Happy Birthday Mom!

It's my mom's birthday today.  Moms are great, aren't they?  They bring you into the world, care for you and get you ready for that inevitable push out of the nest.  They are your teacher, your counsellor, your reality check and your idol.  How many of us have declared "I am never going to marry,  I am just going to live with my mom forever."  Granted, I was about 4 when I said that, but I am still very very thankful for all of the lessons that I learned from my mom.

Happy Birthday Mom!
xoxo

Atomic PowerPoint

I was scanning through my blog reader last night, and came across a great post about building better PowerPoint presentations.  As someone who gets—forcibly—exposed to far too many (bad) PowerPoint presentations, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to pass along worthy PPT tips when I find them.

In a recent entry on his blog, Seth Godin talks about the atomic method of creating a PowerPoint presentations.  If we assume that an average person talks at a speed of 10-12 sentences per minute, and that an average talk lasts about 5 minutes, Seth figures that you will need a minimum of 50 slides (1 per sentence) for each presentation.  Some of these slides will have words and some will have images, but they will all contain a single idea.  These are your atoms, the smallest, most basic points in your conversation.  Seth tells us to then link the slides together, and start practicing the presentation.  Where things don’t fit, drop them out.  When slides seem to fit together, combine them. 

Take your most important ideas and points, and work with them.  Take all of the fluff that doesn’t add value to the presentation and dump it.

In other words, take your atoms, and start building molecules...

...and always avoid those dreaded bulleted lists.

Who is your Lex Luthor?



Lex Luthor is a fictional supervillan and the arch nemesis of Superman.  “Who is your Lex Luthor?” is a phrase used by Jerry, in the TV sitcom Seinfeld, to identify another person’s arch nemesis.  For Jerry, it was Newman, the bazaar postman who lived upstairs.  For Elaine, it was Sue Ellen Mischke, the braless wonder.  For me, and most people who are really honest, Lex Luthor lies deeper within.

We are our own worst enemies?  How can that be?  We know what things and people that we like and dislike.  We know what makes us happy and what doesn’t.  We can even predict that an situation, based on past experiences, will foul our mood—unless something is done to ready us for the challenge ahead.  In simple terms, if we know that something will bother us we should be able to avoid it, shouldn't we.  But if Lex Luthor is hiding inside of us, he  could pop out at any moment and if he is always there, does that mean that he can always take charge? 

The answer is no. 

No, because we know how to defeat our personal Lex Luthor.  No, because we know what his kryptonite is. 

I learned from a very good friend to tackle the things that I dread head on.  He has this wonderful way of taking stock of a situation and deciding what needed to be done.  Once decided, he pauses and takes a deep breath and at this point, I always know what is coming out of his mouth.  “Well, I guess I had better...”, and he adds in the thing that none of us really wants to do.  The thing is though, he really knows himself and that means that he knows that things will not get better for him or his issue if he delays the action that is needed.  He knows that, for him, putting it off will make him stress, and that will worsen the situation.  Honestly, I have learned a lot from this (thanks Chris), and I have found that by asking myself “What would Chris do”—instead of the long breath—I get the focus to see my next step.  Tackling a difficult conversation works best for me when I do not put it off, and knowing that helps me reframe a challenging situation into one that I feel more comfortable managing.  Knowing me is important too.  I know when I am overtired, when I am grouchy, and when there is something from work bothering me at home or vice versa, and knowing that allows for me to build a plan for success when something thorny rears its head up.  I also know that remembering my mantra of “a small moment doesn’t have to define my whole day”, helps me keep things in perspective.  There is nothing worse than feeding one of the little things until it grows and grows into an energy-devouring monster.

Knowing me helps me to predict a challenging week aheads of time.  For example, the last two weeks of November always seem to be a high stress time at school.  The rush of the new school year is over, the weather starts to turn and the days get shorter and darker.  The excitement and business of the Christmas season is still a week or so off and people are tired.  Knowing this, I was able to reframe my last two weeks into some of the most positive ones of the school year.  I still had difficult the conversations, I still dealt with the slippery roads, driving home in the dark, and the early morning wake-ups to get the driveway shovelled.  And, I still had tired people—myself included—all around me.  But I got organized and I defined my priorities.  I made up a list of things that were necessary to get done and things that I would like to get done.  Instead of putting off conversations, I took time to plan through my thoughts.  I started something fun with my staff that I call the Winer’s Club;  instead of whining about the time of year individually and alone, we are collecting wine together for a season-ending draw on the last day of school before the break.  And, I am bringing in lunch for the staff because they have worked so hard this year and they need a nice thank you before going home to recharge with their families and friends. 

I even took a run out into left field.  In a time where I felt too busy to do finish anything that needed to be done and too tired to do it, I leaned on one of my passions—flyfishing—and started to eek away some time, every night, to sneak downstairs and tie a few flies.  Some nights I tied flies, and some nights I re-organized my tying area.  One night I reorganized my flies into sensible boxes based on fishing species and insect type.  Another night I reorganized my tying materials.  One night I tied a few very complicated flies that will likely never get wet, and another I mass produced tonnes of an insect that I have only encountered once (albeit in epic proportions).  The funny thing is that adding in something new didn't make me tired, rather it gave me energy.  Instead of making me more overwhelmed, I found my thought far more clear.  By taking care of myself, even for a small amount of timne each day, I began to find myself more able to help take care of others.  What a great feeling.

In a nutshell:

·         I reframed my problems

·         I took the things that were dragging me down, and turned them into a pathway for success

·         I dipped into my energy well, and let my passion fill my bucket

·         Made it through one of my toughest times in the calendar feeling full of life

·         I took my lemons and made me some lemonade

So, who is your Lex Luthor, and what is your Kryptonite...and what are you going to do about them?

Early Literacy

I spent the afternoon today, working with our kindergarten students on the Concepts of Print portion of our Early Literacy Screener.  It was nice to connect with the children outside of the Principal role, but more importantly, working with the screener has really helped me understand the District’s literacy screener that we use to build a literacy profile for each student.  The inservices that we have been provided have been great, but things really started to make sense to me when I had out LAT teacher administer the screener on me;  what better way to understand a tool that we use than to have to work with that tool on a very personal level.

Today was a start.  I had a 90 minutes of connecting with our youngest learners, and I took one thing off of the plate of a very busy kindergarten teacher.  Tomorrow, it’s Phonological Awareness for grade 1s...

Lest We Forget

We had our school Remembrance Day Assembly on Thursday.  We planned for the local Legion to bring their Colour Guard, for some of our older students read In Flanders Field and some of their original Remembrance Day poetry, and for many of our students to wear their uniforms from Cadets, Scouts, Guides, Cubs, Brownies, Beavers, and Sparks and then lay wreaths at the Cenotaph.  We even had a school family provide a WWI bugle with all of the battles it had served in etched on it between the bumps and dents left by falling shrapnel at Lena, Ypres, the Somme, and Vimy Ridge. The plan was good and our guests arrived, and then everything started to go wrong.  Oh Canada would play in the first two devices that we set up, and the music brought for The Last Post didn’t work in our cd player, in the stereo or the two laptops that we tried.  We were literally on Plan D when our teacher-librarian used her iPhone to download it from iTunes.  We kept our heads, crossed out fingers and started the assembly—sweating.  In the end, it all worked out and we breathed a huge sigh of relief.  And then, after the students left, an elderly woman came to the office to let us know that she was a girl during WWII, and that this was the most touching Remembrance Day service that she had ever attended.  She said that it was relevant and thoughtful, and that whoever put the program together did so with great care and consideration.  Wow.

I think that that last comment is an important reminder about the effort that we put into things and our worrying about everything being perfect.  No one—apart from a Principal, a teacher, a teacher-librarian, and the representative from the Legion—knew what a fuss we had happened getting the assembly ready.  the audience just knew that we hit the mark, and that is the point in the end.  Isn’t it?

I Never Realized That...

...when I made changes that allowed for Earth Science 11 students to complete a test—successfully—that I was improving my instruction.  It was 1998, and I thought it just made sense, and it represented a real shift in my teaching practice from “following along” with my peers to choosing my own direction.  Tests didn’t need to huge marathons of questions, so I reduced a test given to me by a peer from 237 multiple choice questions, plus a 40 mark short answer section, plus essays to tests with 100 multiple choice questions, plus an extended answer section.  I didn’t think that tests didn’t need to be full of tricks, so I reduced the number of choice per multiple choice question from 5 to 4, and then went through the PLOs an removed all questions that were duplicated somewhere else and not actually part of the curriculum.  Then, I made some adjustments for a second test for students with learning disabilities, really focusing on what the key learning outcomes were, and further reduced the choices per question to three (I had decided that I wanted to test what they knew, not how well they could figure out my test).  I took the old written section, combined the best parts of the old test with my learning outcomes and came up with 10 really good questions, and then did something crazy:  I gave the kids the questions in advance of the test.  There was, however, a catch.  They would be required to answer 3 of those 10 questions on test day, and the three questions would be of my choosing.  Having three blocks of this class, I could also mix up the questions that I asked each class to do.  It wasn’t any more work for me;  I had already created a grading rubric with exemplars for each to help the class study.  Feeling pretty good about myself, I did something else that some colleagues though improper:  I offered the test designed for the student with a designated learning challenge to 5-6 other students who always worked hard, but never, ever passed their tests.  Guess what?  They passed this one.  The other students?  Not only did they do well, but I gradually moved toward a “choose the 3 questions that you can answer best model”.  We covered the entire curriculum—really well, in fact—and the students came to class believing that they could be successful.

...when my Social Studies department decided to improve students writing through 3 common assessments that we teachers then marked, collaboratively, using the pre-determined rubric that the essay question was built around that we were using our assessments to inform our instruction.  We didn’t know that this was called Assessment for Learning.  We didn’t even do it because we thought we were cutting edge.  We did it because we were having challenges agreeing with the English department on how to improve writing, and—even worse—because we felt that some of our department members were providing an easier “ride” through our course than others.  We were trying to level the playing field.  But, then an amazing thing happened.  Because we all taught different courses, we all had a different amount of sections of this particular course at one particular time.  That meant while I had 1 block, a colleague had 3.  To even out the marking load, we decided to sit down and mark together.  Our administrator was ahead of his time, and offered us some TOC coverage to work collaboratively during the school day and we were off.  I learned more from that common marking time about good teaching from my colleagues that I had learned in the previous year.   We had to pre-arrange our marking criteria, and once we did we decided to share it with our students.  It’s funny, by attempting to fix a problem that might not have existed, we used our common knowledge and experience to greatly improve our learning and the learning for our students.

...when I embedded online tools into my instruction that I was actually changing the way we were learning in my classroom—my learning included.  I thought that “teaching students in the medium of their generation” (Dave Matheson, circa 1998) was my moral imperative, and I honestly didn’t realize that level of academic success that my students would achieve.  I started off trying to justify my blended model of online learning by creating so many assignments to check for every trivial piece of content that I became buried in papers.  I couldn’t keep up!  A colleague suggested that I try to use discussion boards, and to make the students more responsible for their learning.  Desperate, I tried it…and it worked.  I feared that they would miss out on content, but found that by using a case study approach they picked up all of the pieces they needed and then worked in class at a much higher cognitive level.  This class of students had a class average more than 5% higher on than any other class in the school on our common assessments.  It was amazing, and the change came about by accident.

We have a tough job, and sometimes it is important for us to reflect back on a job well done.  Spend some time this weekend thinking of some of your successes, and use those feelings to help you put together something wonderful for your students next week.