Teacher education

drtombibey
April 18, 2008 at 2:08 pm

Wow chili! You do have your hands full.

There is an old saying in bluegrass: “We tune because we care.”

I guess something similar is true for folks who doctor, write, or teach, but that kind of e-mail is bound to test your patience.

Dr. B

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9 Comments.
Clix
April 13, 2008 at 7:50 am

Hm. ARE they pedagogical gold? If, after showing these emails to students and demonstrating what’s wrong with them, you still get similar emails… is it really working?

(This is something I wrestle with A LOT. Sometimes I’ll think that lesson X has worked better than lesson Y… but you know, it’s never with the same group of students, so maybe the lesson X group was more attentive and would’ve done just as well with lesson Y…)

I don’t think you’re in water that’s ETHICALLY murky, that’s for sure. Teachers use prior student work as samples all the time, and that’s stuff that’s turned in for a grade, not for use as an example. As long as you leave out identifying details, you’re fine.

OTOH, there’s something to be said against ridicule in general. I don’t think it’s an effective teaching method. The students who most need to see your real point – that stupid mistakes should be avoided – are the ones most likely to get caught up in the vicarious embarrassment and tune out what you really want them to hear.

Anyway, to make a long story short (well, short-ER at least!) I just don’t know. I think mostly it depends on your delivery.

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We skipped the comics altogether last week – both due to the amount of items I posted over the weekend and my own laziness in getting them copied and pasted over. Anyway back to Friday this week, and as always courtesy of Darren at TADO .

- Cartoon of the day

- Be Realistic (and for my sake, he starts naming them again – thanks Darren, much appreciated!)

- That hurts.

- Home is… (unfortunately this one rings a little too true for me)

- Ah Interesting

- If computers could talk…

- Biblical computers

- God Complex

- Super user abuse

Until next week…

Reminder: Spaces of Interaction: Thursday LIVE Sessions & Recordings Posted.

I had high hopes for the PowerPoint is Tyranny talk by Jay Cross but he changed the topic to something like What Constitutes a Good Conference and I found the presentation wanting, alas. How to put together good presentations is of interest to me (and all who have sat through boring presentations). I want to learn how to captivate the audience and not use techniques just because they are available. What aspects of the technology lend themselves to understanding the material? How can I guide the learner and still give enough room for different learning styles and what they bring into the space? I too have been guilty of using transitions and music that likely distracted rather than amplified and clarified.

Comment by davidmbsr — February 21, 2009 @ 6:04 pm | Reply

Nothing to do with virtual schooling or K-12 online learning from the remainder of the day, I wanted to use this forum to remind folks – particularly Canadians – of a dark day in our history.

Twenty years ago today, a 25 year old man walked through the doors of Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and spent the next 45 minutes hunting women. In the end 14 women lay dead, over a dozen others injured, with the killer having committed suicide. Stories surfaced of how he walked into a classroom, separating the male and female students, then allowing the male students to leave as he began shooting. In the days following, it was discovered that Marc Lepine had applied to the engineering program at Ecole Polytechnic, but was rejected. He blamed this rejection on the school’s affirmative action policy, which he perceived to be passing him over in favour of women. [For those unfamiliar with these, the CBC Archives has a fairly good entry on the Montreal Massacre .]

Months later, the federal Government passed gun control legislation. You see, even those Lepine had been turned down for the military service because he was deemed to have mental issues. And while the military found him unfit to carry a gun, the regulations in Canada at the time allowed him to simply fill out a form, check a box that he was mentally fit, and then he received a permit to allow him to own any kind of firearm available for purchase in Canada – from a simply handgun to a military-style, semi-automatic assault rifle. Primarily due to the events on 06 December 1989 the laws were eventually changed to require a much higher standard for obtaining a firearms acquisition certificate, many of the weapons previous available were banned, and all gun owners had to register their guns in a national registry.

The current Conservative (i.e., right-wing – not the former Progressive Conservatives of old which were more centre/centre-right – this current group is made up largely of elements from the far right of the former Reform Party) have essentially left the gun registry die. It is still on the books, but the Government has not provided the funding, have not done any of the maintenance, etc. to the point where the registry is so out of date that it has become a useless tool for law enforcement. The current Government is even floating ideas that would lift the current restrictions on certain hunting weapons that play well to their rural and western base (as if somehow a rifle used to shoot a deer couldn’t have been used almost as effectively as the weapon that Lepine chose to go hunting with).

On this day, a day which has become known in Canada as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women , remember these women and continue to fight for kind of gun control that would help in preventing this kind of gendercide from happening again