Category: General

This is the second of 2 posts about anti-black racism and being anti-racist. Here is a link to Saying “I am not racist” is not enough pt 1.

We are now witnessing some of the most significant events in recent history and they are direct responses to the overtly racist actions of those whose jobs are to protect the community. This is by no means the first time, nor will it be the last – regrettably. The death of George Floyd and other recent national news events have many ideological battle lines being drawn in the fight against racism.

I am hoping that these incidents will not be in vain if they can be used as the origins of how white people see themselves as complicit in perpetuating the racism that has led up to this point through their long and loud silences and that a genuine change can begin to end anti-black racism. Hence these posts.

Years ago, Desmond Tutu shared:

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. “

These words circle in my head right now as I consider how my actions as an educator, or perhaps more accurately, my inactions as an educator have allowed racism to continue without truly being aware of it? Seeing the streets filled with protesters seeking a change to a broken system has given me much to reflect on from the comfort and safety of my home far away. I am watching in fear as I see a system threatening to turn violently against them and at the racists who are using these tragedies as a tool to sew further seeds of their hatred and intolerance.

The events of the past week have amplified hundreds of years of inequality, inequity, and injustice in the social contracts of western society. Trevor Noah shared this so eloquently, that when the contracts that society pretends to adhere and uphold are continually broken, then what is keeping all of us from lashing out against the systems that are not honouring them as well? The only way I know how to answer this beyond changing my own actions is through education.

That got me looking for ideas on how to invite and be open to change. Here’s what I have gleaned from countless educators and activists so far that I am ready to do right now;

1. Take a stand. Start by getting off of the fence. Stop saying “I am not racist”.
2. Be prepared to be uncomfortable, to be called out, and to be challenged.
3. Take stock of my past.
   Reflect on what needs to be done better to make a difference to stop anti-black racism.
4. Excuse myself from having a saviour complex.
   Offering support not salvation.
5. Ask and reflect about what are some of my privileges?
6. Let my classroom resources reflect culturally relevant anti-racist convictions
7. Let conversations with students turn into listening sessions where ideas and understandings can be turned into growth and deeper knowledge.
8. Think about how I can leverage my privilege and position as a white male cisgendered educator to effect change.

I am sure there are more things to add to this list as I go forward, but I also need to be mindful of making choices and decisions that can be achievable without feeling overwhelmed or giving up the moment when things get tough. I am ready to apologize for mistakes I have made, am making, and will make. Relying on others is going to be a big part of my growth. Acknowledging that there is so much more to learn will play a huge part in going forward.

Consider the straight forward advice in this recent social media post from Mireille Cassandra Harper as a perfect place to ponder and equip for the journey to allyship.

For people who actively want to be support and be an ally right now, I have written a thread. pic.twitter.com/kTvDgXXO5L

— Mireille Harper (mee-ray) (@mireillecharper) May 29, 2020

We have the means to be on the side that helps change history. As educators, we can use our privilege of being agents of societal change and good citizenship to help change the values of students/society to be truly anti-racist. It will come with discomfort, change, and fresh perspectives that may not match past experiences. However, as change occurs, it will also come with a community capable of seeing everyone within it included, respected, and valued.

Accepting that meaningful change will not happen overnight is something else for me to work past, but I know that these are my first public steps to do so. I want all educators to understand the urgency that I share in this post and encourage you to be part of making this the change that needs to take place. It starts with saying, “I am anti-racist!”

Huge thanks to Ms E Ng for her genuine, supportive, and critical feedback in the writing of these posts.

Nine weeks ago, the teachers of Ontario were asked to do something most of us couldn’t have conceived of when the school year began. We rose to the challenge and in under two weeks we started to deliver distance learning to the homes of the students of Ontario. We did all of this while our own children cried in our arms, our puppies jumped on us, our computers and internet failed constantly and we became the sole earner in our home as our partners lost their jobs. I often am amazed at the skills the teachers of Ontario collectively possess but this was unbelievable. Teachers pulled together to meet their students needs so fast and 9 weeks later we are still sitting at our computer screens for hours at a time to continue this important work.

I teach a class of students with Developmental Disabilities which has made distance learning difficult since they have a limited ability to read or write and incredibly complex learning needs. It has taken a large amount of creativity and unconventional ideas to attempt to meet their needs. I ended up doing a mixture of weekly assignments, online platforms, postal mail and live synchronous learning to try to reach out to every one of my students.

(Just a note about synchronous learning… I used my professional judgement that live synchronous learning would meet the needs of my particular students because of their learning profile and emotional needs. However, live synchronous learning comes with a lot of challenges and pitfalls. I have been very cautious in introducing it to my students and have had at least one TA join me for every session. My team gathered online and spoke at length about parameters and rules for synchronous learning before we started and I have worked with parents to ensure that professional boundaries are maintained. I know that the teachers of Ontario will make the right decision about what kind of synchronous learning will best meet the needs of their students using their professional judgement.)

With four weeks left, I’m sure the energy level is starting to fade for many of our students. Keeping them engaged and excited about learning online is getting tougher and tougher every day. Today I want to share some ideas that I have come up with over the last nine weeks in the hopes that one idea can give you something for your students to do over the next four weeks to keep them going. These are ideas to do with your students if you are meeting with them on Google Meet, Teams or another form of teleconferencing service.

For my students with special needs, the goal for all of these activities was to have students actively engaged in communication with me and their classmates. The activities also focused on social skills such as taking turns, working with others and having patience.

• Who is it? I took pictures I had of my students and zoomed in on one part of the picture such as an eyeball or running shoe. It became a guessing game of who they thought the picture was of. This game allowed my students to express how much they missed their friends and to celebrate their awesome classmates.
• Charades The students and staff all took turns pantomiming an animal. The other students had to guess what the animal was. For my students muting and unmuting their mics has been very difficult, therefore, I encouraged my students to take turn guessing.
• Find Something in Your House On plain pieces of paper, I wrote the colours blue, pink, black, red, green and purple. I showed them to the students one sheet at a time. When the students saw the colour, they had to go and run and find something from their home that was that colour and bring it back and explain what they have found. This is by far their favourite distance learning activity!
• Freeze Dance I used my Bluetooth speaker to play music and we grooved and moved to some of our favourite songs. I stopped the music every once in a while, to allow the students to pose in their favourite dance move.
• Pictionary The staff in my classroom all took turns drawing a picture for the students to guess. My students are amazing guessers at my less than perfect drawings. We work on taking turns and celebrating our friends when they get the right answer through this activity.
• Show and Tell about your pet or stuffed pet My class and I are real animal lovers and we have had many, many conversations about our pets during this time at home. I can tell you so many things about Roxy, Sugar, Herc, Rona, Coco, Fenway and Pepples. It has been a great Segway for many of students to talk about their feelings when we talk about our pet’s feelings daily.
• Making a Bird Feeder My students and I got the materials together for a very simple bird feeder and made them together as we chatted online. We each hung it up in our backyard and watched for visiting birds.
• Art show and tell My students have done countless art projects from chalk drawings outside and poster boards for their friends’ birthdays. We often have a sharing time to show their art and discuss their pictures.
• Exercise Time I lead a half hour exercise time for my students. We all bring our water and get our sweat on.
• Lego building show and share I invite my students to build anything out of lego and tell us the story of what they have built.
• Nature share My students have been noticing things that they have seen on family walks such as ducks, a bald eagle and a beaver. No alligators yet, but you never know in the last four weeks.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for going above and beyond to help your students through a profoundly difficult time. I have never been prouder to call myself an Ontario teacher. You are truly amazing!

May is Jewish Heritage Month. This relative new heritage month began in 2017 across Canada and in 2012 in Ontario. Recently, a good friend of mine was asked to write a letter to the teachers in my area about the importance of Jewish Heritage Month. While she prepared to write the letter, she shared her research and personal experiences of antisemitism as a student. I decided although many of you probably know about Jewish Heritage Month, others like me, may need an introduction to a few resources developed for teachers so that when we return to school you can introduce Jewish Heritage Month next year.

Websites with Jewish Canadian Content 

Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre- Toronto

This Jewish Heritage Month Guidebook is a great place to start when gathering resources for a focus on Jewish Heritage Month in your class. It includes answers to some questions about Jewish Heritage Month, a section on famous Jewish Canadians, a historical overview and introduction to Jewish history and Judaism. There are also some lesson plans to introduce Jewish food, culture and history to your students.

Also on the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre website is a section about antisemitism in Canada. “Hate crime statistics released earlier this year by Statistics Canada revealed that the Jewish community has remained the most targeted group for hate crimes, with 347 police-reported hate crimes in 2018 committed against the community.” Antisemitism is a serious problem in Canada that is not discussed enough in schools. The interactive map pictured below is a way to open the conversation of recent acts of anti-semitism in Canada with students.

Holocaust Museum- Montreal

The website for the Montreal Holocaust Museum has an extensive section for educators. Within the plethora of artefacts and video testimonials for students to view, their is a section called Activities for Studying the Holocaust at Home . This section supports study of the Holocaust from anywhere in the country and contains a user friendly teacher’s guide for educators.  The visuals used in the website help students deconstruct the events that happened during the Holocaust and understand Canada’s role. Within the teacher’s guide, there are also links to multiple interactive timelines that will answer many questions students have about the Holocaust such as how the Nazis rose to power and what the rest of the world did while the Jewish people were being brutally murdered.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs has created a Jewish Heritage guidebook that gives introductory information about Jewish heritage and culture. It includes some introductory concepts about Judaism, some basic terms and an explanation of minor and major Jewish Holy Days. The end of the guidebook has some facts that could be posted in the classroom or shared with your students every day in May.

I know I am supposed to be embracing technology and getting pumped for all the new applications and tools that I am learning how to use. I have been completely in awe of how fast Ontario teachers adapted to this new reality and created engaging learning opportunities on many different platforms for their students. However, I am facing a problem that many of the students in Ontario are currently challenged with. We are both having difficulty accessing reliable technology and the internet.

Last year, I bought a laptop and have had nothing but problems over the past couple of weeks. It has crashed multiple times, has had problems with the speaker and generally just caused me a lot of frustration. I have had to apologize to colleagues and students when our Google Meet has crashed mid sentence because of my laptop. However, I also have a tablet and a phone as emergency backup for continuing my student’s learning and connecting online with my colleagues. Many of the students in my class, school and around the province do not have the same access to technology in their home.

The thing that will stick with me from this time that we are learning from home is the number of students that required technology to complete school work. In my board alone, over 14, 500 students required technology and 2000 required internet to engage in any form of learning at home. That is an absolutely staggering number. In my classroom and my school, 20% of all students requested technology to be delivered because they didn’t have enough technology in their home to support their learning needs.

I think back now about how many messages I have sent through Google Classrooms, or assignments that have been more easily completed with internet and a computer that I have assigned. I realize how disadvantaged some of my students were every time they left the classroom and were starting behind their fellow classmates. I also think of schools where that same number was under 5% or over 50% and how monetary situations are impacting the student’s ability to access the same tools and resources required to be successful at school.

There is no doubt that students need to be confident in using technology in their daily life for many different purposes. Technology will most likely play a fundamental role in acquiring or maintaining employment as students become adults. Technology is also the primary way that many students communicate with each other. I see many of my fantastic colleagues teaching amazing lessons with the limited resources available to them to build the skills the students require. However, there is a major gap that exists between students that can go home and practice the skills regularly and those that rely on limited and sometimes broken school technology.

I am fortunate that I teach at a middle school. Working with the students there keeps me current and up to date on trends and innovations in technology. But over the last month, I have been thinking about those amazing grade eight students in my knitting club and those who assist my students with such kindness. Did they fall in the 20% at my school? If so, will they have any chance at being successful in e-learning courses in high school?

When much of the discussion about on-line learning happened in the media this year during the high school contract negotiations, I often thought My students should never have to participate in any course online. My students all have developmental disabilities and are working towards goals on an alternative IEP. Most have some form of communication impairment and are not able to read well enough to follow instructions online. Online learning seemed like something that would never work for my students! Little did I know when 2020 hit, we would have no choice but to figure out online learning the best we could. It has been very tricky, with some successes and some challenges. Here is what has worked:

1. Sending a PDF file instead of logging on a pre-existing platform. My students are unable to sign onto a device or navigate difficult platforms.  My team sends home a PDF file every Monday with activities, songs and pictures for that week. The PDF has pictures that link to the activity for the student. It is simple, straight forward and allows families to work at their own pace. Since it is a PDF, families have had no trouble opening the file on phones, tablets, iPads, Chromebook or laptops.

2) Having regular parent contact. I contacted all my parents by phone the first week we started the online learning and I end every e-mail, assignment and weekly newsletter with how they can contact me. Spending a lot of time answering parent e-mails and reaching out via phone has alleviated a lot of stress and anxiety.

3) Sending students mail. Who out there doesn’t love to get mail? For my families that have decided not to access the online component of the learning, a letter in the mail continues to tell them that we are thinking of them and offers them another reminder how they can reach out. Did you know that Canada post will deliver pre-stamped envelops to your house? It took about a week to receive our envelops and we were so happy that no one had to leave their house to buy them!

4) Video conferencing with the class and with individual students. My local has worked closely with the board to make some specific platforms available for meeting with students online. When I am meeting with a student and their family, I take another staff member with me on all calls. Usually, it is one of the TAs from my class that my student knows very well. For my students who are incredibly socially motivated and have difficulty reading or communicating, seeing each other has been very important for their emotional well being. I keep it short and control the conversation. Only about half of my families wanted to do this option but the students that have participated, have loved it!!

5) Sharing pictures from class. At the end of every weekly file is a section called connecting. I have included pictures from school and also some parents have submitted some pictures from things that they are doing at home! Many parents have told me that the pictures have been very helpful for their child and they have enjoyed looking at them.

Hello all!

I hope everyone had a great first week of e-learning whether you are a teacher doing this first your first time, a parent helping their child navigate sign ins and questions or if you are a student that is doing their best to learn in a new way. I know that it felt strange for me to have an inbox full of google classroom questions rather than a line up of students by my desk. My students got their google classroom accounts up and running last Sunday so they would be ready for Monday. I assigned them four assignments on Monday, April 6th:

1. Math: Two hours on the program IXL working on their math skills that we were doing in class
2. Literacy: 30 pages in their novel that they took home during the break with a series of questions to see what they have read about so far
3. Geography: A video explaining the push and pull factors of various countries and a few questions to go with this video
4. Science: Three videos of past student experiments from a variety of science strands asking students to describe what is happening in each video in scientific terms.

My 25 students had one week to complete these tasks and could work at any time of day that worked for them. I told them that I would be available to help with any questions they may have during regular school hours. I received many questions through google classroom and offered next steps when students handed in their work. 6 out of my 25 students asked for more work halfway through the way.

In order to gage students learning interests for the week that is coming up, I created a survey to see what they thought of the first week of online learning. These were the questions I asked them:

1. How are you feeling today?
   1. Thumbs up
   2. Thumbs sideways
   3. Thumbs down
2. What way do you prefer to learn a new lesson?
   1. Video chat as a class
   2. Pre-recorded lesson that I send
   3. Reading an article and answering questions
   4. Doesn’t matter, you enjoy all ways equally
3. What subject have you been enjoying most while learning online?
   1. Math
   2. Science
   3. Literacy
   4. Geography
   5. All equally
4. How are you feeling about the one week to work on things?
   1. Too long
   2. Too short
   3. Just right
   4. There shouldn’t be a due date
5. What are some other ways you would like to learn online?

As a result of this survey, I found out that my students were mostly feeling thumbs up, which was good to hear! This is a new way of learning for them and I was very happy to find out that no one was feeling thumbs down. My students also commented that they do not mind what way they learn although most students said they enjoy all ways of learning. In second place was reading an article. They also commented on enjoying all subjects equal with literacy coming in second. For question four, I was very interested in this answer as I had heard some teachers teaching grade eight were not giving due dates, instead having work available. However, my students have been working all year with deadlines so I was not shocked to see that almost 100% of my students said that the one week to complete work was just right. As for other suggestions about learning online, my students are interested in doing a google hangout video/zoom chat. These have been popular with online learning and I am excited for us to try one this week coming up. I will start by asking some questions about what they have been up to and then I will ask them some questions about the novels they are reading.

I am very proud of how smoothly my students adjusted to the online learning environment. I was worried that many students would ignore the work as I am not in the room with them helping them stay on task etc. but they did very well. I also thought they would be discouraged by this type of learning environment but I am once again impressed by the amount of students that handed in their work ahead of time/on time.

For next week’s assignments, I have made similar type assignments but I have scheduled a group chat in order to support the opinions of the students that wanted that added to our online learning platform.

Although this is not the way I prefer to teach, I am happy to still reach students during this time in a way that seems to be working for them. I am enjoying being “back in the classroom” even if it is online and am enjoying having some purpose back in my day.

All the best to everyone during these challenging times. I hope you all are having a thumbs up day!

(My workspace with Milo)