In the depth of winter, it’s important to keep our chins up, no?

I’m interested in anxiety.  Most of my ‘google research’ has turned up information on student anxiety.  I am more interested in teacher anxiety.  Particularly, in the types of worries that wake us up at 1:15 a.m and see us still trapped by insomnia at 3:49 a.m., updating our blogs while the rest of the city sleeps peacefully.

Or, are there other teachers (just like me) who are out there right now, awake, tormented by their chosen profession?

One author I hope to learn more about, possibly through reading her memoir, is Jane Tompkins.  Her story, “A Life in School:  What the Teacher Learned,” addresses the fear of failure, specifically the fear of failure of a teacher’s authority.

What will 2010 hold?

Many world leaders are engaged in talks right now in Copenhagen, Denmark.  This is an important opportunity for the world to come together and establish goals for reducing our collective carbon footprint.

The International Day of Action on Climate Change took place Saturday, December 15th in locations all around the globe.  In my city, it was a blustery, cold evening, but the people came!!!  This photo is of Copenhagen, Denmark’s day of action.  This youtube link will bring you to the interfaith climate vigil held in Halifax on December 12th, 2009.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTGkRvPab30

Here is the site for the Youth Climate Coalition in Canada: http://www.ourclimate.ca/joomla/
This is Clean Nova Scotia’s website: http://www.clean.ns.ca/
http://www.350.org/Here is the site for a climate action website:

The following excerpt is posted on the 350 site, taken from Bill McKibben’s recent blog post, ”The Science of 350, the Most Important Number on the Planet.”

350 parts per million is what many scientists, climate experts, and progressive national governments are now saying is the safe upper limit for CO2 in our atmosphere.

Accelerating arctic warming and other early climate impacts have led scientists to conclude that we are already above the safe zone at our current 390ppm, and that unless we are able to rapidly return to 350 ppm this century, we risk reaching tipping points and irreversible impacts such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and major methane releases from increased permafrost melt.

There are three numbers you need to really understand global warming, 275, 390, and 350.

For all of human history until about 200 years ago, our atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Parts per million is simply a way of measuring the concentration of different gases, and means the ratio of the number of carbon dioxide molecules to all of the molecules in the atmosphere. 275 ppm CO2 is a useful amount—without some CO2 and other greenhouse gases that trap heat in our atmosphere, our planet would be too cold for humans to inhabit.

What is the value of homework?

This is the issue on Cross Canada Check-Up, November 22nd.

Some of the callers whose opinions resonated with me mentioned that it was not necessarily the quantity of homework assigned that was the problem.  Their wish was that the quality of homework could improve.

Some ideas for homework that exercise the lateral mind:

• assign a logic problem to be solved
• assign a question of ethics where the student must make an argument where there is not one clear solution
• assign a research question, such as, “Who was Nellie McClung?”  Students write a brief response to share the next day.
• assign a random date to research with the question, “What happened on December 6th, 1991.”  Many things, relatively important and unimportant, are sure to have happened on that day!

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head that could make homework less chore and more EXPLORE!

Wow!  Just saw a great movie, an inspirational movie for teachers in many ways, called Half Nelson.

As the credits rolled, I saw that the film-makers thanked this website:

www.dialectics4kids.com

Check it out!

The subject of this post may seem a bit heavy, but what I have in mind is conflict resolution in the classroom.  I want to see what insight can be gleaned from looking into mediation techniques used in the broader, global political ‘classroom,’ filled with characters who shift between the roles of ‘bully’ and ‘victim’ and ‘neutral,’ depending on perspective and on the available information.

In my life and my profession, I am learning how when communication shuts down there is little hope for progress or change.  We all need to practise the art of talking it out!

It may be difficult, but this…

“In answer to the question, should we negotiate with terrorists, Roger Fisher (writer in the second edition of Getting To Yes) replies with a resounding yes, because the better our communication, the better our chances of exerting influence. But doesn’t negotiating with someone whose behavior you abhor grant them legitimacy that they didn’t have before, and therefore reward criminal activity? Won’t this encourage further bad behavior because it means we have given into pressure? According to Fisher, it may confer a little legitimacy, but this effect can be minimized by involving relatively low level or non-governmental personnel in the initial talks. The effect could actually be eliminated if we had a policy of negotiating with anyone. With such a policy, no one could attain special status just because negotiations were opened.

What is much more certain and important is that a refusal to negotiate indicates rejection of the other side, and rejection creates serious physical and psychological obstacles to problem solving, because it prevents clear communication from taking place, and it guarantees defensiveness and resistance to change. We simply need to make it clear that a decision to negotiate does not mean acceptance of the other side’s behavior. We can in fact love our enemies and hate what they do, but to prove it we need to act in loving ways by accepting their humanity enough to negotiate for mutual gains. Each side need get no more than that to which they are entitled. And we need to remember that regardless of how we respond, there are no guaranteed results, except that forced agreements are always very unstable.

We need not accept their values or their conduct. What we do accept is the humanity underneath as deserving of due process with the realization that we could be at least partially wrong in our perceptions and conclusions (because of stereotyping, attribution bias, projection, misinformation, inadequate data, etc.). According to Fisher and Brown in their 1988 book Getting Together, we should consider all others as equals, that is “equally human, equally caught up in the situation, equally entitled to have rights, and equally entitled to have any interests and views taken into account” (Fisher & Brown, p. 160). In reality, that is a fairly minimal level of acceptance. But shouldn’t the enemy have to give something for this kind of acceptance? No, bargaining over acceptance is like bargaining over apology: acceptance is only effective when freely given, not when it’s withheld. It is coercive to use acceptance as a bargaining chip; it creates distrust and it helps further entrench a defensive, adversarial relationship.”

http://www.mediate.com/articles/currie4.cfm

Very practical for our students, here is a really great link to a mediation webpage designed to help children become mediators, in order to become confident resolvers of conflict!!!  Just click on the mediation image below, it’ll take you there.

As the banner reads, the site Voice of Witness is
‘illuminating human rights crises through oral history.’

www.voiceofwitness.com

I highly recommend reading any of the interviews and stories found here.
The reason why is best summed up in the words of a contributor, found below:

An interview with Out of Exile editor Craig Walzer, featured in The Rumpus:

We need to be able to digest and give people who are very far away the time and space to tell their story in their own words, rather than these hygienic CNN clips of a mother crying and saying we need supplies, or, ‘They came and burned our village in the middle of the night and we had to run.’ It’s so much more important to humanize things like that.

Here is an interesting website:  http://www.successforall.net/elementary/index.htm

What drew me to this site in particular is my research of conflict resolution, trying to remedy situations so that all people involved walk away feeling happy, and no longer carrying the hurt that led to the conflict because it has been expressed and (ideally) resolved.

I’m reading the “School Climate” link, and it says:

The Getting Along Together K-8 program is a social problem-solving curriculum designed to teach children to think critically, solve problems non-violently, and work in teams effectively and cooperatively. The Getting Along Together program sets in place school-wide processes for preventing and resolving problems among students as well as between students and teachers. Ten interactive, literature-based lessons introduce skills and strategies. Teacher’s guides provide structures for coaching individual students to resolve specific conflicts, and for conducting class-level meetings, setting positive expectations, rewarding positive peer interaction, and addressing class-selected issues as a group throughout the school year. All school staff members, including the principal, teachers, cafeteria staff, and office staff, are trained and involved in the Getting Along Together process to provide an effective, consistent structure.

Curriculum
The Getting Along Together curriculum consists of three components:

Learn About It: Classroom lessons of key problem-solving skills are embedded within reading lessons.

Think It Through: An individual problem-solving model that teaches students to “self-talk” their way through interpersonal problems.

Talk It Out: The Peace Path (an interactive problem-solving model), Roundtable, and Class Councils give students frequent practice using their skills to solve interpersonal problems.

National School Run Day

Friday, September 25, 2009

The Terry Fox National School Run Day (NSRD) allows millions of students across Canada to join together in an inspirational nation-wide day of fundraising for cancer research.

Marathon of Hope

Recently, I got turned onto the educational theory of Marie Clay (1926 -2007).  Basically, her theory is that the three steps to prevention of reading and writing difficulties are:
1.  good preschool experiences in a literate environment
2.  good curriculum for literacy learning in the early years of school (ages 5-8)
3.  early intervention for children left behind by the fast learners

I love Ms. Clay’s idea that
‘teachers and schools are engineering transitions,
not just minding the children until they mature.’

(Yes!  We are not zookeepers!)

Here is an excerpt from the Reading Recovery website:  http://www.readingrecovery.org/reading_recovery/marie_clay/index.asp

Reading Recovery is one of Clay’s important contributions to education. Like the pattern of her work, the program emanated from close involvement with keen insight into those closest to the source. The research project was born from the concerns of classroom teachers who, despite well-designed classroom programs and good teaching, were not able to change the paths of progress for particular children. The driving question, stated with simple elegance, was “What is possible when we change the design and delivery of traditional education for children that teachers find hard to teach?” (Clay 1993b, p. 97.) It is early identification and instruction of these children, and not the classroom programs, that Clay has tried to redesign.

The books I borrowed from the Dartmouth Teacher’s Resource Centre are Reading Recovery:  A guidebook for teachers in training,  An Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement, and Running Records for Classroom Teachers.  Look for my favourite segments on the “Library” page of this blog.