… I can handle playing the challenging piano, just not when the concert hall organizers keep tying one hand behind my back.
This Year in Competition
In the past six weeks I have been managing four classes of teaching while juggling nineteen students who were competing in provincial and national finals in technical competitions ranging from 3d animation and geographic information systems through IT & networking and cybersecurity to electronics and coding, all while also managing in-school IT support and ewaste management.
We don't have the space to run those competitions in our shop because we're overloaded with the largest caps of any tech classes in Ontario and literally don't have the space. My solution was to send students home on competition days for Skills Ontario provincials, which isn't very equitable and didn't allow those of them in physical competitions to produce their best work. We send multiple staff out of the building every day to coach sports for the well-off students who have the resources to enjoy leisure activities in public school. We'd never send sports students off on their own to compete for the school, but what we're doing isn't sports and it clearly doesn't matter as much.
We managed to hang on to our string of medals in IT & Networking with a bronze, but not being able to do the provincial finals in our lab (or live in Toronto which would have been the most equitable of all) damaged our competitor's ability to turn in his best work. Our electronics engineering student was in the same boat, using inferior equipment in a less than ideal home lab rather than using the tools and equipment we have on hand to produce his best results.
 |
| Max & Kohan still hard at it in our tiny back office long after everyone else has gone home representing our school & board at Skills Ontario Provincials in GIS. |
physical support and performed wonderfully, winning us podium gold at Skills Ontario provincials. Our teams of two ended up working in our tiny office, displacing teachers (who were also juggling classes) and causing me to pull hardware out of our stuffed lab for them to work on. Doing that also had me frantically repairing our non-functional, student-built, getting long in the tooth DIY desktops to replace those taken for competition. We're short technology because we've been told to stuff 31 student PCs in each room, even when it contradicts public health rules.
Our 3d animation team of two came together at the end of my game development class last fall. We don't explicitly teach animation but our 3d modelling is advanced because many of our games depend on it, and in last semester's class I encouraged students to build animations to help us develop narrative in our game design.
What did that mean? Trying to juggle doing a national competition three time zones away isn't easy. National competition usually provides proctors on site, but since secondary was fully remote guess where all the proctoring got downloaded to? Yep, the teacher coaches. Mandatory training had us having to miss classes for online training didn't work and had to be done again on the weekend. The 'you-must-be-on-Pacific-time' demands became increasingly absurd, to the point where we were being told students had to take an hour off for lunch at 4pm in the afternoon where they'd be sitting and waiting in an empty school for no reason other than aligning with a competition happening three thousand miles away. Thankfully, Skills Canada came to their senses (in our competition at least) and allowed us to work in our local time. I was still teaching full time through all of this.
***
Small Town Inferiority Complexes
I've spent too much time on aeroplanes coming home empty handed from Skills Canada nationals. One of the most difficult parts of coaching students where I am is convincing our small town inferiority complex that it is capable of national swagger, but our small town thinking doesn't just come from students, it's also systemic. Adults around our students constantly remind them, usually subconsciously, that they're not worthy. The super-students we're up against from specialized hand-picked (700 applicants for 90 spots) Gattaca urban schools don't face any of these doubts; they're being trained to become masters of the universe. We face off against these hand-picked geniuses who "came into computing through a mandatory Grade 9 computer science course" (we've cancelled on-site comp-sci in my building) with significant challenges. With few exceptions, most of my students wouldn't get invited to learn in those hallowed halls of future Davos attendees.
In 2016 our national finalist was catching it from all sides for missing THE PROM; the small town static was never ending and ensured he wasn't focused on his best performance. Talking to other coaches, their schools and communities went out of their way to support their students at nationals. Our school intentionally places prom at the same time as them (but makes sure it doesn't interfere with the sports schedule). In 2018 our national finalist went out to play soccer the week before - a pickup game with the 'adult' mens team and got his ankle broken, putting him on his back foot (quite literally) and preventing him from doing the business in Edmonton. Sometimes it feels like our small town thinking devalues what we're doing to such a degree that the sabotage feels intentional.
This year, with skills being virtual, our two competitors were juggling previous commitments like Bronze Cross training and weren't even inclined to ask if they could be moved (it's not your place to ask, you're no master of the universe). The solution was to give up almost half a day on the last day of competition to honour these local commitments and toss hopes of a national medal away. Had they done that, they wouldn't have landed where they did. We had to fight for days on end to get an equitable approach to the competition as our community simply doesn't value it enough to prioritize it, though I think it fair to say that if you're not flying us out to Vancouver to compete live and you're downloading all the work of competition onto us, the least Skills could have done was develop a more equitable and responsive timetable that recognized that we were all still mired in our local circumstances.
.jpg)
In 2018 at our last National Skills run we got interviewed by the local radio station and the presenter asked a good question: "do you think working with ewaste and lacking resources makes you more competitive?" I think it genuinely does and I'm proud of the DIY ethos we've created. Every year my senior IT students repair hundreds of Chromebooks, giving our school the highest (by far) rate of active technology in the board. Being DIY is value added not just for my students' sake, but also because it helps our building as a whole, though not enough to provide us with the space we need to do the job.
.jpg)
I can push back against our small town inferiority complex by continuing to develop a program that is nationally known for innovation and diversity. I can open up digital career opportunities for our students on pathways from workplace through college and the military to university, but not if I'm being inequitably under-resourced.
Our top finish at Skills Canada nationals prior to this year went to college, not university. We've had more ASD cyber captains than neuro-typical ones, and our teams have been gender equitable years before the top schools we were up against got around to it. We managed that even though our conservative rural school goes out of its way to genderize career pathways for girls. I'm proud of our diversity, it strengthens us in a building that has struggled with racism and gender prejudice over the past few years.
One of our pioneering CyberTitans got into Waterloo for computer science (actually, two of them did). The next year he saw another student from one of the super-schools wearing his CyberTitan t-shirt and told him he was there at the same national finals in Fredericton. The other kid told him it wasn't possible, only the top schools attended that (we actually beat his team to a 5th place nationally). From moments like that I can show our students that they aren't inferior and that any superiority coming from the urban-uber-schulen are usually arrogance and complacency, not superiority. I can show students the work of our grads (who they know in our community) and make the impossible possible. I can remind our school that we shouldn't be identified by sportsball entertainment for the wealthy few and that our students can compete on a national stage with the best Canada has to offer. Coming from a small town doesn't mean you're inferior.
What I don't understand is why the people we're representing would want to intentionally and inequitably withhold resources from us while we're doing this difficult thing. I've never asked for special treatment, just equitable access to resources. We find real value in offering hands-on IT experience by supporting technology in the building and our school directly benefits from it, but we are given no space to do it. Programs in other buildings enjoy smaller class sizes and specialized equipment in specialized shops even when they do none of the things we're doing.
We get held to class caps equal to those in academic streamed English or maths classes while being expected to provide hands-on learning (and shouldering all the safety hazards implicit in that) to classes that include students from all pathway streams. Our coding provincial champion was learning in a stacked senor class with students who couldn't read this year. Stretching to cover that range of ability in a single class with over thirty students stuffed into it is absurd. I've brought this up with pervious principals and they have gas-lit me, implying that I'm lying about class sizes elsewhere even when I provide information directly from teachers in those schools. Our new principal broke that string of gas-lighting and acknowledged that there is no consistency in class sizes across the board in a recent meeting, so I live in hope, but if I've had my head held underwater for a decade over this so I'm not full of it.
Less successful programs in our building see tens of thousands of dollars in technology and tools that we don't. Other schools throw resources at specialized digital programming that we don't see, and then we beat them in Skills. Our school cancels local computer science, leaving us with the burden of carrying those students with no resources provided. Given equitable access to space and equipment, we could help more students find their passion and express excellence in it, even if they have special needs, but the lack of equitable resources means we are reduced to taking opportunities away from our students, usually the most disadvantaged ones.
I have no doubt we'll be seeing more PD on equity in the future, but my efforts to provide it are continually frustrated by systemic prejudice. When we've managed to achieve what we have (which produces a lot of positive press) despite our school rather than because of it, I'm left feeling frustrated and disenfranchised. I love what we do and want to keep at it, but in the past school year I've had five job offers. It's getting increasingly difficult to ignore them knowing that we'll be intentionally under-resourced even when compared to other programs in our own building.
I have learned to play this out-of-tune piano with its missing and ever-changing keys over the past decade. The difficulties in that are many. I can never assume that our successes one year will lead to growth in that area the next because I don't always have students ready to step on the shoulders of their peers and go further. I'm increasingly running out of the will to provide that encouragement against overwhelming odds, especially when they're made overwhelming by local decisions.
Our diversification into different competitions isn't just a reflection of our wanting to be excellent in many areas, it's also a response to playing that piano with changing keys and going where the will and talent is in my classroom in a given year. I've never taken on robotics before, but we have two very strong mechanical/robotics engineers (both farm kids with fantastic hands-on technical skills) developing who will chase that down for us next year, assuming I'm still here barking at the moon. I'll help our students take on giants, but not if we're so under supported that they have no chance of victory - that isn't competition, it's a systemic reminder that you don't matter, and I don't want to be a part of that.
