Edustange

One of the teachers who impresses me is John T. Spencer in Arizona. He got me stuck on the word “nuance” in the past year. His critical thinking on public education certainly demonstrates that. His interests are broad and those of us who follow him even casually recognize his many dimensions. He probably would question this, but I think he is a person in balance. Okay, so maybe he is in a dynamic tension, wobbling around a good deal. That is certainly the way I feel.

When I teach needs and wants, I inevitably make the point that need we always face scarcity. Pick the factor that frustrates, something is lacking. Often it is knowledge, understanding or the ability to apply them effectively. It might be organization, resources, or sufficient numbers to achieve my goal. No shortage of examples of this in my current life, some epic examples from my past. The essential factor that frustrates me is often simply time.

I cherish my partner, family, creativity, ideology, vocation, the list goes on…. These are my passions and I feel somewhat less than Alan if I cannot nurture them. Still, along with those other pesky frustraters, there is that matter of time. Nothing I do gets the time I think it deserves. I can feel inadequate about my commitment and attention to just about anything.

I cannot remember the last time I was bored, and that is a blessing I guess. There is always something I think I should be doing, including abandoning this post to spend an hour meditating as I do Yoga on the floor.

My life is a banquet and I cannot invest too much time in a single course. I am on short order moving purposefully from one task to another. Most of us recognize this and find tranquility in the dynamic tensions around us.

I suppose that is one reason I become impatient with Professional Learning Community models. No matter how earnest we are and thoughtful about their design, they disturb a necessary balance. It feels wrong for me to assign a greater priority to the acquisition of numbers concepts in fourth grade, than literacy, health, aesthetics, culture, science, kinisthetics, or simply socialization. I cannot allow myself to become that narrowly focused in my personal life.

I finished my second term with reports last week I think my fourth graders were amazingly connected to their math and writing. I know we had not connected so well with the rest of their curriculum. That disturbs me.

I’m learning to be flexible about my tools. I’ve been using Evernote, Chrome and Drive, but perforce I also rely heavily on Microsoft Office applications for work. I’m playing with an iPad this year so some heavy word processing switched to Pages. One project has grown so large I anticipate moving it to a Google Doc. Data flows easily from one place to another, and the only certainty now is my devices will break far too quickly and I will need to switch applications along with them.

I have had a hard time keeping up with this WordPress blog. Looking back, I suppose it has always been a sporadic thing. Beyond the obvious press of life with its competing demands, my social networks are in fierce competition. I maintained a personal Posterous site along with edustange. I also fed my thoughts and reactions into Forums like PLP and Classroom 2.0. Always, there were comments to contribute to the deep thinkers I follow. Occasionally, I cross posted my ideas back here. The paragraph above is an example of that.

We all struggle with this issue. Edustange remains the only journal of my thoughts across the years. I wish I had had it for the first twenty years of my teaching career. I need to develop a habit of taking my more thoughtful comments from networks like Google+ and reporting them here.

I just came across this picture and appreciated it very much. I had just told my wife that I needed to find the time to concentrate on my report cards. I feel guilty about a few assessments I’ve done, but failed to transfer onto the report cards for over a week.

It is procrastination, but it is also a growing need to set part of my day aside to tranquility and meditation. My days are very busy. Like a good nights sleep, we all need to meditate.

I devote twenty minutes of time to silent reading each afternoon. My students look forward to that time. I need to always remember to add a twenty minute period of quiet into my mornings. It is a natural rhythm we need to remember.

I seem to take this sort of picture frequently. I am drawn to the image of students partnered in learning, loving a private corner in the room. We opened up the centre of the room for improv this morning. The fourth graders loved that and want to do more, but they really love the private spaces in the room. I think, like me, they crave a chance to ramp down from the clutter of networking with twenty-two other people. Perhaps I am simply projecting my own needs on them. They do gravitate to my two crash pads. Young children, they like the scuffed mats and cheap pillows even more than they like my bistro tables (two standing tables with stools).

The Walmart mats and Liquidation World pillows were such an easy fix. Stools and standing tables were too. They are part of what is working in my room this year.

I was doing my mid-year review today with my school-based administrators. I went into the meeting planning to report a fail on my goals. I was, shall we say, ambitious and perhaps unrealistic. I have not met my objective to get most of them setting personal learning goals, working independently, and following up with authentic reflection. I realized as I talked about my frustrations that these struggles should not blind me to what is working.

Maybe it is too much to ask nine year olds to work methodically through a process like goal setting and metagognition week after week (this is week 24). There is a great work flow in my room. The spaces are working, we transition smoothly from the solitude of seat work to collaboration. The room accommodates these two girls working through the complexities of a math text together while others work alone.

We are deep into the last two weeks of a disruptive inquiry. It is disruptive because it is a very large project for my fourth graders. They are noticing the absence of some of our comfortable routines. I feel the need to return to them. They miss independent writing projects and their literature circles. They miss a pace that allows for short personal activity times. The inquiry they are working on is personal and independent. There is room for individual expression, but it is overwhelming. Our year’s routine turns out to be scaled right for them. I need to remember that for my next inquiry.

Anyway, things are going well. I am happy with that today.

A colleague approached me at noon to vent about conditions in her child’s classroom. Never a good moment for me to negotiate. What, she wondered were my views on daily homework (I assign it rarely)? What did I think of booklets that had not been marked by the teacher? What can one say? I prevaricated quite a bit. We have our different ideas about student work flow and where or when teachers should connect with that flow. I would rather have the conversation with this unknown peer somewhere else in my school division.

Later in the day I was working with thirty-one fourth graders helping them with their Heritage Fair essays. I had 35 minutes today, so I was only able to critique a handful of the five paragraph drafts. Most students were left to their own resources. For quite a few, that was not a good thing. I’ve scheduled five hours for writing. I will have to be creative if I want to meet with each student to review their report. When I do, I will be taking time from the rest of the group.

I sympathize with my unknown colleague. My student’s exercise books and binders are full of practices that have not been checked personally. We correct together in class frequently, otherwise little will get done. I circulate during that time to assess which students are engaged with the group. The numbers of students we deal with make this approach seem necessary to me.

Whether I am doing drill and practice, or projects, the numbers of students and the time available work against us.

I had a very productive Monday after a relaxing weekend. Thanks to a preparation day on Friday, I caught up on some marking and went into the weekend relaxed. Despite some bad weather, my wife and I drove up to Saskatoon for a quick family visit. Sunday I wrote and read. Yesterday I returned to my class ready to tackle an inquiry based research project with our school’s fourth graders. The middle school students in Major, Saskatchewan continue to contact my young writers with helpful suggestions. I ended Monday snuggled on the couch feeling guilty. My social media presence has been neglected.

My posts, tweets, and comments have gradually tapered off over the last year. Conversations I’ve appreciated have lapsed. I’m not totally disconnected, but the relative inactivity leaves me with the same feeling I had after my intensive year at grad school. I feeling the loss. I’m also feeling oddly guilty as I read the still prolific discourse of my network.

The comparison to grad school is useful to me. I’m living the ideas I’ve chatted about over the last few years. I have joined the grading moratorium as much as my system allows.  Students in my room practice authentic, independent learning in a studio environment. They bring their own devices to the classroom. They are connected learners, networking a little with other classrooms. On it goes. Like the period after grad school, I am having difficulty articulating all of this.

I multitask fairly well, but I need to concentrate too. At the height of my social networking a few years ago I was dissatisfied with my personal creative writing. I should have been dissatisfied with the quality of my family relationships, but that realization came later. I rarely achieve a happy balance between my interests. My energies flow from one to the other. The best I seem to do is keep a connection, no matter how tenuous, with each of my interests.

As most of you already know, because it is not a new tool, Evernote fills a niche in our cross-platform workflow. I run in a PC environment at home and on my classroom desktop. I grab a MacBook occasionally, use an iPad as my mobile platform, and carry a Blackberry everywhere I go. This eclectic approach has some real benefits for me, but the real reasons I work this way are incremental changes at school outside of my control and the usual monetary considerations at home. The laptop at home predates smart phones and tablets. I cannot simply replace everything at once.

This year I’m trying to catch up with everyone who has been using Evernote for years. I love Google Docs, but my Blackberry does not. It can handle Evernote. Often our decisions are based on the weakest link.

Right now I am using Evernote for digital records of student progress and personal comments. I can transfer relevant information to our school division’s Excel report card later in March. I am feeling downright organized these days!

This is sort of the same argument made for research. It’s as if you can’t really do research if you can’t write out your report and have other people replicate your own results. Perhaps it’s the tree falling in the forest metaphor. The tree doesn’t really fall if someone else can’t hear it collapse on the ground.

I was doing an extension lesson on symmetry with my students in fourth grade this morning. This is not really my idea it comes from the textbook. I have simply extended it in order to give students more practice time. But I don’t write up these sorts of lessons. They come to me on-the-fly sometimes first thing in the morning, and then I tried them out on the students. There’s often never an opportunity to write up a formal explanation of what I did, or what the specific outcome was.

In our school’s Learning Improvement Team meetings we are given about fifteen minutes to share these sorts of moments every two weeks. It is so critical to share and collaborate on developing effective strategies. I absolutely agree that this is a measure of our professionalism.It is such a great idea, but like so many others it fails.

This sort of collegial exchange usually happens informally and orally. So little is documented for accountability. My specific role in this professional development process is translating unscripted explanations shared by the group into jot notes conforming to the accepted terminology of instructional strategies (AKA jargon). My composition needs to fit onto an 11×8 chart. The 140 character discipline of Twitter has prepared me admirably for this task.

I’ve been annoyed since September with the way in which file transfers from the iPad to the PC computers in our computer labs has been cumbersome and time-consuming. Here at the school we talked about a number of solutions to the problem but the one that I chose was to simply create a Google account for my classroom and establish a Google Drive. I created a folder for each student in the classroom and then today we practiced taking pictures and uploading those pictures to their own folder on Google Drive.

For a number of reasons I wish that they would have their own Google accounts but they are only fourth-graders so it seems to me that I have to do the drive myself. My intentions are partly subversive. Always I’m hoping that if they try an application or technique here at school that they will become adopters at home and around the school.

Having a Google account for the classroom and being able to use it on the iPads might perhaps allow us to upload videos to YouTube as well I’m not sure how that will work yet but I’m going to give it a try at some point in time.

Major, SK to Moose Jaw, SK, 443 KM by car and considerably closer through Google Applications.

In December I joined EdTech Saskatchewan, a new Google+ community. It is a small group at the moment, which should grow as the tech community in our province recognizes how useful it could be. I bumped into Mavis Hoffman once again and suggested it was probably time we met somewhere like the May 2013 itSummit in Saskatoon. She offered to collaborate on a writing project. I jumped on the chance. I have 23 fourth graders and she works with seventh, eighth, and ninth graders.

I could create a blended grade experience for my students within the school. I have not done so so far because my older students are already paired within the school with primary grades. My fourth graders usually end up working with third graders. There is little difference there. Beyond the local logistics, I want to keep untethering learning from my classroom, introduce my students to more tools, and people with different perspectives in a Saskatchewan context.

If we get the project started this month I will introduce my class to Google Docs. It is a practical tool for shared editing and commenting. We are putting it together here. We don’t have a SMART Goal for this yet (barf, see my reflections on that in this post). Such statements usually include an arbitrary percentage of students who will become proficient in the activity. I have no idea. Some of my fourth graders are excellent writers, but they do not collaborate well and guard their independence throughout every stage of writing. Some students guard their writing because they are shy about their deficiencies. Part of learning collaboration is relationship building. I cannot predict that well at this point. The collaboration might be successful for only a few of the students in either school. Everyone will have a better understanding of the possibilities.

I’ve been doing most of my posting on the iPad recently. Its nice to sit down at the old HP Pavilion and compose. WordPress has a nifty new media app to upload and view files.