Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Month: February 2008

  • travel day

    Montreal Metro Tunnel 1
    Montreal Metro Tunnel 1
    image by Flowizm on Flickr

    Every day 2 of our 9-day cycle at school I take my older group of students out on a travel day. We take public transportation to travel from Chateauguay to Montreal.

    Each day 2 we try to go to a new place, and each time I try to incorporate a new travel skill into the day, but today was way too cold to go crazy at -18 when we left this morning! Especially after having to wait outside for 30 minutes for our bus when we missed it by about 2 minutes…

    Luckily  Montreal has an underground city so we opted to wander around underground instead of do the walking tour of great graffiti I had planned. We’re going to save that for a warmer day.

    Things we need to work on:

    • One of my students has a difficult time keeping track of his money and always needs to borrow some in order to get home. Today he had to borrow 6$ from me! I know that this continues to happen because I always bail him out, so I need to plan for this not to happen next time.
    • I try to get my students to plan the trips, but it is difficult for them because they really do not know Montreal very well even though it is so close to Chateauguay.  I have to come up with ways to motivate them to find out about different places of interest.

    I felt that today’s trip was kind of dull, though, when I read my students’ posts I see that there are things to experience – even on dull days.

    We went to Montreal for travel day

    Trip to Montreal

  • Creative Writing Quicky (backup)

    Choose an image to write a story about.

    Minimum 200 words :)

    Write your story in Word and post it as a comment on MY BLOG!

  • Seeing me, Seeing we: Amen of the day, Feb. 24/08

    And I fear for her, since when I look into her downtrodden and detached eyes, I …

    … I see me … Jose Vilson

    At first read, and with Jose’s apparent intent, this is about fear, life, and overwhelming sadness.

    On a larger level, this is about our connections as people, and points me toward hope for the future.

    I inspire to do as Jose, to see myself in the eyes of my students, my colleagues, my friends, my not so friends, my supervisors, my elders.

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  • Change and Community: a response to recent comments

    I am finally back online at home and am able to respond to some recent comments to my post:

    Black-focused public school in Toronto by 2009…What do you think?

    The response became so long that I’ve decided it merits a post of its own. If you want to know what I am talking about when I address specific people, go take a look at the comments to the original post, linked above.

    Here we go…
    @ Jose – help me to understand…why Yikes?

    @ Marc – better special ed programs, eh? That doesn’t sit easy with me at all.

    I’d agree with you if you said better programs in general. One of the issues I have with much of our education system is the segregation that goes on within it under the guise of special ed classes. Instead of recognizing differences in learning amongst different populations, those who learn differently are placed into special programs – a prime example of teaching subject matter and not students.

    I’d like to think that if we look at changing how we teach in general, to recognize difference and see how we can harness it to achieve common goals, then things would make much more sense than creating more special ed classes.
    (see this conversation re: in-school segregation)

    @ Elona – interesting comment. Would they be windows? Let’s look at the present situation in Montreal. The dropout rate for black students in Montreal is even higher than in Toronto. Recent numbers show it at 49%, I believe Toronto’s is very close, at 40%. What do we see through that window?

    I would like to think that by creating schools that represent communities and answer to their needs we may at the same time create a society that does the same.

    @ Chris – I agree in theory, though I’m not so certain that reality reflects the theory. For instance, you write about the fact of plurality in Canada. Our population is certainly composed of many different kinds of people who have many different kinds of beliefs, but do our social systems (like schools ) address needs in a pluralistic way? No.

    The more I write about this topic, the more I realize that I am more in favour of it than not. No question – our school system (both American and Canadian) needs radical change. In order for change, real change, to take place it needs to reflect the real needs and concerns of the people who will be directly affected by it.

    Creating schools that respond to community needs – in this case the need to motivate learning in a particular community that has long been marginalized and disregarded – is a step toward real change.

    My dream – to see all schools a reflection of the communities they are in, with a goal of strengthening  community through education.