Teacher Pt. 3

The strangest thing happened yesterday when I walked into Sir Winston Churchill School: I felt like I was exactly where I was supposed to be at that point in time.  It was like all the forces in the universe had aligned and just brought me there into that noisy, chaotic moment, where, surrounded by hallways far narrower than university corridors, students far younger than I ever wanted to teach, and lockers speckled in graffiti and slurs, I felt like I belonged.  I was greeting Junior High School like I would an old friend, with a deep seated sense of familiarity and the realization that yes, I had in fact missed this.

Or maybe that was the adrenaline talking.  I have the tendency to romanticize moments of extreme mental and emotional duress.  It's a defence mechanism, really: if I convince myself that an event where the variables and outcomes are unknown is familiar, welcoming, and intended for me, I don't have to face the fact that I'm standing on the brink of catastrophe, one slight provocation away from running for the border and never coming back.

Defence mechanism or not though, yesterday was the greatest experience I've had as a teacher candidate so far.  Over 60 students - two grade 7 classes - had gathered into the central hub of the school at four cafeteria-style tables.  Unlike the previous team teaching sessions, my group was working alongside a second group to fulfill the third and final portion of our grade for this assignment.  We had a bit of a different method this time; we had to.  There wasn't enough time in the period to have monologues or presentations, nor did we feel our audience had the attention span to last through eleven presentations, some of them doubles of other presentations.  The result was a compromise: my group had an activity we'd been planning for weeks, one that we felt could be implemented at the beginning of the period and used at the end to bring the group back together for some debriefing and review.  That activity was geo-tiling, the not-extreme kind.  Call me crazy, but I didn't think bear, mountain lions, poisonous snakes and European heavy metal were appropriate for a grade seven activity.  Maybe for a high school class.

We divided the students into eight groups - one for each of the expert groups.  Since we had one double, one group had two representatives.  That left two of us - Janelle and I - to distribute the geo-tiles to groups, collect them, and assemble the geo-tile at the end of the period.  Walking around, I couldn't help but feel a little jealous of my other group members.  There was so much energy in the room, I would have loved to have a group of my own to teach.  Being a sort of liaison was nice though.  I got to see how all the groups were operating, to carry out some executive decision making on behalf of the representatives, and do my best to support everyone and keep the morning moving smoothly.  When the time finally came to assemble the geo-tile, I was very excited to present it to the classes, because geo-tiles look spectacular, even more so when everyone has contributed to the finished product.

The geo-tiles went over really well with the classes, and the teachers seemed impressed with the way the period had gone.  As one of the geo-tilers, I don't feel confident grading the students in any way, because I didn't work with them closely enough to observe their learning styles.  I can say that the environment and the classes were an absolute joy to work with, and that I have seriously reconsidered my staunch stance on what grade I would like to teach when I graduate from the program.  There was so much energy, so much excitement, in that school that I am more than a little overwhelmed by it all.  I'm glad that this was our last team teaching; everything after this experience would have been anti-climax.  

EXTREME GEOTILING!!!!!!

(Ahem...even though I think this is self-evident, I just thought I should preface this post with a disclaimer:  under no circumstances am I endorsing any of the actions I outline here.  This post is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.  I am being facetious.  Don't try any of this at home.)

For this blog post, I could explain the process of geotiling.

Geotiling: the arrangement of paper squares into a spherical shape. 

But because geotiling itself is a bit of a blase process, one that can't really be represented well in text, I decided to mix this post - and the whole geotiling experience - up a little and describe...

Extreme Geotiling:  making a big, colourful ball out of squares cut out of card paper!  Infinitely more fun than regular geotiling!  BOO YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Step 1:  Find a space!  Make a space!
You can't just geotile in your bedroom.  Bedrooms are not extreme. Lure like...a bear or a cougar into your room.  Bears and cougars are extreme!

Polar bears are especially vicious.

Step 2:  Pick your music!
If it was written and produced before the 90s by someone other than Paul McCartney, you're probably on the right track.  If it was written in Eastern Europe or Russia, it's even better!  Heavy metal is infinitely more extreme when there's screaming in a foreign language!

Step 3:  Turn up the music!
If it's too loud, it's not loud enough.

Step 4:  Get your supplies!
Get some coloured card paper with squares drawn on them, and then cover those papers with extreme doodles and extreme colours and maybe firecrackers or something.

 Step 5:  Cut out the squares!
With a sword!

Make sure you cut the slits completely and accurately.

Step 6:  Choose the centre piece!
There's no extreme way to do this.  Oh, no, wait - there is: put one of each of the coloured squares into a tank with a poisonous snake, and reach your hand in to draw one out at random.

The Black Mamba is one of the most poisonous snakes in the world.

Step 7:  Make the first triangle!
Pick two other colours using the same extreme method described above.  Do not try to use the poisonous snake.  Attach the squares using the slits along each corner.  Slide the longer slits into the shorter slits.  Head bang while you do this and scream...a lot.

When you're finished, you should have something that looks like this except, you know, more extreme:

Step 8:  Make a pentagon!
Grab the other two colours and fit them to the other two pieces you just attached.  The result will be a pentagon shape.

Take a break now to go and apologize to your neighbours for the noise.  Just because you're being extreme, doesn't mean you can't be courteous.

Step 9:  START BUILDING!
Remember not to let two of the same colours touch.  The starting pentagon will allow you to map out your next move.

Dance break!  Jump around a little bit!  Yell at the top of your lungs!  Recite Samuel L. Jackson's monologue from Pulp Fiction!

Step 10:  MAKE MORE PENTAGONS!
The pentagon pattern will allow you to keep your geotile organized!

Step 11:  REPEAT THE STEPS ONE MORE TIME!
And connect the last square to the top of the sphere!  DUDE!  IT'S A BALL MADE OUT OF SQUARES!

Step 12:  Take a lot of photos with the geotiling assignment!

(For regular geotiling, just do exactly as I've outlined here without any wild animals or loud music.)

Teaching Pt. 2

(Subtitle: Hot Curlers - A Cautionary Tale)

After reading the responses from other teaching groups, I must admit I was terrified about this week's assignment.  Getting a grade 8 class interested in history seemed like a daunting task at the outset of the semester; finding testimonials detailing students' complete disengagement with the material or unabashedly rude behaviour made a class about Confederation seem utterly impossible.  I didn't know how to react to any of the behaviours I had heard about.  To use an old metaphor, how was I supposed to get horses to drink when they didn't even want to go near water?

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the school though.  It was a setting so far removed from the high school we visited last week: noisier, more chaotic, and more exuberant.  Maybe it was the fact that we arrived just before recess.  I don't know.  Either way, the school was a flurry of activity, and I found myself get caught up in it.  What had seemed like such an impossible task before didn't seem to scary facing a hallway of students ready for recess.  Actually, it seemed like a lot of fun.

Once again, I had a great time being in front of students and delivering my monologue.  I think the costume helped - a friend of mine was good enough to lend me a period dress for the occasion, one I paired with appropriately subdued make-up and curled hair, because all late-19th century women wear subdued make-up with curled hair in my imagination.

(A short digression here, if I may, about hair curling: over the years, I've become a bit of a curl connoisseur.  Calling my hair flat is an understatement of epic proportions.  It falls at inverted obtuse angles over my head, and there is nothing - NOTHING - I can do about it, least of all when it's long, because longer hair is even less likely to hold a particular style.  Now, having a very good curling iron has solved this problem, but curling hair with an iron on one's own is an arduous task.  My hair is shoulder length, and it's still a half-an-hour endeavour, sometimes more.  I knew I wanted to wear my hair in curls for teaching though, so I borrowed a set of hot curlers from my mother's house and didn't test them first.  This proved to be a very stupid idea.  I didn't have enough curlers to cover my whole head, and the curlers weren't hot enough to actually curl my hair, so in the end, I wasted a half-an-hour putting the curlers in and then spent another twenty minutes with my curling iron correcting all my mistakes.  Worse, the curls were gone in less than half a day, and I missed breakfast.)

Ahem - back to teaching:

My activity was a little more successful this time around as well.  I offered the students in my group a scenario to illustrate just how many people were forgotten by Confederation: imagine that Los Angeles, California was going to confederate and become its own, independent nation.  Who would be present at the signing of Confederation?  I offered them thirty pictures of pop culture icons like Justin Bieber and the cast of Twilight and asked them to pick 18 representatives.  When they had done that, I asked them to pretend that L.A. was confederating in 1867. Who wouldn't be a part of Confederation anymore?  They knocked off their politicians one by one based on the criteria I gave them: no non-British subjects saw that the cast of The Jersey Shore was dismissed; no Native peoples got Jacob Black and the Quileute tribe dismissed; and without women, Lady Gaga and Megan Fox had to go, leaving them with only 6 representatives left of their original 18.  These six included George Clooney and Justin Bieber, but I later told them that Justin Bieber was too young to participate anyways and got rid of him.  Cheers of joy from the boys in the group and groans of lamentation from the girls ensued.

Part of the difficulty about picking activities for these teaching exercises has been finding a proper balance between education and entertainment; this week, I definitely strayed too far into the latter.  The activity went by so quickly that I didn't debrief my students as well as I would have liked.  We found ourselves talking about a lot of topics completely unrelated to Confederation.  Also, one of the girls in my group had little to no knowledge of popular culture, meaning that she was largely unable to participate.  For my final teaching activity, I'm going to have to think of something that borrows from popular culture but allows the students to focus on the topic of the teaching presentation.  This isn't to say that the students didn't learn anything; I found that they had picked up on a lot of different material, they understood the purpose of the exercise, and they had a lot of fun doing it.  However, it's clear that I'm still learning how to engage my students with the information, and I'm confident that my next activity will strike the proper chord between education and entertainment.

I do think that I was successful in other areas though.  I made a special point of talking to the shier members of the group, particularly the girl who couldn't engage with the pop culture icons, and I got her talking about her interests which also got her to become more involved with the overall discussion.  Also, my group showed a lot of knowledge about Confederation that they picked up from both my activity and the other monologues, proving that they were paying attention and that my activity had, perhaps, not been such a bust.

Overall, I would give this group a solid three: they were talkative and excited, even if it wasn't about the subject matter, showed a lot of knowledge about Confederation, and they participated in the activity and the presentation of the activity with a fair degree of success.

A Walk Through Riverside

Riverside Cemetery brochure exterior.

Riverside Cemetery Brochure interior

Bob Dylan sings, "The times they are a changin'," and I suppose he's correct, to a certain extent.  He is Bob Dylan.  However, the walk through Riverside Cemetery last week proved that, while Dylan might be right, the times are a changin', some things, no matter how offensive and wrong, still stay the same.  Exactly the same.

I was thinking of this while standing next to the grave of the so-called first female mayor in Canada, Eunace Knight Wishart .  Despite her dedication to politics and her emphasis on 'the Issues', Wishart is remembered mostly by the flamboyantly exuberant hats she wore in public; in other words, her fashion sense.

A hat Eunice might have worn had she been alive today.  (Lady Gaga)

 Gender theorists, critics, fledgling feminists, and intuitive teenagers will tell you that identifying a woman in terms of supposedly feminine traits is trend throughout history.  Politics was a man's business, because men were more rational, more serious, and capable of making the hard decisions.  Politics was a masculine career choice.  Because femininity is defined in opposition to masculinity, it can be assumed and documented that women's business was domestic.  Women's business was always related to frivolous senitimentality, because women were thought to be of the emotional, fragile, fairer sex.  Hence, women who entered a man's world, if they were granted entrance to a man's world, had to compensate for her position.  She had to reaffirm her feminity.  The media would therefore focus on the way she performed feminity: was her platform maternal or caring in any way?  Was she driven to tears by the stresses of the board room?  What was she wearing?

These are not just historical conclusions though.  Women are still judged along similar gender lines in present day if they have managed to penetrate the so-called man's world.  Hillary Clinton was criticized during the previous election for being ugly and shrewish, because she wasn't performing gender norms by behaving like a softspoken coquette or a misinformed punchline to a political joke not worth asking like Sara Palin, whose emphasis on family and fashion made her a much more likeable candidate.  Politics are not the only realm permeated by sexism.  When complimenting a mother on her infant son, people will use terms like 'strong', 'big', 'handsome', terms that denote the physical prowess and strength to face the harshness of the world.  Infant girls are complimented with softer, gentler terms like 'pretty', 'small', fragile', terms that denote a frailness unfit for the evils of the world and deserving of protection.  Role models are are indicative of this gender divide: boys are offered superheroes with both brains and brawn, while girls are targetted by materialistic and artistic pacifists.

 Another gendered moment came at the grave of Mary Riter Hamilton.  Even though her grave dubs her a battlefield artist, Hamilton was actually forbidden to pursue such a profession because of her sex.  Undeterred by this, she honed her skills in France and was eventually awarded a grant to paint battle scenes during WWII.  She was dubbed retrospectively by the generous donors of Thunder Bay who ensured that her grave was properly marked.  Her artwork was controversial, not in the least because she was a woman.  The portrait she donated to the city of Thunder Bay was hidden away for a number of years because it was deemed to vulgar for public viewing.  At first, I thought the portrait was of a grisly battle scene or a mass grave, something that could have inspired the current Saw franchise.  I was disappointed to find that her banned portrait is of a woman nursing a child.

Just as Wishart was associated with fashion during her political campaign, breastfeeding remains a target for social stigma.  Two years ago, a woman was forced to nurse her child in the change rooms of a Vancouver clothing store, because she was apparently disturbing the other customers.  In retaliation, a group of mothers in the community rallied together and had a 'nurse-in', where they all went to the store and nursed their children.  A similar protest was staged in Vermont outside Delta Airlines when a nursing mother and her family were removed from a plane.  At first, I must admit I shared in this stigma, but when I gave it some serious thought, I realized that this stigma is oppressive and denigrating to mothers.  It seeks to vulgarize and ostracize a perfectly natural act between mother and child and conforms to archaic beliefs about the female body needing to be hidden, protected, and enclosed.  I'm looking forward to getting a photograph of Hamilton's portrait during the tour of Thunder Bay next semester.

And so, with all due respect, Mr. Dylan, the times might be a-changin', but in some ways, they're a-staying the same.

An Annotated Personal History of Death and Cemeteries

Before I write anything about the walking tour of Riverside Cemetery, I thought I would offer some interesting, not-wholly-unimportant context about myself and cemeteries:

 

Unknown Date: Visited cemetery for the first time.  Experience not memorable.  At all.  

Sometime(s) During Childhood-Early Adolescence:  Frequent summer play dates at Lion’s Park in Fort Frances, ON.  Park situated right next to a cemetery.  

December 1998: Paternal Grandmother passes away.  Casket is open until the service starts.  Mom assures us that we can touch Gran, but she will be cold.  Poke Gran on the wrist when I see her: she is cold.  Arrive at the cemetery for the burial.  Gran does not have a headstone.  Disillusionment ensues.  In the movies, there’s always a headstone.  Begin to realize that Hollywood might be lying to me.  Am v. sad.  

Early 1999:  Great-Uncle dies.  Did not attend the funeral.  Heard it was beautiful.  

2002: Hide and Seek in the cemetery with at-the-time best friend, Dana.  Rules – 1 person hides amongst the headstones; 1 person rides a bike on the road and seeks.  First time I set foot on top of a grave.  Have always been afraid to do so until then.  Still feel uneasy whenever I pass over a corpse. 

2002: Dana proposes a sleepover in a cemetery.  Never happens. 

2003: Receive driver’s license.  Frequent drives in cemeteries with friends.  Listen to too much Avril Lavigne during this time.  Also introduced to Japanese Rap by long-time friend Amanda.  Never allow Amanda to pick the driving music again. 

Spring 2005:  Explore the forest around the cemetery with friends.  Find a small grave marked ‘Tiffany Rose’.  General consensus – baby grave.  Develop extensive fiction explaining why the grave is separated and largely unmarked.  Feel like Nancy Drew.

Summer 2005: Taken to founder of Orangeville’s grave by Dad.  Am decidedly less enthused than he is about the experience.  

Summer 2007: Drive around graveyard in the West End of Fort Frances with sister.  Find a family of deer living nearby.  Listen to better music.  

2008: Show baby grave to Dad.  Find it surrounded by other small graves.  Am informed by Dad that it’s a pet cemetery, not a baby cemetery.  Am disillusioned yet again.  Decide to no longer show my Dad things.  

Summer 2010: Drive around cemeteries frequently with Dad.  See headstones of VC winners, including Billy Bishop, and a lot of Mason graves.  Am decidedly less enthused than Dad is about the Mason graves.   

Teaching Pt. 1

A friend once asked me why I wanted to become a teacher.  I replied jokingly, "I love the sound of my own voice."  This statement isn't entirely true: I don't love the sound of my own voice.  I find it fluctuates all too freely between my nose and my throat depending on who I'm speaking to and what I interpret their body language to be communicating.  More importantly, when I speak pubicly, I tend to lose track of what I'm saying because I don't want to think about the fact that I'm public speaking.  My mind would much rather wander while my mouth rambles on and on and on.  But I do love to ramble, I do love to speak, and no matter how nervous I get or how far my mind wanders, there's not place I'd rather be than at the front of a room with all eyes on me as I explain something that I just learned, because knowledge, to put is bluntly, is awesome.

Needless to say, I had an absolute blast today.  The assignment?  Present a short monologue to a history class (today's was a grade 10 applied class) about a single facet of a whole unit (for instance: a particular country's involvement in World War I), and then, with a small group of three or four, engage in an activity that the group will then present to the class along with everything they learned.  As a representative for France, I originally planned to perform a mock French accent.  Unfortunately, I could never maintain my faux-French accent during practice.  It always deteriorated into some wild variation of Russian and German, neither of which sound anything like French.  I'll have to practice more for my next presentation when I play a Bishop of New France.  My accent didn't matter though.  The second I stepped out in front of the class and my initial bout of nervousness subsided, I was completely in my element.  I spoke loudly, animatedly, and excitedly, at ease with the 24 sets of eyes that were watching me, 26 if you include the teacher and her EA.  I think I was a little too enthusiastic in my approach though.  The class was actually intimidated into silence at one point.  Reigning myself in, I managed to deliver a semi-coherent explanation as to why France entered the war.

I was going to write extensively about how my activity failed.  Apparently, my brain stuck around to help deliver my monologue, but then it ran for the hills the second I needed to give my group instructions.  Another mistake I made: allowing the students to pick groups for themselves.  Next time, I'll be sure that the group numbers students off or imposes groups so that we don't run into any problems.  But otherwise, I think this week's teaching exercise was a big success: my group and I ended up talking about pictures of post-War France, German political cartoons, grandparents' war stories, and violence in war movies.  That conversation generated more knowledge than my activity could have done had it been successful.  The students learned a little about World War I and a lot more about World War II, which was the war they were more interested in.  They learned about Germany's economy and France's devastation post-World War I.

I learned more than I have in any class I've taken at teacher's college so far: when in an unfamiliar teaching environment, let the students talk first.  They'll tell you (in so many or so little words) what they want to learn and how they want to learn it.  Seek first to understand and then to be understood, as the old saying goes.  The students seemed much more at ease when it didn't seem like I was evaluating them, and I got a lot more participation by allowing them to direct the focus of our study with only occasional hints as to what we should discuss next.  The primary source documents I brought were also a huge help.  Mental note to me: no one wants to listen to an adult ramble.  They want to see cool pictures of a decimated French country side and German political cartoons.  Thank goodness I made the last minute decision to print those off.  They said more than anything I possibly could have, and they said it better.

Ultimately, I think that my group sits at a low Level 3 or a high Level 2.  They were clearly listening and attentive, and were able to recite several key points of the lesson.

I can't wait to do this again in two weeks.

Geocaching in Centennial Park (The Successful Attempt)

Saturday was the second time in two weeks I've been to Centennial Park; that's the most I've ever been to Centennial Park in any of the years I've been away in school.  Five years ago, when I started on this whole 'higher education' thing, neither I nor any of my friends had a car, so getting there was a little bit of a problem.  Centennial Park, for those who don't know, rests at the north end of Thunder Bay by Boulevard Lake just off the highway.  It's a beautiful area even if the weather's terrible: tons of trails, miles of forest, and, if you walk far enough, a series of small waterfalls called the Cascades.

View from the bridge at the entrance to Centennial Park.

The logging camp at Centennial Park.

We didn't make it that far though.  Not on Saturday.  Saturday, we - five of us - tackled the latest in a growing list of history labs: geocaching in Centennial Park.  It was the same reason I was there with J.P. a week ago, except that last week, we was brutally, monumentally, unbelievably unsuccessful with the whole endeavour.  We were using J.P.'s Blackberry as a GPS, which meant that we couldn't punch in coordinates, only check our current coordinates.  Having taken a full day course in orienteering, I figured I could manage in spite of our technological deficiencies.  Of course, I'd taken this full day course at age 13, and I've since forgotten much of what I've learned for the sake of other, more important information...and random, useless trivia.  On our first trek, J.P. and I ended up at the highway, where we stood for a while, thinking about what to try next because, clearly, walking blindly into the forest was not working.  We ended up backtracking, reading and rereading the instructions, and following the train tracks around in a full circle before we finally gave up.  We grabbed some coffee and took a quick walk to Hillcrest Park with another friend of ours to diffuse from the failure of the day.

This weekend, we decided, was going to be different.  We weren't going to leave Centennial until we found the geocache, even if it killed us.  J.P. and I rallied together some friends and headed out at one to wander, equipped this time with what we hoped was a better GPS device than the Blackberry.  We weren't disappointed at first: the second GPS was better than the Blackberry.  Unfortunately, none of us knew how to follow the coordinates without getting more and more lost.  Worse, the GPS was set to French as the owner, my friend, is French-Canadian, so only she and her brother were able to understand what was written on screen.  Again, we abandoned the GPS, because it wasn't helpful, and we stuck to wandering aimlessly up and down the railroad tracks, again, following the directions on our instruction sheet.  Some former students had assured us the geocache was close to the logging camp, so we thought it wouldn't be difficult to find. But just like last week, we were stumped, and unlike last week, we were on a schedule: my friend with the GPS had to get back into the city for work. 

With only a half an hour before we had to leave, J.P. and I finally started to call in reinforcements.  I texted an old friend and current colleague, affectionately called Dr. Devine, who survived the education program last year and completed the assignment.  Devine was good enough to come to Centennial with a friend of his, one who had also found the geocache, and show us the way.  Apparently, the geocache was exactly where the instructions said it would be: by the logging camp, along the tracks, in a chopped tree.  I think the whole park could hear our declarations of joy at the moment.  We were pretty frustrated by the time we were finally showed where it was.  J.P. even ended up kissing the jar, he was so happy.

The geocache!

J.P. kisses the cache. 

Dr. Devine approves of our finding the cache.

I realize that this isn't exactly the account most people are going to post.  Technically, J.P. and I did get help on our assignment.  But I don't think the reward of geocaching is the actual finding of the geocache.  Like some many other things in life, geocaching is about the process.  It's about action verbs like walking, wandering, searching, and exploring.  When we tell this story, like I've done here, we'll talk about the frustration of failing and the joy of succeeding; we'll talk about all the wrong turns we made, all the extra steps we had to take.  It was those steps that made it memorable.


Geocaching, I've also noticed, is about being a part of something: a group of friends, a classroom, a community.  The fact that there was a group of us together made the hours pass by in a sunlit blur, and it made the process of finding that much more fun, because we knew there was going to be a celebration at the end of it all.  This is definitely the sort of exercise I'd like to repeat with the same group.  I would like a functioning GPS though...or some orienteering skills.

In the Beginning...

...there was an education student with a mandatory curriculum and instruction in history course.  The result of this was a strange idea for a project: a blog featuring responses to assignments, field trips, and historical sites.  I will post at least one picture with every post of the location or the activity and provide a brief synopsis of each.  I hope that this blog can contribute in some way to my final, independent study for the class, and that some readers might enjoy my rambling diatribes about geocaching, cemetery walks, old buildings, and gorging myself on pancakes at the Hoito.

Everything for the sake of history.