Holy Rosary Ramblog

Better late than ...

I had the opportunity to hear David Booth speak yesterday. He is "Professor Emeritus and Coordinator of the Pre-Service Elementary program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto." David is a renowned expert on literacy and has written many books on the subject.

In his talk to us, he accentuated the importance of getting children in front of computer screens. He showed us articles from popular magazines that described the changes that have to happen in education. Unless kids learn to read deeply and to express themselves effectively in writing, unless they learn to solve problems and to work collaboratively with others, they will have difficulty being successful in their lives. They need to learn research skills and then begin to ask big questions.

Mr. Booth discussed the pernicious effects of standardized testing. Although he thinks they serve a purpose, that purpose is not to mark schools or districts as failing. He noted the tension teachers often feel when they evaluate children as young as five against the grade one expectations. Since kids develop at different rates, it often does not make sense to grade them against these expectations. At least it does not make sense if one wants to keep hope alive in these children and in their parents. And that was his central point, the importance of hope in the lives of children and families.

Righting...

Friday was an in-school PD day. We began with a community circle that included all of us, teachers, the custodian, the administrative assistant, student teachers, and principal. In our own ways, we spoke about what it was that made us most proud of our school. There are numerous advantages to being at Holy Rosary. Without the problems faced by many school communities, we are obligated to continuously improve our practise.

Our attention then turned to writing. Our purpose was to develop ideas that would improve the writing quality of all students. It is important that the principal and teachers write. It is important for at least two reasons: First, it improves our ability to communicate effectively for our own purposes, and secondly, it serves as a model for students that we practice what we preach. Abby Hoffman used to say: "Don't tell me what you believe; tell me what you do. Then I will tell you what you believe." Good intentions often  produce little because of 'do as I say not as I  do' syndrome.

We talked about the importance of keyboarding skills to the writing process. First drafts ought to be done on the computer. Students need to be able to get their thoughts and ideas down as efficiently as possible. When the text is in the computer, it becomes much easier to shape. Outliner software, like Kidspiration and Smart Ideas, can be useful as a preparation for writing. It would be a worthwhile goal to have all graduates able to key at 40 words per minute accurately. From my own experience, this would give an invaluable edge to our graduating students.

For most schools this is already a goal. But it is a goal that is seldom achieved. There are many reasons for this. One is that the conditions for teaching keyboarding are different from what they were even ten years ago. Students are using keyboards earlier and earlier. In many ways this is good. But it does induce habits that make it more difficult to teach proper technique later. Even supposing this can be overcome, there is still the need to practice to maintain the skill. There is no point in teaching kids to type, if the skill is not maintained.

So assuming the skill can be taught, and I believe it can, then the question becomes how to maintain it. It seems to me that if students have authentic reasons to write, and real audiences to write for, then the requirement of practice becomes integral to the class writing experience.  A limitation common to traditional instructional models is that they are implemented outside of an authentic context. The Internet offers some hope of providing such a context. The phenomenon of Blogging is an example. It also offers the potential of providing an audience beyond what the classroom can provide.

Our goal is to  develop and maintain conventional writing skills for all our students. We need to model writing for real reasons and not trumped up ones. Web 2.0, the read/write web, offers some hope that all students will become skillful writers.

What it means to be well educated...

Yesterday we had an administrators' meeting in Wallaceburg. We only have four of these per year, so they tend to be crammed. The Director and Superintendents present and answer questions on topics within their various portfolios. We heard about safe schools, finance, special education, literacy, and many other things as well. The overwhelming focus, however, was student achievement.

You may wonder exactly what 'student achievement' is. The short answer is that it is what the EQAO (Education Quality and Accountability Office) test results say it is. Holy Rosary's results this year were quite good. And while it is useful to have a number to control the wild imaginings about how a school is doing in educating its students, it is clear that the results of standardized testing are not all, or even a large part, of what student achievement is. It seems to me that we identify student achievement with a number at out peril.

My son's volleyball team played a tournament at St. Michael's College School in Toronto a few weeks ago. It is an amazing school, founded in 1852; it has sent 173 players to the NHL. Frank Mahovlich went there, and so did Jason Spezza. It is a private Catholic boys' school with students from grades 7 to 12. There are 1150 students and each pays over $12 000 as day students for the privilege of attending.

My wife and I ate in the school cafeteria at lunchtime on the Friday. The students were dressed in jackets and ties and were polite and well mannered. They talked quietly as they ate, cleaned up their areas when they finished, and tucked in their chairs for good measure. I spent 7 years teaching in a high school and it was as though I were watching the sun set in the east!

The teacher on duty was a 25 year veteran of the school and its science head. I asked him what the most significant behaviour problem at the school was. He said there were no such problems. Students who got into the school had to meet rigorous academic standards. The school offered no applied courses, no co-op opportunities and no special education. Kids who might need such courses or programs, he informed us, tended to drain the school of resources. All the graduates went to university, he told us, and did very well.

I found myself wondering what would happen if one of the school's students had a special needs child himself. Would he see his own child as a drain on his resources? And if he did think this, would we still call him a high achiever? Would we call him well educated?

The Weekend is Here!!!

Like most of you I have a busy weekend. It started last night when I went to London and had dinner with my daughters. They are both at Western and doing well. I think! :)

Tonight my son plays in the senior high school volleyball final at Lambton College. Tomorrow I will attend the funeral of Nancy Bourdeau. She was the Principal at St. Vincent school in Chatham. There was very little time between diagnosis and death and the suddenness has impacted the whole community.

Tomorrow evening it is a charity dinner; I can't quite remember for what. On Sunday from 2 PM until 4 PM we are having a Lego Robotics session at the school. The team is preparing for a competition and still has some work to do. During that time we are asking that anyone who needs a child's coat for the winter can come and have a look at the coats the grade 6 class has collected.

We just finished our annual Remembrance Day Assembly. It was put on by the grade 7/8 class and was exceptionally well done. There are only three remaining soldiers from WW1 and each is over 100 years old. Maintaining the connection between that part of our history and our current students will become even more challenging.

I wish you all a good weekend!

After Two Months...

I have enjoyed my first two months at Holy Rosary. As some of you may know I taught at this school in 1989-90. It was my first year of teaching and I had a grade one class. Those students are now 22 and 23 years old!

There are many things we can accomplish at Holy Rosary. The school is one of 30 something elementary schools of the St. Clair Catholic District School Board. It exists to educate children from jk to grade 8. In an important sense it is your school. In the next few weeks I will be trying to find out what you think of the job we are doing executing the mission of the school.

I also want to find out what the students think. We are currently surveying them on a variety of matters.  We want them to be happy being at school. If they are not happy, we want to find out why. In this day and age there is no good reason why education can't be interesting and fun. It also has to be relevant to the lives they will live. To be happy and productive citizens in their world will require solid educations.

Rainy Days

It rained all day today so the students did not go outside for recess. They did a very good job of occupying themselves inside the school. Since the SK teacher was off to Watford with her volleyball team, I spent the last hour of the day with her class. Having taught grade one for two years, I have a deep appreciation for the job primary teachers do. Even so, my experience today has deepened an already deep appreciation. And if it looked to the waiting parents that I did not know what I was doing, I say in my defense that it has been awhile.

On Monday students from John Knox School joined our Lego Robotics Club. I know the principal well; our sons have played baseball together in Wyoming for a few seasons now. He is a fine man. I met him when in the early '90's the Mac Users Group began to use Gregory Hogan School as a venue for its meetings. He was and remains someone who understands the potential of technology to improve the educations kids get in our schools.

I visited his school last week. He does not have cutting edge technology. What he has, however, is an idea about how to use what he does have to educate children. As I see things what he has is more important than what he doesn't have.

Our School Council wants the best for the students, all the students, of Holy Rosary. One aspect of having the best is sharing with others. In modeling its care and concern for others in the community, council members provide a wonderful example to their children and to others of how to be in the world.