Put That Cookie Down!

Ages ago, my father and I drove through a good chunk of the northern United States, from Maine to North Dakota, on our way back from Prince Edward Island, where I'd been living for a few years. One thing about that trip that stuck with me is just how much denser the population is on the East Coast than it is here, even in supposed backwaters like Maine or rural Pennsylvania. We visited a friend of mine who lives in the latter, and her town is within a few hours drive of New York City, smack dab in the Poconos, a vacation spot for the denizens of the megalopolis that want to get away from the hustle for awhile.  Unlike somebody from Winnipeg taking off to a pristine and lonely lake up in the Shield, however, the Poconos are not really all that pristine, or lonely. There are towns everywhere, and settlements are never more than a short drive away from each other. Even surrounded by the rugged, forested Allegheny Plateau, there is a sense of being packed in, of constant proximi...

"Move fast and break things" is the guiding principle behind a lot of the business concerns that now run our society. Basically, it means to not think about the consequences of what you're doing and clean up any mess later. This is, of course, stupid. Automation has lead to the loss of millions of jobs (way more than outsourcing) and, with self-driving cars right around the corner, the impending loss of millions more, millions more angry, unemployed middle-class workers of the ilk that voted for a certain orange hambeast two years ago. Not to mention the negative impacts the big tech giants have had on privacy, journalism, and information control. As teachers, the generation we will soon be instructing will, likely, have far less jobs and a far more uncertain future. As automation and social-technological changes eat away at what built our prosperous 20th Century, what exactly will we be teaching them for? I leave that question to you. I've found a video of auto...

Look, people are busy. Most people don't have the time to read through a bunch of data and figure out what they mean. But data are also important to understand, because the problems facing our society (economic struggles, environmental degradation, climate change) as a whole are complicated issues that have, at their core, hard numbers. Luckily, there is a solution to this issue: I N F O  G R A P H I C S Yes, infographics, that stalwart feature of middle-of-the-road newspaper giant  USA Today  and its many imitators. Nothing helps hard data like a snazzy, slick, colourful infographic that neatly summarizes whatever the numbers are saying, from how crime rates are changing over time to the ever-accelerating number of extinctions. In the classroom, they can de-abstract difficult relationships and serve as creative ways for students to express their own data. They're versatile, too. You can make an infographic out of pretty well anything if you set your mind to it. Of ...

You know, up until a few years ago, I really, really hated math, well, at least, doing math. Well, it wasn't exactly hate. It was more frustration that I couldn't get it. From having panic attacks over long division in Grade 4 (poor Mrs. Chudley did her best), to trying really hard in Linear Algebra and still only getting a C, doing math beyond the basics always felt like a futile effort. To quote a classic Bowie song, I was always crashing in the same car, so the prospect of maybe having to teach math someday was terrifying. The students would figure out I don't know what I'm talking about and probably laugh me out of the building. The stuff of nightmares, really. Well, over the last little bit, things have changed. Turns out I actually like teaching math, quite a bit in fact. The switch flipped when I had to teach an adult math course at my summer job. I had to school myself in a few things I was weak in (I can finally do long division!), but overall it was a good...

Before my dad retired, he frequently had to drive hither and yon around the province to various meetings. Not only would his employer (Hydro) have to compensate him for his time, gas, food, and lodgings, but these commutes were, in their own small way, contributing to this climate change thing you might have been hearing about. Why, I thought, wouldn't they just get him to teleconference? Even just going to Winnipeg and back is four hours of driving, four hours of not being able to do anything productive. I've kind of changed my mind, however. While teleconferencing is all well and good, it really is kind of annoying, for a few reasons. For one, there is always that slight little delay between when you speak and when somebody else hears you. It doesn't matter how good your connection speed is, that delay will always be there. It really throws off the natural rhythms of speech. Speaking (durr hurr) the of rhythms of speech, how many times have you and somebody else i...

I don't know how old you are, but chances are you've seen a lot of "sure" things change. The Soviet Union still existed when I was born, but the West's eternal enemy was, a scant 18 months later, as dead as the dodo. Ah, but things never really change, you might say. Ask a teenager who the West's greatest enemy is and, depending on what news they watch, they'll probably say Russia, won't they? If you ask me, and by reading this blog you sort of implicitly did, young people haven't changed all that much either, at least since they took more control over our culture in the middle of the last century. For all the pearl-clutching worry about how technology is changing our precious youth, making them dumber, more vapid, lazier, on and on...well, it isn't. It's just changing how they express what youth have always been. It's amplifying it, really. Young people have always craved connection and belonging, craved growth, had fluid identit...

Well, we had another guest speaker in this week, one Tyler Letkeman of Vincent Massey High School English teacher fame. Overall, his message was this: use technology well and you'll see benefits. Probably the one thing he showed us that I liked the most was Blurb, a self-publishing website. I've used Blurb before, and it's a great way to students' work into a professional-looking publication. The shipping charges are murder, though, so I dunno if VMHS has deep pockets for that or what. One thing I'm a bit hesitant about is the use of memes in the classroom. Memes are interesting because they distill ideas down to an easily digested and easily spread form, but they also lack nuance and tend to oversimplify those ideas at the same time. Still, they are a way for students to express themselves, and we can't really be too opposed to that without turning into the teachers from Pink Floyd's The Wall . Anyways, my question to you is: how do we bridge the cu...