Journal Response 1: Canadian Social Studies

I am responding to John Fielding’s article ‘Engaging Students in Learning History’ from the journal of Canadian Social Studies.  Unlike most articles published in academic journals, Fielding uses his personal experiences in the classroom as the basis for his claim that students must be engaged with learning history.  More importantly, history teachers must inspire students’ historical imaginations through diverse teaching practices.

Having just survived my first placement, I can relate to a lot of the issues Fielding discusses in his article.  In English, teachers have to inspire students’ literary imaginations, a task that is far easier written than implemented and/or conducted successfully.  I appreciate Fielding’s honesty and use of personal testimony in this article.  It’s comforting to know that even experienced teachers suffer from the same difficulties as I had starting out, though likely their suffering is to a lesser degree.

I also appreciate Fielding’s list of lessons, exercises, and activities to engage students with the subject matter.  He has developed a lesson plan for every kind of student interaction, including exercises that are purely objective, factual, or knowledge-based as well as activities that force the student to relate history to their own life, to personalize, in a way, events that came before.  I think this article is a helpful resource for any teacher in the arts, but I appreciate the emphasis Fielding places on history.  In English, there is plenty of space for creativity and student input.  History includes a lot of fact.  Fielding manages to synthesize fact and fun within his article, creating activities that demand students’ learn the material but give them the ability to apply it in new and interesting ways. 

A Title and a Format for my ISP!

I have, after some deliberation, decided on a title for my Independent Study story.  Charles Angoff writes, "History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard.  It is a poem with events as verses."  I love the thought of history as some kind of sound that weaves its way through the ears of the present.  I imagine an orchestra of events playing themselves in a harmony neither perfect nor imperfect but always sublime.  My story shall therefore be titled A Great Symphony of Echoes, and barring the development of a better title, that will be the name on the project when it's submitted for grading.

Rather than post on a fiction or journal site, I've opted to keep all my projects for the class related and accessible through this username.  A Great Symphony of Echoes will therefore be another blog, and every post will be another chapter.  I will continue to update 'A Place in Time' with all my labs and responses, as well as reports of how my Independent Study project is progressing.  A Great Symphony of Echoes will strictly be my independent study project, and it will be submitted alongside this blog for grading at the end of the year.

I'm really looking forward to this project!

Independent Study

For my independent study, I will be composing a work of short fiction that is untitled as of yet.  I know that the story will follow a young Bachelor of Education student as she attempts to create a fantastic independent study project.  Out of ideas and stressed out of her mind, she sends a distress signal to all the great time travelers she can think of: the time traveller from H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Doctor Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, Arthur Dent from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Thankfully, the good Doctor from Doctor Who responds in time.  He takes her on a tour of Canadian history, starting with Confederation and ending back at the present.  Will the education student create an original, 3+++ achieving Independent Study?  I, for one, certainly hope so.

To save on paper, this independent study project will be updated over the internet on public forum of some kind.  More details will be posted closer to the due date.  

More Like White Otter LOG CABIN!

When you're twelve years old with delusions of grandeur, the word castle inspires a pretty opulent mental image for you.  My quintessential castle at age 12 was a vast stone structure with a whole mess of towers, parapets, and great halls.  It was like the Cinderella palace on steroids: bigger and more badass than Disney, filled with everything my eccentric girlish heart desired.

So when my father announced that we were going to see White Otter Castle, my mind was filled with similar images.  No, I was not deluded enough to believe that a castle in Canada could possibly be as epic as the one in my imagination, especially not one built in Northwestern Ontario.  Quite frankly, any castle owner would have deep enough pockets and good enough sense not to construct something greater than even Walt Disney's vision in a climate and ecosystem as cold and as harsh as ours.  Nevertheless, White Otter Castle had earned the name castle for some reason, and my twelve-year-old self constructed a mental picture that was modest enough to fit in Northwestern Ontario but awesome enough to still deserve the name 'Castle'.

Boy, was I an idiot.  Not only was White Otter Castle not a castle in the faintest sense of the term, it was also just barely a house.  White Otter Castle was really White Otter Glorified-Log-Cabin, and it had eaten away four hours of my life that I would have gladly spent anywhere else.  Even now, years later, I can think of a million things I would rather do than make that trip again.  Twelve-year-old Sarah would have gladly whiled away that four hours watching grass grow and seen something considerably more interesting than White Otter Log Cabin.  She would have volunteered to undergo one of those horrific devices from the Saw movies if it meant not having to see White Otter ever in her life.

It certainly didn't help that our trek to White Otter Underwhelming-Wooden-Structure occurred during our annual drive back to Southern Ontario.  Between the ages of too-young-to-remember and fifteen, my family - father, mother, older brother, two sisters, and dog - would make the twenty-odd hour drive from Orangeville to Fort Frances.  Packed in a black Ford Windstar with a maniac behind the wheel (my father would often do the drive in one very long stretch), it was a miracle we never tried to murder one another from being in such close quarters for such an interminably long time.  It was on the return trip that my dad decided we all needed to see White Otter.  It meant that we would have to stay overnight in Thunder Bay and face another whole day of driving, but being that my father is focused and driven enough to always have things go his way (and the fact that we were going to see a CASTLE!), we turned off highway 11 into Atikokan, rented a boat, and headed off in the direction of White Otter.  Four hours later, disillusioned to the core, I clamboured back into that God-awful van and prepared myself for another twenty-four hours of not being at home.

I'm sure there's plenty of reasons to appreciate White Otter My-Father-Lied-To-Me.  Apparently, there's quite the love story surrounding its construction, a tale of heartbreak and despair wherein the strapping young male is abandoned by his beloved after constructing her a beautiful home in the woods.  Having seen said beautiful home, I can honestly say I side with the beloved on this one.  There is nothing romantic about an unfurnished log cabin several hours away from civilization and only accessible by boat.  Here's hoping she found herself a nice city boy and they bought a beautiful condo together.

My sisters still make jokes about White Otter Log Cabin.  They insist that the trip was exciting, and they'd love to go back the next time they get the chance.  Ah, the follies of youth.  Clearly they don't remember the heavily graffitied walls of one man's exercise in desperation, the lackluster exterior of a structure unworthy of the name 'castle', and the prospect of spending another full day in the vehicle on top of having all their dreams of castles destroyed.

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.