Right Message, Wrong Reasons - Not Reconvening InSchool Learning in June

 Right Message, Wrong Reasons - Not Reconvening InSchool Learning in June

         

              I am sure the decision was not an easy one.  For several weeks beforehand, the press was filled with articles about the need to see students back in school before the end of the school year. All that the politicians were watching for was the case count to go down and some appearance of the fact that there would be NO uptick in Covid cases if students went back to school. There was pressure from the teachers’ unions to keep schools closed until all the teachers had had their second shots. There was pressure from the parents to ensure no schools opened until it was safe for the students to be there all day and then come home. There were all the calls about the mental health of the students and the obvious decline in learning due to being at home and online.  To say that the issue was contentious was obviously stating the obvious,

              However, as all of these events were playing out on my devices and on the television, I was thinking what a crazy way to bring an end to the educational response to Covid 19.  I do not say that the cost to parents and students was not overwhelming. I do not argue against the problems teachers would have with having to be back in school full time.  But what bothers me was the fact that I never ever read anyone talking about the timing of the move.

             I am sitting here, in my air-conditioned office at the end of an extremely hot and humid day and there have been more than a few of them already these past two weeks.  I find myself reflecting on the times I was in a classroom on days like this in this very month when absolutely nothing was going right.  In order to understand where I am coming from, those of you reading this have to realize that the vast majority of schools in Ontario and other provinces lack any real kind of air conditioning equipment. Schools were built with the assumption that during the heat of the summer, they would be empty.  They have great furnaces and plenty of windows, but even on days like today, with all the windows open, if there is no breeze, the classrooms can become as hot as Hades.  How do you think teachers or students responded in the past to conditions like this?  They slacked off.  Students knew that heat waves meant summer was upon them, which meant cookouts, and backyard pools, and family trips, and fun riding on bicycles with their friends.  It meant freedom.  For teachers, it meant learning had ceased.  Students have limits to their ability to concentrate on anything academic when their minds are on other things and teachers are not miracle workers.  

            Pandemic or no pandemic, come the heatwaves of June, students are done.  We take our students outdoors and read or draw or sing songs or make up skits and try to find links to the curriculum constantly. We show movies in the classroom and struggle to keep students behaving and in their seats.  It might have been a long time since I was in a classroom, but I know that we have not been retrofitting all our schools with heat exchanges and air conditioners.  Planning has to take this into account, no matter how hard we wish we didn’t have to consider such mundane things.  Imagine how much harder it would be to start trying to get kids back into school for a week or two or three now and deal with the issues of heat and poor learning and lack of discipline and so forth. It is far better to aim to start in September, right off the bat, with specific plans designed to help create the kind of classroom culture where effective learning will take place. It is imperative that boards make sure they have at least one or two people per school who will spend their time hunting down former students who ought to be in school and working with the families to get every child back in school.

           Make no mistake about it.  It would be great to have kids in school now, for sure, but to what end. It would be better to start a week or two earlier, before Labour Day, to make sure all schools are fully staffed and ready to proceed with the hard task ahead of rebuilding student classrooms and school populations and ensuring young minds are ready, willing, and able to begin anew.  In September, we all of us are programmed to take hot days into account and students know they are there to learn and so they do not expect to enjoy any dog days.  Teachers are primed and ready to go.  It is part of our routines as classroom teachers. September means back to the bell and the classroom environment.  We will begin in September as we normally would.  How much better a start could we possibly ask for?  

Interleaving

 

INTEREAVING

 

              I saw this word in a posting I read today about something happening in classrooms and I immediately realized that it is a new way of referring to Integration.  When I was a classroom teacher, I automatically taught by integrating subjects.  We don’t learn history or geography as we are growing up and away from school. We learn about the world and its changes over time.  It is only when we are in school that it becomes first Social Studies and then History and Geography.  When we are studying music and learning how to read music we are confronted with terms like quarter and half notes but of course that has nothing to do with mathematics, right?  When I taught design in my art classrooms, I never thought to refer to patterning which is a strand on the mathematics curriculum.  We don’t think about subjects, we think about topics, or concepts whether they be from one area of a school curriculum or another.

              To help understand where I am going with this, think about browsing on the Internet. From the earliest days of the World Wide Web, students or most adults would sit in front of a computer screen and start in one location or web site and then perhaps click on another hot link which would take them somewhere else entirely, but it was the way their minds were working.  I might start reading about penguins living at the tip of South America but then I’d hit a link about Chile because all of a sudden something came to mind that I was interested in and so I’d click to find out and then I might read about the political situation while reading about Chile and find I was curious whether or not it was the same in Peru because I met someone who came from there.  Our minds follow our interests and our curiosities and if we are forced to NOT do that, some of us would lose interest because our minds are stuck somewhere else.  So, integration or InterLeaving follows the nature way in which we think which would mean it follows the way we learn, because we remember that which is of interest to us.  

              I always tried to integrate my teaching.  If I was teaching about flight, it was not enough to teach about the early experiments of the Wright Brothers, but to read about Daedalus and his attempt at flying and what the Greeks thought about attempting to fly and then to teach about birds and how come birds are able to fly and then about perhaps the principals of flight and then some history and the experiments and so forth.  By doing that, students are kept on their toes.  They are not just making notes, not just conducting experiments, not just reading books, not just watching videos, not just sitting in their desks.  AS I write this, you can perhaps see where the leaving part of InterLeaving comes from.  It is important to teach not according to subjects but according to themes.  That is how our minds work.

              Finally, one only has to think about the sciences that are now so important to our confrontation with the future. We talk about AstroPhysics, BioTechnology, 

BioChemistry, GeoPolitics and so forth.   Each of those began as separate fields of study, but we have come to see that, we cannot really understand one field without thinking about how it relates to other fields.  Interleaving is the way our world works and so too the way our classrooms should work. 

Culturally Responsive Teaching

 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING

 

            One of the unintended consequences of our world evolving into a global community is the necessity to teach students wherever they are about the rest of the world and how cultures differ.  Naturally, because we live in world connected by so many different ways to communicate, we also have students in our classrooms quite often from all over the world.  One can go to even the most far-off places on the planet and meet kids and adults speaking different languages, eating, or wanting to eat different foods and wanting to pick up news from home in a multiplicity of languages.  But cafes, restaurants, tourist spots, schools, bring people together and that cultural diffusion filters into our classrooms.  If we want to make each and every student feel as if they belong so that we as teachers can make a difference in their lives for good, then we need to figure out ways to make our teaching culturally responsive.  What exactly does that mean though.

           Well, first of all, I think it means not painting all of our students with one brush.  For example, since so many students eat at school and share tables as well as conversation, from a very young age, we see children looking at what everyone puts in their mouths.  Gone are the days when every kid had a peanut butter sandwich, some cookies, and an apple perhaps.  There will be any number of different foodstuffs and we should encourage discussions both in and out of class about what the different foods are and where they come from.  Perhaps it would be fun to have a bring your lunch to school day for everyone and encourage children to share what they would normally be eating if they were still where their families were from and what some of the events around lunch time might be. The object of the lessons would be to encourage everyone to share and come to see that although their lunch stuffs might be different, they are still eating for nourishment and pleasure.

             Another way could be to have opportunities for children to share what memories they have from their home countries.  Some of those memories might be harder or more embarrassing to share and this is where cultural sensitivity would come in on the part of the teacher.  He or she has to know what life was like for their students BEFORE they joined their class and ensure that they feel as comfortable as is possible.  Some students might have come from war-torn countries, Others perhaps left their extended family behind.  But we owe it to our students, wherever they have come from and whatever the circumstances of their current lives, to make them feel accepted and welcomed not just by us but by our students as well.

             This list could go on and on, but I will focus on reading materials briefly here since I have addressed this before.  In order for children to want to read and to learn from their reading choices, we should try and find books to include in our libraries, in the classroom and in the school, that share a point of view different from our own. I have made l it my business to read some of the most current literature written by authors telling stories of poverty in India or escape from Syria or dealing with death in a new home in America. There are so many books written by authors who are non-white, African or Asian, who have something important to teach us about life from their points of view.  We can encourage our students, young and old, to read widely about life in distant places and see how although dress and foods and shelter might be different, kids are kids and growing up presents the exact same challenges regardless of where we are.  

          Being culturally responsive means attempting to see the world through the eyes of someone not from the same background as ourselves.  The beauty of that exercise is not only that we learn about different worlds and different cultures and so forth, but it makes us more tolerant because we are becoming broader minded.  That’s the most we can hope for if we wish to continue to enjoy life in a democracy where every person counts and is entitled to be treated fairly and justly.