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.

Tag: change

  • Honouring their commitment to change

    I found out today that the teacher I am replacing for the year has handed in her official resignation. This means that I can possibly stay in my position permanently. HOT. For real! Why is this? Because I feel that I am doing real work here. Real work with kids that shows I am we are making a difference.

    The change is significant. It's my duty to honour it. It's as beautiful and natural as seeds becoming flower. (click image for source)
    The change is significant. It’s my duty to honour it. It’s as beautiful and natural as seeds becoming flower. (click image for source)

    We are the 50 students and 4 teachers in our alternative program for Grade 10 and 11 students. It’s long, hard work – today I arrived in my classroom at 7:30am and left it at 7:15 pm. We are in the middle of an exam week and I saw kids who were tired and frustrated sticking it out, staying late to make sure they get it – whether ‘it’ be math, English, History, whatever. These are kids who are in our program because up until they were accepted into it this or last year they spent more time skipping class then attending it. These are kids who used to walk away when things got tough. They’d still like to, I know it because they tell me, but they don’t. They don’t.

    Not all of the students I have this year are showing this same commitment, and some may not make it until the end of the year because of this lack of commitment. But those that do, they are going places. Because if they can make such deep and significant personal change as choosing to succeed rather than fail, choosing to tough it out rather than give up, in such a short time, then they can do anything. For Real. And imagine, these are only the seeds.

    hmm. It’s time for change all over, isn’t it?

  • Thinking and Becoming

    image from: The Cabinet of Curiosities

    A scream of a shout-out this time, once again, to Jose. I finally got around to reading some of his poetry on The Poetry Cafe and this one ripped a hole through me, enough to consider adding it to my short list of poems I insist kids read.

    You too, read it.

    I Think Therefore I Am…
    By Jose Vilson

    If there’s one thing
    every leader agrees on
    It’s that you are what you say you are
    You become the person you think you are
    I cried as a baby, so I stayed close to the womb
    I crawled for food so I stayed under the parental umbrella
    I followed the rules in school,
    so I stayed subservient to my teachers
    I said I wasn’t worth this life as a young one,
    So the rest of my body almost followed suit with a successful dip by the
    Williamsburg Bridge
    I thought I couldn’t defend myself,
    so I became roadkill for bullies, bullshitters, and racists
    I thought I couldn’t face myself, so I became ugly
    I told myself I wasn’t worth shit, so my skin started to reek
    I thought I was too broke to hang with these preppies in my high school,
    So I found my wallets empty often
    I pinched my skin and thought it was thin,
    so even people I thought were friends tried to get under it
    Because I thought these friends were,
    but they thought not to act on that thought
    Hence, the thundering in my chest was
    my heart beating from the bleeding in my back
    from the knives slicing down my spine
    And I said G_d existed,
    but because I thought he was
    separate
    from me and what I was doing,
    I found myself looking for him in hood heroes,
    priests,
    NBA superstars,
    and everyone but the father I couldn’t will back into my life
    My thoughts turned to a revolution
    Delusions of grandeur turned to self-improvement
    So the first thought I thought was
    I
    am
    G_d
    And instantly my own holy spirit glowed like a torch
    Its light shown all across the room
    And I thought I was a poet so my pen flowed furiously
    Through thousands of unused looseleaf
    Letters to the universe to set my verse free
    From the pressures of perfection felt from my youth
    And I thought I’d live forever through the memories
    Of my many loved ones, acquaintances, my disciples,
    People I might have even just brushed upon
    And people reading this in a similar condition
    A promising living legend thinking this might come to fruition…

  • Mr. Wasserman re-directs

    Thanks to Jose for pointing me towards Mr. Wasserman who I NEED to applaud for writing this:

    I don’t want this to be a complaining post. Nobody likes reading those, for starters, and May is such a great time of year to try to be happy. So instead, I’ve been thinking about things I can do which will raise my ability to respect myself as a teacher, which should translate into improvements, at least in my immediate sphere.

    I’m digging the way he re-focuses his malaise towards what we can do to create positive change. How many times have I heard complaints about how our students:

    • disrespect each other, their teachers, and everyone else
    • drop n bombs, f bombs (the ones about a certain physical activity AND sexual orientations), S bombs (in our school, these have to do with the students from the Kanhwake first nations’ reserve in the area)…
    • just don’t care

    It is rare that I see someone considering what to do as an alternative to complaining. Mr. Wasserman reflectively concludes:

    But I want to focus on giving my students only meaningful work to do, only things that have a clear value to them. the trick, I suppose, is to figure out what those things are.

    Yes, that is the trick. And I think it is really easy to do –> We need to spend more time talking with our students than at them. Well, at least the first part is easy. The second part is integrating what we find out with the curriculum we are teaching. I think that is what makes teaching an art.

    I’ll be heading back to read Mr. Wasserman again.
    Thanks Jose.

  • The Experience Project

    I just this moment discovered this project through facebook – in one of those ads that usually annoy the crap out of me in the left hand column (they annoy me because a) they are usually about finding an adult friend or signing up for some kind of scammy looking deal; and b) when I am at home on my weak little 512mb of ram machine they slow down the page loading process). This time though my eye quickly snagged on the idea of teacher stories that was in the headline, so I clicked.

    My click brought me to a page with this header image:

    First browse makes me like it – a site dedicated to sharing inspirational stories about teachers and teaching is a good thing in my books. Any time we share stories that touch our deep cores about what matters most to us as people we are one step (or maybe, actually, a million steps) closer to creating more of those kinds of experiences.

    Once I scanned through the first page I was drawn by ‘The Experience Project’ logo, I like the font, the colours – simple blues (not so sure about the anxious little character at the front, though).

    Took me a few moments to find out how to get to the project main page (maybe they need a link that is more obvious…) but once I did I was glad I got there.

    I definitely need to explore this some more, but Chalk it Up seems to be but one element of the Experience Project – a social networking site dedicated to sharing the stories that make up our most positive experiences.

    Pretty cool stuff. I’m thinking this kind of thing can be a great way to collect and preserve stories shared during an appreciative change process in an organization.

    I’m going to join and find out some more about it.

    Maybe you can too.

    If you do, I am harmonicagoldfish :)

  • Questions about learning with tech…a start

    …technology integration in schools is not easy to achieve, no matter how much evidence we have that it can help learning. It’s also important to integrate technology appropriately, as critics are quick to point out that computers, besides being expensive, can harm young children who sit for hours in front of them instead of being engaged in the “real world” (Alliance for Childhood, 2000). So what is known about how people learn and the role technology may play in their learning? How might that knowledge provide guidelines for appropriate uses of technology that can help students and teachers?

    Questions to ponder from the ERIC Digest: How People Learn (and What Technology Might Have To Do with It).

    ***added April 1, 2008***

    Elona pointed me toward this great article by Mark Prensky called Turning On the Lights The last section does offer some answers to the questions posed above. Give it a read….

    Prensky, M. (2008) Turning on the lights. Educational Leadership, 65 (6), 40-45.