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.

Author: Tracy Rosen

Let them be bored! For real?
Joanne Jacobs recently posted some data about boredom levels among high school students. She closed the post with a quote from a principal in Hawaii who, when confronted with the stats that 50% of the students in his school liked school, asked the questions – “What about the rest of the kids? What are those kids doing?” (data from Teaching Now – News Flash: High School Students Are Bored.)

Those are the kinds of questions that help to create challenging, engaging schools. I was a bit … displaced … to read some of the comments to her post. For me they represent a huge disconnect between adults (some) and students (most), steeped in a bitter brew. Or maybe those who feel that way are bored in their own lives (not challenged) and don’t feel that anyone deserves a non-boring life. Or maybe… I don’t know. But they certainly don’t represent the ‘it takes a village’ attitude we need for raising good kids. I don’t see caring. I don’t see hope.

My query is, just how well do the comments represent what the majority of people think about learning in high school?
- Do most adults in a given school community (parents, in particular) think that we should just make the kids sit and listen because that’s the best way to learn?
- Do people really think that high school is a place where we should be learning how to sit still for long periods of time?
- Can it be true that people think boredom is necessary?
- Are educators working against the grain of community ideals?
Yay for Topher who took the time to point out the details of the issue, as presented in the article upon which the post was based. I love how he concludes his comment:

…it’s also important to note that students in middle and high schools, while far from being mature adults, are not dullards or wild animals who need to be tamed and broken in. It’s disheartening to see how quickly people tend to forget what it’s like to be in a lecture-only classroom and to actually perpetuate the cycle of (usually – some lecture-only teachers are great) bad teaching.

I strive to make my classroom an active place of learning, one in which the students enjoy being. I know that it doesn’t always happen, especially when juggling a number of different courses a term. The thing is, I talk to my students and am always working towards engagement. I can not imagine teaching any other way. I can not imagine cultivating a sense of boredom as a life lesson in how to learn. I just can’t.

***The image was taken from a strange little blog post about observational data re: the stereotypes of asian and white students collected while the author was bored in class:

I’m in class for four hours a day, which means I am bored to the brink of insanity 20 hours a week. I’m amazed I’m not bald from pulling my hair out from the roots. There’s nothing else to do but to analyze the people in my classes.
July 4, 2010
farmers and teachers

From Dea Conrad-Curry at Notions and Potions in Thinking deeply about the seeds we plant:

…I was thinking of how farmers and teachers are alike. They both are responsible to nurture valuable commodities. Their work is both science and art. They both possess intrinsic passion, returning day in and day out to work over which they have limited control, facing the vicissitudes of nature: mother nature and human nature. And they are both being moved to change by the combined forces of technology and science.

I quoted this yesterday in a short post about recent blog discoveries and I find myself going back to read that quote over and over again. There is definitely something about it that strikes a chord within me. There is a notion of stability, of consistency, of basic humanity in both farming and teaching. Yet, within these stable qualities, there is a necessity for change, for constant, continual change.

I think it is the tension between those states – stability and change – that makes these passionate professions. You need passion to nurture and to live what Dea writes about.

As I wrote in the comment box on Dea’s blog – she helped me to see why I feel so right living out here in farm country.

July 3, 2010
Some wonderfully new (to me) blogs

As always happens just after the end of the school year, I am finding I have more time (and guilt-free time, at that!) to read what others are writing. Here are some of the blogs I have found over the last few days, written by people I am looking forward to reading again.

L’espace à Zecool – Technopédagogue, par choix et par passion…
(roughly translated to ‘Zecool’s space – tech educator, by choice and by passion)

The author is Jacques Cool, an educator from New Brunswick, who works in the area of creating and delivering learning systems for students, mainly online. The blog’s attraction for me is in the area of French resources, which he finds and shares with his readers. It is written in French.

Jim Burke: The English Teacher’s Companion – thoughts about teaching teens and English in the twenty-first century

I found Jim’s blog in a roundabout way this morning. My stats page showed his feedburner link as an incoming link to my page, I clicked on it and found some wonderful writing. Anyone that uses gardening as a metaphor for self preservation and as a method for keeping sane at this insane time of year (or at least what was this insane time of year a mere few days/weeks ago) is someone I need to keep reading.

Notions and Potions – Thoughts about teaching and learning

I think I found this blog through the one above, sometimes the route to a site is quite circuitous! The author is Dea Conrad-Curry, an educational consultant who owns Partner in Education, a company that specializes in professional development opportunities for educators. Lucky for us she also blogs and this bit of writing I found today is what will bring me back to her blog tomorrow, living in farm country it resonates with me.

…I was thinking of how farmers and teachers are alike. They both are responsible to nurture valuable commodities. Their work is both science and art. They both possess intrinsic passion, returning day in and day out to work over which they have limited control, facing the vicissitudes of nature: mother nature and human nature. And they are both being moved to change by the combined forces of technology and science.

The French Corner – the blog that’s all French, all the time

Well, it is written in English but Samantha’s posts are consistently about French, whether it be learning or teaching the language. Samantha is studying to be a high school French teacher and obviously loves the language. This blog is rich in resources and ideas. It is also beautifully presented and I think she designed it herself, which is always a bonus in my books. Samantha will make a great teacher. I’m looking forward to going back.

FSL Mania!

Yes, another fsl blog :) What got me with this one is that the author is sharing books she wrote for her Kindergarten classes, along with some accompanying workbooks. Sharing is good :) The blog is written in English, the materials en français.

Autodizactic – I really like learning

Zac Chase is currently sharing his experiences in Africa with us – his trip to the grocery store reminds me of my first trip to a grocery store in Beijing. I, too, had never seen ‘long life milk’ before then. Now I buy it at home, it’s great to keep in the cupboard for those mornings when I ran out of milk the day before and forgot to replenish with a fresh carton. It saves me and my coffee. When he isn’t in Africa he shares stories about teaching high school students, in particular about the projects they create and how he sets up the space in which to create them, in Philadelphia.

Do you have any wonderful new blogs you are reading?

ps – just found a new one, a few hours after I wrote this post but I have to add it in. It’s Classroom in the Cloud, written by John, a teacher who advocates for ubuntu in education. How could I not love him?

July 2, 2010
Wherever you go, there you are

So now it’s July 1. The paperwork is over and all I have left to do is empty my classroom at the old school tomorrow – today is a holiday in Canada – Canada Day.

Time for brightness and light (and warmth. It’s July 1st and I have a fire going to ward off the chill that 12 degrees celsius brings to this old house) so welcome to my site redesign :) I need something cheery to look at right now. I’ll let this post explain some of the why.

Yesterday was supposed to be my first day of holiday until I was called in to do ‘a bit’ of paperwork that people forgot to tell me about. In Ontario, students are awarded a certificate of Bilingualism depending on the number of hours of French they were exposed to from Kindergarten through Grade 12. The system for figuring this out is rather…tedious. Each year the French teacher has to figure out how many hours each child received and add it to previous years. Not all students are equal though, some with IEPs receive less French instruction than their peers and so we need to figure out the percentage of instruction over the year. There is a form to write all of this in (by hand) in each student’s folder though, sadly, there isn’t a uniform location for the form in each folder. I taught 7 classes of 20 to 34 students per classroom. 5 hours later I was on my way back home. But the stress of this end of year got to me and I spent much of my paperwork time in tears. Uncontrollably so. Every once in a while I’d wipe my eyes and say, ok. It’s over. And it was, until someone came by to ask how I was doing and they’d start right up again.

So I definitely learned that when I’m not at my top form I default to old behaviours. I used to keep my emotions to myself until they finally exploded out of me in the form of tears that just couldn’t stop. And there I was again.

Smack in the middle of my new teaching assignment my boyfriend left. We had a difficult weekend about 2 weeks ago and really needed to talk. Instead I came home from work that Monday to find all of his things gone and I haven’t heard from him since.

I was in the middle of getting to know a new school in a new province, transitioning from high school to elementary school teaching, and writing report cards at the new school all the while correcting, evaluating, and reporting on student work from my old school. I already had a few emotions coursing through my system – fears of incompetence related to both teaching elementary school after an 8 year hiatus from that level and teaching in French, guilt associated with leaving my students and colleagues at the old school, and overwhelmedom from all of that :) Needless to say I packed whatever I felt about this relationship into the back of my mind (heart) in order to continue juggling the balls.

I’m looking forward to this summer to rest and recuperate! Gardening, spending time with friends and family, exercise (I have not exercised in I don’t know how long), reading, painting, and whatever else comes up are how I am going to do that.

July 1, 2010
Passion exists inside me, not inside a job

This blog post has been in the works for a couple of weeks now and was coaxed out by Dan Callahan’s post One for the Record Books over at Geek.Teacher. His post reflects on the mixed feelings he has around changing schools, changing positions.

My own recent job change has had me thinking along the same lines.

Dan writes:

I’ll admit to being very conflicted that I’m abandoning a lot of the core elements that have defined my first eight years as an educator. My new position is going to be so drastically different from what I’ve been doing on so many different levels, and it will differ in a lot of ways from what I set out to do when I got my first job.

* I’m going to be moving from a semi-urban district to a much more suburban environment.
* I’m going to be moving from middle school to elementary school.
* I’m going to be leaving special education to work with a much wider portion of the student body.

In my darker moments, I’ll admit, it feels like I’m selling out. While I know that my new position will have its own challenges, I have to admit that those areas highlighted above feel important, and it feels like I’m abandoning them.

As many of you know, I loved my last job. It was infused with ideals of teaching I believe in strongly – working with students who have been marginalized much of their lives and showing them it doesn’t have to always be that way, putting the student before curriculum, the necessity of relationship, the heightened sense of making a difference in students’ lives.

I used to teach students in grades 10 and 11 at an alternative program, kids who were at risk to not graduate high school but were identified as bright, needing a different environment. Close to half of my students were Native students (Mohawk from Kahnawake). I now teach French in an elementary school in a rural area of Eastern Ontario and at first I, like Dan, thought that I was abandoning those ideals I held close by leaving that job.

Those feelings are also entangled with the sense of real abandonment I fear I’ve left my students. You see, I took the new position with 4 days of teaching plus an exam period left in the year at the old school. The decision wasn’t easy but necessary to gain experience in the Ontario school system. I was able to take it because of the tight teaching team that exists in that program. I didn’t leave my students to flap in the wind with a random substitute teacher. I left them with some of the most caring people I know. That is another fear I have, attached to another one of my ideals, that I have left a teaching team that embodies collaboration, caring, and raising the bar for ourselves and our students.

So, while I was excited to be starting something new and to be on the track to better work/life balance by working at a school in my area of the world, I was also thinking about everything I just wrote about. Not to mention the fact that all of this was happening in June, not usually my most energetic month!

Soon into my new job, however, I began to make connections with my colleagues and with my students. The first time a student came to me on the playground, “Madame Tracy, please help,” I thought, “All is good”. I realized that I am still excited about helping kids to learn, though in different ways. And I remembered, it is not my job that defines me but me that defines my job.

I find inspiration when I need it and at the end of my 2nd week at the new school was intrigued by a tweet in my twitter feed from Elona Hartjes:

The link led to a talk on TED by Srikumar Rao called Plug into your hard-wired happiness. The line, “passion exists inside you, not inside a job,” seemed louder than the other lines that were spoken in the video. And I realize that everything is going to be ok because I love and am passionate about working with kids and teachers, about being part of a caring community dedicated to the children within it, about creating hope for the future within community. My job helps me to live out my passions but it isn’t the sum of them.

June 22, 2010