Taming the GIMP

Looking back on my presentation for SIPS, I feel as though I didn't necessarily address the application of the software as best I could. While I did explain a few practical uses for the software across many disciplines of study, I didn't get to do as many demonstrations as I would have liked. One of the reasons for this is the depth and breadth of the program. There are too many functions, options, and tools to use to explain in their entirety.

*However, I do feel as though that might be a little harsh, as many of the tools and "toys" are similar to Microsoft Paint, which many of my peers have, likely, encountered.*

I must admit that a few more demonstrations would better explain how to use the program. Perhaps, if I had shown the class how I created my "Put Yourself in the Picture" assignment, there would have been more engagement in the class. I believe that my peers may have found a more practical use for the application if they could see where THEY could put themselves. Also, they may have been more interested in the attention to detail that they could adopt when creating their own GIMP art. Furthermore, they would see the entire process more thoroughly instead of seeing a brief demonstration and then a bunch of finished products. I find that it is difficult to understand the process without seeing the process first hand, and that process may take time.

This brings me to the time constraint. Bowen and I, simply, didn't have the time to explain our applications to the full extent (At least not while presenting together). If I(we) had more time, things could have been different. On the other hand, these presentations were designed to give a quick look at a certain piece of technology. We weren't meant to hold seminars on tech. Still, it was my duty to explain this piece of technology and I believe I did the best I could - all things considered.

When life gives ya lemons you have to make lemonade...

The Smartest You Will Ever Be

This is a Case Study Presentation I gave during semester 3. Just a thought about the state of teaching and students in grade 9 during that point. Enjoy...

Does anyone else find it funny that human beings, while at the top of the food chain, are responsible for pumping out the most idiotic offspring in the world? Baby calves don't need much more than a few months of mummy dearest coddling before they're free to roam the open plain. That's saying quite a lot considering the sum total knowledge of all cows on this planet couldn't figure out how to bypass a barbed wire fence without leaving a fresh steak behind. Human beings, on the other hand, need at least 18 years (21 if you're American) before they can be cut loose to face the real world. Does anyone have any idea why? Some would blame the education system, the parents, television, class distinctions, gender bias/confusion, blah blah blah blah. These ideas, being so tired and washed out, are easy targets that fail to look at a far simpler approach. I would argue that it comes from the system we made that makes every child feel special. The way I see it, you make everyone mediocre when you make everyone special.

It started out with giving them toys to play with when they weren't in school. From there kids started getting their own food at restaurants, special prices on public transit and an entire amusement park targeted at their infantile brains. If that wasn't bad enough, kids were awarded trophies for participation and for improving a grade level. The final insults are graduation ceremonies for finishing preschool, elementary school, junior high school, and high school. Every single one of these accomplishments awards kids for doing what everyone already intended for them to do. We see no evidence of that last example anywhere in the adult world because no one would allow that kind of crap. It'd be like handing out awards for all members of society who didn't serve a prison term in the last 12 months. At any rate, all of these things work to produce a group that is satisfied even excited, with their own mediocrity. You might think those are small, if not irrelevant, issues but small things lead to big problems; like a piece of glass embedded in the urinary tract.

I say this because the students of today have been fooled (by us) into thinking that their every action is deserving of a celebration bordering on the fanatical. I have students who feel as though I should be impressed when they put their names on their assignments. In turn, I feel as if I've wasted the last six and a half years of education only to be surrounded by people so dim that a teachable moment is more like lighting a match than turning on a light bulb. Still, there's little use in embarrassing the students for their crippling ignorance because (according to them) they're the smartest they'll ever be at this age. It's as if students hit the age of 14 and immediately recognize their birthday as the first anniversary of born prodigal omnipotence. These scenarios are a painful reminder of why I am tired and why my parents always said, "the next generation is trouble".

Some of you might be wondering why I'm upset by this. I mean, this isn't exactly a big surprise. All generations loathe the next one coming along and there's no sense in getting upset at history repeating itself. Wayne Gretzky once said "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". To me, letting this history repeat itself would not only mean missing a shot; but also trading your stick in for a cigarette and a lighter. The kids of today can't be thrown aside to fend for themselves because we made them who they are. We're the ones who drive them to school and forget to keep up with their performance. We're the ones who put them into sporting programs that reward them for merely being there. We're also the ones who put them in a system that is designed for failure.

Probably the most deviant way in which Albertans try to make their children feel special is the "no fail" policy that haunts the hallways of every primary and junior high school in this province. Instead of letting kids fail based on poor performance, students are pushed through each grade like beef through the meat grinder to promote their self esteem. Kids are told they all have special abilities and are good-natured without actually demanding any exceptional work from them; making students daydreamers by trade, masters of none. That is, of course, right up until grade 10 when the performance hammer comes down harder than a meat cleaver on a chopping block. Once the kids are able to fail a grade, everything changes. While it does force them to study a little bit to receive passing grades, teaching someone who is 15 that they now have to study to pass is like telling a pro athlete they have to pass a linguistics exam to play on the starting line. Suddenly the kids don't feel so special when they have to atone for 10 years of poor study habits and no repercussions for meager achievement. Add in the pressures to consume drugs and alcohol and you've got a wavering group of imbeciles with every reason to mess up, and why shouldn't they? This is the system the educated populace bought into and pushed for.

Since I've just finished sending out interim report cards to my students and calculated the marks from their first Social Studies Unit Exam, I've come to the conclusion that today's youth raises a red flag big enough to cover the hole in the ozone layer. Simple questions on the exam could not be answered because of outright disdain for having to read the question properly. It’s as if our technological age (where you can google an answer to any question and pretend to be an expert on it) endows young people the ability to will informed opinions into existence from the land of dreams. On that note I'd like to say that I worded the questions poorly and that I didn't deliver the material well. I'd like to say that. However, when all information is presented in chart form and I ask for details in numbers (ie: give me two examples of...) figuring out where I went wrong is about as pointless as a pillow after a trip through a wood chipper. That said I still have trouble blaming the kids; knowing what they are a product of. What am I going to do about it? Well, when I crawl out from my mountain of papers, posters and assignments I'll let you know. Until then, someone should check for a barbed wire fence to see if they can find a free steak.

What's Important

From our Great Task, these are the things I'll remember to improve upon:

-PROOF READING!
While Bowen conceded early on that it was his fault, I found a few sentences of my own making about as much sense as an Eskimo trying to speak Hebrew. Proofreading the actual example of a great task would be a good idea for showing some kind of finished product.

-Include a rubric for assessing the use of technology
I thought about this one for a while after class and came to the conclusion that providing a rubric that assesses our use of technology would greatly help our peer review. I also figured that including this same rubric for the students would benefit the class as a whole. I could discover how each class battles with technology and determine whether or not my intended uses for technology are appropriate to the students.

-Make the written component more specific
This one is my fault. The IO version of this assignment requires it to be a research based assignment. However, when I saw it being done in my first year practicum, it was an assignment that followed each chapter of the book "Night" by Ellie Wiesel. In one sense, we proved that this assignment can work in a myriad of ways to benefit the students. However, for the purpose of peer review, we could have tightened things up by explaining the rules a little better.

-Pre-approved pictures in work
This is one aspect of the assignment our team did not discuss. I imagine it was a case of not thinking "how deviant could our students possibly be when picking out pictures off the internet?" I do believe that parameters should be set, depending on what novel/part of history you are covering in your class. However, I do not believe that the teacher should have to check up on the students and the images they are using because it will rob them of some of their creativity. I believe that if the parameters are set properly, the students will choose images accordingly....hopefully...

Now, what we did that sparked some positive feedback:

-Made history cool and personal
I agree that this assignment allows students to choose a perspective outside of their own. In addition, students are encouraged to bring many of their own attitudes into these historical events to truly live them.

-Lots of room for creativity with liberating constraints
Gotta give students freedom from complete freedom.

-Cross curricular connections
Every Humanities/Language Arts teachers dream.

-Adaptable to many grade levels

-Gives students a reason to write something about themselves and the assignment instead of just for the sake of writing.

For all of those students who don't particularly like English Lit, this is a way for them to find a reason to write. It gives them the ability to describe something that is important to them because they are living the experience.

Muddy Waters

Whether or not we'd like to admit it, human beings require consistency in order to establish some kind of progress. When there is inconsistency, things are chaotic at best; which makes walking to the beat of the drum difficult when the drummer is a delusional/paranoid schizophrenic. One of the consistent concepts discussed in this program has been the importance of inquiry based teaching in schools. However, the way in which this concept is discussed causes the students to beg for some kind of music sheet to follow along with.

I say this because, as of right now, the only class that is close to following some kind of inquiry model is the SIPS class. Each week we are encouraged to see the application of various uses of technology, discover and use technology for ourselves, and ask how we can continue to use technology in our classrooms. The learning we engage in every week is important because each of us discovers a "how to" method that can be applied in our classrooms. I suppose the reason why I find this important is because the lessons we learn are pragmatic. They pertain to the job we have been training the last 18 months for. This makes preparing for SIPS class enjoyable because each week we can guarantee learning something new and relevant.

Lecture and Inclusive Practices, on the other hand, fall somewhere between counting cars and watching snow melt on the universal scale of time wasters. While that might appear harsh at first, let me go on to explain my conclusion:

Lecture, while important during my first undergrad (because it has assignments and tests based on the content), is almost unnecessary at this point in the BEd program. Week after week is spent sitting on an auditorium and listening to an expert on a certain subject blather on relentlessly until most of the audience is bored into a coma. I say this because the content of these lectures usually pertains to something we have, likely, already heard, or something we already know about. For example, last week's lecture involved making communication with parents. We were encouraged to use the personal meetings, phone calls, and email to establish contact. We were also given an explanation on: what an email subscriber listing is, why email is impersonal, and that contact between students, parents and teachers is vital for the student's benefit. One of my peers ended up writing on her "feedback" paper that "if we haven't made contact with parents, haven't been to parent teacher interviews, and haven't figured out how to use email, chances are we failed semester 3 practicum and aren't in lecture right now".

I understand that all students/staff might not know how to use email properly, but most of the content of that lecture was, plain old, common sense. Maybe this goes one step further in my affirmation that the "common" part of that term has to be removed. At any rate, if I were to pick on anything further from that lecture, it would be that sitting at the front of a room with 300 people in it and talking for 2 hours straight is not teaching me how to teach inquiry. Instead, it's teaching me how to not teach inquiry.

Which brings me to Inclusive Practices: last class was spent trying to figure out how to use the projector and sound system...during class...during 2 student lead presentations... I almost felt that sitting there and attempting to listen to my peers while advertisements for toilet cleaners and the Olympics ran in the background was some kind of test to see if we recognized the damage done by uncharacteristic interruptions. However, seeing how most IP classes seem to be thrown together haphazardly, it came off as a complete lack of respect shown by the professors to the students for not coming in early to make sure their equipment was working properly. If anything, it taught me how to NOT do something to/for my students.

I could go on to pick apart the assignments in that class...so I will. Being a class that does not have any kind of narrative assessment (or grade), I'm finding it increasingly difficult to recognize the importance of the assignments that are due in that class. I understand the importance of studying some diseases/disorders/disabilities for their own sake, but if we are going to do so (as part of our inquiry based learning), why are we doing so with no intended feedback on our findings? Why are we doing these papers if there won't be some kind of merit attached to it? Furthermore, why are we doing them without some kind of due date that is more solid than pureed H2O? I can do a research paper on Oppositional Defiance Disorder anytime I please, but the purpose of doing one (at this stage in my academic career) is to have a professional verify that I have made some kind of insight or progress in understanding a condition that my students are likely to have. Instead, I'm coerced into doing a 2 page paper only to get an arbitrary "good job" written on the second page. What's worse, we are being lead into the "drop off" inquiry method, where a teacher gives you free reign to study whatever you like and then leaves you alone with no guidance as to how we are to proceed. This is, precisely, the method of inquiry we've been told NOT to teach...yet this is what our superiors have committed to. It's as if this class has been compiled to give the students mindless busy work to give us the illusion of progress forthcoming and time passing.

I believe these papers might carry more intellectual weight if we scheduled some kind of volunteer hours (as part of the program) to interact with individuals who are afflicted with such conditions. I also believe that this class may have benefited the students more adequately if it ran during first year, when we were observing students in practicum, to see how recognizing these conditions is valuable to a teacher.

I guess what I'm getting out here is that following along this term has been a little bit difficult. In terms of self assessment, I feel that I have learned a lot about teaching this semester. Unfortunately, what I have learned most is how to NOT do certain things. I've also learned how rehashing and repeating subject matter redundantly can attribute to lost focus among students. However, it hasn't all been gloomily colored gun metal gray or top soil brown. I've learned unique ways in engaging my students through computer videos, using online organizers to give students direction on assignments, the importance of social networking sites and how students use them, and how to develop meaningful tasks that students will be eager to complete instead of dragging themselves through the motions of daily homework.

Beyond all of that, I've managed to learn the importance of peer review. During our time in reviewing the Great Task, I learned the importance of having my work reviewed by colleagues. In doing so, my peers are likely to give insight on aspects of my work that I would not likely have seen or noticed. I say each assignment is like a pet project: we pet it, stroke it, feed it, and do everything to take care of it, except criticize it where it lacks. Only an outside perspective is likely to achieve that, and in order for our assignments to work, peer review needs to occur.

During that stint, I also learned the importance of reviewing the work of others. Breaking out the critical lens once in a while is good for the brain, as it keeps you working. Through this, I was able to see examples of other assignments that I could use in my classes. Everyone did such a fantastic job; it felt like we were all pooling our work together for the benefit of the entire class. I was so thrilled with this body of work! It gave me a glimmer of hope that getting some "how to's" is possible during my last semester here. It also taught me the benefit of working together instead of working alone. I can imagine that a teacher that works alone has a much harder road than the one who pulls in all available resources. This is the kind of teacher I would like to be!

My apologies for the uncharacteristically long post. I felt the only way to explain my learning to this point was to describe my experience in the program thus far. In short, inquiry done right, with peer review/assistance, and consistency makes a program flow with ease...inquiry done wrong, with interruptions, poor understanding and no guidance is a big flop.