Ramblings of an Australian teacher

Why girls should learn computer programming

2011-11-08T13:23:00.002+11:00

Lately, I have made a case for programming in the curriculum and my colleague, Sarah Macdonald,wrote about using Scratch to help students "understand their own problems, make mistakes and explore alternatives". Thispost is a manifesto for teaching girls in particular how to program.In it, I argue that this is an essential skill for girls to help makethe future rather than see innovations as black magic which they mayonly consume.

Samantha (Year 9): "I have afriend who wrote a program that generates bibliographies for hisschool work."
Me: "That's great. How would youlike to learn to write your own programs?"
Samantha: "No, Mr. Baroudi. That'swhat boys' schools are for!"

Picture from: canstockphoto.com

Today, I read about the Australianfounder of Kaggle.com. Yet another Australian tech entrepreneurmoving to Silicon Valley and attracting millions of dollars infunding. Kaggle.com crowd-sources solutions to difficult scientificproblems. Most of its contributors hold a PhD. It is a greatexample of modern problem solving: human ingenuity combined with thecomputing power of the machine. Anyone who wants to participatein this endeavour must learn to give instructions to a computer. Inother words, they must learn to program the computer!

"But not every student will turnout to be a programmer". This is true. It is not because weexpect all our students to be artists or historians that we teachthem art and history. Most girls' schools teach design technology,the design and making of clothes. If those schools were to take apurely utilitarian view of their education, they would stop atteaching them how to re-attach a button to an item of clothing.That's a skill they can use. After all, very few of them will bedress makers. Thankfully, this purely functional view is not theprevailing one in our education system. All these skills helpstudents make sense of their world, identify their interests anddevelop an appreciation for other people's work when they come incontact with them.

My daughter is in primary school and isalready exposed to many forms of media and computer applications. Ido not want her to think that these things come from a dream factory,somewhere in the sky. Sure, she may not turn out an animator or aprogrammer, but she needs to have an appreciation for these things.It will help her understand her world better.

What I write about computer programmingapplies to other fields of problem solving, such as engineering andmathematics. Programming, as a discipline and as a way of thinking,opens the door to some of these professions which, even in the 21stcentury, are not considered by many graduates of girls' schools.Here's another dialog I have overheard, this time between twostudents in year 10:

Carla: "I would like to doengineering but I'm not sure."
Alexandra: "That's cool. My cousinis studying electrical engineering. He likes his course a lot."
Carla: "Yeah, these things areeasier for boys."

If our girls see the computer as ablack box and the software on it as the result of magic weaved byboys, then they are unlikely to participate fully in their world.Their education, work and leisure will be dictated by those malemagicians whose products our girls consume.

I would love to hear what peopleout there think. Please leave a comment. I may sound strident but Iwon't be offended by disagreements.

Beyond teaching programming: Scratch as a constructivist learning environment

2011-11-02T22:21:00.001+11:00

This is a guest post is the second in a series (you can read the first post here) and is written by my colleague Sarah Macdonald. In it, Sarah tells about teaching Scratch for the first time to her year 7 girls.

Flashback, 2010

End of year curriculumplanning meeting. Students departed. Reports written. Teachers fatigued... and my Head of IT has just announced a majorchange in the IT curriculum for the following year. We will beteaching Scratch. What do I know about Scratch? I knowit’s about programming and primary schools are using it to createendless cartoons about a yellow cat. Why Scratch? Irealise I have a lot to learn.

Mid year 2011

Parent /teacher interviews. Picture a hall, set up similar to ‘speeddating’. But replace hopeful singles with concerned parentson one side of the desk, and well intentioned teachers on the other. It’s getting late, my 20th parent tonight sits down. Mr Smithintroduces himself as a parent of a student in my IT class and asksthe questions that many other parents have been asking this year. Why Scratch? Why teach my child programming? How can youexpect to teach programming to children?
My answer alwaysrefreshes my own belief in why I have come to love teachingScratch.

I say “Mr Smith, when I first saw Scratch Iwondered how many of the students this unit of work would reach. I mean, even if one student becomes interested in computerprogramming after this unit, is that enough to teach programming toan entire class? From a programming point of view, Scratchtakes all of the essential constructs like sequencing, conditionalbranching, control structures, data manipulations and places it in aneasy environment, which every student is able to use as simply asusing children's building blocks. What you need to understand,is that Scratch teaches much more than computer programming. Scratch is important because it is about teaching students to solvetheir own problems and getting them to figure things out anddiscovering how to work things out for themselves.”

Whenasked about Scratch, students gave many suggestions as to itsimportance:

“Scratch taught me to fix problems on myown.”
“it made me be efficient with my time.”
“ittaught me that I need to try new things when it didn’t work thefirst time”
“I took pride in my work, because I had done itall by myself.”

I also explained to Mr Smith that as anEnglish teacher I am always concerned by the plethora of students whoseem reluctant to think for themselves. Those who ‘want theanswer’ to their essay question are unable to see English as anexploration of ideas because they are spending far too much time andenergy ‘getting the answer right’. Scratch teaches studentsthat they need to understand their own problems, make mistakes andexplore alternatives. In this way the students are far moreactive in their learning and they are in charge of finding thesolution, not just waiting for the teacher to give them theanswer.

I tried to get parents to understand that the role ofthe teacher should be to facilitate learning in the classroom. If we focus on giving them tools to discover and problem solve forthemselves, students will be far more equipped to take charge oftheir own learning. Also when they are ‘in charge’ they aremotivated to keep discovering various alternatives and solutions. This is exactly what Scratch does. It’s not just aboutprogramming. It’s about having an aim, looking for solutions,attempting them, learning from mistakes and seeking new ways to solvetheir individual problem. If students learn to do this throughScratch, they can take those skills to their other curriculum areas,whether it be English, Art, Science or Math. Problem solvingwithout the focus on the teacher will allow the student to grow aslearners.

What I am really getting at is the importanceof Constructivist Teaching in building independent thinkers. Constructivist teaching is based on the belief that learning occursas learners are actively involved in a process of meaning andknowledge construction rather than passively receiving information. Learners are the makers of meaning and knowledge. Constructivistteaching fosters critical thinking and creates motivated andindependent thinkers.

A Constructivist Classroom is aStudent-Centered Classroom. Scratch provides the perfectopportunity for students to take charge of their own learning. While teaching Scratch, my students would often ask “How do I getmy character to do x?” I would explain that it is up to themto find a solution. A blank and frustrated look would oftenfollow, however, students soon learn that they could watchtutorials, read instructions, ask their peers or just have a play andlearn from their mistakes. They would often try a series ofalternatives, sometimes taking hours to learn a new programmingskill. At first this would frustrate the students. Theywould whinge, begging “just tell me, and I could be finished bynow!” I would then explain that it is the process that I amconcerned with, not the final product. In this way theclassroom has moved from teacher-centered, where teachers are thedistributor of all things knowledge - to student-centered, where thestudents learning and discovery is in their own hands.

I mustadmit, I find it all very exciting. Langer and Applebee (1),leading educationalists and advocates for the ConstructivistClassroom observe that the role of the teacher needs to dramaticallychange. They state “a teacher's role in providing informationdecreases and is replaced by a strengthened role in eliciting andsupporting students' own thinking (p. 77) and meaning-makingabilities. In a process approach to learning, ideas are allowed todevelop in the learner's own mind through a series of related,supportive activities; where taking risks and generating hypothesesare encouraged; and where new skills are learned in supportiveinstructional contexts.”(Langer and Applebee) Scratch is theperfect environment to adopt supportive instructional contexts whichallow students to take risks and generate their own pathways. To behonest, I was amazed how much I enjoyed stepping away from the frontof the classroom and simply watching students search for answers ontheir own.

Last year, listening to my Head of IT praiseScratch, I believed it would only be of interest and limited benefitto the minority who get a kick out of writing endless lines ofscript. However, it is much more than that. It has shownme that in an optimum environment, students are able to master skillson their own, teach others, learn patience, feel ownership of theirachievements and truly understand what many educationalists areadvocating - When we have command over our own learning we are ableto digest much more than content, we become skilled in the processand learn how to learn.

(1): Applebee, A.N. (1993). Literature inthe secondary school: Studies of curriculum and instruction in theUnited States. Urbana, Il: National Council of Teachers of English.

Every child should learn computer programming

2011-10-26T19:06:00.002+11:00

In a previous post, I have listed a fewreasons for teaching programming in school. In this post, I intend toargue that computer programming is an essentialskill in the curriculum. I was prompted to write itwhen I read the following comments made by Steve Jobs:

"Inmy perspective ... science and computer science isa liberal art, it's something everyone should know how to use, atleast, and harness in their life. It's not something that should berelegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It'ssomething that everybody should be exposed to and everyone shouldhave mastery of to some extent, and that's how we viewed computationand these computation devices."(http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-science-is-a-liberal-art?sc=tw&cc=share)

Usually,when society decides that a skill should be known by all, or most,people, we add it to the school curriculum. So far, it seems thatwe're operating on the assumption that computer programming is askill that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population.

Programmingas an aid to learning

Thoseof us who have learned to program usually find that our thinkingchanges in many ways. When you want to write a computer program, youhave to teach the computer to do something for you. This involvesiterations through a process of deciding what you want toachieve, breaking this down into small tasks, describingthese tasks precisely, writing the program and, mostimportantly, testing and debugging it.

Debuggingis a powerful metaphor for all learning. I read somewhere that moststudents approached tasks with the attitude that they either "getit" or "don't get it". Debugging introduces a processwhereby strategies are trialled and improved upon in a gradual way.Here's what the legendary Seymour Papert has to say in his book,"Mindstorms":

Adeep understanding of programming, in particular the notions of successive decomposition as a mode of analysis and debugging of trialsolutions, results in significant educational benefits inmany domains of discourse, including those unrelated to computers and information technology per se.

Programmingas a skill for the 21st century

MitchResnick, of MIT Media Labs, talks about "interactive literacy".He says that one is not literate simply because he/she can read. Youexpect a literate person to be able to write. In the same way, heargues, most people consume media but are not able to createit themselves. Here's an excerpt of his argument:

Recentcommentaries on new media literacy have emphasized the importance ofthe ability to analyze media critically and the ability toparticipate actively in online communities. Those abilities areclearly important. But I feel these commentaries haven't paid enoughattention to another important aspect of new media literacy: theability to express oneself with new media. This aspect of literacy issorely lacking in today's society: very few people are able toexpress themselves fluently with new mediatechnologies.(http://civic.mit.edu/blog/interactive-literacy-0)

Resnickacknowledges that more content is being created now than before.However, he points out that most of this content is in the form ofwebsites and blog posts that use traditional forms of media. He adds,"For me, the most important and distinguishing property of newmedia is interactivity".

LikePapert, Resnick has backed up his words with actions. He is the mainforce behind the Scratchprogramming environment which enables kids to build thisinteractivity in a fun and effective way.

Itis now easier than ever to teach programming to kids. There are nowmany visual environments that are custom made for use withschool-aged kids. In my school, we have introduced Scratch at year 7level, our junior year. Some of the IT teachers were reluctant atfirst. Now, they rave about Scratch and love what their students haveproduced with it in a very short time.

Ihope this post will help me start a conversation with some who are ofthe same opinion and others who disagree with me. I am planning tofollow it up with two other posts: A guest post from a colleague onScratch as a constructivist learning environment and another on why Iam passionate to see girls, in particular, taught programming atschool.

Pleasejoin the conversation by leaving a comment.

Building an APP with Students: What I have learned this year

2011-10-13T20:09:00.000+11:00

Lastyear, I decided to start an APP development club at my school. Ispent some time in the summer break investigating alternative development environments. In theend, I settled on Corona SDK. Unfortunately, Ionly had a few days left to learn it before the start of the schoolyear. I took some time in Term 1 to complete some tutorials and makeconnections with Corona developers. Thanks to Twitter, I was able tomake friends who have taught me a lot about the technology. The groupbegan in Term 2 and we are now most of the way through an APP weintend to submit to the App Store. A friend has prodded me to getback to writing about the experience so far.

Recapof journey so far:

Asmentioned in previous posts, we meet for an hour on mostTuesday afternoons of each term. In Term 2, we built a small App tolearn how to handle the "touch" event. At that stage, thegroup was 32 students strong. The last meeting of theterm featured an appearance via Skype of Corona developer, PeachPellen.

Oneof the highlights of the journey so far was the day that threestudent members of the group and I presented a workshop on building APPs for teachers at the 2011 VITTA conference. Thedeputy principal who brought them back to school reported that theywere buzzing with excitement.

TheAPP we're building now

In the school holidays between TermsTwo and Three, I had coffee with Ian Chia of Being Prudence. Ian quickly whipped up some code to teach me how Luatables could be used to control conditional paths in a computerprogram. Wow! I have used this code in everything I have done since.He also gave me the idea to get the group to build a hangman game ona fashion-related theme.

The girls loved drawing the hangman incode and using a picture of a head taken in PhotoBooth. Too often thehead was mine!

After a while, we decided to build avariation on hangman. The girls, whose number is now half what it wasat the beginning, are now working in teams:

Programmers: These girls are helping working on bits of the APP which I then integrate;
Icon/Splash Screen artists: These girls are drawing the icon and the screen that shows while the game is being loaded on the phone
Game asset artists: These girls are making the art work that will appear during the game.

Our current APP.
Can you guess the theme?

Anaccidental find (This really did happen)

One Tuesday afternoon, a year 9 studentwalked into the lab just before we had started. She told her friendthat she'd stayed to serve a detention but she had gotten the datewrong. Knowing the girl from teaching her Maths and IT, I guessedthat she would be interested in what we were doing. I asked her: "Soyour parents are counting on you being at school for an hour?"When she answered "yes" I invited her to stay for thatsession. It turned out that she had learnt from her friend about ourgame and produced art work on that theme. The art work wasincredible. When Ian visited the group one lunch time, he left veryimpressed with that girl's skills. Needless to say, she has nowjoined the group and is part of group 3, the game asset artists.

I must remember to implore theprincipal not to scrap the detention policy!

LessonsLearned

I went into this out of a strong beliefthat our girls needed to know how to build technology, not simplyconsume someone else's products. These are some of the things I havelearned so far:

Work on programming fundamentals first: I have not really succeeded at teaching programming all that well. I have given the students an exposure. Next year, I want to start with some exercises aimed at teaching things such as loops, conditional statements and arrays. I am thinking of designing these exercises so that we implement them in Scratch first and Lua second;
Attractive displays trump event handling: Many Corona tutorials introduce event handling very early. I understand the importance of this, but the students were most interested when they were working on the display elements of a hangman game. Next year, we may build an animated prototype of our APP before worrying about interactivity.
It takes three terms to build an App: One short term of tutorials followed by two to build an APP was too short a time. Hopefully, we'll start in Term 1 next year and have three more terms for the APP.
It was invaluable for me to build a connection with professionals: Peach's tutorials, Jayant Varma's tutoring and Ian's inspiration and continual support have made a huge difference. I was stuck on many occasions and these guys came to my aid.
Keep it simple: We are committed to submit our APP to the Apple App Store in the middle of November. To this end, we have made some compromises. The game will have one screen which gets refreshed with each new mystery word. The splash screen will include the credits (which reminds me, I have to get the parents' permission to list their daughters' names).
No matter how many start in the group, many will leave: We have lost students to drama showcases, netball coaching duties and part-time work. Finding the artistic student happened by accident this time around. Next time, I might invite a few students nominated by the art department to fill any vacant spots. We can benefit from their skills and, in turn, we can give them an authentic context to practice their craft.

Inconclusion, I want to thank Ian Chia for all the help he is offeringus and for prodding me to put this post together. Stay tuned for morenews.

Book Review: Totto-chan - A book for every educator

2011-10-01T17:55:00.000+10:00

Totto-chan: The LittleGirl at the Window

Author: Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, Translator:Dorothy Britton. Publisher: Kodansha International, 1996.

ISBN: 4-7700-2067-8

This book was given me as a gift by mysister-in-law, an educator and avid reader. It is the autobiographyof a famous actress and UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. The bookconcentrates on a short period of time when the author attended Tomoeprimary school in Tokyo. In fact, the book is more a description ofthe school founder's practice than it is a life story.

Expelled from first grade!

The book starts by telling ofTotto-chan's expelling from her previous school, when she was only ingrade one. You see, "the little girl at the window" wouldwait all morning for street bands to walk by the school and call themover to play their music. This was seen as highly disruptivebehaviour and, exasperated, her teacher decided the girl did notbecome at the school. Eventually, her mother found a school thatwould take her: Tomoe Gakuen.

Tomoe was founded by an educationalreformer called Sosaku Kobayachi, referred to throughout the book as"the headmaster". It was a small school of 50 students intotal. Classrooms were disused train cars. In the assembly hall, thestudents shared a daily lunch consisting of "something from theocean and something from the hills." Mr Kobayachi believed inexperiential learning. He even asked the parents to send their kidsto school in their worst clothes.

Lessons at Tomoe

Tomoe was a school with a lot offreedom. The students were trusted to climb trees, play freely orstay in class to finish a science experiment during recess. Here's adescription of the classes at Tomoe:

At the beginningof the first period, the teacher made a list of all the problems andquestions in the subjects to be studied that day. Then she would say,"Now, start with any of these you like."

This method ofteaching enabled the teachers to observe - as the children progressedto higher grades- what they were interested in as well as their wayof thinking and character. It was an ideal way for teachers to reallyget to know their pupils. (p. 29)

Adventures on the school grounds

Totto-chan's adventures at Tomoe weremany. One time, she decided to invite Yasuaki-chan to her tree. Yousee, every student had a tree of his/her own but Yasuaki had hadpolio and couldn't climb. Totto-chan decided that he deserved to seethe world from the top of a tree. She used some ingenuity and foundstrength she never knew she possessed. Eventually, Yasuaki was ableto stand in her tree and look at the surrounding area.

Perhaps the most memorable experienceshe had was when she dropped her purse down the toilet! Undaunted,she started emptying the cesspool with a wooden ladle. What was theheadmaster's reaction when he saw her? He asked what she was doingand added: "You'll put it all back when you've finished, won'tyou?"

Things to fear

So what did this headmaster, whopermitted the children to experiment, fail and learn, teach them tofear?

Having eyes, butnot seeing beauty; having ears, but not hearing music; having minds,but not perceiving truth; having hearts that are never moved andtherefore never set on fire. These are the things to fear, said theheadmaster. (p.81)

War

War reached Japan and Tomoe eventuallyburned down. As he watched his creation go up in flame, theheadmaster said to his son, after whom the school had been named,"What kind of school shall we build next?"

Conclusion

This book is poignant: It is charmingand readable by a child but it is designed to make a point. As onereview on the back jacket says, "It is a quiet indictment ofsterile education." An epilogue relates what became of the Tomoestudents that featured in the book. Until the writing of the book, the Tomoe alumni assembled to reminisce every year on November 3rd,the day on which Tomoe used to hold its Sports Day.

Twitter + ReadItLater = Connected educators

2011-09-25T19:46:00.005+10:00

I am writing this blog post for mycolleagues, and other educators, who are not yet on Twitter. In it, Iintend to provide a guide to using Twitter and to managing thereading load that the Twitter-habit will generate.

Understandably, teachers don't want toadd another distraction to their busy days. They often hear thatTwitter is a forum for people who think the world needs to know everyopinion they have and every place they visit.

These were my views of Twitter until Itook the plunge and signed up. I now have an active exchange witheducators from around the world and, thanks to ReadItLater, I havefound a way to read some of their output without adding to myworkload. This exchange has enriched me in many ways: it supplies mewith lesson ideas, gives me a forum to put my ideas out for scrutinyand keeps me up to date with educational trends. Through Twitter, Ihave met someone who has visited my classroom and taught my studentsvaluable skills.

Beyond 140 characters

Each Tweet has a limit of 140characters. This is not enough to discuss an issue but it is enoughto share a link to a webpage, a blog post or video. Here are twosamples from my tweets:

A Tweetcontaining information

A Tweetwith a link - Those interested would click on the link at the end

Decide who to follow

You may want to start by following yourcolleagues and people recommended by them. If you check a website often,like TED Talks, follow their tweets. This way, you will be alertedwhenever there is new content on that site. It is easy to "unfollow"people if you don't like what they share.

Making time to read

Like you, I don't have much time in theday to read articles (or watch videos) that have been tweeted. This is why I have signed up toReadItLater.com.

After signing up to ReadItLater, Do the following:

1) Click on "All Browsers"

2) Click on the link "Read it later"and drag the following bookmarklets to the toolbar of your web browser

You're set. Whenever you visit a webpage you want to read later, simply click on the Read It Later button. This will save the page to your reading list.

Clicking on Reading list will bring upyour saved articles. You can also go to ReadItLater.com and view thesame list. Here is what mine looks like at the moment:

Each morning, I allow myself 10-15 minutesto check Twitter. If a link looks interesting, I click on it and thenclick "Read It Later". When I have time, I go toReadItLater.com and view my saved articles. This way, I can read anarticle when I take a 5-minute break or when I am sitting in a caffeon the weekend. Articles marked as read disappear from your list butcan be retrieved at a later date.

Your reading list in your pocket

If you own an Apple mobile device orone that runs Android (Eg: Samsung Galaxy or HTC Desire) you can getthe ReadItLater App. This allows you to catch up on your readinganytime you're not in front of a computer. If you see me with my iPadin a caffe, I am probably going through my reading list. Feel free toapproach me all the same. I won't mind the interruption!

Fear of drowning

Both Twitter andReadItLater have many features beyond the basics. Don't let this facthold you back. Get started and you will pick up what you need as youuse them. You can reap much benefit from making use of the basicfunctionality described in this article.

I hope this post has been of someuse. If you're an experienced user of either tool, please share yourtips in the comments. If you're new to them, please share yourexperience so far.

Am I the only one upset with Apple?

2011-09-18T20:27:00.000+10:00

Like many people, I have switched tousing a Mac and I love it. I also have an iPad which I enjoy verymuch. As of this year, my school has begun the process of putting alaptop in the hands of every student. Our machine of choice was thewhite MacBook. In this post, I argue that Apple has disadvantagedschools when it terminated this model.

A bit of context: I work at a schoolwith a forward-looking IT manager. He convinced us to become a Macschool about five years ago. That was when I bought my first MacBook.It was not perfect and I even had to return it for repairs after thefirst year. Still, it was the most predictable computer I had everowned. Slowly but surely, the staff and students grew to love theMacBooks and iMacs around the school.

When we considered becoming a 1:1school, the school chose the white MacBooks for their balance of power and value. Year 10s would be "given" a machine,mostly funded by the federal government's Digital EducationRevolution (DER funds). The school had to subsidise the cost as thegovernment provided $1000 per computer. Year 7s would lease a MacBookover three years.

Recently, Apple announced that it wouldterminate the white MacBook. It guaranteed Australian schools supplyof the terminated product and threw in two extra years of warranty on that model only. The department of education chose thatline for those of its teachers who wanted a Mac and offered thema lease over four years. This created a protest campaign, led by the inspirational Richard Lambert, as teachers did not want to lease an outdated laptop and keep it for four years.

What stunned me in all this was thatalmost everyone I spoke to held Apple innocent. Considerthe options they have left us:

MacBook Air 11": Great, compact and portable machine. Yet, its battery life is limited. A colleague of mine used it for powerpoint presentations for half of one school day and managed to drain the battery in that time. I asked her if she had been playing any videos but she replied in the negative.
MacBook Pro or Air 13": Expensive and Apple are offering them to schools with a single year's warranty.
iPad: Some schools are doing great work with the iPad. Still, at a conference I attended recently, students were asked what they would choose if they had a choice and they replied: "a laptop". They loved their iPads but could not wait (their own words) to get home and complete some of their work on a desktop computer.

I spoke to the IT manager of an Appleschool recently. I put the question to him: "Am I the only oneupset with Apple?" He said he was too! He added that, unlessApple could come up with a solution in the next year, many Apple schoolswill face one of two choices: Dump Apple or become BYOD (Bring YourOwn Device) schools.

I would hate to see my school move awayfrom Apple products. I remain hopeful that they will announce a newline of laptops that fills the "value" gap soon.

Is your school ordering whiteMacBooks while there is supply? Did you find an alternative? I wouldlove to know what people out there are doing.

I searched eight years for this answer

2011-09-14T21:47:00.001+10:00

When I first began teaching secondary school Mathematics, roughly eight years ago, I wondered where word problems fit into the structure of a topic: Do they come at the beginning to provide a context or at the end, where they provide an application for the acquired skills. In case you don't want to read on, I am now certain that they should come at the beginning. Still, please keep reading, I want to discuss my reasons and give one example of what I mean.

Source: www.freedigitalphotos.net

Rationale for leaving word problems till the end: Students often struggle with interpreting word problems. They add another layer of complexity. Teaching students to interpret the terminology while they master the essential skills could prove too much for some of them. This is the approach taken in most textbooks.

Rationale for teaching word problems first (and throughout): Learning needs a context and most students struggle with abstract concepts.

This year, I have become totally convinced of the second approach. Here are my reasons:

Most students seem to find it easier to think concretely than abstractly. Before I start teaching linear graphs, I give my students a graph representing the cost of hiring a plumber. They can work out the hourly rate (gradient / slope of the line) and call-out fee (y-intercept). It takes a lot of training before I can give them the graph of y = 5x - 2 and ask them about the gradient and y-intercept.
When teaching Maths outside of any context, be it a game, collection of patterns or real-life situation, students form the idea that it is made up of arbitrary rules. I even know students who maintain that those rules were invented by evil adults to torment children their age!
Word problems are sometimes phrased in a way that is open to more than one interpretation, yet the students expect Maths problems to have only one possible solution. I am not a big fan of this fact but that's another discussion.
Word problems can become more difficult after skills practice! This is because the students know that we want them to use the skills we have just taught them. This is why you find them putting their intuition on hold and using unlikely formulae when first principles are sufficient.

As an example of the fourth reason, consider the following problem from a current textbook:

For a period of 6 months after planting a sapling, a certain kind of sunflower exhibits linear growth. After 3 months the height was 36 cm, and after 4 months the height was 45 cm. Find the rule, connecting the height of the sunflower, H (in cm) and the time t (in months). (The answer is H = 9t + 9)

A student who understands that the gradient is the rate at which the sapling grows each month will realise that it is 9cm/per month. The textbook takes 5 lines and a formula to work this out!

The y-intercept is the initial height of the sapling. A student of mine went back one month at a time, subtracting 9cm for each month, to find that the sapling was 9cm high at the time of planting. She represented this by drawing a small table. The textbook takes another 5 lines of algebraic acrobatics to work this out.

You may be of the same opinion as me or you may be in favour of leaving word problems to the end. Either way, I would love to read your views in the comments section.

Students presenting at a teachers' conference

2011-08-31T20:51:00.002+10:00

On Monday, August 29th, I was joined by three of my students in presenting a workshop at the Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association conference: Leading and Learning from the Edge. We ran a workshop entitled: "Building mobile Apps for iOS and Android Devices using Corona SDK." I was very proud of the three girls (I work at a girls' school) and I wanted to write this blogpost in their honour.

Context

At our school, an Apps programming club has been running for a term and a half. When I received the "call for papers" from VITTA, I thought it would be a good idea to involve some students as this would motivate them and give them a special experience. As we came closer to the conference, I realised that we had covered less ground in the App Club than I had anticipated. The student presenters and I were not as confident anymore.

How we prepared

I began by building part of the App we would use in the workshop. I then met with the three students during a few lunchtimes to build the remaining functionality. It became clear early on that they really wanted me to build the whole thing. Given how busy our school tends to be and given that these girls were involved in other activities at lunchtime (not to mention that I was looking after a soccer team), our meetings were few and far between.

A week from the conference, we had six powerpoint presentations: one introducing us and the programming environment and 5 "steps" for building the App. We also had some workfiles which our participants would modify in each step. We tested every step to make sure that the instructions in our presentations were accurate and presented in the right sequence. In the last week, each of the girls had a run at presenting her part to a small group of students. Throughout the weekend, each of the three practised her part and two of them emailed me questions.

The day of the conference

On the day of the conference, we made sure we got to the venue early and checked in the configuration of the computers our participants would use. We chose four computers and checked them. Three were fine but one didn't have one program installed. The technician who was there assured us that he would get to that one.

We were now at ease and went to attend the opening keynote speech, summarised in this post. When our session started, we discovered that, although it was to span sessions 2 and 3, the participants had been allocated a different presentation in session 3! Still, we got started, each girl having her turn while the remaining two and I helped the participating teachers debug their programs. Much to our delight and relief, no one left half way through. The workshop went really well and the student-presenters grew in confidence and looked like they were right in their element. What was particularly pleasing was the way they called on each other's help when they one of them was unsure how to help a teacher who was stuck.

Step 3 was mine to present and, at the end of it, the participants took the workfiles away in case they chose to complete the App at home or work.

After the session, the students enjoyed the gourmet lunch on offer. When I received a message from the deputy principal who had come to pick them up, I rushed them to return their plates and head out. On the way out, they saw a coffee cart and asked to be allowed to have a hot chocolate each. After the great job they had done, I couldn't say no!

Lessons learned

If we get to do this again next year, this is what I will do differently:

Begin planning earlier: Expect the students to be busy over many lunchtimes. Three weeks weren't enough, five weeks would be better.
Insist that the students have a greater input in preparing the workshop files and presentations.
Include more source code (programming lines) in the workfiles. The less that the participants have to type from scratch, the better
Ask the organisers about the directory structure they intend to use and replicate it on the my laptop (the presentation workstation). This year, the participants found the files in "Other files/presenter files/1206 Corona/workfiles". This is important since many teachers aren't used to Macs.
Schedule a review session with the students. They too can learn a lot from reflecting on their experience.

Finally, observing those students do so well in what could easily have been an intimidating environment filled me with pride and joy. For the next two days, I was on Cloud 9.

I intend to repeat this experiment, even inside the school. In an email they sent me afterwards, the students remarked: "It was a nice change for us to be the teachers and them to be the students."

VITTA 2011: What I learned on day one - First session

2011-08-29T21:27:00.002+10:00

Today was the first day of the VITTA (Victorian IT Teachers' Association) conference. It is the only day I am attending and, as always, I have learned a lot! Here is my summary of the first session of today:

Keynote 1: Roger Larsen, Pearson Platforms
Roger's speech was very engaging. In it, he emphasised 21st Century skills. In particular, he noted critical thinking and entrepreneurship as key among those skills. Roger emphasised that digital content must not be a mere digitisation of paper. He wanted digital content to be changeable and interactive.

Roger moved on to speak about MLEs (Managed Learning Environments). MLE seemed to be an extension of Learning Management Systems. He described a system he helped implement in London where the students signed once and then had access to Applications and personalised content while teachers and parents had access to a variety of records and assessment information.

His advice to administrators who invest in learning technologies: "Unless the teacher is fully empowered, you will fail!" He wanted curricula to be flexible enough to allow the teacher to respond to the needs of the students and to allow for the solving of student-defined problems.
Roger also gave some practical advice on disseminating technology in schools:

Be patient (it takes at least 3 years); and
Identify teachers who will champion the use of technology.

In the end, he kept coming back to the idea that technology has to be relevant to education and not the other way around.

Gerald White of the ACER was invited to join Roger on the stage, as did Yong Zhao via video link from Oregon. Dr White facilitated a session of Q&A through Twitter and SMS. Here are some of the points made by Yong Zhao:

ICT is being used to support the tyranny of standardised tests;
ICT should be used to support students by giving them an authentic audience and global support;
We need to develop right-brain skills rather than the skills that had been traditionally valued; and
Banning sites gives a false sense of security. Students will have access outside of school anyway. It is our responsibility to teach them to sift through what is out there.

When asked what he viewed as important skills for the 21st Century, Prof Yong enumerated the following:

The ability to work across cultures
Global entrepreneurship
Understanding of one's own strength (emotion + metacognition)
Social networking
Responsible risk taking

I hope these notes give you a good sense of what went on this year. If you're an IT teacher or a school leader, I highly recommend that you attend next year's conference. VITTA rocks!

Book review: Mindset by Carol Dweck

2011-08-20T21:43:00.001+10:00

I have recently listened to the audio recording of Carol Dweck's book: Mindset (Ballantine Books, 2007). Dweck is a professor of Psychology at Stanford University (formerly at Columbia). She had had a profound effect on me as a teacher when I was looking at research into feedback.

Dweck's work showed that praising children for their traits, "you're a good boy" or "you're so smart" made them less likely to attempt subsequent tasks which they perceived as challenging. On the other hand, praising children for their effort made them want to persist with difficult tasks and look for alternative strategies to complete them:

if you learn from person praise that success means you’re a good or able person, then you also seem to learn that failure means you are a bad or inept person. If you learn from praise that your good performance merits wholesale pride, you also learn that poor performance merits shame (Dweck, Self Theories: Their role in motivation, personality and development, 2000, Psychology Press, p. 114).

Mindset is a book written for the general public. In it, Professor Dweck distinguishes between two mindsets each of us may possess (more accurately, choose to possess): A growth mindset and a fixed mindset.

Those of the fixed mindset believe that ability is innate and unchangeable. They spend their lives trying to prove their ability. People with this mindset look at challenges as threats, since they associate effort with a lack of ability.Those with a growth mindset welcome challenges and view them as opportunities to, you guessed it, grow!

In a study at the university of Hong Kong, where instruction is in English, students found to struggle with the English language were offered a remedial course. At the same time, their mindset was tested. Those with a fixed mindset declined to take the course, perhaps fearing that it would expose their lack of ability. Students with a growth mindset opted to take the course, given that it would help them understand instruction in their chosen field.

The good news of this book is that, no matter what we start life with, we all can learn and achieve success if we put our mind to it, develop strategies and seek help from others. Dweck gives examples from the worlds of business, sport, science and education to make her point.

This notion challenges me to stop viewing my students as capable or incapable, strong or weak. Instead, I am trying to adopt language and actions that convey the growth mindset to my students. I even told my year seven homeroom about the book and its message. Later that week, we were having trouble accessing the role marking system using the class computer. I managed to fix the problem and one of the class captains said to me: "You're so smart". The other captain rebuked her: "You shouldn't say that!" I added: "I know you meant to say you liked how I persisted until I found a way to solve the problem!" We all had a good laugh.

Last App Club meeting for the term

2011-06-07T18:08:00.000+10:00

Today, we had our last App Club meeting for the term. Some of the students now have exams to prepare for and I have reports to write. I have scheduled 8 meetings for the following term. So, here is what we did today:

Peach Pellen, Corona celebrity and owner of Techority.com, appeared via Skype. She told the girls about the early frustrations they could expect and told them it would be worth it in the long run. She encouraged them to have Apps on the App Store by the time they finish school. Should they stick with it, she added, they'd be able to charge a good hourly rate to companies who needed Apps built for them.
I explained the solution to the problem we had been working on progressively in the last three sessions. I should post a video of the final product as soon as I get a chance. I had to clarify the difference between "defining" a function and "calling" it. I need to stay disciplined about using a minimalist set of technical vocab while the students learn at their own pace.
We managed to build and send the App to one student's Android phone. For some reason, another's wouldn't receive the App and iOS licenses are yet to arrive. Apple is yet to call the school's Business Manager to confirm I am authorised to buy on the school's behalf.

It was a shame that a few girls were missing today: Some had netball training and others were at hockey. I would have loved them to hear Peach's presentation. She said very few words but she was inspiring.

I know that a few of the girls will be dropping the activity in Term Three. One year 10 told me she needed to work on Tuesday evenings while others will have satisfied their curiosity and realised there's some hard work involved. I just hope that most will stick with this.

I plan to do some serious learning over the holidays and to upgrade the Corona Simulators on the lab computers. Wish me luck next term.

Why teach programming using Corona SDK?

2011-05-21T18:39:00.000+10:00

At the moment, I am not aware of other schools teaching App Development in Corona SDK. I am sure that such schools are out there and I would love to get to know the teachers. Being a beginner in this field, I am sure I can learn a lot from those with more experience.

Here is why I believe Corona SDK is a good platform for teaching programming:

App Development is more likely to engage the kids' imagination than, say, database programming;
Corona supports both iOS and Android devices;
Lua, the language used by Corona, is a flexible, minimalistic language. Eg: variables don't need to be given a type and semicolons are not required at the end of each statement;
The SDK includes objects that give access to the mobile device's screen with great ease;
It is a new platform that is gaining a lot of momentum among developers;
The Apple University Consortium (AUC) has started offering courses on Corona SDK. A great endorsement;
Every evaluation I have read of the performance of Corona Apps has concluded that speed is not an issue at all; and
The Corona community is very helpful. There are many bloggers who are happy to post tutorials and answer questions by email.

If you can add to this list, please do so via the comments.

App Development Club: Starting on our first game

2011-05-17T20:41:00.000+10:00

Today, there were 31 students in the after-school App Group. One student had apologised for a medical reason and another one was absent from school.

We started on a simple game that would help consolidate what we have learnt so far note my use of the first person plural, as I am sorting things out myself. This is what was achieved today:

Words falling across the screen (using transition.to)
An event handler for the "touch" event.
When the user touches the words, they disappear.

This may not seem like much, but this simple App made them understand the concept of event handling. They also had to do some debugging, which was nice. For the first time, they had to write their own code and then look over it to find - mostly spelling - mistakes.

A few of them replaced the words with an image and one student had three different sentences coming in from different parts of the screen.

We will make this App a little more involved next time. I hope to have and iOS developer license sorted out in the next week or two so they can finish this term's sessions (six in total) with something on their mobile devices.

It was very rewarding to see the joy on some of their faces when they got it working. I really look forward to these sessions each week.

Exciting news: Corona SDK celebrity, Peach Pellen, has agreed to appear by Skype in two weeks' time. I bet the girls will be inspired by her.

App Development Club: Beginning to program

2011-05-14T19:28:00.002+10:00

After getting over the installation problem discussed in the last post (using the laborious process described in that same post), we had a great class last Tuesday after school. 30 girls filled the lab and worked in pairs. Among them, 3 year 10s sat on the floor and worked on their laptops.
Here's what we did:

I demonstrated a "Hello World" program, where the words fall across the screen. This was a tutorial posted on the Ansca videos page.
I explained about Red, Green, Blue and why 255 was a significant number inside a computer (largest unsigned integer that fits in 8 bits).
I left the students to reproduce this themselves.
The students moved on to a tutorial published by Peach Pellen:

Display a picture in the middle of the screen
Listen to a "touch" event on that picture and make it disappear

It was great to see the girls modify the exercises to suit their own purposes. Some simply swapped Peach's picture with their own. Others used a picture of their favourite singer and made his name drop across the picture.

At the end, I asked them if they had enjoyed the session, and I heard a collective "yes".

My next project is to get them to write a simple game. The words "Tap me" keep appearing at the top of the screen, in a random position, and then move to another place on the screen while fading. When the user "taps" the text successfully, the score increases by one. The game ends when the user has managed 10 successful taps. I intend to break this exercise up into smaller ones with increasing complexity.

I have three people to thank for the learning I have done so far:

Carlos Icaza, from Ansca Mobile, who corresponds with me about all kinds of issues;
Peach Pellen, of the Techority website, for her excellent; and
Jayant Varma, of OZApps, who gives me personalised tutorials via Skype

The reason I am promoting this club is to hook up with other schools that may be teaching App Development, especially using Corona SDK. So, if you're doing this, please get in touch with me.

App Development Club: Teething problems

2011-05-10T22:24:00.000+10:00

Late last year, I decided to start an App Development club at my school. I wanted to use a programming environment that used a language that was less intimidating that Objective C. The idea had to have some differentiating feature, as previous attempts to teach programming had not met with great success. I decided, in consultation with a few others, that it would work best as an "extension activity" for those identified as being among the school's top Maths students.

I spent sometime in the summer exploring LiveCode. It looked good but I couldn't find a clear learning path. In the last week of the holidays, I discovered Corona SDK.

On the last day of Term 1, I sent out ninety odd invitations to girls (no boys at my school) in years 8 to 12. I specified 6 Tuesdays on which we would meet for an hour after school. I was very pessimistic but, while rejecting late submissions, I had to accept a total of 33 students. A mate of mine, Maths/Science teacher and all round scholar, Tony, expressed an interest in learning alongside them.

Well, there was nothing to it. Corona SDK, TextWrangler and a few other tools were installed in one lab. The year 10s, of whom there were 3, would bring their own laptops, as would Tony and I.

It may all sound straight forward, except that it isn't! Here is the issue we have had to deal with:

Corona SDK requires the user's registration details when it is run for the first time on a machine.
This registration procedure cannot happen through the school's proxy server
Each registered user can log on to two machines. There is no such thing as a multi-machine or site license! (Picture me tearing my hair out at this point)

Here is how I have solved the problem for the time being:

Log on to the machine as administrator
Use my Samsung Galaxy S phone as a mobile access point (note: untick remember network)
Turn off all proxies for that connection
Pull out the Ethernet cable
Adjust the time on the machine (Corona is very meticulous)
Run the Corona Simulator and register using one of the student's registration details (we decided that did not need to be a top secret. Those who want to profit from Apps can buy a license for the computer in their garage!)
Restore proxy settings
Reconnect the Ethernet cable
Log out.
Move on to the next machine
repeat steps 1 to 10

Thank you to those who are still reading at this point. The problem is that the registration only "sticks" for admin! So, I now log the students in myself, given that I cannot divulge the admin password under pain of death (my own, that is). The students have been warned not to use the admin privileges for evil, lest the club be terminated.

I will let you know if I find a permanent fix or if Ansca come back to me with a good idea. I will soon blog about the actual learning activities I am using and the people I have to thank for them.

If your school is doing something similar, I would love to hear from you.

A lesson in leadership from a thirteen year old

2011-05-07T11:46:00.000+10:00

Last week, I was on camp with the Year Sevens. A colleague of mine and I were in charge of 17 year 7s and one year 10 "peer-helper". One morning, the team had an activity called "Team Rescue". It was their task to get through a crocodile infested river using a minimal set of equipment, until they arrived at a helipad. The girls had to carry a mannequin on a stretcher. They decided the mannequin's name was Janet.

The activity brought out many individual characteristics in the girls. One girl displayed some selfishness, while others were great foot soldiers. A few girls carried Janet through obstacles without complaining once about their burden. The most remarkable girl was Jenny. She was a great leader and this article is an attempt on my part to consolidate the lessons I learnt about leadership by observing her.

Jenny was full of creative ways to get through the course. She conveyed them to the other girls in a courteous manner and they accepted her suggestions. She gave herself many of the less glamorous jobs. Jenny listened to the suggestions that others made and affirmed them. One thing she wasn't doing at the beginning was giving others pats on the back. This changed half way through the activity, to complete her skill set as a leader.

The thing that impressed me the most about Jenny's manner was how nonplussed she was in urgent situations. Her sense of humour was not threatened for one second, even when she fell and when others were doing the wrong thing by the team.

When we're back at school, I intend to speak to Jenny about her leadership. Our school provides training and responsibilities for such girls, especially as they enter Year Eight. I hope she puts her hand up for a captaincy. I also hope I can learn to maintain my sense of humour when "the chips are down".

Like many of my colleagues, I find camps tiring and I wonder about the sacrifices that have to be made, such as leaving my family and being on duty for 24 hours of the day. What makes it all worthwhile is the privilege of seeing students in a different light and coming to realise just what remarkable individuals some of them are.

Can you think of a time when you learnt a lesson from a child? If so, please share it.

Creating mobile Apps? My thoughts on two helpful environments

2011-01-31T11:57:00.000+11:00

I wanted to spend some time over the holidays (It is summer down under) learning to develop Apps. My purpose is to start an App development club at my school, so I needed to find a set of tools with the following features:

Low cost;
A visual environment for the user interface;
An easy(ish) programming language to add functionality;
A clear learning path to take my students and me from beginner to advanced developer; and
A helpful community who are ready to point me in the right direction when I get stuck.

First Environment: RunRev's LiveCode.

Quick Review: This is a brilliant development environment. You can build applications for Mac OS, Windows, Linux and iOS devices. It ticks all the boxes for me, except for point 4. I could not find the clear path. I think that it is a shame, given how good the environment is.

Recommendation: Should you decide to investigate LiveCode, you must join their Facebook page so you can be notified about their regular webcasts.

People to connect with: Mark Schonewille (@xtalkprogrammer) and Obleo (@oab).

Second Environment: Corona SDK

Quick Review: Not a development environment as such, but functionality provided by the guys at Ansca Mobile and a simulator to show you what it all looks like. You can build your app and then distribute it on iOS or Android devices. Corona ticks the boxes apart from point 2. I can definitely see myself teaching my students using Corona. The programming language used is Lua, trendily obscure!

Recommendation: If you're a beginner, take a look at the excellent tutorials on Techority.com.

People to connect with: Peach Pellen (@peachpellen) and Jonathan Beebe (@beebegames)

A final word: SpriteDeck adds a visual GUI builder to Corona. It looks like a great little tool and I will write about it as soon I get the chance to evaluate it.

Let me know what you think about these, or other, App development environments.

The science of motivation: implications for learning

2010-12-10T22:23:00.000+11:00

In this very interesting video, Daniel Pink presents a surprising fact about the effect of incentives on human behaviour.

To put it briefly, Dan Pink presents several experiments conducted by American universities and one by the London School of Economics, all of which show the same thing: If you're asking people to perform a task that involves creative thinking, monetary rewards make them perform worse than they would otherwise do! His interpretation of this surprising result is that incentives focus the mind in such a way as to hinder the required creativity.

On the other hand, when a group is offered a monetary reward to perform a mechanical task, its members perform better than those belonging to a control group.

Implications for students

What does that have to do with education, I hear you ask. Well, it seems to me that the grades we give our students are the currency of the classroom. When we assess frequently and grade all our assessments, we focus our students' minds on the process of taking tests. Rather than encouraging them to take risks, learn and solve difficult problems, we encourage them to learn facts and procedures. "Is this going to be on the test?" becomes their most commonly asked question. We enter into a vicious circle where they stop valuing anything that is not "going to be on the test" and we start testing even more because "they won't value anything that is not on the test".

Implications for teachers

There has been much talk in the last few years about "performance bonuses" for teachers. Such bonuses may well motivate us to drill the students on taking the national benchmark tests. Our teaching becomes very focused on one set of outcomes. I have heard of American primary schools that have stopped teaching anything but Maths and English. History, Geography, Science, LOTE and the Arts are not benchmarked. Students' performances on those subjects are not tied to a school's funding.

In conclusion, do we think the tasks of teaching and learning are of the creative variety or do we conceive of them as mechanical tasks? Currently, there are many -external- incentives for us to make them belong to the latter type.

One day at the VITTA 2010 conference

2010-12-01T22:19:00.000+11:00

Yesterday, I attended the second day of the conference of the Victorian Information Technology Teachers' Association - VITTA. I could not attend both days because of other commitments I had at school. My impression was beyond good! Here are some details:

Keynote: Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision Australia. Reverend Costello (he's an ordained minister) spoke about leadership. He spoke about leaders, and by extension teachers, tapping into people's needs and curiosities. He gave examples from the story of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Clinton and others. Leaders, he argued, knew how to honour people's negative energies and then reframe them to create a positive outcome. One of the things he said was that a great force in the world is parents making sacrifices for their children. He wondered why our leaders didn't tap into that to make education, and the status of teachers, their highest priority.
Give GameMaking a Go. Three students from Mount Waverley Primary school, accompanied by their inspirational teacher, Leeanne King, gave us a tutorial in GameMaker. They were bright, confident and unbelievable articulate. I was so impressed I tweeted: "I would definitely replace me with that grade 4 boy".
1:1 program in Sandhurst Catholic Schools: The presentation was very informative and would have been very revealing had my school not gone through what it did in the last year. The speakers went through costing, choice of laptops and curriculum considerations. They were very thorough.
Prizes for videos of different categories. Although I haven't done it yet, I intend to check them out on classnet.com.au
Afternoon keynotes: Adam Brice and Paul Callaghan. An inspirational deputy principal of a primary school and a freelance game developer. Wow is all I will say about these guys' presentations. Check out what the students in Adam's school on the website: ischool.net.au. Paul made his slides available on his own blog: www.paulcallaghan.net
Free session. I had a free session somehow! I used it to go around the trade show and talk to people
Edmodo. This was a hands on workshop by John Pearce. Check out his blog. He keeps many helpful links and tutorials.

All in all, I was very glad to attend. The networking was great. I learned a few surprising facts about some university offerings which may help us extend some of our students. Thanks VITTA for a great event.

I hope to go again next year and to see many more innovative educators.

Gaining perspective: The children not in our classroom

2010-11-16T21:22:00.000+11:00

Today, I was feeling rotten about many things. It is the busiest time of year and many other things are going on at and outside of school. I was tired and generally miserable. The thought that dominated all others was: I am being unfair to my own children.

When I came home, two things happened that helped me put things into perspective and feel grateful again.

Firstly, we received a fund raising call from the Alannah and Madeline foundation. They related the story of two children, a brother and sister who had witnessed their mother being murdered by their dad! Talk about perspective hitting you in the face.

Then a moment of real joy took place as I sat and read with my daughter. The book was Horrid Henry's Christmas Cracker. H.H. had been chosen to play the Innkeeper in the Christmas play. His only line was "No", which he was to say as he turned Joseph and Mary away. Henry wasn't one to shun the limelight so he modified things a little. When Jospeh and Mary came to him, he insisted there was plenty of room at the inn. He literally pulled the expectant parents by their robes and promised satellite TV and computers. Why would they go to the stable? It had fleas!

I had a good belly laugh with Christina while reading. We laughed so much that my wife, sitting on the adjoining bed to read to our son, urged me to control myself!

I am now about to embark on a third perspective-rich activity: sleep. Lesson preparation will have to wait to the morning. As a wise colleague of mine says: If you can't walk into that classroom with joy, you're of no use to the students. I am sure my memory has distorted her words a little, but I am equally sure that she will forgive me.

What have you created at school today?

2010-11-06T21:49:00.000+11:00

The schooling I received as a child was truly remarkable considering I grew up in a time of civil war. I finished school reasonably fluent in three languages and with enough Maths and Physics behind me to apply for Science and Engineering degrees. One thing I don't remember doing at school was create things. My art teacher tried but all I could do was reproduce basic drawings or water colours that earned the grades F (Faible - Weak) and AB (Assez Bien - Good Enough!).

This year I experimented with Scratch, an MIT Media Labs environment for building interactive animations and games. Scratch allows students to create, regardless of their level of artistic talent. Given how little time they spent with tutorials and the fact that they only had about 4x60 minutes of class time, a week apart, to create their final product, the results were outstanding.

Some of the students prepared a story that was related to their passion, such as dancing or the Jonas Brothers. Others experimented with a game or a story of adventure. Evil was a common theme! What impressed me was the resilience that some showed as they were solving problems. Most of the students seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves in the process. One of my colleagues, who had been unsure of the relevance of Scratch, took my class while I was away. He then told me how impressed he was with the girls' projects.

For me, this is what the late Randy Pausch would call "the head fake". They were enjoying animating stories while solving problems and getting an introduction to something difficult - computer programming.

If you have used Scratch, Kodu, Alice, GameSalad, Game Maker or anything of the sort, I would love to hear from you.

What do you think Apple stands for?

2010-11-02T20:49:00.000+11:00

In a really good TED Talk, Simon Sinek tell us to "start with why". In a nutshell, he says that successful companies like Apple sell their products by selling us what they stand for: "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." For the life of me, I cannot think of any slogan associated with Apple and what I thought they stood for was very different from what Sinek states in the video.

So here's my question: What do you think Apple stands for? Please leave me an answer in the comments.

Giving valuable feedback to students

2010-09-29T18:46:00.000+10:00

Feedback to students can come from different sources: peers, teachers and the student's own reflection. In this post, I will concentrate on feedback given by teachers and how it can contribute to student learning. Having written a minor thesis on formative assessment, I have found the literature on feedback quite prolific. I submit the following practical thoughts for your consideration:

Give feedback often: It is important that the students not be left wondering about their level of understanding or performance until an assessment is administered. Feedback needs to be timely. Good questioning practices, about which I hope to write soon, can be a great source of information about "gaps" we would like the students to fill.

Be Specific: Clarify the area that the student needs to address. In the words of Professors Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black, there is no point in telling a comedian to be funnier.

Use Comments, not grades: Whether or not students grading is a good idea is not the issue here. A comment like "don't forget that you can only add lengths with the same unit" tells them how they can improve in a way that a "B" does not.

Concentrate on the task, not the kid: Telling a student "you're a good boy" when he performs well might leave him beaming for 10 minutes. This can make also him reluctant to attempt a more challenging task in the future. You see, his status is now at stake. Why risk falling from the rank of the good? I highly recommend Carol Dweck's book on this (Self-Theories: Their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development. Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press).

Allow for limited attention: Let's say you found 10 mistakes in a student's draft essay or Maths worksheet. Returning the paper with 10 comments will only confuse that student. It is best to concentrate on two or three of the mistakes and expect the student to improve on those.

Allow time for the student to act on your feedback: I find that allowing class time for students to act on my feedback works better than asking them to do it in their own time. The students are usually keen to help you help them as long as they see your comments as referring to the task and not to their person.

Allow for differentiation: A student who can do everything you have expected so far can still gain from your feedback. You may suggest an extension activity or suggest that she attempt to find more ways to solve a particular problem.

I hope this makes sense to you but I will be grateful for your comments. Please let me know if you have something to add or dispute.

Teaching as story telling (updated post)

2010-09-27T21:11:00.001+10:00

This is a reworked post:

Three years ago, we held a function at the school for retiring teachers. One of them, a fan of the classics, said: "teaching is about story telling. I believe even Maths teachers should be story tellers."

That day was also the last day of school for our students. My year 7s started quoting back to me stories and jokes I had told them about Mathematics. It was both interesting and surprising to see what had stuck in their minds. This has encouraged me to tell more "grandfather stories" in class. Recently, a year 7 student said to me: "I will never forget anything you taught me this year because you always add a story."
I remember my dad telling me stories on the way to school every morning. Many of these were Gospel or literary parables. Others were simply drawn from daily life.

In one tutorial during my teaching diploma, a student started discussing the merits of teaching parables to children. She wanted religious and literary stories replaced by modern parodies. I took issue with that and advocated original stories, whether they occur in the Bible or Shaekspeare, be told as they are. The meaning and the words would grow on the students over the years. This suggestion of mine was met with ridicule from my peer. She declared that all modern students could think about was "drugs and sex." I'd hate to think what kids of stories she wanted to tell!

I still remember many of the stories that my parents told me. I hope that my children will find the stories I tell them equally memorable. I also hope that I can be a good story teller to my students, whether teaching Maths or IT.

What do you think about the role of stories in teaching?

Why -Not- Teach Programming at School

2010-09-24T20:11:00.000+10:00

Those of us who believe in teaching programming at school level are often asked to give a rationale for it. This is especially the case in Girls' schools where elective courses in programming have a hard time getting the necessary numbers. The following is not a list of reasons to teach programming. Rather, it is an argument for starting the discussion with the question: "why not teach programming?"

A student who can program is able to:

Design and bring a dream to reality. Computers make it possible to turn vision into reality. Making this happen on the screen requires no special equipment.
Build interactive content. This takes students from consuming content to producing their own. We value this with the written word, why not do the same with on-screen content? Click here for more on interactive literacy.
Understand how a computer works. "You don't need to know how a car works to drive it." True, but understanding how the car works has its own advantages.
Participate in the future of ICT. Many students I speak to have no concept of what it takes to make an App for their iPod Touch. Being able to make one themselves empowers them to make things that others can use. They can evolve with the technology rather than simply be dazzled by it.

A friend recently told me that programming was not an expected skill. After all, it was not something that everyone did. This is true. The question is: Do we want our students to play catch up to what everyone does or do we want them empowered to go beyond that?

Teaching patient problem-solving

2010-09-18T13:39:00.001+10:00

If you're a Mathematics teacher, please watch this. I am fascinated in reading your reactions to this:

What to make of the NAPLAN results?

2010-09-17T18:58:00.000+10:00

This week, The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results have come out and will soon be in the hands of parents' with a child in grades 3, 5, 7 or 9. I have blogged before about the political nature of national testing in a broad post. Here, I would like to offer some thoughts on the good and bad of this testing regime:

Positive aspects of the NAPLAN:

Possible formative use: Schools get access to a highly detailed report on each student. If they are up to analysing the data in such detail, they can find some of the misconceptions that individual students have;
Good source of questions for classroom learning. I find some of the Maths questions quite clever and worthwhile using subsequently with the students. These tend to be questions that can be done using "first principles" rather than ones requiring the application of a specific technique.
A peer into curriculum writers' minds: As soon as the "shaping papers" of the -yet to be implemented- national curriculum came out, you could see the NAPLAN test questions reflecting some of the principles reflected in those papers. For instance, the combination of Number and Algebra was quite evident in last year's NAPLAN test.

Negative aspects of the NAPLAN:

They privilege two disciplines above all else: There are reports of schools dropping everything for weeks just to prepare their students for the NAPLAN. Since disciplines other than Mathematics and English are not tested, they get dropped.
Some parents and students have a deterministic view of the results: There is a Simpsons episode about Lisa being told she would grow up to be a home maker based on an erroneous benchmarking test. This turns her from model student to one who would stoop down to the level of stealing and hiding the teacher's editions from the staff room. Naturally, this brings Springfield elementary to its knees.
School comparisons and league tables: The myschool website publishes a school's aggregate results and compares them with those of "comparable schools". As you can imagine, some tabloids use this information to create league tables that include schools from very different demographics.
Results come out too late for schools to act: The results are released very late in the academic year. This is especially problematic in states where year 7 is the last year of primary school. The students won't even be there the following year and the school hardly has a chance to make formative use of the results.

In summary, the NAPLAN test is here to stay. There is a lot of political capital invested in it. Let's maximise the benefits and take the results with a pinch of salt. What do you think about NAPLAN?

The Myth of the "Digital Native"

2010-09-13T20:30:00.005+10:00

We often hear that our students are "digital natives". The usual connotation is that they know how to use the technology and we simply need to provide the context for them to apply this knowledge. Of course, this assumption is true for many students.

In my experience, there are just as many students whose ICT skills are not up to scratch. Here are a few general skills I wish students had picked up in their primary education (grades prep to 6 in Victoria):

Some knowledge of file types and their associated extensions.
This is especially applicable to our school, where we use Macs with NeoOffice and iWork while most of our students run MS Office on Windows machines.
Resizing images while keeping their aspect ratio. It is surprising how few of them know about holding down the shift key
Basic knowledge of keyboard shortcuts. I would settle CTRL-C, X V, and S although N and A would be a nice bonus
File management. I could describe what I dislike about it, but it could get messy!
Production of well presented work in something other than Powerpoint!
Word processing skills beyond the basics, such as headers, footers, fields (eg: page numbering), page breaks and soft line breaks
Tabbed browsing.

Finally, I sooooo wish they all did some form of "programming" in Primay school. This could be LEGO robots, Scratch, Alice or any number of things that have been available for quite a while now.

Please tell me what you think. I am happy to be corrected. Maybe there are other skills that I have overlooked and that you would like mentioned.

Tips for mentoring preservice teachers

2010-09-11T15:38:00.001+10:00

Having posted 7 tips for preservice teachers, I thought I would turn my attention to the supervising teacher. Most of what I will say here comes from the great work that four teachers did with me when I was a preservice teacher. Other things I will say come from my own, limited, experience as a supervisor.

My four supervisors, to whom I am very grateful, gave me two things: freedom and support.

Freedom

Preservice teachers are in the process of learning many, and sometimes contradictory, theories. They need some leeway to put some of these theories into practice. This is the only way they are going to find out for themselves "what works". It is also the only way for them to find their strengths and weaknesses.

On my teaching rounds, my supervisors let me try my hand at outdoor lessons, group work and good old "chalk and talk". I learned that one of my strengths was developing worksheets. I would not have guessed that as in a previous life I hated documentation.

Support

Giving those we're mentoring freedom does not mean leaving them to figure everything out for themselves. We know the school environment and the particular class better. We need to start them off with some ideas and resources. We need to allocate them time to talk over their plans and give them feedback on how they went.

Planning

It is ideal if the preservice teacher could take control of a unit of work from beginning to end. I maintain a "unit plan" document online so that my student-teacher and I can update it. Mostly, she updates it and I add notes to it.

Feedback

Feedback is what we all need and crave. Try to be direct and specific. The following issues often come up:

How to start a lesson and set expectations;
Projecting the voice and addressing students directly so they will listen;
How to deal with off-task behaviour; and
How to wrap up a lesson.

Regular follow up

The preservice teacher you're mentoring needs some of your time to set goals for the next few lessons. Concentrate on one or two things at a time. For instance, say, "For the next two lessons, I want you to begin each lesson by outlining the activities you expect the students to complete and how they relate to what they have done before."

Mentoring others is a great opportunity for professional learning. It forces us to examine our own practice as we look to advise others on theirs. It is also a contribution we make to our profession.

When supervising a preservice teacher, I assume that s/he will work alongside me one day.

If you have some tips on mentoring preservice teachers or, more generally, inducting others into your profession, please drop me a comment.

7 Tips from a Preservice Teacher to Others

2010-09-10T13:03:00.002+10:00

Following my post 7 Tips for Preservice Teachers, I am pleased to present the following tips from the same preservice teacher who inspired my post:

Think of your teaching round as a once in a lifetime opportunity for on-the-job training. There is no industry out there that offers this opportunity to learn the ropes and be mentored by an experienced professional. Take this opportunity to learn as much as you can.
Think of your teaching round as one huge job interview - conduct yourself in a professional manner, and go out of your way to demonstrate what you have to offer.
Don't be afraid to take responsibility and ownership for all aspects of the classes you have been allocated. It's the best way to see what it will be like when you are a real teacher.
Use this 'safe' training environment to trial any pedagogical ideas you have, but always check with your supervisor first - after all, they have the long-term interests of thier class to consider.
Follow your class around in other subjects.
Observe other teachers teaching the same content as you.
If your supervisor is busy, be proactive and draw on the expertise of other teachers.

I hope this will help some of you out there.

7 Tips for preservice teachers (aka student teachers)

2010-09-09T22:22:00.003+10:00

I am currently supervising a very competent student-teacher. I decided to reflect on what it is that Josie is doing well. To those who are about to go out to schools, here are some tips:

Meet your supervisor(s) before you begin your round

Try to make a time to see your supervisors before the start of your round. Ask for their timetables. Spot the dress code among staff. Ask your supervisors if there are particular skills they would like you to brush up on.

Turn up on time

On the first day, especially, arrive at the school well before the time. Attach yourself to your supervisor so you know where you need to be.

Bring your own mug

This may seem like a trivial thing. Believe me, it is important. Before I went out on my first teaching round, a lecturer related her horrifying experience of going to a school, sitting in "dragon lady's" chair and taking "dragon lady's" cup. It was not pleasant!

Keep a list of queries

Teachers are busy. Keep a list of queries you have for each of your supervisors. By committing to having a student-teacher follow them, they have also committed to giving you some of their time. During agreed upon times, ask all the questions on your list. This is much better than interrupting them every time you have a question.

Learn the names of the students in the classes you teach

Ask for a classlist. If possible, obtain photos of those students. Mark a piece of work or check their books. Whatever you do, learn their names very quickly. You cannot manage student behaviour if you can't address the students by name.

Learn to "manage up"

Your success in the round is crucial. Make sure to set up meetings to plan and to review lessons. Do not wait for your supervisors to say, "let's talk about the upcoming lesson." They may well do that but they may equally forget. After you have taught a few lessons, ask them what they would like you to concentrate on for the remaining time of your round. Ask the same thing again one week before the end.

Check your plans before you teach

You may plan a great lesson and arrive in the classroom all excited, only to notice that the interactive whiteboard pen is kept somewhere else (as is the case in my school). Check the equipment in the relevant venue before the lesson. It is essential that you project an image of competence at the beginning. You may not have enough time to rebuild your image with the students if you don't.

Teaching rounds are very hard work but they're the only way you will work out for sure whether this profession is for you. They are also a great opportunity to "make sense" of your university studies. I plan to post an article that addresses the supervisor's side of the deal. Till then, I wish my student-teacher all the best.

Drop me a comment if you have something to add to my list.

Tired but grateful

2010-09-07T21:44:00.001+10:00

Feeling tired
Of late, I have been feeling very tired. The demands of the job and the few other things I try to do in life seem unrelenting. I catch myself thinking of alternative careers, ones where one can leave work at work. I am probably averaging 11 hours a day with a few hours extra on the weekends. The holidays will arrive soon, but there is a lot of work awaiting me.

On the other hand!
On the other hand, I am so fortunate to have the students that I do. Of the five different groups that I teach, I have 3 or 4 students whom I would classify as "somewhat difficult". They're all in the one class, which is a blessing. It is one class that I brace myself before entering. The others are bliss. A student teacher who has observed some of my classes of late has remarked on the good rapport I have with my classes. The kids I teach are really really remarkable. For them, I am grateful.

If you are grateful for the students you teach, let me know in the comments. It is good for us teachers to look past the difficult students and remember the ones who are good to deal with.

What in the Amazon? Your Kindle highlights monitored

2010-09-04T16:18:00.001+10:00

One of my RSS feeds, GTD Times, had a post telling us that Getting Things Done was the 5th most highlighted book on the Kindle. I took a look at the list of the 25 most highlighted books and asked myself, is Amazon cataloguing Kindle highlights?

The answer is: Yes, Amazon knows what you're highlighting and what notes you're writing!

According to the Amazon website:

If you have a Kindle device, you can turn off having your highlights in popular highlights by turning off Annotations Backup in Settings on your device. If you have a Kindle App, we will be adding this capability soon. Annotations BackUp backs up your annotations and last page read and syncs them across devices.

So, here's the deal:

Those of us who have a Kindle device can avoid our reading habits being tracked, only if we have no way of synchronising our reads or recovering them in case our reader crashes.
Those of us reading Kindle books on our iPad or smartphone have no choice but to "share".

Who was it that coined the term "lose, lose"?

The little things our students notice

2010-08-20T20:35:00.002+10:00

I had a gratifying moment at the end of two tiring days. I thought I would share this with my readers:

After returning to school from a sporting excursion, a colleague informed me that he had met with the mother of a current student of his (and former student of mine), Dorothy. During that meeting, the mother mentioned my name as a "mentor" and a "father figure" to her daughter. Apparently, young Dorothy used to go home and tell about Mr B who "said hello" to her.

This episode struck me by the fact that it was both simple and profound at the same time. How many little things do teachers do that touch their students in ways they are not even aware of?

I wanted to share this gratifying moment with you and I hope that you would do the same. Please share any such moments you have had in the comments.

Baalbek (City of the Sun)

2009-07-17T18:50:00.001+10:00

We have just returned from a day in Baalbek. Internet access is down, so I am writing this to debrief myself. I have always wanted to go to Baalbek as it is an iconic place in Lebanon. I didn't know much about what was there, except for the fact that I would find a well preserved Roman temple. It was a very Lebanese experience! The army had come in and shut down the whole place in preparation for a visit to the Baalbek festival by the President, the Prime Minister and several other dignitaries. We found ourselves pleading our case with those in charge. We then gained the concession of being allowed to join a group of French tourists who were being looked after by a well-connected guide. The guide was very knowledgeable. He conducted the tour entirely in French.

The temples
I learned that the first temple was built by the Phoenecians. It was dedicated to Baal. Bek came from the name of the location, the Bekaa valley. The Romans then transformed it into the largest temple dedicated to Jupiter and also built a temple to Bachus and another to Venus. The huge boulders had to be brought in by sea from Egypt. From there, Elephants and slaves dragged them up the mountains and down to the valley. Several generations of slaves died in the process. I am sure that many animals were harmed in the making of that temple! The Byzantines then transformed part of the area into a Church. The Mamaliks (sp?) cleared the Church and fortified the walls, turning the temple site into a citadel against the Crusaders. I will not go into much detail, but here are some interesting facts:

The temple of Jupiter is 300 metres long.
The diameter of the pillars is 2.20 metres. That's greater than the height of a human being.
There are three styles of decorations found on the top of Roman pillars. Only at Baalbek will you find all three in the one place.
Only in Baalbek will you find areas with intact roofs. No one knows how they have withstood the passage of time and the occurrence of earthquakes.

I remember one Biblical scholar once saying: "If you want to know what ancient texts mean by the word 'glory', you must visit the temple of Jupiter in Baalbek.

The festival
At night, we stayed for the festival of Baalbek. My sister had bought us tickets to see the Caracalla dance company. Again, it was a very Lebanese experience. The place had been sold out, but some locals were allowed in at the last minute. Chairs had to be found for them, resulting in event organisers walking in front of us for a good part of the spectacle! A woman was asked to stop filming, but a high-ranking officer who was sitting nearby asked her to ignore the instruction. Despite all these imperfections, the experience was simply amazing. Just imagine a raised platform with historic columns as the background.
The story was mediocre at best. The dancing was, of course, very good and the costumes were unbelievably beautiful. The atmosphere was altogether magical. The star singer was Assi Al-Hallani, a local boy. The crowd adored him, as they did the founder, choreographer and principal dancer of the company - all locals. At one stage, I thought I was the antithesis of Dr Hibbert from the Simpsons. You see, he laughs at inappropriate moments. I had to hold back my tears at the most joyful moments. At the conclusion, the president went up to personally congratulate the cast. With everyone around the president, some of the songs were replayed and individual dancers started their own dance, while the rest of us clapped and danced in the stands. I was all choked up and couldn't even speak to thank my sister and brother-in-law. I simply embraced each of them and gave them a kiss.

I suppose you can take the boy out of Lebanon but you cannot take Lebanon out of the boy.

Reflections on the Victorian Bush Fires

2009-02-28T22:58:00.003+11:00

You may be aware that the state of Victoria, in South East Australia, is experiencing its deadliest bushfire season on record. More than 200 lives have been lost and many communities have been left desolate. The following are comments I wrote to share with my colleagues during the daily staff briefing:

Events like the bush fires of what is now known as Black Saturday raise questions about the suffering of innocent people, and God's role in the same. While much of this must remain a mystery, we can say a few words by observing the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Christ, we observe a compassionate and humble God who, for our sake, would become a servant and endure a most painful and shameful death.

In Christ, God did not eliminate evil. To do so would imply an elimination of human freedom. Instead, Christ shared in our suffering and faced the final enemy of humanity - death. Far from death overcoming, Christ descended into death and broke its bonds. An ancient Christian writer said the following about death: “It received a body, and encountered God. It received earth, and confronted heaven.” After Christ's resurrection, death ceased to be terminal . It became akin to a bridge into eternal life with God.

As Christians, we cannot always provide satisfactory explanations of human suffering. We can, however, declare an all-loving God who suffered and died voluntarily. We can shout: “Christ is risen ... Truly He's risen.”
I pray that, in our current state of mourning, we may allow the Light of Christ's resurrection to reach us. Amen.

Oh Lebanon, where is your glory?

2008-05-13T13:44:00.004+10:00

"Is it not yet a very little while
Till Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field,
And the fruitful field be esteemed as a forest?" (Isaiah 29:17)

I pray that this "very little while" arrive soon. I mourn for those who died in the last few days and those who will continue to die. After 15 years of civil strife, we thought forget the past, time will heal everything. This is convenient, no one had to repent of any deeds, no one had to compensate for any injuries. Hey presto, everything would fix itself. If we can't learn from our own mistakes, maybe others in this world can learn from them. People don't just "move on". Saying "sorry" and telling the other "you count, you are human too" is so essential.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us sinners.

The day we said "sorry"!

2008-02-13T23:18:00.005+11:00

Today, the Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, said "sorry" to generations of indigenous Australians who were stolen from their families. As kids, they were removed by force from their parents and sent to institutions or white families so they could be "saved", "assimilated" and, some would say, so that the Aboriginal identity would be erased forever.

Some have opposed the apology on the following grounds:

It is an admission of guilt by a generation that had nothing to do with it; and
It does nothing practical to help ease the poverty and social disintegration of the Aborigines.

Yet, sorry is a powerful word and those in favour of uttering it won the debate. The parliament of Australia legislated for the removal of children from their families and it should say sorry, even if the mouthpiece is of a younger generation. The stolen generations have requested that they be apologised to and the least we can do is honour their wish.

Today is a historic day in the history of this country. Previously, I have resisted wearing symbols, draping myself in flags and all such demonstrations. Today, I wore a black, yellow and red bracelet at school and changed my facebook status to "sorry". My family was not in Australia and I wasn't even born when the injustice was committed. I want to be part of the future of Australia and I want my kids to grow up in a united country. Saying "sorry" is the beginning of the healing process.

I pray that practical steps do follow and that Aboriginal children grow up in health and dignity. Tonight I will sleep with this vision. "Tomorrow will worry about its own things" (Matthew 6:34).

End of the holidays

2008-01-25T19:11:00.001+11:00

Today is officially the last day of the summer holidays. Tomorrow is Australia Day, so Monday is a public holiday. Tuesday is back to school for us teachers and on Friday we take the year 7s through the routine of using their lockers. The locks work very intuitively - not at all!

I have had a great 6 weeks at home. I spent heaps of time with my two kids, did some work on my Master's thesis (about half of what I had planned, mind you) and managed to slot in just enough double bass practice to stay at the same level (not a very ambitious attitude, I know). I taught my little one to sleep in his cot again and that was quite a good thing.

Anyway, the new school year beckons. Many things to do in preparation but as they say in the movies "bring it on"!

My best wishes to teachers around Australia as they get back into the classroom. I hope you have all had a holiday with much to be grateful for. I know I had.

Mathematics as the science of reasoning

2008-01-20T20:58:00.001+11:00

Last year, a music teacher at my school photocopied an article and placed it in my pigeonhole. I picked up the article and saw the title "Maths minus reason = failure". I assumed it was an apology for everything being taught with its real life applications. Gladly, I was wrong. The article was written by Marty Ross who does much to popularise mathematics in Victoria. His partner in this is Burkyard Polster. You might think of the pair as the Myth Busters of Mathematics - geeky, intelligent and entertaining.

Back to the article. Ross states: "Clearly the purpose for teaching mathematics cannot be primarily to convey facts and formulas that are rarely used and almost immediately forgotten. The true purpose is to teach the reasoning by which these facts can be established."

Ross goes on to lament the way in which the Pathegorean theorem is taught in Victoria. It is a formula to be accepted and applied over and over. He states that "the fundamental reason to teach the Pythagorean Theorem is because of its central role in Euclidean geometry, that monumental body of work immortalised in Euclid's Elements." And here is what he says about the Elements:

The Elements is the most successful textbook of all time ... But its popularity was not because of some universal love of geometry ... . The real lesson was the process by which these geometric truths were obtained. The Elements is a brilliant, extended display of reasoning, beginning with a small number of accepted truths and proving all that follows.

Ross then presents a pictorial proof of the theorem and expresses his sadness at the fact that no emphasis is based on the beauty and simplicity of such mathematics. Instead, the curriculum documents present maths as a list of facts to be remembered and prescribe an ever increasing use of technology.

Ross then puts on his university lecturer's hat and says that, despite the fact that he teaches those students to need or choose to do maths at a university level, he finds that they "enter university viewing mathematics as no more than a collection of facts, upon which they have the most tenuous grasp. Albert Einstein said: 'Any fool can know. The point is to understand.'"

Reading Ross' description of Euclid's Elements is like reading a synopsis of my year 11 Geometry textbook. I was educated under an old-fashioned adaptation of the French system. We learned many theorems, always with their proofs. The test was always guaranteed to throw a new fact or a theorem at us with the simple question "demontrer que ..." or "show that ...".

I have often heard people say "how could maths be made different?" and each time I have thought "Oh, believe me, we could be teaching very different stuff."

Christmas 2007

2007-12-25T19:04:00.000+11:00

Thy nativity, O Christ our God
Has shone a light of knowledge upon the world
For by it, those who worshiped the stars
Were taught by a star to adore Thee, the Sun of Righteousness
And to know Thee, the Orient from on high
O Lord Glory to Thee.

-- A hymn sung in Orthodox Churches at Christmas.

Teaching is about telling stories

2007-12-08T10:31:00.000+11:00

Yesterday, we held a function at the school for retiring teachers. What impressed me the most was that these teachers did not dwell on their achievements and the leadership roles that they occupied. Instead, they spoke at length about the human connections they had made with students and peers. One of these teachers, a fan of the classics, said: "teaching is about story telling. I believe even Maths teachers should be story tellers."

Yesterday was also the last day of school for our students. My year 7s started quoting back to me stories and jokes I had told them about Mathematics. It was both interesting and surprising to see what had stuck in their minds.

I remember my dad telling me stories on the way to school every morning. Many of these were Gospel parables or lives of saints. Others were simply drawn from daily life.

In a class on Theology during my teaching diploma at the Australian Catholic University, a student started discussing the merits of teaching parables to children. She insisted on the use of a simple translation, making sure everything was clear and maybe even skipping the Gospel stories altogether. Children these days will not relate to the contexts used by Jesus when he told the parables. Why not paraphrase the stories and present modern parables instead of the originals?

I took issue with the idea of replacing the original parables. I suggested that the stories themselves had formative value regardless of how much the child understood of them. I advocated reading the stories in a translation that uses beautiful English. The meaning and the words would grow on the students over the years. Everything does not need to be immediately relevant or even accessible.

Needless to say, I was ridiculed by my peer who accused me of expecting students to be interested in the Good Samaritan while "all they can think about is drugs and sex."

I still remember many of the stories that my dad told me. I hope that my children will one day remember the stories I tell them. I also hope that I can be a good story teller to my students, whether teaching Maths or IT.

Merry Christmas to all.

Elias.

Getting to know my students again

2007-05-21T23:23:00.001+10:00

Last week, I was on year 7 camp. That was such a delight, despite missing my family a lot. I was interacting with my students without regard for their academic abilities or lack thereof. It was quite a refreshing change.

One of my roles was to dress up as a bear - a friendly one such as the bears seen on children programs. The students were to go on a long night walk where they would try to spot wild life - Koalas, Kangaroos, etc... Instead, they saw a bear which scared and then entertained them. It was interesting:

One group attacked me to find out who was inside the bear suit. They then told the next group and spoiled the surprise.
The next group, who were looking out for me, attacked me to confirm it was Mr E! I teach that group and when I asked them not to tell the next groups, they took it on board. Their supervising teacher later told me that they kept reminding each other not to tell. It was nice to hear. Sure enough, the next group was taken by surprise.
One group required me to "ham it up" for half a minute before they realised there must be a person underneath the suit. They walked off sure that it was Mr. C, another teacher on camp!

I got word of one of my other students getting out of her shell on camp. She is normally extremely shy and withdrawn. Her mum told me that she never went to primary school camps as she was not comfortable to do so. This time around, she went all the way on the giant swing.

Happy days! The most important thing is that when I told one of my year 7 classes today that we needed to move on with the curriculum, they listened and worked well. The way they could shift gears was truly impressive.

May all your students be as beautiful in every way as my year 7s.

Today, the eve of Good Friday 2007.

2007-04-05T23:10:00.000+10:00

Today is hung upon the Tree, He who suspended the Earth upon the waters.
A crown of thorns crowns Him, who is the King of Angels.
He is wrapped about with the purple of mockery, Who wrapped the heavens in clouds.
He was struck, Who freed Adam in the Jordan.
He was transfixed with nails, Who is the Bridegroom of the Church.
He was pierced with a spear, Who is the son of thPublishe virgin.
We worship Thy Passion, O Christ.
Show also Thy glorious Resurrection.

From the service held on Holy Thursday night in Orthodox Churches.

Maths education: Are we on the cusp of a counter reformation?

2007-03-24T16:01:00.001+11:00

It seems that direct instruction is gaining in popularity these days. Many people are getting disenchanted with reform Maths. The following links have caught my attention this week:

The first is an article reporting on the work of Dr Ken Rowe of the Australian Council for Educational Research. Dr Rowe worked with primary school teachers, encouraging them to use direct instruction. He reports positive results that surprised him and the teachers alike. The second is a video presentation by Dr Cliff Mass of the University of Washington. He argues that a noticeable drop in the mathematical ability of freshmen coincided with the introduction of "reform math".

At teachers' college, most of my lecturers were wedded to the ideals of reform mathematics. They often told us that traditional maths did not make sense. It taught algorithms and methods in a disconnected way. Students could not see the connection between concepts and did not find maths engaging and meaningful. As a high school maths teacher, I find it hard to conclude that students are finding maths any more connected or meaningful as a result of their grounding in reform maths.

When I learned my mathematics in a very traditional school, I certainly found that it made sense. We were trained in the art of geometric proofs. This was something that engaged both our memories and higher thinking skills. We had to answer worded problems in arithmetic from an early age. Just because we did not work with manipulatives did not mean that we memorised algorithms and worked purely by rote.

My fear now is that we go back to the basics with the same zeal that we went into reform maths. Some of the leaders of the new movement ridicule the notion of maths teachers valuing problem-solving. I don't want us to throw the baby out with the bath water. The "reform" period has produced excellent research and teachers' practice cannot have stood still all this time.

What we need is to encourage teachers to use direct instruction and to really put back some meat into the maths curricula of the middle years. What we do not need is a witch hunt against teachers who employ some of the excellent activities that reform maths has brought to the fore. Teachers must be free to choose the pedagogical approach that most suits each situation, taking into consideration the syllabus and their students' capabilities.

As the first of the articles ends: "Dr Rowe said results from the study did not mean that constructivist teaching methods were wrong. The approach had merit, but problems with student learning arose when constructivist activities preceded explicit teaching or replaced it."

Three podcasts on, what I have learned

2007-03-11T17:42:00.002+11:00

This is what I have done:

Created mp3 files on topics related to the IT curriculum;
Included musical interludes - radio program style;
Increased the length of the casts from 11 to 20 minutes;
Varied the bit rate from 128 Kpbs mono down to 56 Kpbs mono;
Prepared ideas in the form of bullet points and kept my speech unscripted.

This is what I have learned:

Keep the file size small - a 56 Kbps mono-channel is sufficient;
Use podcasts to introduce a topic, not for revision;
Keep it short - no longer than 10 minutes;
No need for so many musical breaks. If the cast is short, then just use music to tell the students that I am moving to another section;
Ask the students to answer questions or write an entry on an online forum.
Continue to speak in a conversational tone but stick to the planned examples.

If you have examples of your own, then please share them in the comments.

The national curriculum is a certainty

2007-03-11T17:28:00.001+11:00

In a previous post, I reviewed the debate about the proposal for a national curriculum. Now it looks like it is a certainty. Kevin Rudd, the leader of the Labor opposition, would introduce a Prep - Year 12 national curriculum in Maths, English, the Sciences and Australian history. John Howard, the leader of the ruling Coalition (Liberal + National parties), wants a national curriculum in these subjects, but only at high school level.

As I noted earlier, I do not mind the idea at all. Any difference in the needs of students is unlikely to be a function of the state in which they live. However, the debate seems more political than educational and we may end up with a politically compromised system. How this will compare to what we currently have can only be determined once we see the new syllabi.

It is interesting that Victoria has rejected the Liberals' proposal for a national curriculum, saying that "one size will not fit all". When federal Labor surprised everyone by proposing essentially the same thing, Victoria welcomed it!

We will have a few years to bed down the Victorian Essential Learning Standards. Let's not get too comfortable. Watch for the early retirements in 2010!

2007 election - the clever need not apply!

2007-03-03T18:22:00.000+11:00

Last weekend, the Saturday Age carried an interesting op-ed under the title "Get smart, get beaten". The opinion piece articulated what many people have been saying: "the opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, will never be Prime Minister, he speaks too well!" My entry is not an endorsement of either John Howard or Kevin Rudd. It is a critique of this kind of thinking.

According to Jason Koutsoukis, the author of the article, Kevin Rudd is on the examination table. The government is trying to find the best way to attack him. He further suggests that the Prime Minister has begun playing the "he's too smug" card. "The trick for Rudd then, a Mandarin-speaking former diplomat with a pointy-headed reputation, will be to disguise how smart he is and to prove he has the common touch.

This is not surprising at all to me. Colleagues of mine who are life-long Labor voters have been telling me that Kevin Rudd could not be Prime Minister. I said that it was good to have people like him come to the fore, regardless of the function he will hold in Parliament, because he was quite an exception in Canberra - he spoke polished English. They told me that I had unwittingly stumbled on his biggest hurdle.

Going back to John Koutsoukis, "Australians tend to be drawn to leaders who seem to be one of them. People like Bob Hawke or John Howard". This is another point of intersection between the op-ed and what my colleagues have told me. One of them, who is close to Labor party personalities, added that Bob Hawke took elocution lessons so as to sound more like a working man prior to contesting the union leadership and, subsequently, the prime ministership. "He spoke differently when he was at Oxford".

So, it seems that, as a society, we conspire against the eloquent. Sport elitism is essential to our national pride, academic elitism is anathema.
If you are reading this in the US and think that things are not very different in your country, let me point this out to you: your sports stars may well be idolised beyond your academics, but your sports stars speak really well. Our sports stars sound like your rap singers.

I think I am due for a positive post. There are lots of wonderful things about Australia, its people and education system (or, more correctly, systems). I just had a few negative news stories coming my way of late.

Till next time,
Elias.

Education carnival 107th edition

2007-02-24T16:23:00.000+11:00

Take a look at the education carnival, edition 107. It is hosted by Elementaryhistoryteacher. As you might expect, there's something in it for everyone interested in education on the blogosphere.

Elias.

My first educational podcast - what the students did not say

2007-02-17T17:35:00.000+11:00

Last Thursday I fiddled with Audacity on my PC and made my first audio cast for my Year 11 IT class. The next day I was full of anticipation. They listened to it, and here are the things they did not say:

Wow, Mr Elias, I didn't know you were so talented.
I will listen to this on the treadmill tonight.
I have never understood so many concepts in so little time.
Mr Elias, you have a great recording voice. You should be on radio.

All the same, I felt that it worked really well. The students had been praying with a friend who lost her father, just before my class. They arrived at different times and were feeling understandably upset. The fact that they could start listening whenever they arrived really helped. They also laughed at my joke, which is always a good thing! Here are some of the things they did say:

It was easier to understand than the textbook.
Use music to break up the sections.
Don't make it so long, it gets boring.

So, the next time I podcast, I plan to keep it simple, use more music, and try to be less boring. If they say the things in the first list, I will be sure to let you know.

Elias, a 21st century educator :-)

A national curriculum for Australia?

2007-02-15T19:39:00.001+11:00

A debate is currently raging around whether or not Australia should have a national curriculum. At the moment, each state and territory has its own curriculum, starting age for students, assessment and reporting procedures.

Is the debate about politics or pedagogy? This was the question asked by Australia Talks, a Radio National program. As guests, they had Kevin Donnelly, the voice of the "back to basics" movement, an articulate professor, and Andrew Blair, the president of the Australian Secondary Principals Association. It is just as well that I cannot remember the name of the professor, as he was so un-Australian as to dare argue about semantics. It should have been enough for this voice of the intellectual elite (two words which combine to form an insult in our society) to appear on a program which uses a pompous word like pedagogy in its title. Is there an emoticon that shows I am speaking with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek?

What is clear is that the debate is mainly political. The federal government blames the states for the fact that so many of our graduates have poor literacy skills. The federal minister for education decries the Maoist ideologies of the teacher unions and, by extension, the teachers themselves. The state governments blame Canberra for its poor financial support of schools and universities. The absent voices in the debate are those of the teachers.

On the level of pedagogy (it's my blog and I will use the word if I want to), the program guests were polarised. Andrew Blair wanted us to compete with the graduates of Chinese and Indian Colleges and so, he argued, the "basics" were not enough. Kevin Donnelly wanted us to look at Singapore for inspiration. He often reminds people that Singapore topped the TIMMS results and plays down Australia's performance in PISA, where "problem solving" was valued over computation. His articles always have double quotes around expressions like "problem solving" and "lifelong learning". The articulate professor referred to Finland, France and Sweden as countries we should study and emulate when it comes to pre-school education.

I must confess that in the past few months I have been having some "back to basics" tendencies. I have considered lying on the couch of a therapist and confessing this. Can you see the teacher in a psychiatric clinic saying: "Doctor, I am being haunted by back-to-basics tendencies, can you make them go away"? Kevin Donnelly's statements irritate me in the extreme. The last two federal ministers for education strike me as dishonest and unjust. So, what is pushing me in this direction?

It is hard for me to see how a "curriculum for the 21st century" could be of any benefit if our graduates have no command over the English language. As long as "you plus it" replaces "you add a to b" and "ask the teachers, that's what there there for" appears for a whole year in the Year 10 corridor of an excellent school, what is the use of "critical skills"? If we want them to be independent thinkers, then surely we should want them to be able to express themselves accurately and read serious material.

I was training a choir of young people in my parish and asked them the meaning of the words "condescend" and "incarnate". None of them, including two university students, could explain either term. Prior to becoming a teacher, I would have been scandalised. Now I know that they are, unfortunately, typical.

Is the answer a return to the basics? To some extent, I believe, the answer is yes. I would not want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Here's schooling according to Elias (please excuse my arrogance):

Primary school children must be taught grammar, spelling and multiplication tables. They must also have time to play, explore and think freely. I do not think that a syllabus with these combined aims is impossible. It needn't even be crowded.

English should not be taught to senior secondary students. By year 11, surely people should be able to read serious books and discuss their meaning and structure. It is, after all, their first (and usually only) language.

Bring back differentiation at the end of Year 9 or 10. Please dump this idea that education should equalise everybody. No-one I know has a problem with the sporting elite having their own -elite- institutions. Yet, we are so afraid of educational advantage that we have high school certificates that are free for all. Everyone has the right to a Victorian Certificate of Education after 13 years of schooling. They simply have to turn up.

I Thank you for reading and wish you a good weekend.

Elias, proud father, grumpy pedagogue :-)

The first week back

2007-02-10T21:49:00.000+11:00

Two weeks, one with students, have passed in a short term of eight weeks. My homeroom seems great. Despite having many students who were leaders in their Primary school, there is little evidence of groups forming around these leaders or any objectionable behaviour. My other classes are also going well, which is not surprising at this time of the year. It usually takes our girls a couple of weeks before they feel comfortable enough to test the teacher. Even when they do, it is usually a case of chatting. We don't have many really mischievous students.

I have a greater number of integration students than ever before. I wonder how well I will do with them. I have a very competent aide in two of the classes.

Most interesting to me is the fact that one of my classes, a year 11 elective, has 13 students in it, 12 of whom I have taught before. This must be a function of the time I have been teaching at the school. This is my fourth year, fifth if you count a teaching round I did at the school. The year 11s have been at the school for five years themselves. It is really good to have a working relationship with a class before we get started.

Anyway, that's all the time I have to blog. Theodore and Christina are taking up most of my time.

Enjoy your school year everyone.
Elias.

Why I believe that Christ is God!

2007-01-18T19:37:00.000+11:00

"Woa, I thought that was an educational blog!"
The last few weeks, I have been on my summer holidays (it's summer now in the southern hemisphere) and have not been thinking as much about school. What with my new baby boy and my daughter occupying me. Today, I caught up with a colleague over coffee and we began talking about God. I thought that this is something I should blog as it certainly comes under the criteria of "ramblings of [this] Australian teacher".

To cut a long story short, it seems that, these days, people are prepared to call Jesus Christ everything except for God. He is Lord, friend, brother, companion ... They side-step calling him God. Yet this is an essential part of classical Christianity. He is the "Word" who was from the beginning. Now, why does that matter beyond making an obscure theological argument? Read on and I'll tell you why I think it matters.

If Christ is God, then the Divine and earthly have been united in his person. It means that we too can be united with God. It means that matter can be a conduit of the Grace of God and that this world is redeemed. We too can pass from suffering and death into life. The alternative is not nearly as optimistic or beautiful.

In Christ, God shows the depth of his compassion for humanity and bridges the gap which we have created between us and God. If Christ were a mere prophet, then he could achieve little more than Isaiah or Hosea. He would be -almost- redundant. We can live in a "nice" world without an Incarnate God, but we cannot live forever without one.

Classical Christianity is meant to be gloomy, telling people that they are sinners and undeserving of God's Grace which is granted them despite their ingratitude. Yet, the alternative tells of a God who stays on his throne. The most that such a God would do for sake of self-revelation is give us a subjective "religious experience". I think I will stick to my Orthodoxy.

Elias.

The greatest gift of all

2007-01-08T21:51:00.000+11:00

Dear readers,

I have not blogged for a while, so here is my latest:
In the last two days I became the dad of a second child: a boy. We have named him Theodoros, a gift from God. Well, that's not his real name, only his alias on this blog! I also have a daughter, Christina. So my wife Mary and I can hopefully experience the joy of raising children of both sexes. Mary and Theo are doing well.

May all your news be as good.

Beamingly yours,
Elias.

No ivory in those towers

2006-11-07T10:34:00.000+11:00

People often speak of academics as living in an "ivory tower". I am writing this as a reaction to this claim. Of course, I cannot speak about every academic, just the many who have taught me.

Today, I am due to meet with my thesis supervisor. As it is a public holiday, except at universities, he has agreed to meet with me in my local area, where he also lives. He sent me an email today, which I am including with slight modifications:

I am still happy to meet this afternoon. I am presently taking part in a telelink conference with Europe from 2 am until 1 pm - so I will need a couple of hours sleep after that. What about if we make it 4:30 pm? Would that suit you? Maybe confirm by email and then phone [number omitted] at 4:15 pm, just to make sure that I am awake. Hope to see you then.

Like us school teachers, university staff work weekends, nights and are constantly bullied by law makers. Unlike us, however, they do not get frequent holidays to recover. During their students' breaks, Australian academics are expected to travel and speak at conferences. This usually leaves them out of pocket, as the university covers a small part of their expenses.

What about the fat salaries they are on? A beginning academic, an associate lecturer, earns around $50,000 a year. That's equivalent to a 3rd or 4th year school teacher in Victoria. Why would a practitioner of many years go through acquiring a PHD to take a pay cut at the end of it, I do not know. What is even more baffling is that they would do it knowing how society will disrespect them.

Note to overseas readers: First year students call their professors by first name. This is called egalitarianism, mate!

Elias.

Do they need to walk before they fly?

2006-11-06T18:55:00.000+11:00

Two weeks ago, a colleague of mine said something to me which has been playing on my mind ever since. We mentioned the students' difficulties with spelling and grammar. As an English teacher, he said that there were two schools of thought: one which insisted on correctness and one which preferred to engage the students in high-level thinking. He was of the second school, and said "you cannot do both".

I tend to agree that you have to favour (blogger does not like my non-US spelling of this word!) one approach over the other, due to lack of time. As we are asked to engage the students in higher-order thinking and as we are encouraged to deliver the curriculum using multiple media, should we let go of the rigours of the past?

One model I would like to present for your consideration is the French education system. Everything I say here may have changed of late, so feel free to correct me. French grammar, with its difficulty, is taught to the nth degree until grade 9 (troisième). In the last three grades, everyone is assumed to know the rules of the language and studies literature and themes.

What do you think? Should we build a solid foundation and then let them fly, or would we be holding them back for the sake of an ideal that is no longer important?

Elias.

Why go to university?

2006-10-14T17:59:00.000+10:00

Once every term, I meet with two friends from teachers' college. We have coffee and update each other on what we have been up to since our last meeting. Today, we had such a meeting and spent quite some time discussing the purpose of going to university.

I began by contrasting the American and Australian university systems. I am a big fan of the American model of generic bachelor degrees followed by a professional Master's degree. The university of Melbourne is moving towards such a system, and people are now referring to it as "the Melbourne model".

Lara asked Bill and me what we thought the purpose of a university was: to train people for jobs, further people's knowledge in a given field or raise the educational level of the general population. More and more universities in Melbourne are declaring their hand and defining themselves as training centres - even though they do not use that exact phrase.

Bill said that he would return to uni to do something different, while Lara said she would further her training by completing a primary teaching diploma. I, on the other hand, am falling in love with research. If I had the time ("If I were a rich man...") I would follow my current research master's with a phd. Then, I could join my sister-in-law in having "permanent head damage".

Why would you go (back) to university?

Elias

Helping girls learn Mathematics

2006-09-26T20:43:00.000+10:00

Lately, I came across a few commentaries on this important topic in the popular media. I have also received a summary of a research project through my thesis supervisor. Naturally, as a teacher at a girls' school, I am very interested.

Just slug it out like the boys: The first serious attempt at tackling the issue brings us to an excellent Simpsons episode - girls just want to have sums! I always take the Simpsons seriously, and they seem to really care about education. If you know the episode, you can skip the next two paragraphs.

In this episode, Principal Skinner lets fly that he thinks girls are more likely to struggle with maths and science. He gets booed and, eventually, fired. The new principal, a feminist, divides the campus into two, so the boys do not drown out the girls with their loud voices.

In the girls' half of the campus, a different sort of maths is taught. One which is unlike that of men - something to be worked out and attacked. Instead, maths becomes something that engages the senses. Lisa gets fed up and disguises herself as a boy so she can learn "real math" . When she wins the school award for maths, she reveals herself to prove that girls are just as good as boys, but Bart declares: "The only reason Lisa won is because she learned to think like a boy! I turned her into a burping, farting, bullying math machine!"

The episode seems to ridicule the view that maths is defined in a way that has suited males over the ages. Maths is what it is, and everyone needs to learn it in the same way. I am very interested in your reading of this episode, as mine is not particularly thought out!

Encourage the parents to enrol them in British single-sex schools! An article in Melbourne's Herald Sun reports that girls who graduate from British single-sex schools earn 10% more than those who graduate from mixed schools. This was put down to the fact that they were more likely to take subjects such as Physics. I am really skeptical about such research as it compares means and masks a lot of important data such as whether the comparison was made between equally endowed schools.

Teachers should vary their instruction and assessment methods: The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers put out a "national statement on girls and mathematics" in 1990. In it, they suggest that teachers value certain modes of learning which appeal more to girls. Teachers should "make more extensive use of discussion methods, small group collaborative work and open-ended investigations". Assessment should "include projects, presentations, essays" etc...

I use these things (apart from essays) in my practice, however I have observed that boys tended to dominate group work and presentations when on a teaching round at a mixed school. There is no denying that I have seen my students' eyes light up whenever we have done something creative, involving the use of colours and patterns.

Teachers should use cues which make students concentrate on their strengths rather than gender: My thesis supervisor sent an email to his research group with a blurb from an American dude called "Richard Morin [Pew Research Center]". In it, he points out that research has shown that "women score much lower on math tests if they are first asked unrelated questions about gender issues. The phenomenon is known as 'stereotype threat'". This has led two other dudes, Matthew S. McGlone of Texas Uni and Joshua Aronson of New York University to conduct an interesting experiment.

They surveyed 90 college students, half of each gender. A third of them were asked why they chose to study at a private liberal arts college. "The goal was [to] nudge these young women and men into thinking how smart and accomplished they were." This group exhibited the least variance on a visual-spatial ability test which they took immediately after the survey.

You make up your mind. I will appreciate any input from readers on this topic.

Elias.

Technorati tags: Education Teaching Mathematics

This rectangle is a square

2006-09-21T12:51:00.000+10:00

Earlier this year, my nephew visited from overseas with his Maths holiday homework. He was on summer holidays between years 8 and 9. This is one of the questions I can translate:

Show that a rectangle ABCD, such that AB=√125 and BC=3√45 - 2√20 is a square.

You could post your answer in the comments field or try it with your students and post their answers instead.

Elias.

Technorati tags: Education Mathematics

Solution to the make up four puzzle

2006-09-21T12:26:00.000+10:00

A virtual star to Mr. B. on solving the puzzle. Remember, the idea is to move only one stick to make the equation correct:

Starting postions: | + || + ||| = 4
Solution: | + | + | + | = 4
(move one of || to make a "+" with the middle stick in |||)

I have made a little Flash animation to demonstrate it, but I can't figure out how to upload this to Blogger. If you know, please advise.

Elias.

Make up four: a puzzle

2006-09-16T18:10:00.000+10:00

A colleague gave me this puzzle yesterday. It is very cool.

Rearrange the sticks on the left hand side of the equal sign, so the sum does equal 4.

| + || + ||| = 4

Note: The plus signs are also made up of sticks.

Post your answers in the comments field.
Elias.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: Puzzle Mathematics

Merit-based pay and formative assessment

2006-09-16T11:33:00.000+10:00

Several reports have been released of late telling the government to lift the financial status of teachers if the shortage -both current and looming- of Maths, Science, and LOTE teachers is to be solved. The past two federal ministers of education, Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop, have responded to such reports by asking their state counterparts to implement a merit-based pay scale for teachers.

Teacher unions are usually opposed to such ideas. They argue that good measures for teacher effectiveness are lacking and that such moves would be divisive as they would promote competition in the staff room.

The Education Wonks have an editorial (or wonkitorial as they call it) commenting on a scheme in Iowa which links teachers' pay to the grades achieved by their students in standardised tests. They point out that some research studies have shown that students do not take these tests seriously enough, and teachers would end up being penalised for their students' carelessness. In another wonkitorial they point out that the No Child Left Behind program would turn teaching into the only profession where 100% effectiveness is not only expected, but required.

What is of interest to me is how results on standardised tests are used to improve student learning. To my knowledge, the student learns his/her grade, the parents see their child's rank in the state, and the teacher feels baffled or justified depending on whether the grade confirms or disproves school-based assessment.

Responding to the push for such high-stakes assessment, Professors Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, of King's College in London, wrote a fabulous paper entitled Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment. This and other such papers brought the idea of formative assessment (aka assessment for learning) to the fore.

One thing that Black and Wiliam argue is that teachers are well trained in grading assessment tasks, but are usually unsure about how to use their findings to support student learning. This might seem to be a criticism of teachers, but these scholars then proceded to working with teachers in the UK to look at ways in which formative assessment could be implemented. In their work, they did not condescend to teachers. Instead, they presented general ideas and allowed the teachers to lead the way in discovering effective ways to implement formative assessment. I highly recommend the book: Assessment for Learning: Putting it into practice, by P. Black, C. Harrison, C. Lee, B. Marshall and D. Wilima.

An example I read in a recent paper is that of a preservice teacher who pretested primary (elementary) school children on their knowledge of the moon. He concluded that they knew "very little" and proceeded to teach his unit assuming nothing. This was because, while they knew that the moon was not a source of light like the sun, only two could explain their thinking . The author of this paper suggested that the next lesson should have been based on the question: if the moon is not a source of light, how do you think it glows? This would have been an example of using one's assessment of what students knew to guide further learning.

So, what does all this have with teachers' pay? There is a two part answer:
1- Raising the stakes even higher will make standardised tests an even greater source of anxiety and even less useful for learning; and
2- This could lead to schools in "rough" suburbs finding it even harder to recruit good teachers, as these would leave to work with kids who are more likely to get higher grades.

Black and Wiliam suggest a value-added assessment of teachers' performance, where a teacher is rewarded for the improvement his/her students have made between standardised tests.

Elias.

Technorati tags: Education Teaching Formative Assessment

Have an inspirational (or hopeful) story? Submit them here

2006-09-14T19:32:00.000+10:00

Over at rickety contrivances of doing good, Susan is planning on starting a carnival of hope. Why not contribute a post to such a great idea. Unfortunately, time is running out for the first issue. Come on bloggers, we are interesting people to whom many good things happen. Let's share them with the world!

Also, at spunky homeschool, they are running a contest for inspirational educational stories. You could win yourself a digital camera.

Elias.

Answer to PQR puzzle

2006-09-10T22:22:00.000+10:00

Yeo Hui gets the -virtual- cake for solving the problem first. Mr. Person has again provided the most publishable solution:

It was easy enough to test the cases here. There are only 4 possibilities--444, 555, 777, and 888--that could possibly give three-digit quotients with all digits being different. Looks like it's 444: 148 x 3 = 444.

The answer is therefore C. 13

Elias.

Students' response to the death of Steve Irwin

2006-09-06T20:56:00.000+10:00

After school on Tuesday, I went to the room where I normally teach my Year 9s to leave a message on the whiteboard. I saw a cross with the words: R. I. P. Steve Irwin. I imagined that it was a joke or something left from a drama presentation. I then learned that it was true when I turned on the radio in my car.

The reaction to Steve's death has been phenomenal in Australia. It is being compared with the reaction to the death of Lady Di. This is surprising to me as Australians are normally very harsh on their celebrities. Steve himself had remarked how he was not as appreciated in his own country as in the US. He referred to the "cultural cringe" that we often talk about.

What really surprised me was the amount of grief of my year 7 students. In the morning, during the 10 minute "homeroom" assembly, we say a prayer and the students get to pray for special intentions. The last two days have been dominated by prayers for Steve and his family. The girls seem to identify a lot with his daughter despite the difference in age.

The crocodile hunter was undone by one of the least vicious of the animals he had worked with. When men are interviewed they uniformly refer to his apparent invincibility. I guess most men of his age feel themselves invincible and are reacting to his death with a sense of shock.

I read today that the reaction in the US has also been great. People there loved him. Reportedly, they could not get enough of his landmark "Crikey!"

In the words of my students, "I pray for Steve Irwin, his family, and especially his daughter who was very close to him. Lord, hear us".

Elias.

The latest in education carnivals

2006-09-06T20:44:00.000+10:00

For those who want to keep their finger on the pulse (Ok, I am running out of intro lines!):

The Carnival of education is over at Get On the Bus
The Teaching carnival is over at Workbook
The Carnival of homeschooling is over at Why homeschool?

Enjoy,
Elias.

Puzzle: here's the product, what is the sum

2006-09-04T19:40:00.000+10:00

The following is a question from the 2005 Australian Mathematics Competition - Junior Division (years 7 & 8):

In the multiplication

P Q R
x 3
------
Q Q Q

each of P, Q and R represents a different digit. The sum of P, Q and R is
(A) 16 (B) 14 (C) 13 (D) 12 (E) 10

If you know the answer, send it with an explanation to eliasblog@yahoo.com.au

Technorati tags: Mathematics Puzzle

It's a tough world out there!

2006-09-02T07:06:00.000+10:00

Lately, I came across a chain letter purporting to report a speech given by Bill Gates at a high school. It lists the things that school does NOT teach (we are apparently meant to shout the "NOT") and how "politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality". At the same time, a blogger on The Age website also posted on the things we didn't learn at school.

Schools must tell kids to expect a harsh boss. "Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss." "... very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time." I must say that all my employers, both in industry and in teaching, have been very accommodating. I would have been badly prepared by my school if they had planted suspicion of employers in my mind.

Schools must teach kids everything they will ever need in the world of work. "... how to survive a poorly run meeting ... how to prepare a powerpoint presentation ... how to write a 5 line email." I thought schools have been administring death by powerpoint for quite a while. I surely prepare my students for all those poorly run meetings they will have to endure: I get them in groups of 12 and give one of student a boring script to read. Yes, sir, I teach for the real world.

In all of these posts there are two themes in common: that school is not the real world and that school should be a reproduction of that world. Together with these themes, come two assumptions I used to make in my pre-education life: if people have not learnt something, it is because they were not taught it, and we know what people will need in the world of work, we just need the schools to get on with teaching it.

If the world is a place where everyone has to compete for the few places on the winning podium and if employers are harsh and uninterested in your wellbeing, then it is even more important for schools to be different. Employers will surely be grateful for people who have "found themselves" before they begin work. This way, they don't need to engage in such useless activities on the boss' time. I am sure no one at my school knew I would end up in an English-speaking country when they decided to teach me this otherwise irrelevant skill.

I'll get off my soap box and go play with my daughter. She'll teach me what is real and what is academic.

Elias.
Technorati tags: Education Teaching School

Another puzzle

2006-08-30T20:56:00.000+10:00

Those who enjoyed solving 100 pirates will want to take a look at the 2 Numbers puzzle, on Naught Much. Other people's solutions are in the comments, so be sure not to cheat!

Elias.

Solution to the priates puzzle

2006-08-30T14:07:00.000+10:00

Thank you to those who participated in the puzzle.

The solution in words:
If a number of pirates need only one shoe and of the others half need no shoes and the other half need two shoes, then on average each pirate needs one shoe. So, the answer is 100 shoes.

Algebraic solution, thanks to Mr. Person:

Let x = the number of one legged pirates, and let y = the number of pirates with two legs. If all y pirates wore shoes, we would need 2 y shoes for this group.
But only half wear shoes, so we only need y shoes for this group. And since we only need x shoes for the one-legged (one shoe per pirate), the total number of shoes
required turns out to be equal to x + y, which is simply the number of pirates.

Also, thanks to S. Elsnick who pointed out that some assumptions needed to be made in solving this problem: all of the one-legged pirates always wear one shoe; there are no pirates without at least one leg; no pirates have three legs; the remaining half of the two-legged pirates always wear two shoes.

Elias.

100 Pirates: a puzzle

2006-08-28T18:26:00.000+10:00

Here's a puzzle posed by a student to a colleague of mine. If you can solve it, then please email me:

A certain number of pirates are one-legged. Of the remainder, half never wear shoes. If there are 100 pirates in total, how many shoes will they need?I look forward to your submissions.

Elias.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: Puzzle Mathematics

The most useful course I took at university

2006-08-26T17:00:00.000+10:00

One frustration I had with my graduate diploma of education was the fact that we were expected to read a lot of research papers, without being provided with any relevant training. We did not know enough about research methodologies to be able to read the papers critically.

When I went back to uni to do an MEd, I took a course specifically dedicated to reading Maths Ed. research. I was lucky that the course ran with only one enrollment - mine! The university felt guilty for not promoting the course well enough and let the lecturer go ahead and run it. Later on, a DEd student joined in and a Phd student was attending at the lecturer's request.

This was by far the most practical course I have taken in education. Each week we looked at a different methodology - quantitative, case study, ethnography etc...- and each of us gave a report on a relevant paper. What made the course immediately applicable to my teaching practice was the fact that the lecturer allowed us to follow our own interest for the major assignments:

A literature review on the topic of our choice.
A paper aimed at teachers on the same topic.

In my case, I chose introductory algebra. Out of the reading I did, I got a paper published in a teacher's journal and introduced a unit of work for the year 7 classes at my school.

Much academic research happens in the classroom and with the help of teachers. Researchers often interview children to find out the way they think about certain things. All this knowledge is very useful to a teacher. It is not a case of academics telling teachers how to do their job, it is a case of them providing teachers with information which they are best equipped to make use of in their own classrooms.

Unfortunately, the lecturer recently informed me that the faculty has pulled the plug on the course. I still think that teacher education should always include a course on reading research.

Elias.

Technorati tags: Education

Help! My nerdy humour is not working

2006-08-26T16:41:00.000+10:00

I wanted to liven up a very serious revision lesson with my year 10 IT class. So I used some nerdy humour. I jumbled up some sentences on how computers catch a virus and how these can be removed. When rearranged, the paragraph reads:

Comic book guy opened a file from an unknown source. A virus installed itself on his computer. The virus infected his files. Comic book guy panicked. He ran anti-virus software. The files were disinfected. Comic book guy breathed a sigh of relief, and celebrated with a Vegemite sandwich.

Next to this was a cartoon of the comic book guy (from the Simpsons) saying: "No emoticon could describe how I feel".

Needless to say, they thought it was a very lame joke :-(

Hip people out there, can you help me? Or am I beyond help?

Elias

The 81st carnival of education

2006-08-23T21:15:00.000+10:00

Thanks to the very efficient education wonks, this week's canival of education is now up and ready for your reading pleasure.

Elias.

You do the curly whirly and you turn around ...

2006-08-22T20:18:00.000+10:00

Most Maths teachers would be familiar with the following algorithm for converting mixed numbers into improper fractions. Improper fractions are those where the numerator (top number) is greater than the denominator (bottom number). Thanks to Mr. Person for the illustration.

Basically, you get the numerator of the improper fraction by multiplying the whole number by the denominator and adding the result to the numerator. Fabulous and very sensible! I am being sarcastic, in case you cannot tell :-)

Every year I revise this topic with my year 8s and they all know some part of this algorithm by heart and usually forget another. They fumble through "you times by the bottom and plus by the top". The poor souls get to repeat this, until they use proper verbs (add to, not plus by)!
Not one of them can explain why this works, or is interested in knowing why this works.

This year, I have the fortune of having a year 7 class instead of my usual year 8s. They were happy thinking: one and a quarter is the same as 4 quarters plus another quarter. This can be written as 5 quarters. After they all understood this, I thought I would show them the obligatory shortcut illustrated above. They had seen it in primary school but could not fully remember it.

For the first time, I was the first teacher they had who called it the "curly whirly", and they were not interested. They wanted to think about it logically, turning the whole number into a fraction. So, this leaves us with one good use for the algorithm:

Oh, the curly whirly
Oh, the curly whirly

May your Maths classes be filled with song!
Elias.

Technorati tags: Education Teaching Mathematics

It's hanging on the fridge!

2006-08-22T12:04:00.000+10:00

I began this semester with a new year 9 class. Two weeks into the semester, one of the students invited me to a talk she was giving in her English class entitled "why I despise Maths"! The student certainly displayed a negative attitude in class, though she did achieve a high mark on the test.

At parent-teacher interviews, I learned that she enjoyed creative subjects. I suggested that, since we were learning "linear graphs", she could try out the virtual beadloom software. Today she announced to me that she had made a beadloom and enjoyed it. I asked her to show it to me, but she said "It's at home, hanging on the fridge!" She then turned to her neighbour and began to describe the activity.

As you can imagine, I was so delighted. A piece of Maths work is on display at a year 9 student's house!

Elias.

Technorati tags: Education Teaching

The 80th Carnival of Education

2006-08-16T21:21:00.000+10:00

If you're after news, opinions and all things education, then check out this week's Carnival of Education at the Education Wonks.

What is wrong with rote learning?

2006-08-05T10:13:00.000+10:00

The Victorian curriculum seems to be built on one of two assumptions: either people do not have memories, or else their memories need to be left unused. To my knowledge, the students are never asked to memorise poems or mathematical definitions.

A year level coordinator once told me about an English teacher who made the students repeat a poem until they could recite it by heart. That took place during an excursion. When they were back at school, many students commented that they had never realised one could remember something if one repeated it over and over! These were 15 year olds who had not developed strategies for memorisation. I once read about Western hostages in Beirut, and how they kept themselves sane by reciting their favourite poems.

The other day I was describing a project on the Pythagorean Theorem to my nephew, a French educated 17-year old from the middle east. I first asked him if he knew the theorem. He thought for a couple of seconds and said: "Dans un triangle carré, Le carré de l'hypoténuse est égal à la somme des carrés des deux autres côtés" (In a right angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides).

Did the fact that he knew it by heart mean that he understood little of it? Not at all. It gave him the necessary vocabulary to describe his understanding. As we walked on, I described the geometric proofs that my students had to describe as part of their project. He had never seen those proofs before, but we could discuss them abstractly, without having the pictures in front of us. I could use words like "somme" (sum), "surface" (area) and "longueur" (length), with which he was entirely comfortable.

I then mentioned the concept of a proof by induction, something taught in the first year of a science degree at a typical Australian university. He said, "yes, I know what that is. Induction is the opposite of deduction in that you begin with a particular case and generalise. In deduction, you apply a general rule to a particular case."

Let me temper all this by stating that I am not a "back to basics" teacher. I teach algorithms and shortcuts only when absolutely necessary. I do believe that mathematics needs a context, and that understanding is paramount. My complaint is that we seem to have thrown the baby out with the bath water. We often speak as though learning by rote is a poor alternative to learning with understanding. I think that we can use some rote learning to support understanding. Let me know what you think.

Elias.

Categories: Education

Remarkable Jackie

2006-07-30T19:13:00.001+10:00

In my first two years of teaching, I taught a remarkable girl, whom I will refer to as Jackie. She was the type of student who had to know why everything was the way it was. She always asked me to show her the veracity of theorems and the reason that any particular algorithm actually worked.

I must say that I always welcome this kind of inquisitiveness, and get frustrated by the fact that many of my students have been irreparably convinced that Mathematics was a subject where thinking had little to do with success! I often allowed myself to be manipulated into teaching the traditional way: the teacher gives lots of notes and then sets work from the textbook.

Jackie was different in this respect. Her questions were a breath of fresh air, especially when she was in year 8. That particular group was a difficult one to work with. They were very nice girls, but not the type for whom thinking or a high level of self discipline came naturally.

My biggest frustration was when I could not answer all her questions. This was sometimes due to lack of time, the fact that concepts required a higher level of Maths to demonstrate, and even my lack of experience in teaching.

One remarkable occurrence was when she asked me, after returning from the mid-year break, to teach her a practical way to work out percentages. She had no trouble applying the formula we had learned in class, but she found it difficult to use it when shopping! So, we spent recess working on a good mental strategy for shopping.

In my third year of teaching, Jackie was on my year 9 class list. I would have loved to teach her again. Instead, I suggested to her that it would be best if she had a different teacher for a change. I asked for her to be placed in another class, and a place was vacant with a teacher who is very different from me. Mrs Jones is a very traditional, and very experienced, teacher. I think it is good for students to experience teachers with different styles throughout their years of schooling.

To the teachers reading this, may you be blessed with a few Jackies in every class.

Elias.

Categories: Education

Grateful for every day?

2006-07-29T18:33:00.000+10:00

Yesterday, a colleague asked me whether growing up in a time of war had changed me. Did I savour each day of my life?

Given his apparent expectations, My answer must have been disappointing. The fact is that, like most people I know, I live a life disproportionately dominated by mundane concerns. I plan for and worry about the future as though I were sure to live a long life.

One thing that I have learned from the war was the importance of a good education. When you hope to make a future for yourself outside your country of birth, education is your only passport. It is a sacred thing.

I remember many people using the war as a pretext for the way they lived. Those who stole or fought with militias said that the circumstances of life necessitated their behaviour. Those who turned to God, pointed to the absurdity of the things of this world. Everything was truly ephemeral and almost everything was pointless.

I was surrounded mainly by people in the latter category. I think their love for God can be matched by some whom I have met in the West, but not their complete dependence on the Divine. Those people live truly holy lives. They endangered their lives to help others and gave of their necessity to care for those worse off. They lived in the world but were not part of it.

When my students ask me "why will I ever need to know this?", I sometimes answer "I had no need to learn English when I was at school". How can I not be grateful for the level of language instruction in my birth country, when my passport to a future came with an Australian visa pasted in?

Here am I, with a healthy family and a job of my choosing. How lucky I am! Yes, I am grateful for every day.

Elias.

Categories: Education Middle East Religion

C'est la politique qui prime

2006-07-23T18:14:00.000+10:00

I remember a time in my youth when a the leader of a militia was doing the rounds of universities. In one of his speeches, he emphasised the French proverb, "c'est la politique qui prime". Loosely translated, this means "Politics before all else". He argued that the students' education could not take precedence, sincec an unstable country would not provide them with a future. All considerations had to make way for politics.

I believe that people who love freedom and who have strong convictions always defy reality. A committed Christian forgoes some income to keep Sunday mornings free. A practising Jew limits his social engagements to keep the Sabbath. A determined student studies despite the bombs that take away both the peace and lights of his study area.

Obviously, my upbringing in a war torn country provided me with many opportunities to defy reality. I was blessed with parents who did not wrap me in cotton wool, and instead allowed me to grow and explore myself in what were very difficult circustances.

Yesterday, I had an experience where politics did come before all else. La politique a gagné. I had a loud disagreement with a person about whom I care regarding the current situation in the Middle East. I will not detail the argument here, except to say that I suspended my good relationship with that person and all that meant to me to take up a political point. All this, in the comfort of a lounge room in Melbourne.

What does that have to do with education? I remember a lecturer at teacher's college telling us that education was highly political. A tug of war has been taking place of late between the federal and state governments over who controls schools and universities. The funding of educational institutions is often a hotly debated topic, especially close to elections.

External testing seems to be the current catch cry. Politicians use it to peer inside the four walls of classrooms. They label children, and satisfy the community's need for accountability. As a teacher, I am too well aware of the drawbacks. The body of research on teaching and learning is being burnt at the altar of political control. The child is in danger of becomming a dot on a continuum. The joy of learning is at times replaced by the stress of performing.

Teachers cannot always go against the system. But we must refuse to entertain the system to the extent that it asks us to teach badly. All children are not the same. Let us defy reality as much as we can, and replace politics with joy on top of our considerations.

C'est la joie qui prime!

Elias.
Categories: Education Politics

How I became a teacher?

2006-07-06T18:36:00.000+10:00

Here's opening one's soul:

I remember one day discussing with my dad the fact that I wanted to study Education at university. He encouraged me to read about education and keep it as a hobby, but counselled me to do something which would earn me a more decent wage. I suppose this is not unusual, especially where I was born, where pursuit of a living wage often meant emigrating to the West or taking a post in the Gulf states.

The idea kept simmering in my mind, even though I completed an engineering degree and worked for a major telecommunications company. In the year 2000, I requested permission to apply for a training position in Europe. It turned out to be an inopportune time for my department to let go of any of its members. A few months later, we were closed down by the parent company and I found work as a trainer, contracting to a large US company.

The IT slump hit hard towards the end of 2001 and, despite signing with another leading software training provider, the contracts were few and far between. I decided to turn the crisis into an opportunity and took some time to read "finding your mission in life", a section in Dick Bolles' classic "What Color is Your Parachute?". Everything I read and all the profiling tools in the book pointed me to teaching. I decided to apply to local universities for the 2003 intake, but was dissuaded from this by some members of my family.

In November 2002, I was offered two jobs which I rejected, having realised that I needed to go ahead with my decision to undertake teacher training. It was too late to go through the regular chanels but the Australian Catholic University had a process for late applications. It was a great surprise when they called me with an offer. I later learned that my chosen methods, Maths and IT, helped me as both were -and remain- in great shortage.

Since then, many things happened that confirmed my decision. I was called by a technical college to teach evenings while I completed my teaching diploma in the day. A school that had hosted me for a teaching round offered me a full-time position beginning January of 2004. Everytime a decision had to be made, something would open up and appear to be the natural option. Most importantly, I had my wife's full support throughout the journey.

I was raised to believe that when the circumstances of life all point in one direction and things turn out for the better, Divine Providence is at work.

Elias.

Good memories of a Year 8 class

2006-06-28T14:19:00.000+10:00

In my first year of teaching, I had a great experience with a Year 8 class, which I will refer to as Year 8B. This class had a good reputation with the humanities teachers. They spoke well, discussed things, but did not put their heads down for skills practice in Maths. I found them ok but not as responsive as my homeroom, 8A across the corridor. I attended a seminar run by a classroom management guru, Dr Ramon Lewis, and decided to try his methods with them.

We agreed on some rewards which they would get for displaying the expected behaviours. A couple arranged a special deal with me: 10 ticks for good behaviour would result in a letter of commendation to their parents. From the beginning, I told the class that I was not comfortable with the use of rewards and that I would eventually retract them. I simply wanted to give some of them an incentive to work well and find out that they can achieve in Maths.

Well, the system worked really well for many of them and only one student made an inquiry when I stopped giving out rewards. Here are some of the things I observed, for which I will always be grateful:

One of the weaker and more talkative students began to telling her friends: "Shsh, I am learning". Paying attention in class and doing what was required of her had helped her achieve good results, even in the much dreaded Algebra.
I walked into the last lesson declaring that we would do some useful learning. Some objected that they had finished all assessments and were entitled to a slack lesson. In the end, the students astonished me with how quickly they could use graphics calculators to produce linear graphs which formed prallelograms, triangles and -in the case of one of them- a five pointed star.
Jess, a keen girl who had broken her writing arm, insisted on taking the end of year exam. This was a training exercise only and the grade would not appear on the students' reports. She arranged to meet me at a lunch time with a friend who would act as a scribe. They assured me that they would work right in front of me so I could see that they were not helping each other.

Mind you, this class also included a girl that still thinks of me as an incarnation of the devil. This is for reasons which escape me. Maybe I look like the devil! I could not win them all, but that class remains the highlight of my career so far.

Elias.

Report writing

2006-06-12T19:51:00.000+10:00

I did not post anything the last two weeks, much to the disappointment of this blog's 2 readers! I was writing reports for my students! The reports came in two formats: the usual school format for the IT classes, and the new "plain English" format for the Maths classes.

For two weeks, I turned in at midnight and got up at dawn. My poor wife was being woken up by my alarm clock. I started making silly mistakes towards the end of that period. For instance, I photocopied only one side of double sided Maths sheets. I fell for a tricky joke which my year sevens played on me! They rubbed their elbows and said, "can you rub your shoulder like this?" Needless to say what my mistake was.

All this is now history, until reports collation night next Wednesday. The last weekend was wonderful. My wife, daughter and I went away on Friday night and returned to Melbourne on Sunday morning. That was wonderful!

Now it's Monday night, and the long weekend is over. I have to spend a few hours writing two Maths tests and preparing a lesson. But that's ok, as I am planning to stay up late and watch Australia take on Japan in the World Cup. I can hardly wait!

Elias.

Teaching is a privilege

2006-05-28T16:59:00.000+10:00

Often teachers, including me, talk about how overworked, underpaid and misunderstood we are. To be fair, though, most of the teachers I work with also have a sense that teaching is both a vocation and a privilege. To be part of the lives of young people can be an awesome experience.

Lately, I have had a sense of this privilege. The creative arts festival, to which I refer in the earlier post "every student has a gift", really showed me what a brilliant bunch of kids I work with. I also enjoyed their encouragement for my participation in the staff item. A colleague of mine wrote an entry in his blog in which he declared: "I pity the teacher who only gets to see his/her students from the other side of the desk".

On the same day as the festival, I received a letter from the principal confirming her approval for me to work on a part-time basis next semester. I had asked for this arrangement as I am trying to carry out a research project for my Master of Education degree. Our school has a high number of part-time teachers, and it was not easy for the administration to accommodate me in this way.

On Friday afternoon, the teacher who sits next to me in the staff room offered me the use of her holiday house over the Queen's birthday holiday. I did not even ask, she just said "you've been working hard, you deserve a break!" I have had other jobs prior to teaching, but the human interaction I have found in this vocation is unparalleled.

For my students, school leaders, and colleagues, thanks be to God.

Elias.

Every student has a gift

2006-05-26T21:05:00.000+10:00

Lately, I heard about a former student of mine getting high honours for her achievements in drama. I remember looking at a colleague who, like me, had taught her Maths, and saying: "she was a scatter brain in Maths!" Of course, I meant it in a nice way. We had both spoken about that student and thought that she was very intelligent but lacked motivation to do well in Mathematics.

Earlier in the week, our college held its annual festival of creative arts. The talent on show was amazing. Over 400 students (out of ~ 1150) took part. Many students who have difficulties in academic subjects displayed great ability in music, drama or dance. Of course, there were also the all-rounders who excelled at everything.

As I sat and listened to the awesome orchestra playing Holst's Jupiter, I remembered my schooling years. I also attended a single sex Catholic school, though in my case it was a boys' school. Music and, to a large extent, sport were seen as extra-curricular. There is no way known that we would have put on such festivals that interrupted our "learning". Ironically, I remember being asked to write an essay in my year 10 (seconde) French class based on a citation which read something like: "an education system where a child has no time to learn the piano or classical Greek is a dead system."

To be fair, my schooling took place during the time of a civil war. It was a miracle that we got taught enough Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Arabic, French and English to pursue our choice of courses at university. In my case, I was able to emigrate to Australia and study Maths and Computer Science without taking time out to learn the language. For this, I am eternally grateful.

Elias

The new "plain English" report cards and formative assessment

2006-05-20T21:20:00.001+10:00

The former federal minister for education, Brendan Nelson, wanted schools across the nation to give students A to E grades on their performance in all subjects. The Victorian government's adaptation of the new system has taken this to the extreme - extreme folly, that is. Students will receive A-E grades on the following "dimensions" of Mathematics:

Number;
Measurement and Chance and Data;
Space;
Working Mathematically; and
Structure

While the government is advertising the new "plain English" report cards, I wonder how many parents know what "structure" and "working mathematically" refer to. So, my school will be doing the right thing by the parents and adding our usual very high to low ratings on each topic.

Getting an A in the new system is reserved for those who are working "well above" their year level. The majority of students will be getting a C, which means that they are working at their year level.

The need to assess for so many different grades can easily come at the expense of formative assessment. I am very interested in comments from any teachers in other countries that have gone before us into an assessment-heavy curriculum. I want to know how you make room for formative assessment.

Take care,
Elias.

Little time with family

2006-05-14T21:07:00.000+10:00

Last week, I was on year 7 camp. This was a great experience. I got to challenge myself and my fear of crazy rides. I was quite sick going into the camp, which is why I packed cold and flu tablets. I ended up doing the ropes course, 18 metre high giant swing etc...

Back from camp, there was little time to rest. Saturday, I had a conference to attend. My head of faculty and I gave a workshop on digital portfolios. The audience seemed to have a lot of questions, which I guess is a good sign. Normally, we would have stayed for the next two sessions and then the finger food and social interaction. Instead, we just headed home to our families. After my daughter slept, I updated an article I had submitted to a peer reviewed publication and sent it off to the editor.

I felt good about the two additions to my resume, though I wish I had more time to spend with the family. I had made both committments last year, before I got so busy. A cartoon in our conference presentation showed a man pointing to a computer screen and telling his wife, "you said we had to spend more time with the kids, so I turned their photos into icons!"

Elias.