Student Led Differentiation

Occasionally we actually get some good ideas from PD in-servicing. I previously wrote in praise of Paul Gorski's anti-grit (possibly now anti-resilience) stance. Today we watched a video that, in a nutshell, asked us to better understand how stats work, which is a very necessary concept for everyone to grasp in order to recognize that the average of a group isn't reflective of each individual. The more interesting bit here, though, is instead of teachers differentiating instruction for each student, we might be able to teach students to figure out what they need to be their best learners, I think possibly by offering weighted options, challenging them to adhere to time limits, and helping them figure out the difference between true limitations and failures due to educational barriers. This is a bit round-about, but it all comes together in the end.

In my social science classes, I belabour the implications of population data falling on a normal curve. What we take as "normal" is typically just 68% of the population, and the other 32% is... something else. If we can really wrap our heads around this idea that only 68% will be one standard deviation from the norm, then we can better understand how stereotypes form, and how terribly simplistic and inaccurate they are as a way of understanding any group of people, thus beginning to dismantle prejudices and discrimination.  

Not Dead Yet!

This pandemic feels like living in a horror movie that just keeps going on and on. We think the killer is dead, but then they come back for yet another attack. Is this one finally the end? Is this one?? When is it over?? Checking our watch is a bad sign for any movie: it should have ended ages ago. But every horror film has a cast that does the stupidest things that make us yell instructions at the screen. Don't split up! Don't go in there alone!! Take off your high heels to run, you idiot! If only they'd have listened to us, they would all still be alive.  

And here we are: Yelling at our screens (and on our phones and at meetings) to keep protections in place for at least a few more weeks after March break, but the cast running the show isn't listening. We have been abandoned to our own risk-analysis, and, in our schools, the choice that will make or break us is left in the hands of children. 

Politicians appear to be placating people who want to come to schools and stores without a mask to get things to feel normal again, but they're completely ignoring the real fears of the people who are now wary of entering these buildings because they don't want to get a brain-invasive virus. Make it make sense!!

On Removing Mask Mandates

I'm gobsmacked by the recent move to remove the mask mandate for schools starting March 21st, at the start of spring. In the words of Dr. Genevieve Eastabrook, it's premature demaskulation! The Hamilton Board dared to face down the ministry, but my board only had one trustee, a former nurse, willing to go on record as voting against the new rule that students must be allowed to go to school without a mask. A few voted in favour, but most abstained. The special meeting and vote took place from the safety of their private homes, of course. Hamilton's decision, if it sticks, will provide us with an excellent control group in this macabre experiment on our children. One argument my board's trustees made in favour of following the ruling was that, since the trustees aren't medical professionals, they don't have a right to make a medical decision and therefore have to follow Dr. Moore's lead. They do, I would counter, make calls on pedagogy, ventilation, urban planning, etc. despite not being specialists in those areas because they've been voted in to make informed decisions that affect the well-being of our students. And they could have made an effort to look to other specialists' views for some advice:

IT ISN'T SAFE YET

We appear to be following behind Denmark's lead as they dropped mask mandates on February 1st. This graph shows how closely our fatalities aligned until their mandates were dropped, and then their rate of fatalities soared. Canada is bound to follow that trajectory. We're significantly less vaccinated than Denmark, so things could be even worse for us. So why are we okay with this?? 

On Masks, Ventilation, and Contact Tracing - Yes, Again!

On Monday I presented to my school board to try to persuade them to keep masks even if (when) Ford removes mandates and to allow me to keep my Corsi-Rosenthal filtration unit in my classroom, dammit! Here's my 8 minute presentation/plea. They said "thanks" very politely, then the Associate Director started talking about nearing endemicity (at 101:15-23 here), which isn't remotely the case but more on that later, and then a trustee reported on the harm caused by masks both from the ingredients in the material and the restrictions on talking while eating during lunchtime, as they harkened to our pre-pandemic lives. 

But at least I tried. I don't mind trying and failing, but nothing feels worse to me than not trying at all then always wondering what might have happened had I done a little more or at least done something. Nobody tried to suggest it's a mental health problem to wear masks this time, although I was prepared for it since that was the Associate Director argument at a previous meeting. Current studies show that the strongest correlation to mental health isn't tied to mask wearing but to levels of the virus in the community. If we wear masks to keep levels low, then it will improve mental health in the region! 

On the Importance of Civics Classes

On Monday, I did a five minute bit on CBC Radio's Metro Morning with Ismaila Alfa about teaching civics. They called me last Sunday afternoon, having exhausted all other avenues, because I happened to tweet this the previous day:

It wasn't even a particularly well-liked tweet! 

And then right after that interview, I was called to do it all again on Thursday on CBC-KW with Craig Norris, who tweeted out my profile picture. I update that picture ever ten years, so this one is six years old, but seeing it spread around all big and everything just brought it home that I've aged about 20 years in the last six! It's been quite a time!

Lunatic Fringe?

I'm a bit of a social media addict, but I quietly wandered away from Facebook last summer when too many people I know in real life were making fun of people wearing masks. A quick peek back finds far too much support for this inane convoy making a mess of Ottawa. It's bad enough having to deal with that unnerving feeling in person, my blood running cold as it's explained to me that N95s are too uncomfortable to bother with, and that we have to make peace with death and the death of others. We have to live our lives!! The lack of concern for how overwhelmed hospitals are and childhood hospitalizations increasing has me reeling. 

And we can live our lives for so much longer, and with much greater pleasure from good health, if we get vaccinated, wear better masks, and keep buildings well ventilated. It's baffling to me the level of denial and the weird rationalizations people are making around the pandemic. I hear that, like me, people are terrified for their lives and the lives of our children, but denial just makes it so much worse. It IS possible to mitigate the risks and avoid the costs with just so little effort! 

Questionable numbers here, but estimates still show N95 give better protection.

The "truckers convoy" is a perfect symbol of misdirected discontent. I put it in quotation marks because most of this gang aren't truckers, and most truckers have denounce the whole shenanigans, with over 90% vaccinated. It's really a white nationalist grift and a distraction from worse events allowed to continue.  

Bad News is Increasing, but More Slowly?

Teaching in Ontario right now is an absurdist's wet dream. Schools can only close if there's more than 30% absent, and many classes are half full, but nobody's actually away because any online contact gets them marked present, so even sick kids are logging in. Masks provided for kids smell of kerosene and are adult sized, huge on tiny faces. One teacher suggested using them as car covers. The vast majority of classrooms do NOT have a HEPA filter, and many classrooms don't have windows at all or the windows are frozen shut, but we all have excellent ventilation. There are no CO2 monitors to know for real, though, but trust us. Two doses are "almost worthless" as protection past six months, but 12-17 year olds who got dose 2 back in May aren't eligible for a booster because they're perfectly fine. Classes aren't sent home from a contact in the room anymore since nobody is allowed to tell if there's a positive case in the class, but we all go home if one person gets lice, which makes me think of this scene from Pleasantville:

Ontario Schools Opening Monday: A Collection of Responses

There is a simmering rage out there from Lecce & Moore's reiteration of the "leaked" news of schools being in-person in five days. Of course it wasn't truly leaked. This is how Ford gets feedback on his ideas before making them his ideas. It's a childish way of establishing plausible deniability. And now, IF they schools actually shift to in-person learning (schools haven't closed since this all started - they just shifted online), then it could be "absenteeism" that closes them, and Ford's in the clear!! Of course it won't be "absenteeism" as far as any authentic definition is concerned, i.e. teachers and staff avoiding work without just cause. No, it will be from illness and family care days. They're ready with an arsenal of retired teachers and parents that they're hoping will step up to take the place of teachers that they expect to get sick! Parents won't hear anything about it, though, until we hit 30% - THIRTY PER CENT - absences in a school. So no more late night texts to find out a student in our class has the virus. A question for the Minister and Doctor, if they wouldn't mind: By the time 30% of the school is absent from omicron, what are the chances that the rest have it?? 

Here's a selection that was live tweeted during the announcement from my disgruntled corner of the world. I didn't include attribution in case people don't want to be mentioned here, except in the case of authorities in their field. Some of my own tweets are in the mix:

Juris My Diction Crap

This Matrix clip has been at the front of my mind since I started looking into how to get a booster for my youngest, who's 17, because I question if recent orders around delaying boosters for the 12-17 and around getting kids back to school in nine days are really for our protection! 

My oldest caught the covid from their partner who got it from an ill-advised trip into Shoppers Drug Mart, and my little bunny is very sick, and it sucks so much!! (Wear N95 masks, and wear your googles, too, kids!!) But we've been lucky that the oldest's bedroom is in the basement with their own bathroom, so they're relatively easily contained, and the rest of us made it to day five unscathed and testing negative. My biggest worry aside from the well being of my triple vaxxed oldest, who doesn't have the strength to get out of bed, is my unprotected teenager getting it. 

LTC Homes: Ownership Matters

Nancy Olivieri, Michael Hurley, Vivian Stamatopoulos, and Natalie Mehra explained Doug Ford's sneaky passing of Bill 37 just before Christmas in today's Toronto Star.  They warn, "Hope to live out your old age in dignity and comfort? Think again." 

Ford doesn't want us to know what's been stolen from Ontarians. This bill "smooths the way for billions of public dollars to be funnelled to for-profit LTC for another generation," allowing Ford to promote for-profit ownership and issue new licenses to operators with terrible records. 

Covid-19 has exacerbated problems in LTC homes, but the problems were already quietly brewing: 

"Decades of tax-funded incentives aimed at improving for-profit facilities were offered to their operators--and were declined. . . . for-profit LTC is worse than that in publicly run facilities, across a range of outcomes. Owners siphon off revenue to shareholders, spend 24% less on direct care, have fewer staff and lower pay compared with non-profits, and fail to deliver on standards of care. . . . Ford confirmed plans to allocate thousands of new beds in 30-year licenses to for-profit companies, including to operators of homes in which the military exposed hideous examples of neglect . . . paid for by public taxes, and by residents' fees."  

Resilience During a Pandemic

I learned little from English classes. I think my highest grade in high school was a 53. I mastered grammar and that formulaic essay enough to slip over into a passing grade, but I never understood all the metaphor and symbolism talk. At the time, I suspected it was all made up. Secretly, I still think so. I had the same reaction to formal theory discussions in art classes: the lesson that every single choice of colour and line and space is carefully pre-determined with an eye to balance and complementary structure and all the other elements I now forget. Our teacher encouraged us to watch a Georgia O'Keefe interview on television one night, which I imagine he later regretted. O'Keefe described painting by filling the canvas from the upper left corner to the lower right. She had no idea what it would look like until she was finished! Ha!! Okay, so I get that we were not a crew of burgeoning Georgia O'Keefes sitting there, in Mr. Millar's grade 9 class! Some people have a feel for design, it's in them, so they don't need to be taught how to structure words or images. The way it seems to work is that the rest of us have to try to figure out what the talented few did and copy it perhaps to become writers and artists good enough for mainstream consumption or a largely unread blog, but scarcely able to affect anyone at any depth. 

Parenting in the Time of Covid

He was on his way out the door, to walk around with a new friend outside. 

Me: Rapid test, masks, or walking 6' apart? Which are you doing?

Him: It bothers me that you ask. I shouldn't have to live with your anxieties. You just ask because you're anxious about it, and your anxieties shouldn't have an effect on my life.

Me: You're going to hang out with someone and then come back into the house with other people who are vulnerable. Omicron is far more contagious, so being outside isn't enough. There is a very real risk that you could catch and spread the virus walking outside next to someone if you're both unmasked. You have to choose one of the three. Either she tests before you go, or you both wear masks, or you walk far apart. 

Him: But that fact that you ask means you don't trust me. I know what I'm doing. I read the research.

Me: I read the research too, which says that we need to start masking outside. I trust that you'll follow your own risk assessment. But I think we have different risk levels that we're comfortable with. I accept far less risk because your sister is way past needing a booster. Once she gets it - if that ever happens - I might be less inclined to check that your risk levels are in line with mine. Right now, I want some reassurance that your plan is in line with my lower level of risk comfort. 

I'm at the "My house - my rules!" point in the pandemic. It makes it very difficult to live with adult children - for everybody. He said he'd be gone an hour; he was out for five hours. I'm happy he's meeting people and getting out there, but I'm also really glad that I pushed him to wear a mask! Here's hoping that he actually kept it on!

ETA:Turns out, she was on it. She insisted on rapid testing first and wearing a mask outside. Thank god for small favours!

On "Fixing" ASD

I watched a course-load of videos by Dr. Alok Kanojia (@HealthyGamerGG) this past summer. He's a therapist specializing in addiction in his day job and focused on gaming addictions online, but he has broadened his videos to encompass many other issues. He doesn't do therapy online but "coaches" people instead. And typically right there I'd be out. Coaching?? It all sounds a little goofy and new-agey. But I got hooked when I first saw his video with Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints) the previous October because of his openness to really listen to her experiences and learn from them before asking the precisely right questions necessary to get her to understand herself at further depth. And then they meditated. It's a mix of Freud and a mountain top guru; at the very least I'm learning lots of Sanskrit words in the process.

I appreciate how he let Natalie explain her experience as a trans person, BUT then I saw a more recent video with a streamer, DesMephisto, taking about being autistic. Dr. K focused on fixing their ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). He often uses an addiction analogy to explain that, generally, first we need to understand and accept who we are, like we have to accept being an addict, but we don't stop at acceptance; the next task it to change ourselves so we can better live in the world. And then he asked Des what many consider an offensive question: "If I gave you a pill that would make you no longer autistic, would you take it?" 

Yikes. 

If that doesn't seem offensive, then imagine if he had asked Natalie that same question about being trans. It doesn't even make sense. 

Chomsky's Lessons from 2021

Yanis Varoufakis spoke to Noam Chomsky, at DiEM25, about what 2021 has taught us. In a nutshell: the wealthy puts profits over people to their own detriment (e.g. patent rights over vaccines, which provoked mutations) and will only help with climate change if they can profit without taking risks. We have climate policies that could help, but we need more protesting to force this change. The U.S. citizens have been convinced of lies around climate change and world politics. Europe needs to stand up to lead instead of following the US, and we need to negotiate better with China or we'll end up in a terminal war. We must focus on what we might actually influence - i.e. our own country's acts of atrocity. Don't seek protection from ideas you don't like, but meet them head on with intellectual rigour (abridged quotations below).

On Trying to Find Peace with Prem Rawat

Since falling into a pandemic funk, I've tried a variety of books and videos to try to get a little inner stillness in order to continue to function. Omicron and our region's rising numbers aren't helping matters! I'm crap at meditating, but Healthy Gamer's course (my notes) came the closest to getting me on board. The modules walk you through the background of breathing exercises, and how they work in the body, and I stayed with the lessons largely because the work to do is all thinking and learning instead of doing. When the course came to a close, and I tried the doing part, it quickly fell apart. I keep trying again from time to time, but I'm still looking for something that will help it all stick for me. A colleague loaned me Hear Yourself by Prem Rawat, which is all about calming that inner dialogue. 

Still Going On about Masks!!

I've never been much of a rule-follower. I'm that teacher that lets kids sneak out early and shows movies with some questionable content (with kids forewarned and allowed to leave if triggered - none ever do). I go way outside of curriculum guidelines, allowing the class to guide the direction of discussion. In teacher's college, students in my first practicum told me a dirty joke. Back in school, other practicing teachers asked what I did: Did I give them detentions or send them to the office? No, I laughed. It was at that moment I vowed to be a teacher, not a cop - imparting knowledge without policing behaviours that aren't hurtful to anyone. I've always hated when schools feel like prisons, training grounds for factories with bells that tell us what to do, when, and for how long. 

But I do follow rules that make sense. And masks make sense. I even follow more than the rules suggest because our policies don't go nearly far enough to keep us safe.

So now I'm completely demoralized by suddenly being the enforcer in the classroom. 

Srinivasan's "The Right to Sex"

"It is absurd to contend that vice, ecstasy, and passion would become impossible if man and woman were concretely peers" (xiii).  ~ Simone de Beauvoir

Amia Srinivasan's book rivals Kate Manne's fantastic Down Girl in the most exciting way. It's an absolute must read for anyone hoping to improve themselves and the world as we're led incrementally through issues around sexual tensions and traumas all with an intersectional lens. This is a collection of five essays that, she explains, "represent my attempt to put into words what many women, and some men, already know. This has already been the way of feminism: women working collectively to articulate the unsaid, the formerly unsayable" (xv). I mainly focus on the first and final essays, with the others laying further evidence for the primary argument.

THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST MEN

She starts by looking at the 8% of sexual assault reports that have been classified as false based on a police officer's personal judgment. 

"Police officers were inclined to consider a report false if there hadn't been a physical struggle, if no weapon had been involved, or if the accuser had had a prior relationship with the accused. [Of the suspected false reports] none resulted in wrongful conviction. . . . Nonetheless, a false rape accusation, like a plane crash, is an objectively unusual event that occupies an outsized place in the public imagination. why then does it carry its cultural charge? . . .  Many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors, overwhelmingly male, intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. . . . Over half of their cases involved 'official misconduct'" (3-4).

On Burnout

Dr. Alok Kanojia is a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction treatment. His videos are fantastic for some everyday issues as well, like this one on burnout. The most impactful line from this video is that burnout tends to happen when, "people who want to do a good job are placed in situations in which doing a good job is very, very difficult." It's not because you're lazy or a bad fit with your career, but that your workplace isn't acknowledging their part in making a job unnecessarily difficult. And it tends to happen more to people who actually care about what they're doing, not people who are just putting in hours. He says,

"One of the biggest scams that's currently being perpetrated against people about burnout and mental wellness . . . that's subtle and society wide . . . people are placing the responsibility for burnout on the individual. . . . . Burnout affects the individual . . . so there's a subtle scam going on that once you label it as an individual problem . . . then you work on it as an individuals. It's a catastrophic shift of responsibility from the workplace to the individual."

Monbiot on our Current Challenge

George Monbiot wrote an article that he's calling his best bit of writing. It's largely more of the same argument that people can't seem to hear or respond to. We're ignoring the changes in the world at our peril. 

In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. . . . In normal conditions, the system regulates itself, maintaining a state of equilibrium. It can absorb stress up to a certain point. But then it suddenly flips. It passes a tipping point, then falls into a new state of equilibrium, which is often impossible to reverse. . . . If one system crashes, it is likely to drag others down, triggering a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. . . . vast tracts of the Cerrado have been cleared to plant crops – mostly soya to feed the world’s chickens and pigs. As the trees are felled, the air becomes drier. This means smaller plants die, ensuring that even less water is circulated. In combination with global heating, some scientists warn, this vicious cycle could – soon and suddenly – flip the entire system into desert.

The mainstream media treats it as an afterthought. Chomsky has been on about this for decades: we keep getting distracted by sports and entertainment when the world needs our attention. Even in political news, we focus on the wrong things. 

On Moral Injury

I just re-read a post full of sound and fury that I wrote last year at this time, detailing my initial shock at our unsafe and unprecedentedly intense working conditions at the time. The only policy improvements since then is that students don't have to be in the building during lunch and that we flip two courses every week so we only work five days without prep instead of seven months. What's worse is that there are twice as many in the building, and kids know they can take off their masks all the time to eat or drink. Teachers are finally allowed to wear their own masks openly (I've been hiding mine the whole time) while kids are getting lax about theirs (some teachers too due to vaccine-provoked complacency), and we have no recourse to stop them - excepting being that bitch of a teacher who won't let her kids take a sip of water in class! I realized how many rules at school I've ignored over the years to students' delight, and it sucks to suddenly be seen as a hard ass. The rules still don't make sense. We still err on the side of privacy instead of saving lives by stopping the spread. We still provide businesses with free rapid tests (paid for with our taxes) and leave the $40 option for unvaccinated children. The world feels crazy in its callousness.  

Then Dr. Hishram Ziauddeen's twitter post on moral injury really hit it home for me. Here it is in full with just minor punctuation adjusted for clarity: