Merry Christmas to all

A Merry Christmas to all,  may it be filled with joy, children and the gifts that fill your world with love and happiness.

Next year promises to be another great one.  I look forward to posting again in the new year.

Russ.

National Curriculum

Here is a table that comes from a National Curriculum broadsheet.  It contains some interesting insights.

The first is fractions and decimals finished at yr 6.  I haven't seen many year 10 classes confidently performing four operations on decimals or fractions without a calculator.

The second is that I haven't seen many students enter year eight with adequate algebra skils.

With the movement of year 7 to high school we can address some of these issues but it does not really address the core issue of the declining ability of primary to progress students through mathematics outcomes.

The national curriculum writers seem to acknowledge this issue here, "In comparison to the Singapore mathematics curriculum, the Foundation to Year 10 Australian Curriculum: Mathematics content is introduced more slowly in the early and primary years to ensure students have the opportunity to develop deep understanding before moving on. By Year 10, the conceptual difficulty is similar to that described in the Singapore documents."

The responsibility has been placed on secondary school to accelerate through the course.  This will have an negative impact on the second tier of students to be able to absorb the information in a developmentally appropriate method through upper school.  It seems we may be revisiting the forgotten middle.

The issue of why students need extra consolidation in primary is probably more cultural than educational in origin.  With the loss of value and payoff of education in Australia, families are not supporting education in ways previously found.  With changes to compulsory education, the value of graduation has decreased as a workplace differentiator.  There are clear payoff changes exacerbated by the relatively high incomes available for manual labour related industries during mining years. Unless of a recent migrant group  - education is a social occupation.

Two parent working families have not been able to make the commitment to assisting students reach their potential.  Sadly, even families making the commitment (to embed tables, assisting with homework, taking an active interest and are reading together regularly) are not gaining the benefit as the majority now lies on the other side of the divide.  It is going to take considerable commitment by the department to turn this around, I think the community has already given up.

(...and Mackenzie reminded me of something today.. writing anything legible listening to Yogabba gabba is near impossible - having distractions in class for those who concentrate singly (like me) must be exceedingly frustrating.)

The five years ago game.

Five years ago..

I didn't know how to play guitar
I didn't own an awful lot of board games
I didn't have this blog
I didn't know how to teach well
I hadn't experienced 5 years of wonderful kids seeking to excel
I hadn't worked with some exceptionally dedicated peers

I didn't have the joy of my beautiful daughter and the perspective of a parent

I miss my nana and could probably be less cynical.  All in all, I think, these past five years have been very good.

Point Systems

Extrinsic reward point systems often end in probability based rewards to reduce cost.  The more points in for the week, the higher the probability of winning a prize.  Like most extrinsic reward systems they have instant impact and then reduce gradually over the year unless continually renewed.

The system though is fairly one sided and lacks the concept of the win/win.  It's more the instant gratification/self gratification than something based in development of values, delayed gratification and development of the caring person.

I'm wondering if we could extend the points system to make a true currency of it.

Kids value when extra input is put into the classroom, they value when they can help someone else, they value when their effort contributes to something bigger, they value things that may help them improve.  Or at least this is what we want them to value.

What if kids could:
donate points towards a teacher doing extra PD to bring a clearly stated idea back to the classroom (points not generated in that classroom)
donate points towards the charity child (and the school converts them back to cents/dollars)
donate points towards the house points competition
donate points towards evaluating an overseas event
donate points towards a school speaker / event

Kids want ownership of their environment and these sorts of ideas help them get a feeling of self worth by expressing their value beyond themselves.  The feeling of self worth, I think, is a key goal.

Our kids are in an interesting place, I think it might be timely to investigate avenues for this type of idea.

Getting sick

Sickness is a constant issue as a teacher.  By the end of term, we're all a bit run down and as soon as the adrenaline cuts out, you tend to hit the wall.  If it's not the flu, it's migraine..  I'd estimate that at least half of the staff report to be susceptable to migraines. 

As curriculum demands on teachers become greater and society itself is asking more of teachers, I suppose the maintenance of teachers will become more of an issue.

Well... this time has been a doozy.  First four days after the end of term my fever has been spiking up to 40 every time the panadol runs out, sleeping 20 hours of the day and having lucid moments (like now) where I think I might just be getting better.

I knew there was a reason I looked forward to holidays!

Update:  It seems having temps of 40C+ for 6 days indicates pneumonia.  Off to get checked.
Update:  This high temp thing is great, xrays and blood test in under 20mins.  It was like an olympics.
Update:  It is pneumonia (the second math teacher this year).  The drugs are working now and the temp stopped overnight (yay!).  Hopefully I'm on the mend.

WACOT and the Teachers Registration Board

The King is dead.  Long live the King.

For those that don't know, WACOT is being repealed and a new Teachers registration board is being set up.

I just read through the new bill. Teacher representation on the board is now at the discretion and invitation of the minister. Requirements for registration become the primary mandate of the board.  The new bill gives the board the ability to define what a teacher needs to be and do for registration and re-registration.

Hopefully they will treat the new board primarily as a body for weeding out miscreants and keeping teaching institutions honest, not as a body responsible for monitoring and developing professional development.  A school is the best level for monitoring, mentoring and developing teacher effectiveness, the mentoring programme organised by WACOT ended up being little more than paperwork.  The change might be recognition that a registration body is not the right vehicle to monitor teacher competence.  If a case ever reached the Teachers Registration Board, one would have to imagine that it would be serious enough to involve police.

Given that the registration board is nominated by the minister, embarrassing events such as the "Teachers for Australia" (the 6 week teaching course) being rejected by WACOT will now more likely be prevented.

With a fairly limited mandate, hopefully they can get on with getting the job done, not worry about costly fringe activities and keep the fees and paperwork down!

Reflective posts

Four years ago, I started posting here to record the journey from practicum teacher to teacher.  Stats on the blog have shown that reflective posts are the least interesting and posts that relate to improvement in the classroom are the most read.

I have often wondered why.  It could just be that my reflective posts are boring.  Personally, I find that they are the most important because they make me consider my own teaching practices and drive me towards the successful classroom interventions.

It could be that we don't want to know what we do badly and we do want quick fix band aids.

Often we don't want to be reflective or introspective - we don't have time, lack the will, we're scared of the results and are unwilling to make the effort.  Given all I have learned here, having worked with the blog for a reasonably long time, it's fairly easy to say I think reflective practices are worth the effort.

I must be an idiot

I'm an idiot.  I really must be, because I don't understand and I can't understand the logic of the criticism no matter how the concept of "Empire Building" has been explained to me.

We have an inspirational maths department (not my words but that of a teacher outside our department).  Kids say to us that they want to come to school to do maths and they're not always the geeky ones.  We have a high level of energy in the department, kids actively choose our subject and we have fewer behavioural issues each year than ever before.  Kids don't even look that embarrassed when we talk to them in the yard.  We actively seek to help other departments and we do our share of tasks around the school.

And for this we are accused of empire building.  By this (and I sought to get this clarified) it was meant that we have created a "cult" of mathematics where kids actively seek maths in upper school over other subjects.  Let me be the first person in history to apologise for having engaged kids.

Now if we were preventing students from completing work of other subjects by loading them up with extra work, you might think this could be true.  We don't.  If we advised them to take higher maths without having grades and work ethics to suit, it may be true; but we are diligent documenting how we justify our subject selections and unfortunately now have to turn kids away in upper school.  If we loaded up in school committees and ran an agenda (of any sort) and bullied them through, it may be said but we rarely volunteer for committees and are more frequently tutoring kids between classes than being in the staff room.

I don't think we're victims of tall poppy, but our relative popularity (??!!??) with kids seems to be threatening in some way.  If a kid selected Drama, Phys ed, Computing, English or any other subject because they liked the teacher group not an eye would be batted.  If this meant that they had to do a higher maths and they were motivated by their involvement in the other subject, we would work with them and find them a course that they could do.  Another student with a viable path to uni - that's fantastic.

If year 7 kids are choosing our school because of maths one would think that the collegiate group (not just the principal) would go, great guys, we'll get behind you and create a wider vision for us.  If kids are clamouring for a staffed and funded maths camp, what possible reason is to not get behind it.  Five years ago we arrived and the atmosphere was toxic towards the ATAR classes, I don't think anyone believed we had long left before we became a vocational school.  Today we have a growing group of TEE kids, a wonderful team that guides them into uni through ATAR and portfolio pathways and a teacher group that can and does support them in their final years.

... but we have a long way to go.  When asking our year 9 class, "how many students went to university from our school",  they said none and were shocked when we said close to 50% - they were more shocked when we rattled off the names from three years ago and told them how well they were doing.  There are a number of much larger schools in Perth that can't do this and can't even run stage 3 courses.

I suppose this is a cautionary tale, because sometimes we all are a little disparaging and I can say firsthand how demotivational this last week has been for at least two of the maths department - we both have thick skin (and heads) but it is annoying to say the least.  If others do not want to lead, get behind those that make the time and have the will to do so.  Be careful with criticism especially if it is only to assuage your own conscience about what you should be doing as it can have toxic effects on your school.  Be encouraging wherever possible.