Breaking The Ice

BUSU Ice Breakers logo (a group I have been involved with for the past two years)

     I think as teachers we all realize that it is important for us to know our students. For many teachers, this means learning about their students before they even enter the classroom. By that I don't mean creeping their social media profiles, but rather checking their student files to see if they have a learning disability or have had behavioral problems in the past. It is also important to know if any of them are new to the country or have recently moved into the region and whether English is their second language. Having this information greatly enhances how well a teacher can teach a curriculum to a class. But what effect does your students knowing you have on their learning?

    Going through high school, I got involved in the Outdoor Education Club which took students hiking, and backpacking and taught us survival skills. As the events were often long, with the last two being 3 and 5 day long events in the Bruce Peninsula and New Hampshire, I got to know the teachers running it very well over the years. To this day, I can walk into the Science department at my school and all the teachers will remember me and ask specific things about how my life is now. This greatly added to my interest in the sciences, specifically Biology and Chemistry (hence them being my two teachables now). I got to know two teachers in particular so well that even now, many years after graduating, we still meet up once a year over coffee to chat about our lives. One of these teachers has been a huge influence in my decision to become a teacher. I think it's important for teachers to share information about themselves as well. Now, I understand that there are clear boundaries when talking to students about your personal life and clearly you do not want to be going over those boundaries. However, by sharing random personal stories, it shows students that teachers are not just robots and that we too have lives. By making connections with your students, you gain the respect of your students and it actually motivates them to do better in your class. In grade 12, I was put into a classroom that was being taught by one of the two teachers that I had talked about earlier. As it was my final year, I had gotten to spend quite a lot of time with her over my years in secondary school. I remember her telling me on the first day that she was excited to finally have me in her classroom and frankly, i was also very excited to have her as a teacher. Having known this teacher for such a long time definitely contributed to how well I did in her class, not to call her assessment biased. I realized about a quarter way through the semester that suddenly I had put Biology at the top of my priority lists, I always did my readings and always finished assignments a few days before they were due (with some exceptions). I realized that I really did not want to disappoint this teacher because I knew her so well. Her outstanding level of understanding for when assignments were late really didn't help either, they just motivated me more to not disappoint her. Because she knew all the things I was involved in within the school, on days where there were many events or important meetings going on, she would understand if I were to hand in things late. This connection that the two of us had greatly contributed to my decision of applying to Brock for the Concurrent Education program and to finally decide to be in it as well although I had many other options for post secondary programs.

    Another teacher that had a great influence in myself becoming a teacher was my Chemistry teacher. She was also in the Outdoor Education Club although she was not as heavily involved. However, having her as my Chemistry teacher twice greatly added to how well I knew her and thus also really motivated me to do well in her class. This particular teacher would actually bribe us with her stories. The deal was that if we were good in class and didn't disrupt her while she was teaching, on Fridays, she would read us one of her personal adventures that she had written in her journal. Most of these adventures were from her crazy days of travelling after going to University and she was very good at story telling. This greatly contributed to her students thinking of her as more of a person than just some robot that comes every day to school to throw information at them.

     Last year, I was given the opportunity to go back to my secondary school and evaluate the teaching of some of my old teachers for an assignment. One of the teachers I had the pleasure of evaluating was my Chemistry teacher. What I had found at the end of the assignment was that the teacher used many of the great teaching techniques I had learned in school. I also noticed that the teachers exhibited very similar teaching philosophies than the ones I had developed over the last couple years in Concurrent Education.

These are just some of my personal experiences with how connecting with your students can motivate them to achieve success and do well overall in school as well. I think it's very important that teachers try to build connections with their students. So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead, break the ice!

I wanted to attach a different clip that I had thought of while writing this blog, however I have been unable to find it so I will leave you all with a similar one instead. Who said teaching can't be fun? Enjoy!

Stayin' Alive

" Students do not learn in order to be evaluated:they are evaluated so that they can learn more effectively..." (Quebec Ministry of Education, 2003)

     In the world of teaching, among the pressure of standardized tests, and other assessments, many teacher forget this very important thing. We get so caught up in making sure our students are ready for those EQAO and other standardized tests that we forget the most important thing; whether our students are actually learning or not. I came to Canada at the young age of 9 from Pakistan. In my culture, schooling is usually taken very seriously by elders and family members. Schools give out tons of homework (we're talking notebooks upon notebooks!) during the summer breaks and families place a lot of effort on schooling and making sure that their kids are doing well in school. It's so important in the culture that it is actually abnormal for a child to not be going to a tutor to learn. It is a common thing for elders to ask kids whether they've actually learned something or just memorized it (most kids just memorize things). Keep in mind that public schools in Pakistan usually teach by the Victorian era, traditional, old story model. Students are expected to memorize their multiplication tables pretty early on compared to Western schools, and there is not much if any constructivist style of teaching.

     Bringing this back to Canada, in my experiences as a student, a student leader and as a teacher, I've noticed that schools sort of brainwash us into only caring about marks and not really caring about actually learning. As soon as an assignment is handed out, students immediately question exactly how the teacher would like it to be. We actively try to cater our own work to fit the ideas of our teachers and our leaders. If teachers ever give an open ended assignment with free roam to do what we want with it, usually the next 10 minutes are chaos. People usually ask where the rubric is or why it doesn't exist. There is suddenly a lot of anxiety generated about the assignment. Trust me, I know. I do the exact same thing when it happens to me. Over the span of public schooling, we create this strict model of telling students exactly what we expect from them. It doesn't help that our marks determine our future, especially in the last couple of grades in high school. It is a ridiculously scary experience. We put so much emphasis on getting good grades so that we can go to good universities, or get scholarships that often times, we aren't learning anything, we're just spewing out information that has been cashed in, in our heads by our teachers. Now obviously all this is just my experience and doesn't apply to all schools/teachers in Canada or even in Ontario.

     It is a wonderful feeling when you find passion for something and it's an even better feeling when you can help someone else find it. When we (teachers) concentrate too much on the assessments, we forget what many of us actually started teaching for; helping students find their passion for learning.

Welcome!

Aloha! I will be updating this (as the name suggests) bi-weekly, rambling on about my opinions on the education system and all things related to education. This will be my first blog so you all get to join me on a new journey!