shore leave anyone?

as its friday night the issue that POPED into my little tired noggin is this, school year, is 10 months okay, is it too long or should it be all year long? now as a teacher we are VERY use to having summers off and would be hard pressed to relenquish them, but is there pluses to this senario? well assuming no increase to curriculum load per grade came with it, it would give those few extra months that would give wiggle room in a typically hectic schedual to get everything covered propperly to be ready for provincial testing, also it would give days that could be FUN!!!! we could do the field trips and lose a class to a guest speaker that enrich the learning.

just a sleepy thought

Mr Scott, 1 to beam directly to bed. (WHAAAAAA annoying transporter sound effect)

ADHD truth or scifi?

its probally just me being cynical but is it just me or is every child that has behaviour issues or doing poorly coming up with a ADHD code nowadays? its the fix all for elementary kids. Now i am versed in psychology so i do know that yes there is a legitamate case for ADHD but i think it is getting used too much for anything that doesn't fall into another category. So i think having the knowledge of a kid coming into my class with a ADHD label doesn't impress me much (thank you shania) i would be skeptical to see if this is a legit case or a work of clinical science fiction.

Multiple intellegences and wormhole physics

as any good scifi fan knows that not every member of your team is equally compitant at all things. for example you wouldn't want Jack O'Neil to be fixing your DHD to get you home in a time of crisis, thats Major Carters field, similary you wouldn't want Daniel Jackson protecting you in hand to hand combat (although in the last few season that have tried to make him the warrior archeologist not the sneezing academic of the original seasons), thats Teal'c thing, so how is it that such an obvious concept is not applied to childrens education? Of course jimmy the sport star, with great kinestetic ability is going to have problems writing down in words the ideas in his head, i mean he probally couldn't write in words the ideas of how to play his sport well, but put him on the field and let him SHOW you the concepts and he would tear you to shreds. but alas and alack we just need to work on that application of teaching in multiple intellegences and we would be thrown thousands of light years ahead.

Mr Crusher put it on screen....

and thats exactly how it was, grades for every student, some failing, some near perfect, but all shown on the smartboard as the numbers were inputted. i was a bit converned about it and when i quietly mentioned it (thinking it was an oversight) was told that this is how everyrthing was done, on screen so everyone can see, that it was a motivation factor.....ummmmmm. Yes i can see that knowing that everyone will know your score would make you want to do better but for the struggling student that is trying but still resting on that 49% mark, i thought that this would cause some confidenciality issues that would cause parents to complain but apparently not, so what is the general opinion about this practice, am i too OLD school in my thinking that most students don't want to share their low score with others or is it that they just dont care and who care who knows...

wow that paragram/sentence would make most grammar teachers twitch...hehehe REVENGE!!

close channel

Valentines and the student

i'm all filled with squishy feelings of love and happiness (or mcdonalds breakfast) about my family today, but this squeezed a question into my brain (yes it got past the egg mcmuffin and orange juice) to see how we treat students on this day of love. i know that my daughter wrote a valentines card for her kindergarden teacher, and this will probally continue at least through elementary school but when comes the point of not being OK to say they love their teacher? i guess being the highschool teacher its more of a concern to us who deal with older kids but i think that we try to be kind and caring to all students on ALL days not just feb 14 but where do we draw the line when they want to tell us more than we need to know to be just their teacher. Some kids don't have a solid parent figure that they can go and talk to about problems in life (gotta love the teenage years), so it is a bit of a compliment that they feel comfortable enough with you to broach the subject but then comes the issue that they may begin to see you less as a teacher and more friend and lose respect for your teaching authority, and in few cases the feelings grow from friends to more which is a major issue so where is a good place to draw the line so they feel supported and cared for in the class but not too much so that new emotions grow....maybe Data from star trek has it best, no emotion so it can only be logic.

to focus or to scatter, that is my question...

i've started obbserving with a teacher that is BIG into multiple intellegences and he doesn't plan to do much note taking type classes with his class and then i will take the reigns and i have been predominantly a lecture with a few side activities to highlight other "intellegences" but if you aren't able to follow the main theory push in the beginning then how effective will the activities be? so here is my delemia, to continue in my tried and true method that focuses energy on the traditional method that most students have been taught in or do i diversify so that everyone get a little bit, but will that little bit be enough to sustain the learning? if i focus i know that i will miss some students but i will hit a good % and i know that those will get enough out of my classroom antics to learn, i only have to do additional help for the other "intellegences" at other times.

teacher evaluations, its a double edged bat'leth?

So we had our battery of teacher evaluations today and as i was filling out the 3rd one i wondered about whether it was teacher evaluations or assessments, now that may be a bit nitpicky but what we did was not give a grade or number score but gave our opinion about the capabilities of these teachers. one thing i have learned, especially being the biology teacher, is that opinions are like butts, everyone has one so dont think you are special because of yours. so what real worth are these reports, i understand the theory behind the idea that it is to give feed back so that a teacher can see from the students perspective how they are doing and improve where they can, but REALLY, i think that my 2 years of teaching high school has taught me a few lessons and one is that a good teacher knows that being the popular teacher doesn't mean that you are doing things the best on the acedemic front. so what does that mean...well i think that these tests SHOULD be done unbaised but if the teacher has spent the semester returning C grades to you (whether its because you are slacking or they are being hard on you) the view on that teacher will come up at review time.

i'm not saying that we shouldn't because some people need to know how out in left field they are but maybe another method could be devised.

computing in the cloud

so heres the debate, computing in the cloud is using online software to do everything (ie my hotmail account is not on just one computer it everywhere... insert evil laughter here MWAWAWAWAWAWA) compared to the installed on the home computer MS office 2007 which is only on that computer (insert snickering here because its on all 3 computers in my house) but hopefully you get the idea, that there are pros and cons on both side of the issue. is it better to suffer the slings and arrows of students excuses "the network was down so i could print my essay today" or the apathy of "i forgot it at home so i cant print it"...its like the federation vs the klingon empire, one has the moral high ground, the other has cooler ships and metal clothing...i'm torn.

but if i can bring an iota of reality back here, computing in the cloud has the mobility advantage that allows access wheneveryou can connect to the internet, but there is the potential issue of security for data, big sites get hacked quite commonly. The other issue as mentioned in the excuses above is that network connections can be tempormental at times so this could effect productivity if your online service is down for maintence.

ok compare that to the COSTLY purchasing of a microsoft office suite that is only accessable from your home, now when your there it should always be available and work in mostly secure settings.

so friends, romans, lend me your fingers and tell me what you think is the better option. (ARGH i was tending toward the literary themetoday wasn't i? must have been sitting too close to english teachers types) [yes you too lori, even if you are so far far away]

Assessment Vs Evaluation, its gould Vs Tokra

ARE they the same or are they different? THey have elements the same but the end result are different....
so the tokra they are "technically" paracitic gould but they dont force themselves on the host like gould, assessment "technically" tells you what the student is doing in your class but it doesn't force a final grade , that and it is much more curriculum objective based. for ex: Donnie has learned to use a blog effectively in EDIT350 would be an assessment, but donnie gets a B is an evaluation of his blogging skills. Summative year end Evaluations are problematic because for the overall year you may get a C but that doesn't tell you that i got all A in science but all F in english class, so what does the C really mean? i know that unless we go to a system of modularize every section of a course and give grades on each one and allow individual modules to be repeated then we can't really change the summative grades for a class but i just think that maybe we should tweek the norm to get a better assessment (or evatuation) of what the student knows.
(insert glowing eyes and wierd voice here)

Diverting power to forward shields...

just over one week.... thats all left of class time for this professional term, so as the title indicates divert that power to just holding together, we have quite a few micro (and some not so micro) teachings plus a few decent sized assignments but then (cue inspirational music) obserations and exam...ummmmmm

N E ways thanks for your support and comments, i need em for this last push to the finish.

its now time for more muscle relaxants so i'm off to find a little piece of oblivion and fall in for the next 8hrs, see ya on the other side of the wormhole

mike

Beuler, beuler, anyone seen beuler....

ok so a slight diversion from the scifi theme to something a little more education based (as education based as ferris beulers day off can be but at least there is a school in it!) and running on the idea of absentism i find myself laidup with a slipped disc in my back and loaded up on muscle relaxants and antiinflamatories so if spelling gets a little "hooked on phonics" its cause higher brain functions are now on a need to know baisis and spelling isn't need to know right now.

ok so to my quandry....how to deal with the student that is constantly absent, where do we draw the line on how much we bendover backwards helping the student catch up and when they are taking advantage of a kind teacher? I have always tried to help because i know that things happen( i am the case in point right now) to good people but when its every other week and then the expectation of "you can't test me on this i wasn't there"....oooohh that one REALLY makes me happy.... how do we tell them, its your responsibility, deal with it. and isn't it interesting that the students with those attitudes are the ones with the parents that have no quams calling and complaining that their little angles are failing my class. (also the parents that take kids out of class for 2 weeks so they can go for a vacation and expect the world to freeze until they come back, if you miss class you need to catch up with us when you come back, is that fair or am i ranting again?)

ok i think i have broken every known grammar law, sorry english teachers, so i will sign off.