Tag Archives: school

A world of meetings

Today is the first day in a while that I don’t have an 8:30am neeting, but I have one at 9, a long one at 10, then 12, 12:30. And 1pm. For almost four and a half hours I’ll be sitting at my desk staring at my computer screen in meetings. That’s less than what I had yesterday. And yesterday, I ended up on 3 one-on-one conversations with teachers, and a phone call with a student as well. I barely got out of my chair.

I know things will settle down. I value much of the work being done in many of these meetings, but right now I feel like these meetings are equally a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I still get to connect with colleagues and video helps me feel far more connected than voice alone. Cursed because many meetings could just be informational meetings take 1/10th of the time.

Spending 4-6 hours a day in meetings is not efficient or effective, and some days even small ‘to do’ lists are taken home, or added to tomorrow’s list.

What’s really making this tough is that when I normally have days like this, I can take a break by walking down the hall and checking in on kids. I can peek in on teachers teaching a class. I can sit in a busy staff room and join a conversation. My daily 12:30 meeting is a staff check-in organized by the teachers and still feels like this, but for the most part I miss the opportunities to connect with students and teachers in a busy school… and I’m getting a bit tired of non-stop meetings.

This is not the ‘new normal’

Note to educators:

This is not the ‘New Normal’, this is a pandemic that will come to an end. This is temporary.

We need to be positive. Communicating that this is ‘normal’ is not encouraging to students or parents. 1/3

* This is an opportunity to try new things.

* We are learning at a distance only until we can work together again.

* What a pleasure it is that we can still see each other online.

* Aren’t we lucky to be living at a time when we still get to share experiences digitally! 2/3

Let’s face it, the term ‘New Normal’ is going to be tossed around a lot outside of education, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t construct positive vocabulary and language around these unusual times, in our digital classrooms, and in our communication home. 3/3

That is a thread of 3 tweets that I shared yesterday, and I want to add a little perspective:

Imagine being a grade 12 graduating this year and it was your last high school play that got cancelled, or your final season of Track and Field, or your graduation dinner-dance.

Imagine that you come from a single parent home, your parent works 10 or 12 hour shifts, you have siblings that you don’t get along with, and your daily escape to school is gone.

Imagine that you are 6 years old, and you can’t have a play date, can’t use the playground, and can’t spend time with your grandparents, who usually visit you every weekend.

Imagine any one of thousands of scenarios where your routines, your friendships, your family structures, your family financial well being, and all of your extra-curricular activities are disrupted.

Now let’s just call this the ‘New Normal’… No.

COVID-19, schools closing, and ‘social distancing’ have taken so much away from our kids, let’s not take ‘normal’ away from them too.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

After today, I’m going to take at least a few days off from posting about school, remote learning, social distancing, and Covid-19. I need to take a break from writing about these things daily, but will admit it’s hard when that’s mostly what’s on my mind. The reality is that these things aren’t going away any time soon. We are in this for a while.

Despite that, the last two weeks have felt like an all-out sprint. There are so many things that need to get done and the days have disappeared into busy blurs of activity and exhaustion.

This can’t be sustained over the marathon we have in front of us. We. Need. To. Slow. Down. This four-day weekend couldn’t have come at a better time.

No, I won’t be taking all four days completely off. But I will let go of work for a couple days. I will continue to exercise and take care of myself. I might be a little lax on my good eating habits. I will sit in front of the television. I will read. I will get outside.

Most importantly, I’ll remind myself that there are more than two and a half months of school left… If I’m going to be my best, it will be because I remember that I’m needing to be my best over a marathon of time, and not just for a short sprint.

The quick answer isn’t always the best answer

Tomorrow marks the first day back from March break in our school district. Teachers will not be returning Monday/Tuesday, and can schedule a time to come in to collect resources etc. after that. The continuation of learning plan will evolve over the week in response to schools being closed to students due to COVID-19.

I know that students and families want to know what things will look like after that, but no one is rushing to give answers, and for good reason… This is all very new to us and our approach moving forward deserves thoughtful planning.

We need to consider:

  • Ministry expectations and requirements
  • District plans and protocols
  • Capabilities of staff & technology
  • Capabilities and needs of students and families
  • Fairness with respect to expectations across the district and province.

This last point is interesting. At one my schools, Inquiry Hub, we could almost run everything the same. Every class already has shared digital spaces. We could have students meet on Microsoft Teams during class time and students are only in class 40-60% of their day, so they could still have large parts of the day to do school work, and inquiry projects, and have free time. But how fair is it for us to expect this of them at home, when no other school is expecting this? How fair is it when we don’t know how equitable home situations and supports are?

We need to go slowly. We need to ask a lot of questions. We need to think about expectations at the provincial, district, school, and home levels.

A quick response will not be as good as a slow, thoughtful response. The pandemic has everyone thinking in ’emergency response mode’. What we need now is long term thinking and planning. We can’t treat a continuation of schooling like we are in a constant crisis with immediate response time required. We have to remember that the school year ends at the end of June, and quick responses now, without thinking and processing time, will not help us get to the end of June in a thoughtful and supportive way. We need to slow things down, think things through, and put the long term well-being of our students first.

Nothing normal about the new normal

I’ve been camping out at my oldest daughter’s place in Victoria while my wife and other daughter are home. I’ve loved the daily walks we have gone on, and we’ve been watching Prime Video together in the evenings, enjoying ‘Hunters’ – a fictional series about a group of Nazi hunters in the late 70’s. These two activities add up to about 3 hours of my day… The rest of it has been a blur. Recovering from a broken knee and a shoulder injury has left me feeling very limited about what I can do for exercise besides go for long walks, with a cane, which just makes me feel old.

I’ve taken some more time to write than I normally do. I’ve spent way too much time following the news and stats of the Coronavirus, and I’ve more than doubled my social media time on my phone. I’ve also been thinking a lot about work and have had a number of emails and calls related to “continuity of educational opportunities” that will continue, even with our schools closed to students. Like most people, I have more questions than answers.

What this all adds up to is a very unusual schedule, where I have no idea what normal feels like? Today I slept in. I usually write this before 6am, and right now it’s after 1pm. The only thing on my agenda after this is a walk on my own, listening to my audio book, and a walk with my daughter around sunset. I don’t have the motivation to do more, and yet I’m already getting restless and know that I have to give myself some projects to work on. I’ve got a neglected newsletter and podcast that I might bring back. I might do some writing beyond this daily-ink. I might nap.

No matter how I look at things right now, there is nothing normal about what my day will look like until March break ends. Even then I don’t think I will have any kind of normalcy to my life… but the ‘normal’ of the past few days has to change soon because I’ve never really done ‘nothing much’ well as a major pastime. The new normal after the March break is still filled with unknowns and will include a drastically different schedule than before this global pandemic changed all of our lives.

What have you been doing to spend time well during this social distancing experience?

daily-ink-weekend-ideas

Learning Through Failure vs Failing to Learn

We talk a lot about learning through failure, but not a lot about failing to learn. When we fail because of lack of resources, lack of support, lack of knowledge, and/or lack of reflection, it’s just a failure. We do not necessarily learn.

When we talk about learning from failure, we are not actually talking about failure, we are talking about perseverance, and resilience, and tenacity. We are talking about coming up to resistance and unplanned outcomes and working through them to achieve a goal. We are talking about students learning significantly more than if everything went their way.

Who learns more, the person who follows the cookie-cutter curriculum and content-focused assessment, or the student who tries something really original, challenging, and maybe even epic? Even if both paths led to the coveted mark of an ‘A’, which path holds the most promise for deep learning?

We never want students to fail, but we also don’t want them to have such an easy path to success that the learning is forgettable. The struggle that potential failure can create is something that separates learning through failure from failing to learn.

(Image by Bill Ferriter)
Artist

A Place to Dream, Create, and Learn

Imagine a school where you are given time every day to Dream, Create, and Learn.

I’m writing this Tuesday evening before our annual Open House and publishing it on the morning of the event. I popped in earlier in day to see how things were going. The teacher who has worked with the students the most on this event has Tuesdays off. Another teacher is working with students on displays in the hallways, a third teacher is popping his head into the gym periodically to see how things are going and if he can help. A former student is working with a crew to get the sound up and running, and our show director is setting up the order of entrances and exits to ensure mic hand-offs go as planned. I was invited back at 2:30pm to see the final run-though. I arrive at the end of the ‘cold open’ musical performance and stand next to another former student, who ran the open for the last two years. He speaks first, “This will be the best Open yet.” The song finishes and I ask our student director? Did you write that song? “A group of us did.”

I watch the rehearsal and there are issues with sound, and a video not working properly. I am not worried about this. Last year Alvin Law did a presentation at our school and he told me that he’s presented to large corporations with massive budgets and he was never treated as well by a sound crew, or had a sound system work so perfectly, as he did at our school. I would have thought he was just being polite had he not repeatedly emphasized this, even when we were saying goodbye at his car. My sound crew know that their job is to be invisible… unnoticed because sound is never an issue. I know that they are students and it might not be as perfect as that, even if the last 3 shows were.

I only had two suggestions: First, a pair of presenters did not have a strong ending to their talk, so I suggested they present what’s coming up next; Second, one of our Grade 12’s starts with a personal story then gets lost in a list of things she accomplished. I suggested she remember to go back to storytelling and share why that list of things are important to her. Our show director has a lot more to say. She is as in control of this rehearsal as any teacher could be. She is critical, for example: “That was really good except your timing drifted off,” she says to the guitarist and piano player. She is encouraging, “I like the way you two play off of each other.” And most importantly, she is respected by the performers and presenters, and they know and understand that she has their best interest in mind.

A student designed the advertising.


Two students are working together on thematic ads for Instagram:

Coder Chef Artist

The Foods class have created custom deserts. All the clubs have representatives to share what they’re doing. Freshly created student work is on display on our walls. This isn’t just an open house, it’s a showcase. It is an opportunity for students to present to an authentic audience, by students who love the fact that they don’t just sit in classes all day. A presentation by students that get to design part of their day. They get to throw themselves fully into running and presenting at an even like this… they get to Dream, Create, and Learn as part of their school day.

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I’ve written about Inquiry Hub Secondary a few times before, most recently in March, on my Pair-a-Dimes Blog. Here is information for educators.

A little reminder to educators

I’m writing this as a reminder to myself as well as to others. This isn’t something I’m preaching, it’s something important enough to keep at the forefront of my mind, our minds, as the new school year is about to begin.

There is always so much to do at the start of the school year, and there is the curriculum that must get started… but above all, there are human beings that are coming into our buildings that we need to get to know.

Human beings who have had wonderful summers. Human beings that lost a loved one. Human beings that arrive to school hungry. Human beings that help take care of their younger siblings. Human beings that love their pets, video games, riding their bikes, fashion, art, history, and science.

Get to know these amazing humans. Start there. Not just with the ones that make this easy, with them all. Take the time, your students deserve it.

T.I.C. Chinese School PE Program Inspection

via qik.com

This routine is practiced almost daily for a few months before the inspection. At the start of the year it involved skipping ropes, but our school (neighbouring theirs) showed a lot of interest in basketball, so they incorporated basketballs into their spring routine.

Every student was asked to bring a basketball from home. The small items on the ground near them are cardboard rings that they made to keep their ball from rolling around at the back of their classrooms. Often during PE classes you’ll see the younger students wearing these like bandanas on their heads. Cute!

Watch to the end to see the speed at which they run to their line-ups to head back into the school. It’s that fast even when there isn’t an inspection happening.

A neat look into a very different school culture.