a reference point or guide to the learning. As students sail (rather than ride the rails) they must choose their destination, (what they want to learn), and tack and adjust their path as they go… using the teacher as a compass that keeps them on their ‘learning’ course.

Challenges

  • Students and teachers need to know how to sail- they need to be literate in these new ways of learning and communicating. They must be adaptable, willing to course-correct as they go.
  • Students and teachers need to seek out other sailors- communities of learners, online this too could be considered a literacy issue .
  • Students must bring their own sails- and not all sails are created equally, the metaphor can work with sails being competency (skills), motivation, handicaps (the ability to function physically, emotionally, intellectually (not everyone has the same sized sail), and technically (the ‘new’ literacy issue again)).
  • Teachers need to let students steer- it will take a while for many teachers to give up the steering wheel and become the compass.
  • Teachers need to be ‘useful’ compasses- “Don’t confuse the pointing finger with the Moon” comes to mind here… also think of using technology for learning rather than using technology to teach. If students steer themselves, they will take us into uncharted water, and we need to be able to point the way even when we may not know the best course of action. (It isn’t about ‘right’ answers, it is about the journey- this goes back to Warlick’s [or rather Toffler’s] idea that learners (students and teachers) need to learn, unlearn and relearn all the time.”

—

If teachers are focussed on providing content, they don’t need this metaphor because they are essentially taking all their students on the same journey. The teachers are captains with their students on the same boat. However, ‘Teacher as compass’ works very well with inquiry-based learning. Students will do projects where they become more knowledgeable than the teacher in a specific area of content. If teachers are trying to be the content providers for students who are all on different learning voyages, the teachers will fail. However, if teachers are guiding their students, helping them seek out information, and expertise, and supporting them in creating a learning plan… if they are the compass… then they can support students on their individual learning journeys.

Teacher as compass: Teachers provide the true north, and help students find a worthy course… one that will challenge their skills on the open learning seas.

__________

Also posted on Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts 
Image by Ylanite Koppens from Pixabay

small changes can have a big impact

A friend of mine, Keith, was visiting this weekend and I went downtown to connect with him. We walked by the Starbucks I used to manage, a couple blocks from where he used to work, and he asked someone to take our photo in front of it. It brought back fond memories of us connecting at lunch breaks.

Taking this photo and looking inside reminded me of something I did while I was there. This narrow Starbucks on Hornby Street is near the law courts, the art gallery, and many office buildings. In the mornings the rush was crazy for about an hour and a half, then the store would quite down with smaller rushes at lunch and at the end of the day. One of the challenges this rush created in the mornings was that people would look in, see the lineup, then leave… hopefully to come back later, but likely we were losing customers.

Inside the store, we had our main cash register, then the pastry case, followed by a counter then the 2nd till for selling coffee beans. Back then the beans were not pre-packaged, we had scales and empty bags, and cupboards with different flavoured coffee beans in them. Generally we would run just one till, unless someone wanted coffee beans, but every morning rush we would have both tills open to maximize how many people could come through. However this created a huge problem for us because the line up would be 10-15 long for over an hour and a half, and navigating to the two tills slowed things down and created opportunities for people to butt in, although I’d say this was mostly done unintentionally. No matter how we managed it, at some point during the rush we’d be apologizing as we helped navigate who should be next, with the lineup going to two very different places, but the store being too narrow to really create two separate lines.

I spoke to my District Manager and told her I wanted to move the second cash register. This also meant moving the pastry case too, to make room for the two tills to be close, but also have a space in between them to serve two different customers. She understood the challenge and had it done to my requested specifications. In the following weeks the results were pretty impressive. During our 1.5 hour rush, we averaged between 45 and 60 more customers (15-20 more per half hour). We had many regular customers thanking us for the change. We also had less people walking by because we were busy, since they knew that the line up would go quickly.

The renovation was probably paid off in a few months, we dealt with less issues around managing the line, customers were happier, and all we did was move a cash register about 9 feet (2.75 metres). We can’t always make big sweeping changes but sometimes small changes can have a big impact.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place (and…)

The origin of the idiom ‘between a rock and a hard place’ can be found in ancient Greek mythology. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus must pass between Charybdis, a treacherous whirlpool, and Scylla, a horrid man-eating, cliff-dwelling monster. Ever since, saying one is stuck between a rock (the cliff) and a hard place (the whirlpool) has been a way to succinctly describe being in a dilemma. (source)

There is a simple strategy that I often use, both for myself and when working with students, that seems to help when I/they are stuck ‘between a rock and a hard place’. The strategy is to find a 3rd choice. The interesting thing is that the 3rd choice doesn’t have to be great, it can be worse than the other two, but it does something tricky to your brain. When you have to choose between two tough choices, you can think of it as a scale, and you weigh things on either side. The problem is that you think of one side and add weight, then you think of the other side and you add weight there too. Your brian does this indecision dance between the two tough choices, never really allowing you to pick one over the other.

Sometimes, by seeking out a 3rd option, you can discover something you would not have thought of when putting yourself in a dichotomy. However, if you are truly stuck between a rock and a hard place, you probably don’t have a good 3rd option and so the 3rd option is often even worse.

When you add a 3rd (undesired) choice, you can no longer look at the problem as if it is on a scale. The extra option becomes a comparison point for the other two choices. So what your brain does is that it weighs your original two options against the new option, instead of against each other. When this happens, one of those options will often seem better than the other, in a way that comparing just the two on their own didn’t.

When dealing with students, this also helps give them an ‘out’. Often a student is choosing between doing the right thing which is uncomfortable, or accepting a consequence. In this situation, it might seem logical for a kid to make the ‘good’ choice. However, an oppositional student, or a student that is embarrassed, might actually choose the more painful choice. It’s not like they are actually choosing it, they are choosing not to do the thing you want them to do as an act of defiance. A third choice takes away the oppositional response. Now they have to weigh three things, and the better choice looks significantly better than the other two.

So the next time you are stuck between a rock and a hard place, you can torture yourself with a tough and unclear decision, you can avoid the problem altogether (knowing full well that it won’t go away), or you can come up with a 3rd choice to help you decide… it’s up to you!

This is my life

I was dreaming. In the dream there were a group of kids lost in play, and nearby a young boy was sleeping. His mom gently woke him up. The boy, as it turned out in the dream, had Aspergers. I don’t know why that was relevant? He lay there, newly awake, saying a few incoherent things, and then he said, “This is my life.”

Suddenly my entire dream was about this statement. In my dream, I actually planned out writing this down. A young boy wakes up and is disoriented, then he comes to a realization that ‘oh, I have woken up, and this is my life’. How seldom are we ‘awake’ enough to truly understand this profound statement?

Recently I listened to the audio book ‘In Love With The World – A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardot of Living and Dying‘ by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. In it he spoke of the idea that we die every night and are reborn each morning. We completely lose our consciousness, our identity of who we are, when we fall asleep. And we wake up anew. With waking comes the realization of who we are, and our consciousness returns to us, ‘this is my life’.

Do we take the time to truly appreciate the wonder of waking each day? Of being reborn to who we are and who we can be? Each day is a new day, each breath a first breath, each moment a moment to be fully present… Like kids, fully immersed in play.

This is my life. This is your life. How will we choose to live it ‘now’?

Wake up.

We need a new word: Memidemic

In July, 2013, when I wrote ‘Positivity Memidemic‘, memes were not what they are today. The growth of the use of this word, meme, has made the idea of a new word, memidemic, even more relevant.

The definition I created in that post was a little off the mark:

mem·i·dem·ic

Noun ~ A widespread occurrence of a good idea in a community at a particular time: “a passion memidemic”.

Adjective ~ Of, relating to, or of the nature of a memidemic. Synonyms

I think I missed the point in my definition because it is the spreading of positive ideas, images, and videos that needs a new word to describe what’s happening.

The problem of not having a word like this lies in the current words we use to describe these positive events happening: Viral and Epidemic.

Both of these have very negative connotations to them. We don’t want viruses or epidemics to spread, but  we do want positive memes to spread.

When something positive goes memidemic, it is spreading, and we want it to spread. We want to share the joy of it spreading. We want to see it shared, re-shared, and enjoyed. The word ‘viral’ doesn’t suggest that.

So the next time you see something adorable, inspiring, heart-warming, or wholesomely entertaining that is spreading and being shared, tell people that it’s going memidemic!

We want to see good memes about Greta Thunberg spread memidemically!

Glass ceilings are opaque

The idea behind the glass ceiling metaphor, is that there are invisible barriers that keep minorities and/or women from positions of power. But when I think about the portrayal of women in media and social media, I realize that there are some very visible, sometimes blatant and sometimes subtle, ways that make that ‘glass ceiling’ much more opaque.

I do not always recognize this myself.

Yesterday I shared this tweet and image: (I decided not to link to it)

1980’s: Experts agree that…

2010’s: It’s true, I read it on Facebook… 🤔

To me, that’s both insightful and funny. Then I received this response in a tweet from Natasha Knox:

So true!

Side note – do you find the male/female representation in this meme problematic, or is it just me?

To which I responded:

Ouch, now I notice it.

The use of gender roles here is problematic in more that just one way!

When my two daughters were younger, they used to love Dora the Explorer. This is a great cartoon with a female hero (recently a movie too, but I haven’t seen it). In the cartoon, Dora relies on two animated objects: a map and a backpack to help her on her adventures. Dora has to ask the male map which way to go. The female backpack always needs ‘your help’ to figure out what item in the backpack Dora needs. Intentionally sexist? I doubt it. Perpetuating gender stereotypes? Absolutely!

It is this perpetuation of gender stereotypes that I think makes the glass ceiling more opaque than people realize. Because looking through that ceiling, or rather breaking through that ceiling doesn’t always get women to the same place that men above that ceiling are. Not when expectations and preconceived stereotypes are different when women are in those roles. I think ‘problematic’ depictions of women, like the 2 examples above, are seldom done with an intentional bias, but they are done far more than people think. One or two examples may not seem like much, but done over and over again, on many forms of media and across many social media platforms, I think things like this can become normalized and self-perpetuate. That it is not necessarily intentional is what makes the issue so cloudy. That it is sometimes intentionally perpetuated makes things even worse.

I think it is important to identify and call out these biases. Where have you seen them recently?

Poor Visibility

Our destination was 40 feet away, we just couldn’t get there.

I was in Montreal for a water polo tournament, and three of us decided to stay an extra couple nights, so that we could ski at Mont Tremblant. When the ski day arrived, we woke up early and began the drive to the mountain. Unfortunately the snow started around the same time and visibility was horrible.

The Honda Accord I was driving was good in the snow, but my windshield wipers were on their last legs, and I had to constantly use the washer fluid to help with visibility… then we ran out of this fluid and things got bad. Visibility was awful, but the snow wasn’t wet enough, and my wipers smeared the dirty windshield and the wipers started to tear. Visibility was so bad that I had to pull off the highway.

This was not an era of cell phones and GPS, and the map we had was a brochure, with basic highway instructions, which didn’t include the small exit we just took. We had no idea where we were or where we needed to get to in order to remedy our visibility problem.

Then we got lucky. The first road we took ended at a ‘T’ intersection and as we were pondering which way to go, we saw a Honda dealership just to the right of the intersection. What luck! We drove in and picked up new windshield wipers, but they didn’t have windshield wiper fluid. We asked directions to the nearest gas station and used a few plastic cups of water from their water fountain to help us clean the windshield. It also stopped snowing so other than very slippery roads, our situation was much improved. At least we could see!

It only took us about 5 minutes to get to the intersection of the gas station, and that’s when the trouble started. The gas station was at the top of a very small hill, but the grade of the hill was pretty steep and I couldn’t get the Honda up it. My all-season tires were no equal to this snowy incline.

My friends got out and pushed. No progress. I gave one of my friends a chance at the wheel and I pushed. No success. My other friend took a turn. The gas station remained 40 feet away. We weren’t going to get the car there.

We weren’t going to get the car there… That was my defeated sense, before the very simple realization that you, the reader, have probably already come to. But for me it was both a stroke of insight and also a moment to laugh at myself and my dejected friends.

I walked 40 feet up the hill, purchased the windshield wiper fluid, and brought it to the car. Minutes later we were on our way to the mountain with new windshield wipers and a full talk of washer fluid.

It doesn’t hurt

Years ago, my sister took her young son to buy new shoes. When the salesperson measured his feet he told my sister, “his feet are two full sizes bigger than the shoes he has been wearing!”

My sister was shocked and asked her son, “Why didn’t you tell me your shoes were too small?”

He replied, “They don’t hurt if I scrunch my toes up like this.” And pointing to his feet, he ‘scrunched’ and curled his toes in tight.

His mom brought him new shoes, went home, and cried. She felt like a terrible mother.

Kids are resilient. This was devastating for my sister, and not a huge deal for her son. If my sister didn’t share this story, her son wouldn’t even remember it.

~~~

What are the things that we do now, either to ourselves or have inflicted upon us by others, that are equivalent to this? In what ways do we ‘scrunch up’ our lives and accept, or tolerate, something that is uncomfortable, but we accept it? We don’t attempt to change.

Is it the way we treat ourselves or the way we let someone treat us?

Is it the ache we feel but we only take care of the symptoms, not the problem? (Tylenol is easier than physiotherapy.)

Is it the unhealthy diet we choose?

Is it the distractions we choose, that take us away from more important things?

Is it the way we let trivial things consume our thoughts?

Or is it that we let negative emotions, ideas and happenstances anger us and take over what kind of day we can have?

We tolerate a lot of discomfort because discomfort isn’t pain. It doesn’t hurt to eat Cheetos rather than a healthy snack. It doesn’t hurt to watch one more episode on Netflix rather than reading a good book, doing a hobby, or spending time with family. It doesn’t hurt to complain about a colleague rather than finding something nice to say.

It doesn’t hurt… or does it?

Sfumato in education

“The word “sfumato” comes from the Italian language and is derived from “fumo” (smoke, fume). “Sfumato” translated into English means soft, vague or blurred.”

Sfumato “…is a painting technique for softening the transition between colours, mimicking an area beyond what the human eye is focusing on, or the out-of-focus plane.  Leonardo da Vinci … used it in many works, including the Virgin of the Rocks and in his famous painting of the Mona Lisa. He described sfumato as “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane“. (Wikipedia)

I think we need to soften some of our edges in education:

• School isn’t its own entity. We need to soften the edges between living and learning; Parents as teachers, sharing expertise, and; learning happening in our community... as part of a student’s school day.

• Assessment isn’t formative or summarize, it’s both, it’s continuous, it’s self-reflective, and it can be conceptually/curricular based as well as competency based.

• Subject lines need to be blurred. How can we learn about the biology of crisper without talking about philosophy and geopolitics? (Should scientists be altering the human gene code? If we don’t think so, who in the world should decide? And do we have the ability to stop research in other countries? Will we create a different class of humans?)

Here are some others to think about:

• Bell schedules

• Universtiy entrance exams

• promotion by age

• Does every kid need to learn to code? Or to do Calculus? Or… (insert skill here)

• Write the same test

• Do the same art project

• Be assessed on the same scale

I think there are many ‘hard lines’ in education that should be blurred, softer, and less definitive.

Where would you add a little sfumato in education?