ZZZZZzzzzzzzz...........

24 hrs without sleep. Head feeling a bit wonky.

So this is why you would discourage young mums from coming to school.. And kids staying up all night playing WoW.. grrr...

Slowly learning baby talk.. Going pink.. needs feeding.. or going pink.. too many blankets on.. or going pink.. needs nappy changed.. or going pink.. feeling grizzly..

zzzznnnkkk. (sound of head hitting desk)

Baby Mackenzie & Paternity Leave

Our wonderful baby girl Mackenzie was born on Monday.. After sleeping on the floor in the hospital for three days, I'm glad to be home. Working this week was hard, with little sleep and wanting to spend time with Mackenzie but I know being able to help when the baby goes home is more important after watching other mothers struggle without the assistance of the hospital midwives. My students were understanding and my colleagues supportive so that was good!

I suppose the downside is that I'm not as prepared to help with our baby as I would have been if I had been at the hospital all week. Dr says I need to take two weeks to help with Mum's recovery. I may need to have two weeks recovery from the fluff Mackenzie just did!

Organising leave has been a bit of an experience. The new EBA has clause 34.1 that allows partners to have five days paid leave. Payroll (after initially saying it was like carer's leave and I directed them back to the EBA to check) acknowledged that this was not a sick leave allocation and it was an additional leave allowance.

This raised a second issue that there is no code in HRMIS for relief to be allocated against when I am on Partner leave. AFAIK HRMIS has not been updated for the new EBA leave requirements. Multiple calls to district office has left this unresolved.

All this checking and outlining requirements to relief teachers chewed up my DOTT making it difficult to create enough time to adequately prepare relief lessons and get back to the baby quickly after school to give my wife some respite. I didn't anticipate needing to take off more than a few days. I'm am going to owe some chocolate to our great relief teachers.

Interim reports are due next week, so I need to do them at home between sleeps. Since my HoD is taking my level 3 classes (these classes I know will be ok - albeit they may be more judgemental of my teaching style), I can mark my tests today, collect my Modelling assignments on Thursday, look in on my 10's some time next week and all should be right when I get back.

There's nothing worse than going back after an extended leave and there being a heap of mess, unsettled students and lagging programmes to fix. Hopefully I've done enough.

The big news of the week is no more levelling for assessment. Yay for the minister!

Now to focus on the family for a little while. She's soo cute!

The big day...

The big day has arrived and we're getting ready to go to the hospital. Fingers crossed all goes well. We have no idea what we're supposed to do today except wait for contractions to be 10 mins apart... They're about 12 now. Very nervous.

but... Yay!

3D trig, bearings and angle of elevation have proven themselves a stumbling block again. Once a diagram was constructed from a worded problem, students were able to complete problems. Walking students through constructing answers seems to have raised their confidence. Next year I will suggest adding a full lesson to just constructing (not solving) 3D, bearing and angle of elevation problems.

Oblivion has me hooked again. That stupid game is a weekend wrecker.

A generational approach vs the "me" generations

Baby boomers and generation y have a lot in common. Both have come in boom times and both are self centred. It is no wonder why they have such difficulty relating to their parents and their social responsibility.

I look forward to the slow shift where we look to setting up future generations and not just where we have enough loan capacity available to get our next plasma TV and leaving debt to future generations.

How can you expect to have loving relationships when your personal philosophy centres around the pleasure principle? The decline in birth rate and the fact that couples are deferring having children gives me hope as it indicates that current relationships are starting to understand the responsibility required for a happy family, and seek to raise children in an environment free of the financial and emotional strains seen in their divorced parents. I for one am one of those - paranoid about debt levels and very cautious before embarking on child raising.

For me it was a case of taking a holistic approach to our future, considering all aspects and trying to balance them - career, marriage, security, need for purpose, even spiritual requirements. Teaching was great as it was something I enjoy doing, is relatively stable, has a greater purpose and allows me time with my family +1 - to provide them with support. It did take ten years of work in other industries to be able to afford to enter teaching.. but it was time well spent as I can use this experience to help my students. Hopefully as my child grows up, our well established relationship (now in its 13th year) and my new educational knowledge will help raise a well adjusted and capable child. In time, all that I have will be theirs and hopefully they will continue and mark their mark on the world (I can hear you laughing - but I can try!).

You can't plan for everything, but to not plan is to never fully appreciate success or to learn effectively from failure. Only a few days to go before the baby arrives... Yay!

Evidence Based Education

Evidence based education is the new buzzword in education. It shares an acronym similar to OBE but is remarkably different in its approach to teaching. We need to be careful in engaging in more edubabble.

At face value it sounds much like common sense. From what I have read it can be summed up as following: "Systemic change in education should only occur with valid, statistically supported evidence." Today, where information is so easily shared there is no excuse for implementing blanket change without scientifically verified support (note that I don't say pseudo-scientific).

You can imagine some resistance from teachers as this sounds that it might take any chance of introducing new ideas/methods into the classroom. To my mind it is hard to argue against a process that ensures that the majority of what teachers do is tried and tested (if it fails, it is easier to detect why) and new ideas are limited to a small portion of the curriculum/pedagogy.

The prescribed evidence based methods would be imbued at teacher training programmes. This ensures that the majority of teachers perform at least at a minimum standard by being educated in tried and true methods. Higher risk alternative strategies or optimisation strategies would only be used as an adjunct to the tried methods.

As a parent you would not want your child subject to scientifically unsound/unproven educational methods. But.. with proof comes a necessity for time to find proof and judge what level of proof is required. This is not conducive to the immediate political needs for success in education. The issue it brings to mind is, "can the need for evidence march at the pace required for results?" ..and will the need for results and commercial lobbying compromise any findings made to the point of irrelevancy. I suggest this irrelevancy and bastardisation of results is exactly what will happen.

Change of this type would take at least 15 years to develop content, rotate in new teachers, start new students on their 12 year journey and develop change management processes to effectively monitor progress. Can you imagine a minister standing up and saying we will start the process now and if a subsequent government doesn't mess with it, we will have a good educational results in 2024? The long term nature of education is a good reason to divorce it from political imperatives and place it into a vehicle responsible to government via regulated requirements. I imagine this was first intended with the Curriculum council or SEA.

OBE was an opportunity for teaching to become a true profession again with each teacher becoming a curriculum expert for a given range of students. For those trained in the concept and with the necessary horsepower and support to use it, OBE is a wonderful curriculum development tool. Unfortunately the poor implementation of OBE, the tangling of cooperative learning with OBE and issues with assessment/levelling made it an unmitigated disaster in WA.
Despite this it still would be a mistake to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

EBE is the pendulum swinging and brings a new range of opportunities with the pressure of performance on teachers falling back to professional curriculum writers and systemic decision makers. It too needs to be taken with care until any evidence of success justifies the hype.

Driving school curriculum

The connection between middle school (yr 8-9) and senior school (yr 10-12) in the absence of a prescribed syllabus is cause for concern. When a teacher is limited by timetabling to only teach middle school classes they can lack the perspective gained by teaching senior school classes.

Similarly teachers only teaching in senior school that never teach lower school classes can lack an understanding of the difficulties in teaching younger students.

Where there are middle schooling practices, we have to be ever so careful to ensure that the "developmental" curriculum in middle school is dovetailed into the prescribed and effectively "streamed" curriculum of senior school... or else we end up with cream puffs with little resilience and disparate understanding/skills.. that when faced with pressure of performance they sadly crumble.

To not have cooperation between the middle and senior school is a real recipe for disaster. By not pushing hard enough in middle school, students find it difficult to adjust to the rigor of senior school. By pushing too hard, students become disengaged and arrive at senior school unable to enter effectively into more demanding subjects.

I believe that the only way forward is with strong leadership and it has to come from the staff that have taught and have an understanding of the needs of all five years. As staff with courses of study experience only exist in the senior school, under normal circumstances, this is where you would normally find that person. Typically they are well respected and driven individuals, although recently they may be feeling disempowered and ill used.

Once that person is identified they need to be empowered with the ability to make change such that the transition of students through middle to senior school promotes the highest outcomes from students. Being part of performance management and hiring processes for learning area staff may be a good idea.

Secondly they need to identify areas of intervention that will improve results across all five years at school, in assessment practices, student motivation, ICT implementation, curriculum development, statistical analysis of results and pedagogy ideas.

Thirdly they need to be a conduit to other learning areas to measure the amount of transference of information, examining opportunities for application of mathematical concepts effectively.

Lastly these leaders need to be recognised for their achievements and clear measurables need to be defined to show them any progress that is made. This needs to be a positive process with focus on success and examining failures for better ways to achieve desired outcomes.

With the dogs breakfast that currently exists with the lack of a current syllabus and the imminent failure of the development of a national curriculum, the opportunity exists to enhance state schools through effective identification of issues and the subsequent change management. State schools that face this challenge head on will avoid the catastrophe that is approaching post the disaster of the OBE implementation.

Baby Week

We're all prepped and ready for the arrival of our first new family member..

nursery finished... tick
house tidy... tick
bag packed ... tick
classes prepped for next week... tick

baby?? late of course.. just like it's mother.

My wife had a dream that she was having a Labrador. We checked on the ultrasound and it definitely is a baby.

I'll take a day off when it's due and then another four days when they come home. It's all very exciting and we're both looking forward to meeting our new family member. I've been telling my students that we'll name the baby Eunice or Eugene to make sure they grow up a maths dork, study hard, don't get boyfriends/girlfriends until they are at least 40 and make lots of money.

I'm finding the 3A MAT Trig test difficult to construct as my first attempt was too easy. I'll have to beef it up again later.

:-)

Escalating issues with students.

Some teachers are really good at identifying a potential behaviour issue with a student and bopping it on the head. Occassionally a student just gets a bee in their bonnet and won't let it go. What starts as a shoosh directed at a student when I start my lesson, ends with the student on in-school suspension for multiple misdemeaners during the lesson and ongoing issues for months thereafter.

There's a knack for diffusing students and when I'm concentrating usually I can pick the student and prevent them from doing stupid things. My favourite list of things to prevent these events is as follows:

Sleep well: If I'm tired I'm bound to miss the signs of a student ready to blow and probably respond with less patience than I normally would.
Maintain firm class rules: Respect, responsibility, doing your best.
Look for storm clouds: Student body language on entering the room can give an indication to their mood.
Use of humour: Sometimes a simple laugh can turn a student around.
Check their understanding of the topic: If a student feels hopeless they may compensate with poor behaviour to hide the issue.
Low key responses: Have a range of responses that don't draw attention to the student (eg. hand signals, proximity, diversion, interacting with nearby students, sending on an errand.)
Backup responses: Moving students, talking to them out of class, preventing students sitting near disruptive influences, extra homework, class detention.

If all these fail (and the student continues to disrupt the class) or a critical incident occurs (abuse of teacher/student, uncontrollable anger, damage to school equipment, visibly upset/crying) then upline referral is required - probably resulting in suspension. This of course causes further issues (my estimate) is that it takes 4 days to catch up for every day missed in senior school. The quality of the upline support will dictate how easy it is to re-introduce the student to class and resolve the issue.

When suspension occurs I see this as my failure - albeit sometimes I wish I knew some of the 'confidential' information within the school so that I could modify my responses to errant behaviour accordingly.