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.

Year: 2009

  • Attitudes toward teaching

    Is there a big difference between public attitude towards teachers in the US and Canada?

    When people find out that I am a teacher I NEVER (and I am not a wanton all caps user) am made to feel like I have settled on teaching for lack of ability to do otherwise. Did I mention NEVER?

    On the contrary, people usually respond with cools and wows and I have great respect for you, it must be hard, how do you do it? They then follow with talk of their memories of school, the teacher who they’ll never forget, the cafeteria food – whatever. The point is that my job conjures up memory, stories – of hard times and good. The stuff that life is made of.

    Ken Dryden talks about our personal Board of Governors and who we would like on it. He reminds us that while few of us could name specific accountants or salespeople for it we could all think of teachers we’d like to sit on it.

    So I have a hard time understanding the article linked to by @AngelaMaiers today, called Schools Need Teachers Like Me. I Just Can’t Stay by Sarah Fine in The Washington Post, Sunday, August 9, 2009.

    Or at least parts of it.

    I can definitely understand teacher burn out. When you love teaching sometimes it’s hard to find the off switch. There’s always one more thing to do, to plan, to correct, to prepare, to present, to remind ourselves of, to talk to a student/colleague/parent/volunteer about. And that’s during the regular school year, figure in report card season and the things to do possibilities multiply exponentially.

    I can definitely understand that feeling of loss when you just can’t get to that one (or more) kid. No matter what you try, s/he will still give you the cold shoulder, still skip class, still (seemingly) not care about learning. Then I remember that this is learned behaviour. That the child must have experienced so much loss of her own that she can’t let anyone else in. And my feeling of loss grows.

    I can definitely understand the frustration of massive failure, when a large chunk of your group fails. Within a long history of failure, a few months with a new teacher will rarely be able to make the monumental difference needed to turn 30s to 70s – no matter how much we want it. Though it is sometimes possible with the proper structure and trust.

    Working towards that structure is what keeps me sane.

    But I don’t understand the lack of social recognition Sarah Fine writes about in fully one half of her article. Or, rather, the dismal recognition she describes it as having. She writes that teaching is considered as being for the unambitious and untalented, that people think it is a second class profession.

    Do I live in a bubble? Are people coddling me with cools and wows and then sneering once I leave the room – can you believe she’s a teacher? How gauche!

    I don’t think so. The reactions I get are honest and from the heart. People don’t share stories through whimsical smiles about things they think are second rate and undervalued.

    She does have it right though. Teaching is hard work, it is life work. I wouldn’t describe it as grueling and the fact that she does makes me think that Sarah Fine was just not meant to teach. My gut reaction? This article was an attempt at justifying that.

    Then I read the comments and there were quite a number that supported her views. As well as a number who felt like me, if you aren’t meant to teach don’t teach.

    But I recognize that I write this from a Canadian perspective. Which begs me to ask – are Canadian teachers more valued than our American colleagues? What is different here?

    3am sleepless update: Apparently Michael Doyle tried to reply to this post but he wasn’t able to post the comment. Lucky for us it made it to his own blog. Go read his take on the matter – as always, it points to truth for me. —> On Why Sarah Fine Left Teaching

  • Two Weeks and a Bit

    …to get so much in :) I am SO excited to start work again. At the same time, I have so much I still want to do this summer. It’s going to be a busy 2 weeks and a bit :)

    The 4 of us, the teaching and support team at Directions, met last Monday. We decided that I wouldn’t teach History this year. That brings my preps down from 4+ to 3+, which is a good thing though I will miss history. I’ll be teaching Art to grades 10 and 11, Ethics and Religious Culture to both grades, and Contemporary World Issues to grade 11. The more I think about it the more I LOVE this workload.

    I also have a new blog project in the works for September. More to come on that.

    Today I’m going to hang with my parents and some of their friends for lunch (always a yummy affair) and then head off to Day 2 of Under Pressure. I go every year. It’s an outdoor graffiti/skate/breakdance/dj event. It’s an international graffiti competition with all that other stuff going on around it. Sunday just about always happens at a club I worked at years ago for a number of years. A few of my old friends still work there so it’s always a hoot. Loads of fun. Just hope the rain holds off. Here’s a picture from last year, click on it to get to some others:

    Skating at Under Pressure, 2008, with some graffiti being made in the background. Fun times. Click image for source.
    Skating at Under Pressure, 2008, with some graffiti being made in the background. Fun times. Click image for source.

    I’m going to be starting the year with a focus on graffiti in Art class, so I’m collecting data ;)

  • It’s basically about shifting from getting people to love you, to you loving them.

    This post is going to be about an excerpt from Stephen Downe’s blog summary of Michael Wesch’s talk at D2L Fusion. Wait, you think that was a bit confusing? Before I get into the meat of this post, let’s take a moment to recognize exactly how I found these words.

    This morning I decided it was time to update a few things. Many of my networks still had me as living in Montreal, QC, which I moved away from about 6 weeks ago. (Facebook won’t let me make the change, it apparently won’t let you list a current city that it doesn’t recognize and, well, Bainsville is not exactly the largest speck on the map.)

    After doing that I decided to update my blogroll (go see the new ‘hot blogs‘, they really are), and then I decided to change up my featured blog posts (those are the ones in the black strip at the top of the blog). So, as I was reading through some of my favourite posts to determine which ones to add to the list, I also read through the comments. I had forgotten about Heidi Pence, and there she was, commenting on ‘Who Are Teachers?’. So I clicked through to her blog, Think, Think, Think and found A New Beginning, a post about what is on a lot of our minds as we get past the middle point of each summer: the year to come, where I came across this sentence, attributed to Dan Meyer:

    It’s basically about shifting from getting people to love you, to you loving them.

    So, I clicked on over to Dan’s blog to see the context and found its attribution to Michael Wesche. And yay, there was a link so, of course, I clicked through it and found where the sentence began – with Stephen Downes. It is embedded in a lengthy blog summary of a talk by Michael Wesche. So, I can only with certain accuracy attribute it to Stephen Downes, awesomely inspired my Michael Wesche. (Yes, I am a bit of a research geek. A bit.)

    This is basically what that all looked like:

    That 23 and sunny business is a lie. I need to find a new weather applet. Haven't found one yet that recognizes Bainsville either...
    That 23 and sunny business is a lie. I need to find a new weather applet. Haven’t found one yet that recognizes Bainsville either…

    Ok. That being recognized, here is the meat, snipped from Whatever by Stephen Downes at Half an Hour:

    …her hairdresser said, “Love your audience and they’ll love you back.” Instead of focusing on self, she focused on the beauty of the audience and the whole event. And I allowed myself to do the same thing.

    I never let that leave me. I would start with that. I would start with loving my students. And it’s striking how much my teaching has changed in five years, as a result of that. It’s basically about shifting form getting people to love you, to you loving them. It has four parts (Fromm, 1956):
    – caring
    – responsibility
    – respect
    – knowledge

    It requires all four. For example, caring without the rest is like patronizing. Respect without the rest is idolizing. The four together are true long. And focusing on that, instead of focusing on your performance, opens you up to your audience. It makes the walls go away.

    Be genuinely interested, caring, kind, and loving to your students. Heidi’s going to be mindful of this come September, I am as well. I can’t imagine teaching any other way. If you don’t do it with love, why at all?

    I appreciate how he framed it – teaching really isn’t about being liked. Some of the teachers I have worked with in the past who have had the most difficulty in terms of classroom management and getting students to perform were overly worried about whether or not their students liked them. Of course it’s nice to be liked. I know I would generally prefer to be a well-liked person than a poorly-liked person. I still find myself at times thinking, ooh – but that won’t be popular, they may not like that (and by extension, me) but teaching is not about that. It is about loving your students and caring for what happens to them both in and out of the classroom. And then it is about making sure all of your decisions are, if not based in, at the very least touched by that love.

    It’s a lifelong learning process, keeping that frame in place.

    Edit —> Added, a few hours later.
    Look what just showed up in my feed reader from Kelly Hines. I had to include it here, it’s so timely. There are no accidents.

    So, no, I don’t teach like my hair is on fire. I don’t really think that Rafe Esquith does either. He teaches like his heart is on fire, and that’s the greatest thing a teacher can offer his/her students. And when you are reading about astounding things that others are doing, don’t get overwhelmed by the how’s. Focus on the why’s. When you do that, you will find inspiration to light the fires of your students.

  • New Media Literacies? Please.

    This post began as a comment to The New Media Literacies by Susan Carter Morgan over at scmorgan: teacher, learner, which, by the way, is my addition to the One Comment Project (#OCP) for today.

    I have a hard time with the term ‘media literacies’. These aren’t literacies. Plain and simple. They are tools and networks. So often literacy is confused with context and tools.

    Why does this matter?
    Because when people start to talk about tools and context as literacy they shift their focus to the tools rather than keeping their eyes on the big picture.

    We see schools, teachers, districts seeking out technology for their schools and classrooms and then we end up with computer labs that aren’t used because many teachers don’t know how to manage learning in a computer lab yet. Or interactive white boards (big expensive smart boards) that are used to enhance lecture because teachers don’t know what else to do with them yet. Or professional development that advocates for the use of social networking in classrooms within schools whose IT departments ban social networking sites on the school’s network.

    As Angela recently wrote in Needing a Framework to Facilitate Learning,

    It’s impossible to make choices around tech tools until we understand where we need to support kids better as learners and create plans for accomplishing that. These plans have to be systemic in nature in order to effect change. This requires expertise in so much more than technology.

    This is a theme I’ve been writing and talking about for a long time. What I am happy about is that lately I am seeing more and more blog posts, like Angela’s, around the same ideas. What ideas? That we need to focus on professional development. That we need to re-connect teachers with their passion for teaching in order to clear the path for change in how they teach. In order to re-connect teachers with the children in their classrooms and their needs and in order to teach teachers the skills they need to answer to these needs in a collaborative, systematic, systemic, mindful way.

    Literacy is about understanding the world around us through symbols that are used to create meaning, mainly through text and the various ways text is presented. We can do that through a variety of hard and soft tools. But the big picture for us teachers is how we will use the tools at our disposal to help our students develop their literate selves.

    Thoughts?

  • The Watkinson Garden

    [cross-posted at 09/10~Looking Forward]

    During our conversation on climate change, Marcy Webb told me about a girl named Mary, a high school student who “…has chosen to devote her summer to sustainability. She is helping to cultivate an herb and veggie garden, on the school grounds. The goal is that the bounty from the garden will be used in the preparation of lunch meals at the school. She is maintaining a blog.”

    So this post is about that blog. The blog is a diary of what she is doing to take care of the garden on a daily basis, though there is no description of why she is doing it. For that, I will trust Marcy’s description above :) I’d like to find more examples of initiatives like these to share with my students, not to mention to remind me about everything that continues to inspire me as a teacher.

    Do you know of any? Please share!

    Here is a sample from Mary’s blog, Watkinson Garden:

    Day 14!

    Today I went to school and spent my time weeding along the entrance. I also deadheaded flowers around campus, once again there was no reason to water the plants because the rain we have been having.

    Very simple gestures that make such an impact.