Being a Gadfly or Just a Bitch

Or perhaps we should be casual observers watching the end without comment. Hmmm....

A few years ago, a friend with a similar house as mine in a similar neighbourhood complimented my laundry line, but bemoaned the fact that it wouldn't be possible for her to have one. As I provided ample rebuttal to each point of opposition that started with "I'd would, but", she eventually stopped me with, "I'd would, but I just don't care enough about it. I wish I wanted to more, but reducing electrical demand is not a priority for me."

We need to get to a point where people make it a priority, where people are shocked into action.  Hailstorms in Mexico might be a start. But some of my travel-loving friends, and one of my own kids, still have no intention of slowing down despite further evidence that air travel is even worse for the environment than we thought. Denial in the form of "I'll just drive a little less to compensate for a couple air trips each year," isn't going away fast enough. Or, more recently and disturbingly, a friend's solution: "Travel more and have lots of kids and grandkids and enjoy life, and then we can all just take suicide pills when it gets too dark out there." Her only concern with her plan, if I'm remembering correctly, was if her kids died before administering doses to their children, leaving the little ones behind. Yikes.

Bigotry and Violence in K-W

I stayed in the small town I was born in, and it got big around me. Like parents of young kids, who fall into the trap of continuing to see them as they were so many years ago, I still think of K-W as a really safe, little city. But now we have bigger buildings, and faster transportation, and violence. Gun violence even!

The latest stats show that police reported hate crimes here have decreased a bit since last year, down to 6.7 per capita, on par with London, Toronto and Montréal, a bit more than Calgary, a bit less than Guelph, Thunder Bay, and Ottawa, but WAY less than Hamilton at 17.1. But it's possible that people are just on it more in Hamilton, reporting every little thing in order to keep the city safe. It's hard to say. Regardless, it feels worse now than it used to. It doesn't feel safe to be out on certain streets at certain times.

Yesterday there was a rally held to protest the "bullying" of an anti-LGBTQ protester who was charged with assault with a weapon after beating people with a helmet a month ago.

Cancer and Lymphedema: Two Year Update

In the span of one year, from August 2016 to July 2017, I was told I had three tumours in my left breast which led to three surgeries, which provoked lymphedema, and my dad died, and both my adult kids moved back home in the winter, one at the end of a five-year relationship, the other because of a profound mental breakdown that kept him in his room for months afterwards, possibly exacerbated by a family trip I insisted he attend and will forever regret. Both of them were far too forlorn to be able to help with snow shovelling or kitty litter or dishes. They were there for comforting, not to comfort.

I soldiered on through it all, tending to the housework and taking minimal time off work. After the first surgery, I was berated by an administrator, in front of my class, for the inadequate midterm report comments left by the LTO who replaced me, so I was back in the classroom after two days following the next surgery. Getting told was just one too many things to tolerate on top of everything else. Being considered incompetent after leaving copious notes and coming back early felt like an undeserved cruelty I couldn't adequately handle at the time.

Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Or maybe we'd recognize Nietzsche's last man as ourselves:

"Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfulest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth! . . . The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest. 'We have discovered happiness'—say the last men, and blink thereby. . . . With the creators, the reapers, and the rejoicers will I associate: the rainbow will I show them, and all the stairs to the Superman. . . . What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."

Nietzsche's last men are contemptible because they aren't really alive. They have their basic needs met, but there's no spark in them, no spirit. They're merely content to exist with conveniences they had no part in creating. They need to be awakened from this sleepwalking! 

That's a nutshell version of what I heard from Jenny Odell's lovely and compelling read, How to Do Nothing (but with a lot less Nietzsche in it).

Eleanor Oliphant? Not So Fine

I rarely read fiction, so maybe just ignore this rant. I know little about this kind of thing, but it might get me writing again after a dry spell, and it's at least a distraction from the world at large. Tra la la.

I was recommended this book, and it's being optioned by Reese Witherspoon. I loved Wild, so I thought this might be worth the Kindle edition at least. I was horribly mistaken.

Many spoilers below in my top six reasons why I really hate this book: 

Real World Curriculum

Almost two years ago, in July of 2017, I crafted a "Real World" curriculum. It must have rained or been outrageously hot for a few days in a row for me to have put this all down. It was sparked by ongoing conversations with students of two types (the conversations, not the students).

Many grade 12s regularly complained that they didn't learn anything useful in all their years of schooling. They're about to move out of their homes, and they have no idea how to do anything required for basic survival. They're terrified and unprepared for the next stage in their lives. The other line of discussion is more varied, but it includes the many little things students haven't picked up over the years, like the existence of the residential school system in Canada or what makes a stupid argument verifiably unreasonable or not understanding the implications of their view that all taxes should be abolished or having no idea of the components of a basic sentence or how the legal system works in their own country. We don't let students graduate without basic literacy and numeracy skills, but I also wonder if we should delay graduation for basic knowledge and life skills.

So I started with a list of things they didn't know and skills they didn't have, and expanded it into a curriculum proposal.

Then I did nothing with it because the whole thing is ridiculous and nothing will every change. We're all about maths and sciences and technology. What else matters?

But things are changing - mainly for worse, but some for the better. A recent article about one school teaching life skills - "adulting classes" - has provoked some interesting staff discussions.

So here's my lengthy and unwieldy proposal from a couple year back. It involves one course each year replacing a few other courses, but it could easily replace that horrible mandatory online course idea!

McKibben is Banking on Protests

Bill McKibben in The Guardian:

"Luckily, we have two relatively new inventions that could prove decisive to solving global warming before it destroys the planet. One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement. . . . Before we can best employ these technologies, we need to address the two most insidious ideas deployed in defence of the status quo. The first is that there is no need for mass resistance because each of us should choose for ourselves the future we want. The second is that there is no possibility of resistance because the die is already cast. . . . The reason we don’t have a solution to climate change has less to do with the greed of the great, unengineered unwashed than with the greed of the almost unbelievably small percentage of people at the top of the energy heap. That is to say, the Koch brothers and the Exxon execs . . . Let’s operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. That we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things." 

I have a commenter who thinks it unconscionable for me to provoke students to skip school to protest. Anon (of course) thinks protesting is a matter of privilege because only the wealthy can get tutors to catch up on the work they missed in that one afternoon each month. I responded that tutors aren't really necessary, and later was reminded of all the times parents take their kids out of school to go on vacation for a week or two, and all the time they miss for sports or to rehearse for the school play or to look at what happens at our local waste facilities or how a cow is milked. All those are important things, and none require paying for a tutor to catch up.

BUT none of those, seriously, are as important as slowing climate change and saving many species from mass extinction, including our own.


ETA: It's not like Trudeau is standing up to big oil, but here's this anyway:

Can We Change by 2030?

The timeline of 12 years has stuck to the point that we're continuing to say it after the first year has passed. We have until 2030, which is 11 years from now. This BBC doc says we can do it!




We've done amazing things, and we have to treat our current crisis as if it's an alien invasion. The entire world has to band together to overhaul any outdated (i.e. dinosaur-dependent) infrastructure, transportation systems, agriculture, and general production methods. We also have to just stop buying crap we don't absolutely need and stop going places for our entertainment like the entitled monkeys we are.

It's the top earners who have the biggest impact: David Wallace-Wells wrote, "If the world's richest 10 percent were limited to that [European] footprint, global emissions would fall by a third." The top 10% globally includes anyone making over $70,000 in Canadian dollars. According to this site: "A $70,000 income in Canada has enough buying power to put you in the 90th percentile globally for per-person income. Within Canada, your income falls around the 50th percentile." That means almost 20 million Canadians need to go on a GHG diet.

Absolutely we have to change policies and politicians. But, at this point, it's a both/and proposition. I don't know about you, but I have significantly more immediate and certain control over my own behaviours than over the type of government that gets into power. I can also protest the shit out of them, though!

For Earth Day, write a letter to your MP, MPP, Mayor, and city councillor begging them to make this their top priority. Here's a poem for inspiration:

To have an impact on GHGs,
ditch dryers, A/C, and food to freeze.
We have to reduce cars, planes, and meat,
then put on a sweater and turn down the heat.
Basically, anything that burps, heats, or cools
uses a ton of fossil fuels.
Reducing consumption of our unnecessities
can also remedy future generations' obscenities.
But electricity from the tides, wind, and sun
allows us to keep having lots of fun!

Life After Warming

David Wallace-Wells's book The Uninhabitable Earth starts out with a repetition of facts that won't be news to anyone paying attention, but he has a lovely way with words.

Four of the last five extinctions were from greenhouse gases, and now we're adding carbon to the atmosphere 100 times faster than at any other time, and "guilt saturates the planet's air as much as carbon, though we choose to believe we do not breathe it" (5). In the last 40 years, more than half the worlds' vertebrate animals have died and the flying insect population declined by three-quarters (26). His focus is largely on humanity, but we'll be taking most other life forms with us when we go. Our continued actions are at the level of a genocide, and the "Kyoto Protocol achieved, practically, nothing; in the twenty years since, despite all of our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy, we have produced more emissions than in the twenty years before" (9). Even if we stop short of the two degree mark, we'll still have a sea-level rise "to draw a new American coastline as far west as I-95" (13). "Our current emissions trajectory takes us over 4 degrees by 2100" (27). At 5 degrees, "Parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans"(39). And "heat death is among the cruelest punishments to a human body, just as painful and disorienting as hypothermia" (48).

Like Rats Jumping a Sinking Ship

My class had a great conversation the other day about discrimination and W.E.B. DuBois's "double consciousness." I discussed the theory and solicited for comments, but there were none, as I expected. This kind of thing needs to sit a little and gel before we can really address it. So I rambled on a bit about the history of the term and its origins in Freud's writing before I asked again for comments or connections. Then the hands started and a conversation developed. We can only talk about our own experiences with racism and sexism in a room where trust has been established. That is exponentially true when we start talking about our own racist or sexist thoughts and feelings and that time we threw our own group under the bus by letting someone's joke go by without mention or by joining in to feel like part of a group that openly disparages people that look like us, but have decided that, somehow, we're different.

There is no way that conversations like this will happen online. We need face-to-face interactions so we can read the room. We need to see that nodding head across the rows in order to be brave enough to tell our stories. And teachers need to catch any subtle eye-rolling or smirking with, "Let's look at the other side of the argument too," to get it out in the open to be addressed and gently (but firmly) dismantled. And there might not be a course like this at all if the new class size formula wipes out this elective.

If we want to create a society that is divisive and full of hatred and blame for one other, Ford's new education policies are right on the money. And it's starting already:

"The discussion between private and public schools appears to be growing, with several independent schools in the region seeing an increased demand. Teachers and students alike are more seriously considering going the private education route, a debate that seems to be intensifying following recent changes to public education. . . . the founder of St. Jude’s and Scholar’s Hall, Fred Gore, says registration is up 30 per cent."

We can see what happens when people with means move their kids out of public schools by looking next door. It's a mess. Some schools have the newest developments, while others scrounge for basic supplies. The wealthy compete against one another for places at the very best private schools, while public school kids have to take four busses to get clear across town to the last remaining building that offers knowledge for free.

If we want the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, we elected the right man for the job. Brilliant! Once Scheer gets in this fall, we may as well just go ahead and eliminate that longest running border. Manifest destiny for the win!

ETA: 

Varoufakis's Economic History for Dummies

First published six years ago, Varoufakis's book, Talking to My Daughter about the Economy, addressed to his then 12-year-old daughter, is a quick read in economic theory that would benefit from some dates and locations in its lessons to cement examples in history. He was still discussing the text in a podcast last June, so he must still stand by his claims. And it rests on one very important point: "You cannot afford to roll your eyes and switch off the moment words like 'economy' or 'market' are mentioned" (10). We've lost the luxury of ignorance now. We need to all understand how the system works.

Yanis Varoufakis was the finance minister in Greece for six months in 2015, and we know what happened there. Some say he couldn't possibly have fixed the problem, particularly as an outsider of sorts. When asked if he was sorry he hadn't resolved things sooner, he responded,

"Your question, sir, is the equivalent of putting to the British people in 1940 that Winston Churchill's speech, with which he raised the sentiment of the British people against the invaders, was responsible for the suffering of the Londoners after the Blitz or during the Blitz. The shortages, the rations, and so on and so forth. There's no doubt that freedom and rationality sometimes needs to be defended by means of a great deal of suffering. But to turn to the victims and blame them for what the villains have done is the height of audacity."

Regardless Varoufakis's role, one critic of his action as Greece's finance minister, the Minister for Finance in Ireland, who expected to hate the book, was surprised to find it "a stimulating and elegant perspective on market economies . . . accessible but not simplistic. . . . I found the section on public debt somewhat poetic (also see his explanation on public vs private debt here). Even if this dimension is not evident to other readers, the lucidity of the explanation will be." But he found the solutions to it all "baffling in its brevity."

So, let's have a look.

Climate Change is About Capitalism

Phil McDuff in The Guardian:

"Today’s children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other choice for them. . . . Right now we can, with a massive investment of effort by 2030, just about keep the warming level below 1.5C. This is “bad, but manageable” territory. . . . We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital. The impact of a dramatic reconfiguration of the industrial economy require similarly large changes to the welfare state. Basic incomes, large-scale public works programmes, everything has to be on the table to ensure that the oncoming system shocks do not leave vast swathes of the global population starving and destitute. Perhaps even more fundamentally, we cannot continue to treat the welfare system as a tool for disciplining the supposedly idle underclasses. Our system must be reformed with a more humane view of worklessness, poverty and migration than we have now."

Absolutely.

Another Piece of the Puzzle that is our Premier

Nora Loreto on Twitter yesterday:

We already know that part of the increase in anxiety and depression is due to straight up loneliness. Kids are already too isolated from one another in real life. This will only add to that isolation as they struggle, on their own, through a course they've been forced to take. 

More Ford Cuts: Ban Cell Phones, but Mandate Online Courses

From iPolitics:

"On top of the change to class sizes, the government is also mandating that all high school students take four of their 30 credits online. This requirement will take effect in the 2020-21 school year. These e-learning classes will average 35 students per class, according to the government." 

This is huge!! I don't understand why this wasn't part of the original statement in the CBC's articles yesterday or in OSSTF's statement! Online courses have notoriously high failure rates (50% according to one study, but 90% including all the people who drop the course) except for the ones that grossly lower curricular standards by, for instance, having students read just a few pages of a book instead of an entire book in a university-level senior course!!

A New York Times article, from just over a year ago, outlined how online courses harm students:

"In high schools and colleges, there is mounting evidence that the growth of online education is hurting a critical group: the less proficient students who are precisely those most in need of skilled classroom teachers. . . . After all, taking a class without a teacher requires high levels of self-motivation, self-regulation and organization. Yet in high schools across the country, students who are struggling in traditional classrooms are increasingly steered into online courses. . . . In reality, students who complete these courses tend to do quite poorly on subsequent tests of academic knowledge. This suggests that these online recovery courses often give students an easy passing grade without teaching them very much. Consider a study conducted in the Chicago high schools. Students who had failed algebra were randomly assigned either to online or to face-to-face recovery courses. The results were clear: Students in the online algebra courses learned much less than those who worked with a teacher in a classroom. . . . Even though the courses are seemingly identical, the students who enroll online do substantially worse. The effects are lasting, with online students more likely to drop out of college altogether."

Ford's Cuts to Education

As reported in a CBC article, Ford's cuts to education, so far, aren't nearly as bad as anticipated. Could it mean he actually listened to citizens? Or maybe they've been hinting at cuts so horrible that now we're all just relieved and drained of the fight to stop the cuts he did make.

Average class sizes will be bigger in high schools (from 22 to 28). If you just picture a classroom of typical students, you might thing that 28 isn't a big deal, but it doesn't work like that. Right now we typically have 28-32 in an academic class, which is averaged in with classes that might have as few as 3 students in them who are extremely high needs to get that 22 figure. So changing the average to 28 doesn't mean classes will each have 28 kids. It means some will have 3 and others will have 38. OR, worse, some will have 6 and others will have 35. He promises no job cuts as he implements this over a few years, so that means fewer new hires.

Arctic Destruction

I just want to put this document here so I can find it again: Global Linkages: A graphic look at the changing Arctic. It was compiled by the UN Environment and GRID-Arendal. It looks at populations in the Arctic, and how it's being impacted by climate change (permafrost thaw, ocean acidification...), pollution (contaminants, plastic, mercury...), and changes to biodiversity (migratory species, invasive species...). 

Seligman's Hope Circuit

Martin Seligman is famous for a learned helplessness study I wrote about a few years back:

In a famous experiment, dogs were put in a compartment and trained to jump a barrier when given an electric shock. After one or two tries, the dogs jumped the barrier immediately after being put in the compartment even when no shock was given. BUT some dogs were restrained the first time and not able to jump the barrier. They had to tolerate the shock without being able to escape. When they were unharnessed, they still didn't jump the barrier, but just stayed there, tolerating the pain.

Are Grades Harmful to Students?

A bold claim was made to me recently that giving students grades on assignments and tests actually impedes their ability to self-assess their work. It's a big deal when an educator insists that what you've done for years is actually harming the ability for your students to achieve to their potential. The winds have shifted again, and there's another movement coming, this time to restrict grading student work with anything beyond descriptive feedback. I think that number or letter grade is actually important to student success, and that initial claim requires some scrutiny.

Student Self-Assessment

One goal in teaching anything is to get the learner to a point where they can recognize whether or not they are achieving with excellence. Absolutely! In some areas, excellence is easier to see than others. If you're learning to swim, then excellence at a specific level might be measured by the ability to swim one length without touching the bottom of the pool. That's a marker that's easy for the novice to recognize just by the feel of whether or not their feet touched bottom. But other learning is more difficult to assess as clearly. If a student is learning to dance, or learning a new language, or learning to argue a philosophical position, the student can easily feel like they've master the new skill, yet be completely mistaken. This is what makes So You Think You Can Dance so entertaining (or just sad).

A Different Sort of Electoral Reform

What if politicians were no longer allowed to campaign by burning fossil fuels travelling all over the world?? What if there were a very strict and low limit on campaign spending. There could be one election website, and each party would have access to one page on that site where they would have to, clearly and succinctly, explain their platform under specific headings common to all the pages (and they'd be barred from making a separate website). They would have a list of candidates in each riding, and can add only one 5-minute video to their page. There could be a page with a forum for questions that's strictly moderated by an intelligent group of non-partisan do-gooder volunteers, each with a degree in philosophy (and, hence, little else to do). No fallacious reasoning will be allowed! Something similar could happen within each party, as well, as they choose their leader.

No flights, no travel expenses, no signs, no phone calls or knocks on the door. Just a straightforward comparison of the platforms with a clear explanation of the implications.

And imagine if we could actually hold politicians accountable for their promises. If they lied in their platform, then we'd oust them immediately, so their platforms would end up being very carefully worded.

Then wealth and backing wouldn't be factors in running in an election. Anybody with a strong idea and the smarts to understand all the implications of their ideas and explain them well could end up leading even if they grew up in a poor family. 

Then charm and schmoozing wouldn't have an effect on the populace. People would respond to the ideas, not the rhetoric.

While we're fantasizing here, we could also ensure that our MPs and MPPs vote based on polls in their ridings, not based on their party leader's position, you know, like in a democracy!

The only way we'll get a leader who actually stops pipelines and changes the agricultural industry and subsidizes solar, wind, and tidal power, and actually affects our future positively, is if we can stop corporate lobbying. One way we can do that is to stop campaigns from costing a small fortune.

What we're currently doing doesn't work, and it doesn't have to be like this.

OFSTED Report

OFSTED recently published a report on what works in schools. Some of the ideas were relevant only to the U.K., but other ideas can be used here. They studied schools in a few different ways, looking at types of teaching that's most effective and what else really matters in a school.

Some obvious findings:

"teachers need solid knowledge and understanding of the subject(s) they teach. . . . where direct measures of teacher subject knowledge are used, the evidence is much more positive. . . . There is also evidence that teachers’ content knowledge affects their teaching practices. Baumert et al (2010) found that teachers with greater content knowledge have higher levels of pedagogical content knowledge, which itself leads to greater attention to cognitive activation (developing pupils’ conceptual knowledge through, for example, summarising and questioning strategies) in their teaching" (9-10).