New enthusiasm

It's been more than a year since my last post on this blog and I can only say, by way of explanation, that it has been an eventful year of many changes for me. In other words, I have been very much otherwise occupied. I'm still processing some of the learning of the past year but I come back to this blog with renewed enthusiasm and energy.

The question of how the design and delivery of learning in schools needs to respond to the burgeoning of digital technology continues to occupy my thoughts, especially with regard to the meaningful integration of technology into the curriculum and how to support teachers in doing that effectively.


I've just finsihed reading a very useful ISTE publication called web 2.0: new tools, new schools that sketches out the groundwork ahead for administrators and teachers to make the critical changes in schools to adapt learning and teaching to meet the needs of the students in our classrooms today and in the years to come.

I am reminded that Thomas Edison said in 1922: "I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system, and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks. The education of the future will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture, a visualized education, where it would be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency."

.... and we're still waiting ....

Could that be the fate of the promise and potential of digital technology too?

The authors of web 2.0: new tools, new schools, Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum, caution that: "even though massive amounts of money have been spent on training educators, we have not seen a real difference in the ways technology has been integrated into the classroom." They quote a U.S. Department of Education Report (2004) which concluded:

"We have not realized the promise of technology. Essentially, providing the hardware without adequate training in its use - and in the endless possibilities for enriching the learning experience - meant that the great promise of Internet technology was frequently unrealized."

So, could the promise and potential of digital technology for the transformation of learning and education go the same way as that of the motion picture?

I think not, for several reasons that include: the world has changed and our students have changed - they are not long going to be content to sit politely and passively in our classrooms while we prepare them for a past age.

More later.

A Timely Tribute to Teachers

I love the music but Pink Floyd didn't portray teachers or schools in a flattering light so I guess I have to redress the balance a little.







As another school year draws to a close and I reflect on all the heroic work that goes on in schools, I feel compelled to pay a tribute to teachers and the hard work, dedication and love that so many of them bring to their work with young people. I have been privileged to work with some amazing teachers who have really made a difference to the lives of their students.

Not surprisngly, not all teachers fall into that category and, heaven knows, I had more than my fair share of not-so-good, or even downright-awful, teachers when I was at school but I also had a few inspirational and wonderful teachers who significantly shaped the person I am today. I pay particular tribute to Val Morrison, who was my English teacher for two years and who opened a window in my mind that forever changed the way I see the world.

Thank you, Val, for your belief in me, your encouragement, your interest in my writing and your care and love.

(Mind you, it is entirely her fault that I became a teacher - I could have been rich!!)

This quote kind of sums it up:


"If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job."

Donald D. Quinn


A friend sent me this article from the Washington Post:

One Last Assignment: Give Your Teachers an A+

By John Kelly,
Metro Columnist, Washington Post
Thursday, June 14, 2007

If you can read this, thank a teacher.
If you can calculate a 15 percent tip, thank a teacher.
If you can find B flat on a clarinet, thank a teacher.
If you know how an oxbow lake forms or what photosynthesis is or what the green light in "The Great Gatsby" symbolizes, thank a teacher.
If you can speak intelligently about the causes of the Civil War or understand the passé composé or figure out the molarity of a sodium chloride solution, thank a teacher.
Thank a teacher, because you weren't born knowing this stuff. You were once a blank slate -- a tabula rasa -- and a teacher filled you in.
Thank a teacher if you know what tabula rasa means. Or in medias res. Or deus ex machina.

We don't really thank teachers enough, do we? And yet I can't think of people more vital to our future. You might be sitting in the Pentagon right now, directing some aspect of the global war on terrorism. You might be in an operating room, performing liposuction. You might be dribbling a basketball in the NBA Finals. You might be doing something really, really important, but I have news for you: What you're doing isn't as important -- as sacred, as noble -- as teaching a child.

Or as hard. Can you imagine standing in front of 25 or 30 kids all day, every day? And not just standing in front of them, but teaching them, molding their malleable little brains. You'd have to pay me to do that. (But evidently not too much. Shouldn't teachers earn as much as, say, newspaper columnists?)

Granted, you've had some bad teachers. You've had teachers who were barely a chapter ahead of you in the textbook. You've had teachers who failed to recognize your innate wonderfulness. There are people who aren't cut out to be teachers, just as there are people who shouldn't be architects or ballet dancers.

But you've had some good teachers, too. If you're lucky, you've had one or two great ones, teachers who were enthusiastic about their calling, who inspired you, who made you understand.

It must be tough to be a teacher these days. First, there are the parents who don't impose any discipline whatsoever on their kids and expect schools to make up for the neglect that children suffer at home. Then there are the anxious, overinvolved parents, the ones who say, "My child is gifted and talented" out of one corner of their mouths then ask out of the other: "Why are you giving him so much homework?"

Today is the last day of school for my kids. I have something to say to their teachers at Eastern Middle School and Richard Montgomery High School -- and to their preschool and elementary teachers and to my teachers from all those years ago.
Thank you.

You can read the original article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR2007061301950.html?referrer=google

SO, I wish all the teachers I know a well earned rest over the summer. May you come back to your work at the end of it charged with new energy and hope!

Your very flesh shall be a great poem

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body

– Walt Whitman

Graduation week!

Another graduation week looms ahead at HKIS and, for the students who'll be graduating, this marks a major transition in their lives as they say farewell to their friends and family and take off into the wide world and the unknown that lies ahead. It's scary and exciting, in equal measures. Nothing will ever be the same again!

It's got me thinking of my own last week at school. I can remember it in very clear detail - I guess because it was a week of heightened emotion. Boksburg High, the school I went to, had a very stable population and I was with the same people, more-or-less, for seven years. In fact, I'd been in the same school as many of the kids in my year since Primary I and some even since kindergarten.

It suddenly struck me at the beginning of that last week of school that the group of us would never be assembled together in one place ever again and that I probably wouldn't see many of them again .. and that is, in fact, how it was.

It was the first time I can remember experiencing the bittersweet feeling of the melancholy of saying goodbye and farewell to a group of people with whom you've been closely associated over a period of time, knowing that it's likely that you won't see many of them again. (Yay! Facebook!)

Most of all, I can remember the songs I was listening to that week. Music is so evocative of memory and when I hear those songs again now, I am transported back to that time.

I was - and still am - an avid music lover and at that time I was listening to the great music of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Fleetwood Mac, Van Morrison, Led Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy, Judas Priest, Budgie, Creedence Clearwater Revivial, Janis Joplin, Lindisfarne, The Rolling Stones, Yes, Grateful Dead, Uriah Heep, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Procol Harum, Camel, The Eagles, Jethro Tull, The Doors, Santana Abraxis, Black Sabbath, The Who, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd and ZZ Top. Those were the days!

I was especially listening to Alice Cooper that final week of school ... especially "I'm Eighteen" (although I was only just turned 17 at the time) and "School's Out" which were both highly appropriate, it seemed to me, for that week. I was a great fan of Alice Cooper and I had all their records. Good grief!




Of course, we didn't have ipods and cds ... it was still the days of LP records - 12-inch black vinyl disks with holes in the middle of them. I wonder if cds will seem as quaint to the next generation?

The eye of the blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird


I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.


II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.


III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.


IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.


V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.


VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.


VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?


VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.


IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.


X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.


XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.


XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.


XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

by by Wallace Stevens

What makes a fire burn

Fire


What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.


Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.


So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.


When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.


We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.


by Judy Brown

Salvador Late and Early

Salvador with eyes the color of a caterpillar, Salvador of the crooked hair and crooked teeth, Salvador whose name the teacher cannot remember, is a boy who is no one’s friend, runs along somewhere in that vague direction where homes are the color of bad weather, lives behind a raw wood doorway, shakes the sleepy brothers awake, ties their shoes, combs their hair with water, feeds them milk and corn flakes from a tin cup in the dim dark of the morning.

Salvador, late or early, sooner or later arrives with the string of younger brother ready. Helps his mama, who is busy with the business of the baby. Tugs the arms of Cecilio, Arturito, makes them hurry, because today, like yesterday, Arturito had dropped the cigar box of crayons, has let go the hundred little fingers of red, green, yellow, blue, and nub of black sticks that tumble and spill over and beyond the asphalt puddles until the crossing-guard lady holds back the blur of traffic for Salvador to collect them again.

Salvador inside that wrinkled shirt, inside the throat that must clear itself and apologize each time it speaks, inside that forty-pound body of boy with its geography of scars, its history of hurt, limbs stuffed with feathers and rags, in what part of the eyes, in what part of the heart, in that cage of the chest where something throbs with both fists and knows only what Salvador knows, inside that body too small to contain the hundred balloons of happiness, the single guitar of grief, is a boy like any other disappearing out the door, beside the schoolyard gate, where he has told his brothers they must wait. Collects the hands of Cecilio and Arturio, scuttles off dodging the many schoolyard colors, the elbows and wrists criss-crossing, the several shoes running. Crows small and smaller to the eye, dissolves into the bright horizon, flutters in the air before disappearing like a memory of kites.

by Sandra Cisneros