Ontario Subject Associations

STAO, Science Teachers Association of Ontario

OAGEE, The Ontario Association for Geographic and Environmental Education

OAME, The Ontario Association for Mathematics Education

OHASTA, The Ontario History and Social Science Teachers’ Association

OPHEA, The Ontario Physical and Health Education Association

CODE, Council of Ontario Drama and Dance Educators

OSEA, The Ontario Society of Education through Art

OMLTA, The Ontario Modern Language Teachers’ Association

ORMTA, Ontario Registered Music Teachers’ Association

Why marks drop at university

Almost everyone has had occasion to look back upon his school days and wonder what has become of the knowledge he was suppose to have amassed during his years of schooling, and why it is that the technical skills he acquired have to be learned over again in changed form in order to stand him in good stead.

John Dewey, Experience and Education

This caught my attention as a teacher who has had to wonder why student marks drop in university, and why university professors don’t have an intelligent response beyond saying that high schools don’t do their job. The linked excerpt comes from Lapham’s Quarterly (Vol. I, Number 4, Fall 2008), and addresses schooling as “preparation” To extrapolate and apply, I think Dewey makes the point that when students learn how to write in high school English, they do so in response to particular teacher notions of what writing is for the material they are teaching. When those students go to university, they falter in the same task because they face another teacher with other notions of writing attached to the material they are teaching, which would seem to make it necessary that, in some degree, the teaching of writing needs to begin again as the university’s responsibility to its students.

On Line Teaching

You might be quite surprised to find how easy it is for you to create a plan of work for some of your students using on line tools and applications. A blog, for example, can be the "home page" of a website you create with instructions for work, and links for students to follow to the appropriate research sites, or to sites where they can, themselves, create web pages that will look quite professional.

Here's an example.

Teaching Poetry

Experiencing Poetry describes an approach for secondary students that tries to side-step, for a time, the thorny issue of "meaning" in order to encourage an experience of poetry by close observation, rather as one might look for a time at visual art, giving it the kind of attention that eventually draws from it some significance. I've published in on Scribd (see link in the sidebar) so that you can see how that application works.

English in the Counting House

The Queen was in the parlour

Eating bread and honey.

The King was in the Counting House

Counting out his money.

As a consultant, I often recounted this story when in the company of Ontario teachers who were panicked by the number of Expectations (outcomes, standards, what you will) they had to address. The panic is different in the elementary and secondary panels, but equally formidable. The elementary teacher is obliged to address dozens and dozens of Expectations from different subjects; the secondary teacher may address three complete sets of Expectations in different courses, and for over a hundred students in each semester of the year.

My story was about a time when I took some senior high school students to a “conference” at the University of Guelph. The conference was a marketing tool. Students could chose to attend workshops or demonstrations in a subject they might study should they choose to go to Guelph.

I thought, heck, I’m not going to listen to some English prof, so I headed to a Physics demonstration on the electron microscope. The fellow there had a stack of large photographic images in front of him, taken by the microscope. The top photograph in the pile, he pointed out, was an image of a small blemish on his arm. But when we looked at it, he drew our attention, not to the blemish, but to the space surrounding it, and to another “spot” in that space.

He carefully set that top image aside, and showed us the second photo which enlarged, and focused on the new “spot,” but again, after pointing it out, he moved our attention to the surrounding areas, and to another tiny spot. Naturally, the next image (#3) was of that spot, further enlarged and with larger spaces surrounding it and, of course, a new spot for our attention. On to image 4….and so on, and so on, and so on for several images that followed.

This raised, for me, an epiphany, and I asked a question something like this: “So what you’re saying is that, depending only on what visual aids we can devise, I could look further and further into my surface and discover there almost an infinity of space?” Yup, he replied.

Needless to say I was struck, like Hamlet, by an understanding that stops action dead in its tracks – which is just about how teachers have felt about the new standards curriculum.

Only, gazing at the standards curriculum is knowledge of a different sort. It’s sort of like someone put on a pair of goofy analytical glasses that made them think they could see infinitely into the structure of learning about language, literature, culture and self, and the wonky glasses engendered a gleeful curricular madness that got set to paper and has become the new “vision” of English. And now we are panicked, gazing at it all. But our inertia is not like the intelligence that paralyzed Hamlet. Our paralysis is more like what we feel when we meet a Polonius: “My God, the man can’t be serious!”

Some time ago, John Steinbeck wrote his take on the Arthurian Legend. In it, Sir Kay was the knight who stayed home to count the equipment and monies available for quest. The rest of the knights and ladies went out on quest, and are remembered for the adventures Sir Kay missed.

So much for the bean counters, and the curriculum model that envisons countless things to do.