Spicy Food is Good for You!

This photo is of Joe’s Burgers’ amazing chilli sauce which my family and I had for dinner tonight. Ya, ya, I know it kinda sucks, and I know there’s nothing worse than someone tweeting/blogging about the mundanity of their daily meals. This isn’t about that. I just wanted to tell a funny story.

At the end of the day today, I had about 3 minutes to kill with my students so I invited them to line up and challenge the Grand Master of Rock Paper Scissors.

They all queued up with great resolve. I surprised even myself when I discovered they could not beat me. One by one, I was whupping their rock-paper-scissor butts. It was so bizarre. The kids started looking at me as though I was a sentient being.

In fact, the truth was that I had discovered a pattern in their behaviour. Most of the time, a student would observe which kind of fist the previous player lost with, and predictably use the opposite. So, if I had defeated one kid with a rock over his scissors, the next kid would inevitably try me on for size with paper, to which I would respond with scissors.

Finally, after creaming about 9 kids in a row (I realize I am enjoying this a bit too much) I ‘allowed’ a student who I knew could use a confidence boost to beat me.

He was elated.

As the class roared with encouragement, I reassured them with feigned arrogance that it was likely only because this student enjoyed spicy food like me that he knew how to defeat ‘The Master’.

The kid turned to me with the face of someone who has seen a ghost and whispered, “It’s … true … I do love spicy food”.

In about a span of 10 seconds, I had convinced the whole class that the key to rock-paper-scissor strength was a passion for chilli peppers.

When one of my students pouted, begging me to explain how she had managed to lose to me when she was, in fact, a fan of the spicy stuff, I replied with my own question.

“What kind of spicy food do you eat?”

“I eat stuff like Doritos Spicy Nachos!”

“Not spicy enough,” I stated with the scornful face of Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid. “You need to eat kimchi soup or fresh jalepenos!”

“You’re right, Mr. Lee,” she replied as though resigning to the alignment of stars in sky. “But tonight I’m going to go home and eat a tonne of wasabi peas. You’re going down tomorrow.”

You should know too that my students are in grade 5 and 6. They aren’t kindergarten kids. They watch R rated movies on a regular basis, text each other while doing it, and there isn’t a swear word in the book they don’t know intimately. But, for five minutes today, they totally suspended disbelief with me. In fact, that’s kind of what it’s like for me everyday. I love being their teacher because they love learning.

The reason I’m telling this story is because it was a pretty stressful day for this spicy food loving Literacy Teacher, planning for PD in the depths of teaching’s most wintery (figuratively and literally) season. This little moment with my students reminded me how awesome this job is after all.

[This blog post can also be viewed on my Project365: http://www.flickr.com/photos/r_o_y_a_n/4329192916/]

Mini TED Commandments

I tweeted a version of the TED Commandments my class created as success criteria for Oral Presentations. Wow, it totally went viral and exceeded the Google Docs Bandwith. So here it is again for anyone to download:

MINI TED COMMANDMENTS

One of my best days of teaching ever (or How the World is Different Now)

I had one of my most memorable days of teaching ever last week. I didn’t plan it on paper, but to some extent I did in my own mind. I could never have predicted what would happen this day, but I did predict that something like this could happen when you use web 2.0 tools in the classroom.

On Monday, a wonderful reporter from the Globe and Mail named Susan Krashinksy (@susinsky) came to my class to do a story on the ways we are using a web-based comic creation tool for literacy in the classroom. The students and myself were totally stoked by this. It was a great day. Susan hung out as we worked on our Social Studies / Language project, took some photos, asked some questions.

On Wednesday, the article was published (check out the article here). I posted the link on our class moodle and Twitter, and sent it to a few colleagues and friends. Not that big a deal, but fun. Little did I know that it was in reading the article as a class that we would open up an exciting can of worms.

The students in my class beamed as they heard their names being mentioned in our national newspaper. As we neared the bottom of the web page, we noticed that there were already quite a few comments posted. One of them was negative.

(For some reason, the numerous comments that were on the site have been deleted. I’m not sure if it was crashed by my students going on and commenting, but, unfortunately, most of them are no longer there.)

The essence of the negative comment was that a) we were dumbing down learning; b) we were not teaching writing; and c) kids today won’t be prepared for the future as a result. What’s more, the comment had a very sarcastic tone.

If only you could have seen the look on my students’ faces as we read this comment together. It was a mixture of shock, excitement, and anger. My entire plan for that period was sabotaged. We had to deal with this comment.

I was taken aback by the conversation it started. After calming my students down, I had them plan a reply to the comment in groups. Here are the ideas they came up with:

• We did hard, critical research for the project.
• It’s much harder to be creative and different in presenting information than just writing them in paragraphs.
• We don’t just comics. We use many other technological tools, and we work hard on our reading and writing.
• Working on fun tools like bitstrips gives us a voice. The teacher lets us show ourselves, not just pleasing the teacher.
• We are trying to address 21st century skills like collaboration and creative thinking.
• You have a narrow view of what learning is. it’s not just about paper and pen and essays?

I nearly weeped with pride. I just couldn’t believe they were already so articulate in communicating what was happening in our class. Some other ‘teachable moment’ points we had to address:

• Why it’s important to be respectful in our reply, and not take a personal stance.
• Whether or not we should use or real/full names.

So that’s what happened. It was one of my best days of teaching ever, and it could only occur in this crazy, constantly changing world we live in. Here are some of the replies from my students:

Hi Mr.Allen

I’m Dana from the article. I read your comment and i noticed that you think that when we were on bitstrips, you thought that we were just playing with comics. I just wanted to say that we were also doing work. Don’t believe me? well here’s what we did. First we took a few weeks to find information on what we were doing our comics on, then we had to put all of the information we had and put it all in 5 comics. most of the student had lots of information so it took them longer to arrange the information. we aren’t dumbing down, we also use paper and pencil and other programs to help us with our work. So…,what i am saying is that first did u try out bitstrips then write the comment? If not then why did you write the comment if you don’t know how good bitstrips is. try it out then think again if you think we are dumbing down the future. Bitstrips is not only for fun, it can be hard if you have to find alot of information and decide how to put all of your information into 5 groups for 5 different comics. so please try out things before you say if its good or bad.

Dana

Hello Mr. Henry Allen, I am a student in Royan Lee’s grade 5/6 class, the Nathaniel in the article to be exact, and I would like to thank you for the wonderful compliment. It got me to thinking: why do you have that opinion of our digital literacy? I settled on the fact that everybody has a different view of learning and school. Times have changed! It’s not all pen and paper anymore!

Switching gears, I would like to inform you about our digital literacy. We also use YRDSB Moodle, a website used by many classes in York Region where you write in forums about anything, view your homework, access informational websites, and a whole lot more! Try it sometime!

Finally, I would like to say that if you ever have any concerns, feel free to voice them anytime!

But seriously! It is hard work! For example, we have to create characters, pick through your information, setup positions, sizes, props, shapes, furniture, backgrounds, and titles! It’s hard work being a critical thinker!

Hello, I’m a student from Mr. Lee’s class. I sort of have to say that you are wrong Henry Allen. You have proved some intelligent points in your comment but 1 thing is that we have done hard research before making the comic on bitstrips. For example, I researched Japan. 1 worksheet we had to do was fill in an “ASAB” sheet.(Authorship, Sources, Appearence, Backup.) School isn’t always about writing big essays with a pencil and paper. If we all kept writing stuff like that, some people will only be doing a bunch of work for nothing. If we do comics on bitstrips, we will be having fun and learning at the same time. This will be easier for students like me to learn. It’s MORE frightening for us to think about going to school and only writing paragraphs and paragraphs EVERYDAY! This might even help us become a computer engineer! Or maybe an awesome literacy teacher like Mr. Lee!

What I Learned From My Daughter’s Piano Teacher

The other day I tweeted that I was learning so much from watching my daughter’s piano teacher in action. My friend Down Under @mnjorgenson messaged back to me that I should blog about it. A butterfly must have flapped its wings somewhere because I was literally thinking of doing it when I read his message. Here’s the deal with Yumi’s music class.

You go to a nondescript house and walk to the basement where a slightly cramped and most definitely humble little room awaits. Yamaha or Cosmo Music it is not, but it is painted in cheerful primary colours. You sit down with your child at one of the keyboards. There are eight kid-parent pairs in all. Ms. Lin sits up front at her piano. For one hour, you act as something of an Educational Assistant sitting beside your child as they take lessons from the formidable Ms. Lin.

Ms Lin is not the piano teacher of my childhood, of course. She does not hit my daughter with a ruler. She is friendly, but is so in a slightly distant way. In other words, she means business, and wants the kids to know that she means business. The hour burns by. Speaking as someone who is fairly confident in his educative capabilities, I would say that I am consistently amazed by Ms. Lin’s teaching methods. More importantly, I learn heaps from her.

‘Gradual Release of Responsibility’ is not just jargon; it works

Ms Lin probably doesn’t even know it, but she uses the GRR model of teaching an learning in her class. Everything revolves around a circular process of MODELED explicit instruction, SHARED/GUIDED practice, and INDEPENDENT work. It’s so bloody effective and reassures me that what I’m doing in my class is not just something invented by school teachers.

Kids can learn anything if you take it slow

When we first started in the class, Janet and I were a little mystified as to how Yumi ( a 5-year-old at the time) could possibly learn to, say, play a melody with the right hand while the left hand played a chord. Just pressing a key with one finger seemed to be a challenge. But after just one year of weekly lessons, she can now play an entire song doing that. Why? Because Ms. Lin never jumps to step 11 if the children have not confidently grasped step 9 and 10. I don’t think this means that all learning happens in a sequential, linear fashion. Rather, I think it means that you shouldn’t put students in positions to where they cannot possibly succeed.

Repitition is important

Nuff said.

Kids can’t sit for long

The children in the class do not ever sit at the keyboard for longer than 5 minutes at a time. Ms. Lin constantly alternates between stand-up activities at the front and sit down practice at the keyboard. It’s like she’s using a 6-year-old’s natural distractability against him/herself. In my own class, I’ve noticed that even something as simple as getting students to stand up out of their seat to be enormously beneficial. It’s like a metaphorical cigarette break without the lung cancer.

Homework is useful when it’s consistent and is merely practicing concepts from class

I don’t like homework. I don’t like doing it, assigning it, checking it, marking it, helping my kid with it, or giving it to the dog to eat. But, surely, the polarized debate surrounding it is a tad simplistic. Homework is just plain necessary for development in music, and it’s sometimes necessary for our classroom students as well.

Kids want to impress peers far more than their teachers/parents (and rightfully so)

When we mention to people that Yumi takes a piano class, instead of private lessons, they are often surprised. We ourselves even wondered about the efficacy of this model when we first began, but, wow, have we found it effective. The students in Ms. Lin’s class are constantly on display, accountable to an audience of their peers. I am not even certain if Yumi would practice at all if it weren’t for the fact that she has to (as they say in hip hop culture) represent. This is precisely why I use Web 2.0 tools like Moodle in my class program: Kids. Need. To. See. And respond to. Each others work/ideas. All the time.

There are most certainly a plethora of contextual and curricular differences between Yumi’s class and an average public school classroom. Not the least of these is are the differences in class size, parental involvement, and strictly skill-based nature of the piano class. I also realise that Ms. Lin is by no means breaking massive ground or telling us something any good teacher should already know. But sometimes it’s the little stuff that really matters.

Ms. Lin, I am sorry if you are horrified that one of the parents in your class is deconstructing your pedagogy on a weekly basis (no less blogging about it!) I just hope you know that at least one person gets what you’re doing.

(This is not Spam!) How Twitter Saved Me $800

Those who know me know that I am a freak for technology (or a ‘technology slut’, as my father-in-law so affectionately has called me). Considering this, I suppose I was rather late to online social networking and the blogosphere. I don’t really know what took me so long, but now that I’ve found it, I’m all in like someone playing with house money.

I wanted to share this quick true story with you because it has become my new token reply to anyone, in my professional or personal life, who suggests that technology is inherently the tool of the devil.

A few weeks ago I had to put in a warranty claim with Rogers on one of our iPhones. Anyone familiar with this process knows that Rogers sends you a package which includes: a) the new device; and b) a pre-paid UPS envelope in which you must dutifully return the device you are replacing. So, being the anal task manager that I am, I promptly scooted down to the nearest UPS Store to drop-off the returning package.

Big mistake.

From that day forward, said phone ceases to exist on the planet. There is no record of it ever being put into the UPS, let alone Rogers, system. I do not know what happened, but one can infer.

So I waited a few days, even though I knew UPS usually delivers within the GTA quite promptly. More days passed and I started to get a bad feeling. I myself was stupid because all I got from the store was a little scrap piece of paper with a hand-written tracking number and a store stamp. I checked on the online tracking site. Nothing. Rogers.com. Nothing. I started getting worried.

My next step was to go back to the store and ask what had happened. My Spidey senses spiked with anxiety when I walked in and found another man angrily talking to a UPS agent on the phone, demanding to know where his ‘lost’ item was. I asked one of the young lads about my package, and he shrugged his shoulders kind of like the way one of my grade 6 students once lied about stuffing an unwanted ham sandwich in an unused cupboard in the classroom. “It’s not our fault – it’s head office’s,” was his claim. So I called head office.

“I’m sorry but there is nothing we can do because it was never put into the system by the store”.

I called Rogers.

“I’m sorry but this is really a UPS issue. We don’t see it in our system.” (The Rogers customer rep even warned me to never drop-off at a UPS Store!)

In other words, The Usual.

That very day I also received a letter from Rogers warning me that if I did not return my phone soon I would be out 800 smackers. I didn’t know what to do. Write a letter? Wait? Just put a ‘trace’ in the system? No, I tweeted it.

OMG I think the UPS Store stole my iphone #RobbedByUPS

Ten minutes later I received this reply from the UPS head PR office: @r_o_y_a_n Please contact us immediately regarding this issue at the following number … I was stunned.

The rest, as they say, is history. The saga did not end completely there, but people at UPS sure got very helpful very fast. Needless to say, and rightfully so, the iPhone with legs is not costing me a cent.

If the head PR office rushes to the assistance of a mere speck of dust like me because I seem to have a voice I never knew I had, what does this say about Twitter and Web 2.0 as a kind of emancipatory tool? What about the Ahmadinejad Regime’s desire to literally stamp out tweeters during the Iran Election (or #iranelection, as it’s known in the Twitterverse)? And why is the NFL, the most powerful sports juggernaut in N. America, banning their players from tweeting? Hmm, one of the biggest courier companies in the world, an autocrat, and a multi-billion dollar sports league don’t like people speaking their mind on a little website? In my world, that’s something that is, at the very least, interesting.

So the next time a colleague angrily calls you ‘A Tool’ (another true story) for giving PD around technology, or your kid’s high school decides (in vain, no doubt) to ban cell phones at school because, well, it’s just easier, tell them the story of how a corporation was concerned about, and acted immediately upon, the Twitter habits of a little Asian man in Toronto.

My first ever post!

I have no idea why I’m starting my first ever blog four days before the start of a new school year. God knows I have other things I should be doing. Long range planning, lessons, nifty name tags. I must be a masochist. Actually, I’m a parent.

Being a dad to Yumi (6) and Jackson (2) is pretty awesome. One of the most spectacular things about it is that it makes me a better teacher. Every single day I learn things about pedagogy and psychology that astound me and lead straight to better classroom practice. Rather than being a strain on my time and energy, I really think of it more as a professional steroid of sorts. A Pedagogy Enhancing Drug. For instance, the other day I was at the playground with my 2yo. As Jackson is wont to do, he was climbing and sliding down everything in sight. This one thing cracked me up.

As he was trying to go up some bar climbers that were probably a bit too tall for a 2yo, he stopped three quarters of the way up and yelled, “Help Daddy!” What did I do to solve this crisis, knowing that the same skills he used to climb most of the way up would likely take him the rest of the way? I didn’t push him up or hold him. I simply placed my hand gently on his bum with all the pressure of a dandelion seed. With no trouble or complaint, he scooted to the top immediately.

I remember laughing when he did this. It was so funny to me because it told me everything I needed to know about one thing kids need from adults and teachers, especially in the 21st Century: the illusion of assistance.

Then there is my 6yo. Determined, silly, and occasionally haughty, she was so mad when her friend Emily could swing on the monkey bars like, well, a monkey, while her own swinging style was more like a paranoid R2D2. Little did we know that it was going to be Yumi’s summer raison d’etre to become monkey-like.

If she knew how to swear properly (actually, to be honest, she does) there would have been a lot of juicy expletives those first few days. Every single day we were at the playground, it was all about the monkey bars. Day after day, falling, sore hands, frowns. If we went to one without monkey bars, she’d make a disgusted face like Queen Elizabeth at a Bingo night.

Needless to say, she now kicks ass on the monkey bars.

So let’s recap: 1. Saw a friend do it, thought it was cool, desperately wanted to as well; 2. It was hard, kept trying, made heaps of mistakes; 3. Got it.

Barrie Bennett once said that he knows there’s good learning going on in a classroom if the kids look busy and the teacher is walking around. This may be a bit simplistic, but I like it because it fits in with my playground metaphor. When my kids are at the playground, they mess around, talk, brag, cry, get dirty, hurt themselves, ask for help, refuse help, direct themselves, create and tell stories, repeat things over and again, and always seek new challenges. I sometimes get involved to get them started, or stand close to ‘Watch This’, but I’m never in the drivers seat; always the passenger. And most of all, the playground experience is exponentially enhanced by the presence of my kids’ friends.

That’s essentially what I want to achieve in my class this year. I want it to be really fun, really challenging, and really safe. I want my ‘playground’ to be so cleverly designed and constantly evolving that only other playground architects can notice the subtleties of it. Oh, and I want the students to learn far more from one another than they do from me.

Cheers,

Royan