Like a Fish in Water

1) Would you like a big bowl of Anxiety Soup? 

We just finished the final round of this year's Cyberpatriot / CyberTitan Canadian Student Cybersecurity Competition.  To say this year has been a challenge would be a gross understatement.  We lost half our teams immediately thanks to COVID restrictions.  The cancelled teams were both the junior teams who have missed a vital year of apprenticing with the seniors as we prepare for competition.  Thanks to this break in our process we'll be seeing a reduction in the skills we've systemically developed over the past three years.  

With our two senior teams we limped through two rounds of the competition mask socially distanced to mask (because no one is face to face anymore) in our nerd lab at school.

The first round was shaky, especially on our senior co-ed team where our most experienced, senior students didn't show up mentally on competition day.  Some careful coaching and focusing got them on track for round two where both teams scored more like they're able.

We just completed the final round of competition last Friday, and (because things weren't already hard enough) this time it was fully remote thanks to Ontario's systemic mishandling of COVID19.  This had me up nights worrying about connectivity and tech at home for eleven competitors on two teams in eleven different home locations.  Our student built DIY lab means I can take care of the complex setup needed to do Cyberpatriot and let the students focus on the material itself, but not this time.

The competition uses virtual images (computers simulated inside a window) that give students hands on experience with infected and compromised computers.  When you open a virtual image and start working on it a timer starts and you've got six straight hours to maximize points by fixing the image.  If one of your images doesn't open or a student is having technical issues, you're still on the clock and losing time.  Doing IT support in a live environment with harsh consequences like that is very stressful, which is why I'd been anxious.

I delivered technology to students at home and did everything I could to ensure that they had what they needed.  I said repeatedly, "don't talk about what you're going to do, rehearse it!"  This was finally heard (after repeating it several times - teens don't like to practice things) and students didn't just think they were ready for Friday, they knew.

They sent me photos of their home setups, most of which were home made/DIY computers that we either made in our lab at school or they built at home using the skills they learned at school.  That produced a level of satisfaction I hadn't considered; this final round students were competing on technology they built themselves that they'd also done all the software setup on so they could then demonstrate advanced digital skills well beyond what Ontario's atrophied digital skills curriculum asks.

Put another way, I've been presenting on Cyberpatriot/CyberTitan for several years and a number of teachers have told me they'd do it but the technical setup is too complicated.  It wasn't for the grade 10s, 11s and 12s at home last week.  Maybe it's time to integrate digital fluency into Ontario's Teacher's Colleges if we're expecting every teacher in the province to be proficient in the medium.

2. Swimming with the Digital Fishes

I've talked about the power of authorship in understanding and developing a meaningful pedagogy around technology use many times, but this time we took things to a place where few dare to tread.  As we prepared for this seemingly insurmountable challenge I didn't tighten things into rote demands for compliance, I gave these students agency, and doing so gave me a peak into a world few teachers ever get to see.

Thanks to Heidi Siwak's suggestion, I watched My Octopus Teacher last week.  What I saw on Friday in competition is much like what Craig Foster saw when getting to know his octopus: a wild animal being brilliant in its native habitat.

When you see students operating in the restrictive, overly prescribed walled garden of your corporately provided educational technology you're seeing (in the ones that are actually digitally fluent because most aren't) a wild animal in a restrictive, unfamiliar and domesticated environment.  This produces a kind of reticence in the digitally fluent student that means you're not seeing them as they really are when they operate in digital spaces.  Even teachers with digitally literate students don't often get to see this natural behaviour, which is expressive, efficient and astonishingly rich.  It's also private and respective of personal space and how people choose to represent themselves online.  It's cool to use voice or share screens.  It may even be cool to use animated avatars, but what isn't cool is demanding visual access to a person when they're digital.  The wall we're running into with students not participating in video chats isn't just invasive, it's also counter-cultural to what they do when left to their own devices.  When you're digital you're something other than your physical self.  Our ageist demands for video capitulation ignore that generational truth.

One of the ways we came to terms with managing the many challenges of trying to compete in a technically challenging international cybersecurity competition while stuck at home in a lockdown was by letting the students self-select the tools they would need to do the job.  This started with making sure they were on technology that gave them the administrative privileges they needed to move freely.  Nothing we've ever been handed at school was that.  The other side of the equation is selecting the software we needed to be able to communicate quickly, privately and efficiently.

The students selected Discord as their communications medium of choice.  I've had a passing acquaintance with this software but hadn't been on it recently.  One of my jobs as Cyberpatriot Coach is to proctor the teams and ensure compliance with the rules; I'm judge as well as coach.  Cyberpatriot's minimum requirements for fully remote competition only asked for a single check in with competitors, but considering the circumstances (worldwide health emergency, remember?), I thought a bit more contact was in order.

The teams each set up private Discord chats focused on various areas of the competition.  They couldn't see each other, but I could quickly move between both groups and connect to live voice chats as well as screen sharing.  This was vital in our approach to the competition as we encourage and depend on collaborative team interaction when problem solving.  Other teams may like to do the loner hacker in a room by themselves, but we've never approached it that way.

One of the reasons for this is that I'm trying to raise digital skills in cybersecurity in a place where we started with nothing.  To do that senior students work with the juniors when we're practicing for competition (teams are physically and virtually contained during competition rounds).  Collaboration isn't just how we compete, it's also how we learn the material.

Discord's fluid and efficient communications environment not only allowed me to proctor the competition by easily moving between teams, it also let the teams design their own internal communications structures and then leverage them with astonishing effectiveness.  Because they are all fluent in the medium their use of it is emotive and staggeringly fast.

While we were waiting for the email from CPOC to start round three (it never arrived, I had to contact Maryland directly to get access - my best guess is it got blocked by my work email - sigh), I watched memes appear and morph in the group chat.  This was happening beneath continuous voice chats and screen shares.

Once competition began I was moving between the specialists on each team and then between the teams.  I would drop into an ongoing discussion about how to solve a problem and immediately get a, 'hey, King' from the people in the chat.  Discord has a little chime that goes off when you join a chat and the students are keyed to it.  There is a misconception that teens aren't engaged online but it's because of how we situate them in educational technology, not because they are incapable of rich, interactive online engagement.

Over the course of the six hour competition I was flitting between discussions, but Discord doesn't just make those discussions fluid and natural, it also lets you know what's going on in them.  At one point three students were in the senior team's Linux chat and our two operators were both sharing their screens so that all three people could see them.  What was next level in terms of UI (user interface) was that the menu down the side was showing me (in real time) how many verbal channels and screen shares were going on across all of the rooms.  That kind of clean, functional interface is a distant dream in GAFE.  This ability to easily share the live data streams that matter (talk, text and screen share - not invasive webcam footage) is precisely the kind of collaboration I feared we'd lose in a fully remote environment, but Discord made it possible for us to do what we normally do in a very difficult situation.

We must let go of the idea that we need to use digital communications to replicate the face to face classroom while we're remote through video.  It's a reflex based on (older) educators' need to get back to something familiar to them, but it's entirely alien to our students and ignores how digitally fluent students communicate live online.  The resulting lack of engagement and frustration on all sides is now in clear focus for me.  Glitchy, bandwidth heavy and privacy invasive video conferencing will never replace the classroom.  It was a misguided suggestion made by a man with no idea what he's talking about (both in terms of education and generational technology culture) that led us to this impasse.

What made this potential disaster a success was DIY technology at home on self-selected communications platforms.  We started and ended the day in a Google Meet on our board system and it managed to be both laggy and disengaging after Discord.  Students never turned on webcams in Discord but because they could quickly and easily screenshare and emote in written chat while verbally communicating, they created an immersive and powerful online communications experience.  On our stilted video chat at the end of the day I was left wondering why video chats are seen as the future.  Like telephone calls they're the fixation of a previous (Jetsons fan?) generation, but not the future ones.  If we weren't spending all our time pressing students' faces into their webcams on the bandwidth heavy, invasive and alien-to-everyone video platforms we've been told we have to use, we'd be able to see how the younger generation swim in their digital sea, and maybe go and meet them there instead.

Absurdities

 I came across this article by Yuval Noah Harari called  "Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species."  It's not often that I'm rocked by something that I read, but this did that.  He has a particular line in it that explains the dissonance I feel with the world at the moment: 

"...truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. "

This happens with people so often that it's one of the main reasons I find them so taxing.  Supporting other people's fictions isn't something that comes naturally to me.  I understand the social advantage of forcing compliance to untruths in order to establish loyalty between people, I'm just terrible at it.

In the last post talking about how to move forward in the morass of misinformation and negativity surrounding us, I mentioned that if I wanted to give up my idealism I'd go into management.  Management is one of those jobs that demands a facility for moving in post-truth ways.

A few years ago we had a poorly planned grade 8 day happen where an unexpected influx of students from the Catholic system resulted in over fifty children in one of the groups moving around the school seeing what's on offer.  After half a dozen groups of 25 or so students accompanied by their teacher came through our program, this horde of fifty plus unaccompanied by an adult (because the second school system in Ontario won't acknowledge the public one) burst into my shop and proceeded to do hundreds of dollars in damage before leaving.

I was livid.  I emailed admin and guidance and said (truthfully) that this was a dangerous situation that never should have been allowed to happen.  This upset our new head of guidance who was a good friend of our new principal.  His solution was to walk up to my room (very angry that I'd made his friend cry) and demand that I apologize for saying that this dangerous situation was dangerous.  I was teaching a class at the time but he wouldn't let me leave the hallway he'd hauled me out into until I'd apologised.  It was a brutally honest moment of human hierarchical interaction where compliance to a lie was demanded and the usual niceties that we cloak our fictions in were swept aside.

More recently, as we switched to fully remote learning again following the mid-winter break, we were told "no one saw this coming" by admin.  Other than every doctor and epidemiologist in the province?  Other than anyone who had ready a credible news story in the past week?  How big a crane do I need to suspend my disbelief?  The only people who 'didn't see this coming' were the politicians who caused it, and evidently education system managers who are so focused on making the wishes of what is perhaps the most malignant minister of education in Ontario's history a reality that they've lost sight of reality.

One of the reasons I like working with machines is because they are honest in a way that human beings seem to find nearly impossible.  Reality continues to exist beyond the fictions people dress themselves in and will always ultimately win.  I find aligning myself with that reality is an opportunity for enlightenment in a way that the socially lubricating, self-serving human fictions are not.

Shakespeare has Hamlet tell Horatio, "There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy", and that's a good touchstone.  Reality is indeed more vast and complex than the lies we wrap each other up in.  I only wish more people would get as excited about the truth of the world as they do about the self-serving fictions we demand of each other.

In the midst of this chaos a wise colleague suggested the Netflix film, My Octopus Teacher, which tells the story of a man miserably lost in the fictions we all chose to live in finding his way back to reality.  It's a beautiful story, and one we find hard to hold onto when we're in the churn of Ontario COVID mis-management.

Rationalism will never have the following that reductionist demagogues find because the one is hard work while the other is slight-of-hand salesmanship, though the sleazy salesmen don't always get it their way.  Recent North American political change suggests that even the most persuasive demagogues get chased out of office when reality makes its presence felt.  Our political system isn't perfect, but it does tend to self correct.  After years of abuse in Ontario public services and a year's worth of fumbling the largest public health crisis in human history, that self correction sure feels a long time coming.

In the past week I've read articles about how doctors in Ontario & Quebec are working out protocols to decide who lives and who dies when they run out of capacity to treat pandemic patients.  On the same day an article came up talking about how flights are up to sunny destinations because many people are giving up on doing right by others and just want to satisfy themselves, consequences be damned until they need medical help and there are no beds available then they will be the ones crying loudest.  All while Ontario is experiencing a second wave of the pandemic that makes the first look like a hiccup.

So, we're running out of hospital capacity to treat severe cases, testing has fallen away most likely as a way to make it look like the numbers are coming down.  The politicians who have mismanaged this crisis are looking for ways to spin fictions in their favour.  I drove in to school the other day and the line for testing at our local centre stretched around the hospital.  People want to get tested but the powers that be are more interested in spinning self-serving fictions.

Meanwhile, at the peak of the worst pandemic in modern history and with the emergence of a new even more transmittable variant of COVID, what are we doing in Ontario education?  We're preparing to go back to face to face classes next Monday.  Then we too will get to play the 'who-gets-treatment' game with other front line workers while interacting with and giving the highest transmitting age groups a chance to drive another spike.  That's why I'm awake at three in the morning wondering at the hypocrisy of human beings.

What 2020 Taught Me

This is the fifth attempt at this post.  Sometimes, reflecting your way out of dark place professionally takes some iteration.  Previous attempts ended up heaping frustration on top of frustration until it seemed overwhelming again - not the best way to resolve a metaphysical crisis even if it is all true.  I'm not the smartest, most upwardly mobile educator in the world, but I know my craft and I'm good at getting students to express their talents.  I'm also effective under fire and can always find a way to get back on my feet again when the going gets tough.  This year has been a test of that resilience and at times it has broken me, but reflecting on a year where Ontario education has lost the plot more than once has me thinking about a Banksy piece:

I've been tempted to leave education a few times over the past year for pastures less politically misdirected, but I genuinely enjoy my work, recognize its social importance and don't want to walk away while my profession has forgotten its primary purpose in a fog of political misdirection and pandemic panic.  Education matters.  It matters even more in a crisis.  That's a simple truth 2020 has taught me.  What else has this epically crappy year taught me?

LESSON 1:  The people running 'the system' aren't focused on pedagogy, they're focused on making it run (at all costs, even if it makes people sick or abuses their lack of privilege)

I've known this since I got thrown under the bus for handling my mother's suicide too slowly, but 2020 has reminded me of systemic intent by shining a harsh light inside the process.  From taking multiple pay cuts to protect student learning in January while admin sat in empty schools collecting salary, to watching the system lurch back into the classroom unprepared in September, 2020 has shown that the most important thing to people running Ontario education is making a schedule and then ensuring it happens.  Pedagogy and equity might come up in the marketing material, but action around it is non-existent.  Threaten the schedule though and you'll get an immediate reaction.

This came into focus in November when we watched Ontario Education Workers United's live webcast on how to stop the 'pedagogically impoverished' hybrid/simultaneous online and face to face learning model.  I've had a go at this unsustainable and problematic smoke screen of an approach on Dusty World previously.  There was a great deal of dissonance in listening to educational experts like Doctor Beyhan Farhadi talking about pedagogy when the system itself seems to have turned its back on it entirely.

Our absurd pandemic teaching approach reduces in-class instruction to less than half the normal face to face instructional time while making no changes to curriculum expectations because it's important to retain the appearance of credibility.  Actual pedagogical credibility, let alone equity, compassion and even teacher burnout doesn't appear to be a consideration unless it's an email or newsletter - board newsletters have proliferated this year.  2020 has taught me that the system must run at all costs - even at the cost of the people it serves.

Our broken pandemic teaching models also demand that teachers be simultaneously teaching online and face to face to two different groups of students simultaneously all day every day while throwing about a month's worth of material at students each week.  It's doing this having cancelled face to face special education support which has led to even further inequity in the classroom.  It's an approach that has hurt my son directly.  Listening to parents of students with IEPs begging for support and compassion is heart breaking.  I'm going to make a point of honouring that need even if the system appears to be deaf to these calls for help.

The paradigm shifting moment during that OEWU webcast was a Toronto teacher and union activist who approached the fight from a very pragmatic angle.  She said (and I'm paraphrasing), that the system is only interested in making sure the system works and if you want it to take notice you have to stop if from working.  Killing yourself to make a bad system run and then complaining about it isn't an effective approach.  System administration will only pay attention to you if you stop the system from functioning.  I'm not sure where to take that truth in 2021, but it's something to keep in mind if you see systemic abuse occurring and want to stop it.

The Ministry mandated full day of racism training we got in September prior to starting an unprecedented change in schooling feels more like a smokescreen rather than any kind of genuine attempt at addressing inequity.  Trot out a day of racism training (entirely delivered by 'woke' white women) and then execute a schedule designed to suit privilege while crushing students who don't have it.

2020 has taught me to see actions, not words, as the real barometer of an institution's intent.

LESSON 2:  "This isn't elearning, it's emergency remote learning"

A wise colleague said this in one of our earliest online remote meetings and it changed my mind about how to teach in a pandemic.  My reaction in a crisis is to display initiative and work to help people, but systemic paralysis was followed by a lurch into elearning with zero support and then a series of baffling changes of direction by the Ministry in terms of what technology we can use.

Ontario's experiment in remote learning ended when Stephen Lecce came on one Friday afternoon and told students across the province that marks don't matter in remote learning, which has established a culture of irrelevance in remote learning that continues.  We aren't supposed to grade any learning that happens remotely and many teachers have given up on it entirely due to poor student engagement.  The system's zero support is ongoing - we've been given no PD or even time to redesign the entire curriculum for remote learning on the fly.  The metaphor of building a plane in the air hasn't changed, and we're going back to full remote learning tomorrow.  How do you think that will fly?

2020 has taught me that curriculum is less important than student and staff welfare. It's a pity the people in charge only pitch wellness emails at this ongoing mental health crisis, but as a classroom teacher my ever shrinking sphere of control still allows me to address it with my  particular students, and I intend to.  While other teachers are crushing students (especially the ones with IEPs) in a desperate quest for academic credibility in a system that's only pretending to have it, I shall not.  This involves differentiating, which is another one of those pedagogical best practices we've burned to the ground during this crisis.

Some students, like myself, want to be engaged and kept busy lest they go mad with frustration!  For those students I will offer the variation and enrichment I've always pursued (yes, even in a pandemic), but for the vast majority less is their new normal.  For this group (which includes many teachers), being gentle is more important than being productive.  2020 has taught me that for the majority of people, when the going gets tough, waiting to be told what to do and then doing as little as possible is the way forward.  It doesn't bode well for a future bulging with ever increasing overpopulation in a limited ecosystem, but it's the world our systemic myopia has brought us to.

2020 has taught me that pushing broken people only breaks them more, so I won't be doing that even if the system demands it.

This is indeed emergency remote teaching.  It isn't a 'new normal' and we shouldn't all be waving flags proclaiming, 'I got this'.  What we should be doing is looking after the children in our care, supporting their families and our colleagues and making sure that everyone is alright instead of pretending that everything is business as usual.  We can always learn what we missed on the other side of this.  Meanwhile, we're getting strident 'you have to provide blah blah minutes of synchronous instruction online' directives as we return to our second bout of emergency remote teaching.

There are too many system-people hanging on too tight that need to unclench.  I realize that this is being driven by a sabotaged Ministry, but enforcing it makes you complicit in it.  I'm going to look after my little patch (even the ones with special needs!) and push back if my student wellbeing first approach isn't deemed appropriate by the powers that be.

LESSON 3:  Most people just want to be told what to do, even in a crisis...

My first instinct in a crisis is to show initiative and try to act in a way that helps, but the system thinkers don't want you doing that, they want you to fall in line and do what you're told.  This is problematic for me as my raison d'être in teaching is my agency as a teacher.  When the best I can hope from the system is benign neglect I can get a lot done in my immediate space, but when the system is in crisis it insinuates itself into my classroom and this is infuriating.  If I wanted to give up my idealism I'd go into management.

I'm able to do what I do in the classroom because I have agency.  One of the reasons I enjoy classroom teaching is because I have the latitude to make decisions that aim at the highest ideals and see them through without having to water them down.  In a crisis it seems that systems clamp down on individual agency and demand compliance.  My issue with that is that I've never done the bare minimum, always do excessively more and my students benefit from that in many ways.  I refuse do my job in an online lockstep of systemic expectations, especially if they're designed for marketing a fiction of a full school experience during a pandemic that is preventing exactly that.  I have no interest in misleading people, most especially my students.

Not all teachers are above-and-beyonders, but I gotta tell ya, the vast majority are.  You'd be hard pressed to find a single teacher in my school that doesn't do extracurriculars and work on the weekend.  Given some latitude they'll do more than the minimum simply because they are professionals.  2020 has taught me that I don't necessarily want to leave the classroom, but I would like to work for a system that recognizes my professionalism and honours it instead of treating me like an errant child.

Many people want to be told what to do and wait for that direction.  You'd think that would change in a crisis but it seems to intensify.  I've occasionally had leaders who recognize my need for action and honour it, but they are a minority.  I suspect this is a control issue for most.  Many people find invasive and systemic control a comfort, but for some it feels like strangulation.

Reading Matt Crawford's latest book, Why We Drive, this fall while I was getting waterboarded at work taught me how to differentiate to students in a crisis by recognizing the need for human agency in an increasingly automated world.  Some people need clear direction and eased expectations while others want to exercise their agency and do something to help.  I only hope that the people running things recognize that.  We could get a lot more done if the doers weren't being strangled by system lockstep thinking; we need to do much more than we are.

***

We're about to step back into emergency remote learning after the mid-winter break, which hasn't been much of a break at all.  Everyone looks grey, stressed out and exhausted.  We are probably not even half way through this pandemic marathon but I'm not about to let it diminish my professional scope.  My classroom will recognize that my students might be providing daycare for their siblings or working to support parents who have lost their jobs.  Others may live in rural locations with spotty internet or might be trying to do remote learning on ancient or poorly working technology that they only have occasional access to.  The school system likes to ignore these issues while sternly demanding full days of remote synchronous instruction.  I'm not going to demand that because I have no interest in maintaining a vicious government's fiction of business as usual in the classroom.  What I am going to do is help where I can, give each student what they need to feel like they're achieving something (anything) in this crisis, and make sure the ones who want to do more have the tools and material to create the agency they crave at a time of forced helplessness.  If everyone wakes up the next day feeling recognized and enabled then that's a sound pedagogical goal.

Personally?  2020 taught me not to throw myself into the massive gap between the system's failure to do what it should and what my students need, because it's unsustainable.  I'm not helping anyone if I hurt myself trying to make up for the lack of vision demonstrated by the thousands of people 'above' me on the org chart.  I'll read my Tao Te Ching and follow Lao Tsu's advice and withdraw when my work is done.  2020 has taught me that the system will happily let me burn myself out attempting to resolve its shortcomings.

To hold and fill a cup to overflowing Is not as good as to stop in time.

Sharpen a sword edge to its very sharpest, And the (edge) will not last long.

When gold and jade fill your hall, You will not be able to keep them.

To be proud with honour and wealth Is to cause one's own downfall.

withdraw as soon as your work is done. Such is Heaven's Way.

Tao Te Ching Chapter 9

2020 also taught me that the education system's academic focus is a fiction we all tell ourselves to justify its existence, but it's actually much more foundational than that.  The deeper truth is that the system should be less about curriculum and more about equity and inclusion.  Public education is one of our best tools for socially enabling everyone to become their best selves.  If we approached this pandemic by differentiating our expectations and working from a place of compassion and inclusion instead of fake academic integrity we'd do more good and teach students about things that genuinely matter, like kindness.  Ultimately, education should be about recognizing individual needs and enabling students to express their best selves, the rest is paperwork.