I love teenagers!

Staff House Challenge in Traditional Dress -
Our new Principal, Andy Fraser,
in his kilt. :-)

Wow! What a week! It has been my first week back at school after half a term's sick leave while recovering from surgery.

It was an absolute delight to be back at school on Monday. I spent the whole day with a huge grin on my face. I was loving catching up with all my students. They were all so pleased to see me back and many of them said so! By the end of the day I was wondering around the admin block burbling things like, "I love teenagers!" Many of my colleagues did a double take (particularly those who are parents of teenagers) when they realised I was serious! Some muttered dire warnings to the effect of: "This won't last!"  Still, by the end of the day I was physically exhausted and went straight home to bed.

Marcia, HOD PE, in the egg
and spoon leg of the relay.

Day 2: still smiling... to cut a long story short, by Friday I was still enjoying my job but I was VERY tired and the gloss had definitely worn off! The strain of five full time days at work (plus two nights out at choir - not doing THAT next week) had really told on me physically, and I was beginning to snap at people and do a good impression of 'grumpy teacher' instead of 'hysterically joyous teacher'.

Greg (in traditional cricket gear)
pushing Janice (traditional tramping gear)
in the wheelbarrow leg.

Friday lunchtime was the Staff House Challenge: points for traditional dress (I went Scottish with a twist of Maoritanga); and points for the winners of the relay (involving egg and spoon, three legged race and wheel barrow). I did my bit with the egg and spoon.

I could not have survived this week, or indeed been so relaxed about my extended absence, if I hadn't had a very good reliever taking my classes. I was so lucky to get an English specialist teacher who did a fabulous job with my classes and kept them on track. She also kindly arranged for them all to be doing independent work (mostly essay writing) this week, so that my role was roving to give feedback and keep students on task, rather than a lot of whole class teacher-directed work. Thank you so much Michelle Jones!!!  :-)

I still got to the end of the week somewhat shell-shocked, but I made it! Slowly easing back in and have some decisions to make about the direction of my programme.

Year 10s: Have been finishing off their film unit on 10 Things I Hate About You with an essay on whether the film is typical of the teen movie genre. I was intending to move on to an introduction to Shakespeare and a quick look at The Taming of the Shrew - BUT: in Social Studies they are doing the Pursuit of Power unit at the moment (focussing on Hitler) and have just been shown the film of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. There is a fair amount of interest and engagement and I am wondering if I should go on to my Striped PJs novel unit now rather than next term as originally planned. Will decide tomorrow, possibly will discuss it with the class and get their view.

Year 11s: Have been finishing their novel unit on The Whale Rider with writing theme or character essays. These will get formative feedback for the 2.1 external but a copy will also go in their writing portfolios. In the coming week I want to move on to their Connections study.

Chris G and Anna in the
three-legged race (this was
before they knocked over
all the pegs!)

Year 12s: Have had a slightly depleted class this week with some away on an Outdoor Ed trip. The remainder have been finishing the novel study on All Quiet on the Western Front by doing preparatory work for a style+theme essay. By the end of the week it was clear that they needed some help moving from this to an essay so I spent the last lesson doing whole class collaborative deconstruction of the essay question, planning of the essay and writing the introduction. Hopefully they are now on track but I will do some more work on body paragraphs with them in the coming week. When we have finished the novel essays I need to return to mop up the end of the film unit on Platoon which we ran out of time on at the end of last term. Not ideal but it was easier to leave a discrete unit for Michelle to run rather than expecting her to finish a film study I am teaching by ear and creating resources for as I go!

My wonderful colleague, Avatar.

Year 13: In some ways have been the most problematic class during my absence, mostly due to many needing more help to complete their Hamlet research essays (upcoming blog on everything that went wrong with that unit and what I learnt from it). Some of them were working with Avatar (my colleague who was acting Head of Department in my absence) on this during classes in the first part of the term, rather than in class with Michelle studying Nineteen Eighty-Four. As a result, most have now finished the Hamlet essay, but several have not finished reading the novel (the novel I gave out at the end of LAST TERM!) and are nowhere near ready to write a theme essay on it. I have given them some class time this week finishing their essays but most of the time has gone to the first viewing of our film, V for Vendetta, as we must move on to the film study now. Things have been complicated by having several students away on a Geography trip too, hopefully they have watched the film at home as requested.....

I can see that I need to give myself time to settle back in, take the temperature of my classes, and reconsider my year's programme to ensure the essentials are covered. A relaxing weekend has helped. Next week I am not going to try to go to both my choirs (two nights out was one too many). I just have to pace myself and keep healthy.

Advice to myself: Kia kaha, kiddo, don't push it! Keep enjoying those students!

What happened in January...

All the things I should have been blogging about this year, but wasn’t...

Week ending 13 January

My complete inactivity in this week was largely the reason I didn’t get blogging... It was total R & R.  We had headed back home from spending New Year at the in-laws and my partner had started back to work after the Christmas break. I slept a lot, I read a lot of trashy novels, and I completely ignored my ‘to do’ list!  I do think teachers need some down time like this, though.

Week ending 20 January

Apart from my friend Beth coming for two days to reorganise part of my book collection at home, this week was dominated by the NCEA results coming out and by the time I spent poring over them and thinking about them. Who had done well and why? Who had not? Why? What did we do right? What do we need to improve? What did I teach well? What did I obviously not teach well? For once, even though I obsessed about the results for days I didn’t get depressed by them. There were plenty of good news stories to counterbalance the dismal outcomes for a certain cohort who will remain nameless... 

In addition, a lot of time this week went into thinking about our teaching programmes in the English Department and what, if anything, needed to change as a consequence of analysing the NCEA results.

Week ending 27 January

Senior Management and Ash doing a mail out 23 January

I spent most of this week doing a massive clean up in my classroom. I went through every box file and got rid of many bins of paper for recycling from the train wreck which was my desk and the floor around it! I filed till I dropped and I got out the bucket and the cleaning gear and cleaned all the shelves and the desks and the whiteboard and yadayada. While this may sound mundane, having a clean and organised classroom makes a huge difference to my mental and emotional health, not to mention making teaching and learning easier in a classroom environment a bit more adapted to its primary purpose! 

The other thing that happened this week was that we had a voluntary PD (professional development) day around information technologies, which was held at our college on the Friday (25th January). I ran a session for this on using MyPortfolio to record evidence of professional practice and reflection against the RTCs (Registered Teacher Criteria). I somehow have become the school expert on MyPortfolio by starting to use it before anyone else did...  I am running this training again soon so I will post in detail on it then, with links to my handouts and templates, etc.

At the weekend my partner Sean and I did the Waikanae Garden Trail:

And suddenly, my holiday was over...

Bad Blogger!

It is March already and my blog has been sadly neglected. One of my New Year's resolutions was to blog every week. I started in the first week of January by drafting a blog entry, but couldn't post it because of the terrible wireless coverage where we were staying. And it stayed unposted when we got home from our holiday... and so did all the other things I would have blogged about in the meantime.

So for what it's worth, here is what would have been my first blog of the year. In blue are my comments on how I am doing on my resolutions so far!

1st week of January: The New Year's Resolutions

1. Be positive.  I think it is all too easy to focus on the problems, the lack of resources, the constraints of the curriculum or those imposed by assessments, regulation, etc. I found myself considering the title "Facing down the New Year" for this blog and decided I needed to get myself into a more positive frame of mind. After all, I love my job and I am looking forward to getting back to my classroom! 
Actually, I am doing really well on this. I am feeling good about my classes and the school and focussing on the positives. :-)

2. Focus on the kids. Remember, the students' learning experiences are the most important thing, and this includes their learning context, especially social. Relationships are the key to a positive learning experience, and I know I find it all too easy to get focussed on the learning goal at the expense of the process. In education, as in life, the ends rarely justify the means... if the means aren't working, you've probably lost most of the audience before the learning goal is in sight. 
Hmmm, this is a timely reminder. Most of the time this is easy but sometimes the paperwork grind gets in the way, the course planner says I should have finished this unit by now, and it is hard to hang on to the centrality of the learner, as opposed to my next administrative deadline.


3. Hold on to the joy: Those moments when the lesson is zinging, when someone ‘gets it’, when they come rushing to tell me what they did in the weekend, when they want to talk about the book they are reading, when a student cracks a joke which ruins the point I’m making but makes my day. The joy from being able to share the books I love and the love of reading, and get paid for it! 
Yes! Holding on most of the time. But see 2 above!


4. Document it: We have ERO coming this year so I not only have to be a good teacher, I need an evidence trail to prove it. Beyond the obvious of the management document, course outlines, unit plans, data analysis, etc, I would like to try this year to document more of the joy moments (see 2 above). I’m not sure how this is going to work, whether it is a case of using my blog to record them, or whether I am going to drive my students nuts taking photos on my iPhone of them in action... watch this space!
Aaargh! Keep watching.  Not doing so well on the blogging, but I have started working on my own eportfolio to document my professional practice.

5. Get better at using the technology I already have: I have a Mimio, which is an amazing gadget that turns my ordinary whiteboard into a smartboard, but I am not using it much. My goal this year is to be using it regularly for the functions I already know, and to expand my knowledge so I can use it for a wider range of things.
I'm doing pretty well on this. I have gone from hardly ever using the Mimio to using it almost every lesson. I am still mostly using it for basic data show and recording notes on the whiteboard though, but I am using it!

6. Blog regularly: Make a blog entry every week - no matter how short, how simple, how apparently 'uninspired' I might think it - to maintain the discipline of regular self-reflection.
Crashing, crushing failure here, but I am not going to admit defeat! I will turn this around.

And this ends my 9 week old blog post....  originally drafted on 7 January. :-) 

The photo below is the Kapiti Coast and Kapiti Island taken from the Paekakariki Hill Road in early January.  It was a stunning day.

School Libraries Supporting Learning

I'm back at National Library Palmerston North with Sue, our college librarian, for the final day of our library professional development course, School Libraries Supporting Learning, which is being facilitated by Jan Watts. For everything you ever needed to know about school libraries, go to this website here: http://schools.natlib.govt.nz


School-based Initiatives

The day started with reports back from participants on how their in-school library initiatives had progressed since our last meeting. We reported back on the work Sue has done creating a library manual, and the visits Sue and I did to other colleges looking for ideas for our library development for when we move the library next year. In addition to what we reported Sue has also trained up student librarians and set up a roster for them to cover intervals and lunchtimes, and has done a huge weed out of the collection - the book stall at the college gala is benefitting from this! We heard from schools preparing summer reading programmes, culling out of date stock, developing collections and spaces, preparing school reading profiles, schools with either the librarian or students presenting book reviews at assemblies, and a school which had purchased a significant number of new books and had been working on processing these and weeding the old collection to make room for the new acquisitions. It was great hearing from the other schools about the changes they are making.


The Library Supporting Inquiry Learning

Jenny Wilson and Lesley Wing-Jan:

• Student-centred learning
• students lead the process and identify their needs
• Teachers and librarians guide and support
• Rich and relevant learning, rather than reciting information
• Students then present and act on that information

Key stages:

1. Tuning in: identifying prior knowledge, immersion, preparing to find out - focus of the inquiry, questions related to the inquiry, (if group task) who to work with and roles of group members.
2. Finding out and sorting out: shared experiences, direct experiences, taking students beyond what they already know - sources of information to use, how to organize and record information, how to present information found.
3. Action and reflection: applying and reflecting - what to do with the information, making something new, how to make connections between ideas, experiences and learning

Points which came up in discussion:
Accessing prior learning. Using oral sources eg. phoning/skyping an expert. Identifying the dilemmas - where sources disagree - this can identify a genuine area for investigation - real contexts.
Teaching triangular validation - three different sources which say the same thing, to be sure it's correct.
Resulting in some sort of social action at the end, eg. letter to editor, design new rubbish bin.
The importance of teaching the skills - especially the research, quoting, referencing, validating and identifying sources etc.

There are a range of inquiry learning resources available on the National Library website here:
http://schools.natlib.govt.nz/search/node/inquiry This is the most fabulous resource for both teachers and librarians, with a huge range of excellent links and resources, give yourself 5 or 10 minutes and go and look at them!


Playing in the Sandpit...

This was time for us to work with an adviser to explore a resource with which we were not familiar. Sue investigated the kids-friendly search engines while I learned more about EPIC, which I had heard of but was not familiar with - the old story, if it requires a school-wide password, I won't know it so I won't use it! 15 minutes later... I am a total EPIC convert and have decided yes it has relevance to English teaching, it is not just something for the history teacher!! To find out about EPIC, go here:
http://www.tki.org.nz/epic2


School Library Reporting

What and how do we report to the Board of Trustees on the activities of the school library? Make sure reporting highlights evidence-based practice, include case studies; what can we show rather than tell? Acknowledge the contributions of others (Board, parents, student helpers, etc).
Target audience: BOT, Principal and Management, but also school community.
Timing: annually - maybe towards the end of the year. Some library managers give a brief report of activities to TLR once a term.
Format: paper, prezi, youtube, powerpoint etc
Content: examples of collaborative practice with teachers, team teaching, targeted initiatives/strategies, evidence, student/teacher feedback. Special library events or promotions, statistics - usage, collection, patterns of use, services etc. Developments undertaken, recommendations for future developments which could require additional funding and which relate to the direction and goals of the school.
Tips: be brief, clear, avoid library jargon, use data, photographs, charts, video.


Where to from here?

Open Libraries - physically, virtually; welcoming, dynamic, lively, open-minded, ubiquitous - online 24/7, BYOD, connected. Building a connected learning culture, students who are literate in a range of media, digital citizens, readers, with a culture of success. A library which is learner-centred.


Our next steps at Otaki

• Staff survey
• Completing our manual - day to day procedures documented; student user profiles
• Reporting to Board of Trustees on this year's activities
• Next year a focus on expanding our graphic novel collection further
• Library Development Group: continuing preparation for our library relocation
• Looking at curriculum cooperative ventures for next year e.g. a Science research unit

Professional Learning Networks

We spent some time discussing various ways, tools and media for growing our own PLNs. This made me feel good because I was already doing most of the suggested things, such as: Twitter, GoodReads, LibraryThing, blogging and following blogs, list serves, formal PD opportunities (such as this course), online communities and professional organizations, and using Evernote.  I don't use Delicious (anyone want to comment on why I should if I already use Evernote??). As a result of this session I signed up to Scoop.It using my twitter profile (@shakespearenut). I tend not to use Google Reader as someone said it was going to be phased out - not sure if this is still true. The blogs I follow I tend to have an email notification for a new post.  Comments, anyone??

This has been a GREAT course!! Thanks so much to Jan Watt and the National Library team! :-)

The winds of change: blowing our way...

It's a week and a half into the new term and, as usual, nothing is normal in our college world... (yes, I know that's tautological!)

My 'holiday' was frenetic with finishing major reports and course outline information for next year, attending conference, singing in a couple of concerts for a choir I belong to, writing an essay for my course at the wananga, several days in at college marking, a parent/teacher meeting, being ill with a sinus infection and... a glorious two days off doing absolutely nothing. A lot got done but it was one of the least restful holidays I have had for a long time. In retrospect, much as I enjoyed the NZATE conference (see previous blog posts), it cost me a truck load of money (the school was only paying for about 1/4 of the costs) and it took a huge chunk of time which perhaps would have been better spent catching up on my sleep deficit. It pains me to say this, because I enjoy conference so much and normally get so much out of it professionally.

Week 1 of term was mainly spent helping seniors through the final stages of assessments (Connections for levels 1 and 2, and close reading of film for my Year 13s). I also needed to get my head around my programme planning for the rest of the year, re-jigging as necessary, and there is always the marking I didn't get done in the holidays. Week 2 has been very 'bitsy' as we had a teacher only afternoon on Monday, I had in-school PD on restorative practice on Tuesday afternoon, and today I have been in Palmerston North for a library course.

Which brings me to the 'winds of change' part. Due to the demographics of the local community and the fact that the population bulge is working its way on out, we have had a steady roll reduction in recent years. On the first day of term I was told that in order to reduce our property 'footprint' to our correct entitlement for the reduced roll, the Ministry of Education intends not only to remove some prefabs but also to bulldoze half of the building in which my department (English) and the library (for which I am also responsible) are currently housed. The library and the English and Social Sciences Departments are to be relocated elsewhere in the school, but where 7 teachers currently teach in 6 classrooms we will have to teach in 4. I am sure this makes perfect sense to someone somewhere in Wellington, but to me it seems a little bizarre to go around lopping bits off permanent buildings and the idea of not having a permanent classroom is extremely depressing. However, in this case, mine not to reason why. The decision is a done deal.

So, it is a case of seeing it not as a problem but as an opportunity. The library has to be relocated, and this gives us the possibility to redesign the space to better meet the needs of students, teachers and the community. We have been wanting to renovate the library for a long time, and now it is going to happen.

Moving the English Department will put some urgency around jobs we know need doing, such as deciding which old paper resources should be scanned and retained in electronic form, which kept, and which are outdated and no longer needed. We are going to need to do a big 'clean out' and weed out textbooks which we no longer use or need.

The first priority for me and Sue, our college librarian, will be planning our process and timeline. The move is apparently going to happen in term 1 or 2 next year, so we don't have a lot of time to work in. Watch this space.

Never a dull moment in this job!  ;-)

Unpacking the possibilities...

Final Keynote: Cilla McQueen - New Zealand Poet Laureate 2009-2011

“Unpacking the possibilities of metaphor is a poet’s pleasure.”

Both Cilla’s parents were teachers. She loved English and History and taught languages at Columba College. Her knowledge of English language is “continually developing.” 

At primary school her writing was mostly about horses and skiing…

She began keeping a journal in the 1970s. Her first book, Homing In, was published in 1981.

“Metaphor’s layers of possible meanings can enable a poem to say more than it seems to say.”

“Reading, both silently and aloud, is very important.”

“I think a real book is more memorable than its electronic version.”

“Perhaps reading aloud is even more important nowadays.”

“I like the human role of teacher as interface.”

I like the fact that she wrote a poem “surreptitiously” in the classroom while teaching! J

McQueen has been a full time poet since she was the Robert Burns Fellow in the mid 1980s.

We were privileged to hear her read three of her poems:

·      To Ben, At The Lake

·      Learning to Read

·      Revolution

A few other links:

Wikipedia entry on Cilla McQueen.

An old TV clip from Kaleidoscope 1984.

Poet Laureate

This one has links to some of her poetry online

Otago University Press page

You know what happens in Room 101...

Workshop 5 – Simon Williams, Waitaki Boys’ High School –

The ‘Ope in Dystopia

Aptly, this workshop is taking place in Room 101 here at our venue…

Simon read 1984 at high school and it really spoke to him. At the time (1989) people were saying that Orwell had ‘got it wrong’ and Huxley had ‘got it right’.

First use of the word ‘dystopia’ was by JS Mill in a speech in the British Parliament about Ireland. He also used the word ‘cacotopia’.

So where is the hope in dystopia?

Simons sees it firstly in the texts themselves. Some he was talking about:

·      Brave New World

·      Fahrenheit 451

·      Nineteen Eight-Four

·      The Hunger Games

·      The Iron Heel – Jack London

·      The Handmaid’s Tale

·      Ender’s Game

·      Uglies – Scott Westerfield

·      Lord of the Flies

1984 is his all time favourite. A few interesting facts – in Britain during WW2 some clocks were adjusted to 24 hours to assist in shift work. Also, vegetables were not rationed so the smell of cabbage would have been very familiar to Orwell’s readers.

Some other texts:

·      V for Vendetta

·      Dark city

·      Brazil

·      The Matrix

·      We

·      Notes from the Underground

·      A Clockwork Roange

·      Soylent Green

·      Starship Troopers (the novel by Heinlein)

·      The Man in the High Castle

·      The Running Man

·      Battle Royale

·      Blind Faith

·      Logan’s Run

There is hope in the quality of the texts.

Another hope that Simon sees is that dystopian texts are replacing the vampire texts as the teenage craze.

He asked what other texts workshop participants had used:

·      Children of Men – as film at Y12

·      Feed, M T Anderson – didn’t go well with Y11 although they did well in their external. They said it was ‘too weird’

·      Oryx and Crake

·      See article by Margaret Atwood in the Guardian on Ustopia

Quotes James Tiberius Kirk: “The three most beautiful words in the English language are, ‘I need help.’”

For Simon, that’s what many of these dystopian texts are about – they are a way of saying something is wrong with society – help!

Simon has real problems with A Clockwork Orange – he sees the ending as gutless – ‘Oh, I’ve grown out of it.’  Apparently the American edition cuts the ending!!!!  (This is why the film stops where it does.)

Orwell said 1984 was a warning, Huxley said Brave New World was a ‘reasonable prediction of the future’.

What did they get right?

·      Atwood: nuclear ‘accidents’; infertility

·      Huxley: genetic manipulation/engineering

·      Minority Report: so much information about us.

·      The Iron Heel: people coming into factories to shoot the unionists – apparently happened in Columbia

·      Orwell: telescreens (CCTV), thoughtcrime, double think (let’s invade Iraq because there are weapons of mass destruction there…), newspeak.

Belching out the Devil, Mark Thomas – about Coca Cola. Also As Used on Nelson Mandela.

[And if you don’t believe that Big Brother is watching you, check out this news story about electronic surveillance in the US!]

Sorry I didn’t write many notes, folks, too interested in listening and discussing. Thanks, Simon!