What are you doing right now? What's on your list?

[Connie Weber]

Hi, Everyone. Busy enough?

This is a community check-in forum: please sketch out a list of your projects, activities, happenings (and mishaps!) of this current time, maybe what's going on from now until June. Come on--it'll be fun to see what everyone's doing.

What items are on your list right now? What fills your days? Is each day different from another, or are they the same? What's coming up shortly? What do you have to be done with by June? What are you really into? What are you dreading? What events are going on or upcoming?

[Terry Eberhart]

Hmmm - 2 days and classes are over, grading and review lectures finished last night, delivered today *yeah". I am taking a class in Flash and have a practical tomorrow - guess I better figure out how this sw works. Then finish the last exams which I give on Friday. I am getting close to the end of my second quarter of teaching as an adjunct (5 classes total), received my full Angel certification (we will see what Blackboard does to us) and moved one class to hybrid.

And I had my first interview for a full time teaching position on Monday. I should hear back within a week. Anxious - who - where - what - me - did anyone hear a phone ring? More coffee.

[Janice Robertson]

Realizing all the math content that my students still don't know and wondering, now that I'm down to just days before our EQAO test, which of the gaps would be most valuable to fill!!!!
I hate knowing that there will be questions my students won't be able to answer, not because they are not capable of learning, but just because we ran out of time before the "TEST"!
Sigh. I always feel like I've let them down when there are content questions I haven't exposed them to, but the alternative is to not give them rich learning experiences with other content area, and to just RUSH them through things. I've discovered that the downfall to good teaching that sticks, is that it's time consuming so something else always gets left out!

[Nicole Wolf-Camplin]

Three weeks ago we learned that we will need a new head of school. I won't go into the politics, but I have spent too much time in the last two weeks, going through resumes, setting up multiple interviews for each of three different candidates who have visited our campus. We may have one more to go. Oh, and I'm also on the interview team for a new office manager. It has been chaotic on top of the regular end of school, end of budget year, and graduation activities. Not fun. In previous years when other teachers have asked me "when are you done?" I've been sad, but this year, I can't wait for the year to end. This is my first year as a 12 month employee, and technically my year doesn't end, but the pace will change. The pace of the last two weeks has been killing me and I want a personal life again. Heck I'd settle for a few hours of good sleep.
; )

[Ian Carmichael]

Can you feel the strong resonsances from Australia? Wow, Nicole -there's a paperwork and bureacratic overload for sure. Still, at the end of it, I hope you succed findning some excellent personnel - and they can run the next set of interviews!

[Connie Weber]

to-do's, this weekend
3 more papers to write for my graduate class, student reports to finalize, Elluminate talk to plan, garden greens to thin, flowers to transplant, horse to brush, student work to write notes on, car to wash, laundry to get off line, speech to plan, coffee to drink.

[Maria Fleyshgakker]

Today I had an interview for my next job and, as usual, I had my best ideas after the interview was already over. I decided to share this idea with others because we all are talking about inquiry method, project-based learning, problem solving and case study, but it is so hard to create even one really good and really inquiry based project that will help the kids to learn the basics of science, math, history or all of them together and gain the skills of a lifelong learner. How should you start? Where would you get your ideas? How do you know that what you have is better and relevant, not the usual stuff repeated again under a different name?

So, here I suggest that you ask the kids to bring you their questions, real ones, the questions they are thinking about right now. Help them sort the questions, classify them. Questions that require simple reading can be researched on the computers. Have them Google the answers, copy the info, paste it in quotation marks, and report where the info was found.

While they are doing that, you can create the problem-project (may be more than one) out of the remaining questions, which can include more activities like more observations, guessing the hypothesis, designing the experiment, collecting the data, and proving the hypothesis to be right or wrong. There can be even more activities involved: they can start real life application of their best ideas.

I think that if we start asking the kids what is it of the greatest interest for them, we can create the best projects. Right now we are trying to invent projects that are of interest to us and force them onto kids. Sometimes we are lucky and get them interested, but when we are not so lucky we damage their curiosity and creativity. We also damage this great idea of teaching through problem solving.

I understand and believe that we do want our students to learn some topics from the standard curriculum, so this project based learning can have those topics introduced to the kids before we ask them to bring their questions one by one. This way we can create a series of projects along the lines of the standard curriculum.

[Gail Wolkoff]

Hi, I am getting my mind around starting back- or should I write going back into school. I have been working all summer, from my living room floor.
GHS made some sweet changes to our Service Learning program. This change kept me busy.

I am in the process of creating curriculum around self injury for middle school wellness classes.

I guess I should also mention I have become a fan of Eureka.

[Rogier Gregoire]

I am excited about participating in this group because of the comments of Cindy Fadel in recommending me.

Because my ideas and the work i have chosen to undertake has not been in vogue ( and probably never was during my life time) I have often found it hard to hold conversations, difficult of otherwise, that tend to run contrary to traditional views of educational purpose and practice. Moving upstream of the current or recent educational difficulty is the problem that I encounter in too many forums or schools of education. No one questions or clearly looks at the purpose of schools from a critical thinking point of view. Questions like "why do we educate?", "What is learning?" And more succinctly how can we accomplish both?" go unattended or visited like passing signposts rather than as important goals on their own.

Certainly our current school system is driven by an ability to finesse such questions with valid sidebars on politics, social/cultural imperatives and of course money. In regards to the latter, the quality of life, the future of the collective (locally and globally) are now measured by financial standards not human values and once human development gets measured against such narrow and limited industrial values the answers are predictable and misleading.

The result is that my work as a practical and grounding effort is to try asking the right question for the immediate and most pressing dilemmas so that the answers come from addressing the causes rather than the symptoms. I may have become a regular Jeremiah. I hope that this list has an opening for one in its conversations. You can see that my background is not traditional but in a society that has lost any sense of inquiry this might be of some value.

Rogier Gregoire

[Ellen Pham]

Hi Rogier- nice to meet you! You might enjoy this ongoing discussion on Fireside- The Important Questions- What's Worth Knowing? I think I need another infusion of that discussion in my life right now : )

I'm moved by your second paragraph- it is such a personally disheartening system to live in. So much energy is spent just having to live, cope, work, raise children with human values under this system so completely driven by financial/industrial values- arghhh!

I'm going to go off and think about the two questions you raise, "What is learning?" and "Why do we educate?" What other questions do you think are important to be asking in this time of educational "reform"?