A collection of digital wonders and some other stuff
The third teacher rally this week will be held this evening at 5:30pm at the Lethbridge Tourist Centre.
All are welcome to come out and show support for Alberta’s teachers and for public education. Here is the ATA’s poster for the event:
I attended the rallies on Sunday and Wednesday and as a teacher and advocate for public education was so happy to see the large turnout and public support.
My friend Chelsea Matisz is a returning contributor to CBC Radio One Calgary’s Unconventional Panel. She spoke on the show this morning about how the strike is affecting her and her family.
When the [government] stopped tracking class sizes in 2019 it made it impossible for accountability and now we have this problem. It shouldn’t be a surprise that we’ve gotten to this point. There should have been schools being built and teachers being hired and so the fact that we are at this point where the teachers are on strike is a failure of the government to be able to see that they needed to collect data and account for what’s happening. To me it’s clear, you know we have a minister that said, ‘classroom sizes don’t affect academic outcomes. There is no evidence for this.’ There is evidence for this.
She went on to discuss the $460 million that the government has invested in private schools. Private schools by definition are only available to a limit portion of the population. If one doesn’t meet the criteria or can’t afford their high tuitions, they can’t go and yet public funds are propping up these ventures. It’s not right.
Teachers from Lethbridge, Palliser, Horizon, Livingstone Range, Holy Spirit and Westward School Divisions were all out in solidarity all over Alberta during the weekend as the teacher strike was about to start on Monday. I attended the rally at Henderson Lake with my family to support my colleagues and students in what will likely be a lasting work stoppage.
The government announced yesterday that they would be initiating a lockout for teachers. A lockout is an employer-initiated action that legally restricts employees from performing their work or receiving pay from the employer.
Because teachers are already on strike and not performing duties, the lockout does not change teachers’ current status but it does make it more clear the hostile position the government is taking toward teachers.
The lockout will take effect at 1:00 p.m. on October 9.
I support teachers and this lockout is only widening the gap in what teachers and students in Alberta deserve.
There will be another rally tomorrow (October 8) at Henderson Lake from 12-1pm. There won’t be any speeches this time, just getting out and being visible to the public.
As a parent and teacher I’m excited to be running for school board trustee in the Lethbridge Public School Division.
I’ve been a teacher since 2010 and during time as elementary and high school teacher I witnessed first hand the deteriorating conditions within the education system in Alberta. I know we can do better.
Here are my priorities as a trustee:
Learning conditions in schools can be improved when classroom sizes and students with complex learning needs are supported. This means changing the criteria for when assistants are hired to be in classrooms and reducing class sizes. Money needs to be allocated to reducing class sizes not increasing the number of employees at central office.
Trustees and school boards can support teachers by creating policies that help teachers in all the ways they need. It is important that policies that make it easier to have safe and caring classrooms, that trust teacher autonomy, and that show teachers during this difficult stage of education in Alberta that there are boards that understand the complexities and serve to ease that burden.
The curriculum was pushed through without proper consultation from teachers in Alberta. The very people that are experts are curriculum weren’t asked to help build it and it reflects that this process didn’t respect the professionalism of educators in Alberta.
I’ve decided to put my name forward to run for the Lethbridge Public School Board as a trustee. I believe the trustees hold a crucial position that provides significant impact on children, families and the entire community.
I want to ensure every student in the Lethbridge School Division receives a high-quality education that prepares them for the future, whether they choose post-secondary education, a trade, or entering the workforce. This means focusing on foundational skills like literacy and numeracy while also embracing modern learning that teaches critical thinking and problem-solving.
As a trustee, I will be a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars. I will scrutinize budgets to ensure that funding is directed where it matters most—the classroom. I believe in transparent financial reporting so our community knows exactly how their money is being invested in our children’s future.
Parents are a child’s first and most important teachers. I want to foster a culture of partnership between schools and families. I will work to improve communication, ensure parents’ voices are heard and respected, and make it easier for them to be actively involved in their child’s education.
As Lethbridge is on traditional Blackfoot territory, I am committed to honouring the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action by supporting Indigenous education, culture, and language programs within our schools.
I look forward to continuing this dialogue as the campaign season kicks off.
This week I read an article in the Atlantic this week about the growing perception that today’s elite university students lack of ability to read books to the end1.
Here’s an excellent follow-up / rebuttal by Carrie Santo-Thomas, a teacher interviewed for the piece.
I was not surprised by Horowitch’s hypothesis. She attributes undergrads’ lack of reading stamina to lowered expectations in high school literature curricula, specifically arguing that limiting full-length novels and replacing long-form content with excerpts and summaries has weakened readers’ constitutions. She, in turn, ascribes these instructional choices to the oppressive presence of standardized testing and the Common Core. And cell phones, always cell phones.
It is a perfectly reasonable assumption, but it’s wrong. This is not to say that there aren’t external factors affecting students’ reading stamina, but to line up such a simple series of dominoes to topple oversimplifies a complex challenge and places undue blame on the shoulders of discerning young readers and the public school teachers who work tirelessly to support them.
Today was world teacher day. They were talking about it on the radio this morning as I pulled up to the high school I’ve been subbing at lately. Nobody inside mentioned it directly to me, but they did have Nanaimo bars in the staff room to commemorate the day.
When I think of world teacher day, and I’ve heard this said many times by others, I like to think “every day is world teacher day”. Which I suppose means, there’s never a bad time to thank a teacher.
Tonight I received the following email from the ATA. Our provincial government is going to end up making public education a lot more expensive and a lot worse for students.
There is one issue facing public education in this province right now that has the potential to irreversibly damage our education system more than anything else.
Bill 15 cleared second reading this week and it is expected to be passed before May 12.
Can you help get the word out about this bill by forwarding this email to five friends?
“Citizens of Alberta should be concerned. Everyone who cares about the province’s history of excellent education should be concerned,” says Dr Myer Horowitz, who has served as the President of the University of Alberta and dean of their Faculty of Education. “Everyone who wants classroom teachers to have a bias for professional practice should be concerned.”
Former Alberta education minister David King says, “(Bill 15) would be a serious mistake, with a multitude of unintended negative consequences and no material upside.”
Retired ATA CEO Dr Gordon Thomas says, “these actions will destroy what’s left of what was once the world’s top English-speaking education system. A professional collegial culture, where teachers are supported in their work, will be replaced with a management-labour culture where teacher technicians are directed.”
Brett Cooper, assistant superintendent for Pembina Hills School Division says, “maintaining the ATA’s dual role is central to protecting our public education system and the collegial approach that makes our profession so special in this province.”
Richard Rand, a retired lawyer who has served on professional discipline committees for the law society, says, “the current, ATA-led, practices and procedures overseeing teacher discipline in Alberta represent as good, or better, a system governing professional discipline as any I have encountered in any profession.”
And Albertans are opposed to it too. Public opinion polling from Environics Research shows that only 17 per cent of Albertans and 2 per cent of teachers trust the government most to uphold standards for the teaching profession.
Do you trust this government and this minister to provide fair and effective oversight for the teaching profession in Alberta?
I don’t.
Call or email your MLA. Tell them that you are opposed to Bill 15 and that passing it would be a huge mistake.
TLDR: I get too many people asking me for editing permission that can’t be bothered to read this post so I’m adding this link: skip to the bottom to make your own copy.
I’ve been using the The Edmonton Spelling List for my grade 5 class. Because we’ve switched to at home, online learning I created a Google Form as a place for them to write their answers. It’s a nice bonus that Google Forms marks it automatically.
Not long after I instructed my students to load up the Google Form, my stomach sank. Sure, a few students loaded it with no trouble, but other students began complaining about a warning / they were unable to continue. It wasn’t clear at first what was causing the problem. Then, one after another, the students who were complaining started to drop out of the classroom meetup.
It turns out that I had put the Google Form in “Lock-down mode” because I didn’t want their browsers giving them hints on how to spell the words or tabbing over to Google to get a helpful correction on the words. Well, lock-down mode locked the students out of the tab that had the meet-up. A few of the students rebooted and rejoined the class but another more intrepid student began filling in all 50 blank questions with non-sense so that it would allow him to submit it. That’s one way to kill ten minutes of class time.
Long story short, lock-down mode would have been great for in-school learning but it didn’t work for online schooling. I ended up having them do a version not locked down and just pretended that browsers don’t underline misspelled words.
The list below has copy generating links in case other teachers want to make a copy.
Working with the Kahn Academy, Disney Imagineering released a free course on theme park design called Imagineering in a Box.
Imagineering in a Box is designed to pull back the curtain to show students how artists, designers and engineers work together to create theme parks. We take a behind-the-scenes look that learners love and make it an active experience through student-driven projects. We do this by weaving together videos and exercises into lessons that culminate in a long form project. The goal is to make students aware of careers they never knew existed and deepen their understanding of the process, concepts and terminology of the creative workplace.
The course is comprised of 32 videos designed to encourage viewers to think about a wide range of skills including story development and conceptual design, math, physics and engineering. Completing the first three lessons, I agree with the write-up… this course, “ignite[s] curiosity, inspire[s] creativity, and cultivate innovation in the minds of students and teachers alike”, all the while creating a fun and engaging opportunity to explore new concepts. They say it’s aimed at middle school or high school so I’m not sure I would present it to my grade five class, but I sure am tempted. I live for this kind of thing.
(via Waxy)