Put That Cookie Down!

Humans have a long history of trying to justify treating each other poorly. Something within the deep primeval psyche of our species drives us to bully, control, threaten, diminish, or outright harm our fellow kind, yet those that do so "for no reason" are shunned as degenerate or crazy. Hence the elaborate justifications: They're a different colour than I am! They have different political beliefs! They follow a different religion! People and nations will twist themselves into all sorts of logical knots to give themselves a reason for their own malevolence, facts be darned. Take the schoolyard bully who makes fun of the child who wears glasses. Wearing glasses has nothing to do with measuring the individual worth of a person, and the bully knows this. The glasses are just a prop, justification for otherwise baseless cruelty. Blow this example up to the level of the nation state, and you have most every war ever fought. There's even a Latin expression for it,  casu...

Educators get pulled in a lot of different directions. We gotta teach, we gotta coach, we gotta professionally develop, and we gotta put out more brushfires than Smokey the Bear. One thing that is always pulling on teachers is the curriculum, the massive document that dictates what we, as educators, are professionally obligated to teach. You get to know that document well, and you keep knowing it well until it gets totally overhauled, which seems to happen once too often or not often enough, depending on the subject. You love to hate it and hate to love it, the curriculum. It's nice to have a guiding document that sets out exactly what you should be doing in the classroom, but it also feels rigid and unyielding, like the bars of a cage. And like a cage, you can see right through it while you're trapped inside, watching freewheeling and experimental methods of teaching fly by unencumbered. We hear a lot about letting students take charge of their own learning, and yet that...

The Internet is a firehose blasting you in the face. Sorry, what? Oh, right, uh, in terms of taking in information, the Internet is like a firehose blasting you in the face. There's so much, and it comes at you so fast, you can't really deal with it, and then your face goes numb because of all the water hitting it and this analogy has really run out of gas. The point is that you need SOME way of corralling all that information into a manage and fact-checkable space so you can actually work with it. This goes triple for teachers, who are in the information business and have a professional mandate to make sure that their students have the skills to use information effectively. It's kind of the whole point of teaching, actually, and in the age of ubiquitous Internet access, these skills are becoming harder to teach just as they become more important to teach. If you have effective curation skills, you can impart them to your students so that they aren't totally l...

...and you and you and, well, everybody, really. Copyright is something that we don't actively think about all that much unless we are employed in an industry that makes its gravy from it. You hear a song on the radio, you watch a movie on Netflix (or Crave, if you're a contrarian), you buy a book featuring reproductions of famous pieces of modern art (this post assumes you are cultured as heck), and you don't know or particularly care to know about the legal and financial wrangling that led to you being able to listen, watch, or buy. It doesn't add much to your enjoyment of music, art, whatever if you know all that, and there is a reason that legal dramas are never about copyright lawyers. The internet has increased this apathy, since you can pretty much find any cultural product ever made with a Google search, wether or not the person who created it is getting any coin from it being in the Tubes. As teachers, we can't really be apathetic about this, because ...

In case you were wondering: - I was born in 1990 - My favourite colour is purple - My favourite kind of pizza is Hawaiian  - I will most likely be either an English or a Science teacher, or in a nightmare scenario, both at once - I run a brand, have a band, and have my own photography magazine. I'm a Renaissance man without any talent - I can't wait to finally start my teaching career, both because I really enjoy the profession, and also because I'm old and really would like to have a real job, finally Thanks for reading, I'm sure you don't regret it.  -cg 

So I'm going to be a teacher. Maybe you are also going to be a teacher, or are already a teacher, or you gave up teaching and are reading this while sipping hot cocoa in a chalet in the French Alps after a day of skiing, in which case, good for you. Any of you would know that teaching is like trying to put a tornado in a cage. This blog aims to make sense of the whirling chaos of delivering curriculum, managing a classroom, dealing with workplace politics, and getting the kids to stop playing Fortnite for at least one measly hour and read a gosh-dang book.  Given the subject matter of the elective course under which this blog was created, expect a lot of posts about the Internet, and maybe a few "memes" because that's the only method of communication that exists now. cg