Playing an Out of Tune Piano With Ever Changing Keys With One Hand Tied Behind My Back

… 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.

In virtually focused competitions like coding, our competitor wasn't hamstrung with a lack of
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.

We worked hard over the winter getting a handle on animation principles.  The boys did provincials on our used-when-we-built-them-in-2019 SHSM VR PCs using free software.  If we didn't have SHSM support we wouldn't exist at all.  Up against specialist animation programs (including one in our own school board) with tens of thousands of dollars of newer tech, using paid-for-software, our team created incredible work with limited resources that earned them provincial gold and a place on Team Ontario at Skills Canada Nationals in Vancouver, though this year being what it has been, we only got to attend virtually.

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.

My co-coach and I both had to take a day to proctor the competition and the boys did fantastic work in two six hour marathon animation sessions, winning us not only our first national medal, but making our team of two the top secondary 3d animators in Canada.  Not bad for a rural composite school on very used technology surrounded by storage in a tiny office with no room to move using free software.

***

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.

I don't mind facing down all of these challenges in coaching technology competitors at my school.  I grew up in a small town and do not like the idea that urban super-kids with seemingly infinite socio-economic privilege and access to specialized education and technology we can only dream of get to walk away with the trophy (though they usually do - the irony that they're given monetary rewards for being rich isn't lost on me either).

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.

I like being an underdog.  We didn't beat the Millionaires' Row specialist schools from North York at CyberTitan this year (well, we beat most of their teams, just not their top ones), but we did beat a cyber-academy and all three teams from a semi-private, charter specialist school.  And we did it with students from all streams, many of whom are also neuro-atypical.  We represent the diversity of the vast majority of students unable to participate in these competitions.  That charges me up.

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.

Face Your Fear! Maths Trauma & Inequity in STEM Education

In January the president of the Ontario Association for Mathematics Educators (OAME) sent me an email after seeing our online activity around game development and coding and asked if I might present at their conference in May.   If you'd have told high school me that I'd one day present at a maths conference I would have thought you're having me on.  For me, maths and science were the hammers that the education system used to teach me that I wasn't good enough, but I'm rethinking that egotistical framing.

One of my co-presenters also didn't have a positive maths experience in high school and we were both worried that it would be like being back in class again.  That's where the teacher would single you out and make sure everyone in the room knew that you didn't know what you were doing, then they'd fail you, usually with a caustic remark about how 'this isn't for you'.  I'd internalized the idea that maths (and science) went out of their way to make me feel stupid, but after doing our presentation (everyone was lovely, of course), I'm reconsidering my failures in maths and science from another angle.

We immigrated to Canada when I was eight years old.  A lack of research had us moving to Montreal right after Bill 101 came in, which wasn't great for a little kid from rural England.  By 1980 we'd moved to Streetsville on the edge of Mississauga and that's where I grew up.  Various calamities happened both financially and emotionally while I was in high school.  I didn't play school sports because I worked every day after school from the age of 12 on.  School sports, like maths and science, are for those privileged children of leisure who have the time and money to participate - that's why we shape entire school cultures around them.

In senior high school my dad was in a near fatal car accident that had him hospitalized for months.  During that time I was working as well as doing all the home things that he usually did.  This meant that the hours of homework meted out by maths and science teachers didn't get the attention it demanded.  The tedious and repetitive/rote nature of S&M homework didn't help either.  Before grade 11 science I was daydreaming of becoming an astronomer.  After I failed it, not so much.  High school accommodated my lack of socio-economic clout by guidancing me to go find a job that Canadians don't like doing - like a good immigrant should.

I dropped out of grade 13, worked as a night security guard (full time) while trying to attend Sheridan College for visual arts.  I dropped out of Sheridan when I couldn't get to class after not sleeping every night before class.  Eventually I  found my way into a millwright apprenticeship which offered me the economic stability I needed to finish high school, which I did at the age of 22.  I eventually left millwrighting and went to university, finally settling on English and philosophy degrees, but even there my maths trauma haunted me.

A requirement for my philosophy degree was to take the symbolic logic course.  My first time through it was run by a computer science prof who didn't like how big the class was so he used every rotten maths trick in the book (surprise tests, undifferentiated instruction, sudden changes in direction, etc) to shake out the 'arts' students who needed it for their degree.  That course could also be used as an 'arts' credit for the STEM types who took it as a bird course.  That prof succeeded in chasing out all the philosophy students from that philosophy course.  The next semester I tried again, this time with a philosophy prof.  I told her of my fear of maths and she went out of her way to differentiate both instruction and assessment.  I ended up getting an 'A' on the mandatory course I thought I'd never finish.  I can do maths and complex logic, just not when it's weaponized against me.

As a millwright I never had a problem tackling applied maths when I needed it.  When I transitioned into information technology, again no issues using applied maths as I needed it to do my job.  It appeared that I wasn't as bad as maths as the education system had repeatedly told me I was, though I still carried that luggage with me.

My anxiety was high as I got ready for this presentation.  Alanna made a comment that resonated though.  If you work in a secondary classroom you've probably heard teens talking about how this or that teacher 'hates' them.  Alanna reminded me that this is a great example of everything-is-about-me teenage egotism.  My maths and science teachers didn't hate me and weren't vindictively attacking me for my failures; no student matters that much.  Having done this teaching thing for over two decades now, I can assure you that 'hate' isn't something most teachers feel.  To be honest, when we're not at work even the most difficult students aren't on our minds.  For the teachers who do feel hate for students, you need to find another career.

Looking past the teen-egoism of my own mathematical inferiority complex, I got along with my STEM teachers pretty well.  I certainly wasn't a classroom management headache.  In retrospect, what happened to me in class wasn't vindictive on their part, it was a result of my lowly socio-economic status.  Had I been a stable, well off, multi-generational settler whose ancestors were given whole swarths of Canada for free, I'm sure we'd have gotten along just fine.  Were I not in the middle of family trauma, perhaps I would have stuck it out.  Had I been a student of a less creative nature who thrived in structure and repetition, I imagine I'd have found a place in STEM even without the financial means - I did eventually embrace my technical skills despite the system's best efforts to alienate me from myself.

Last week one of our maths teachers emailed the entire building asking how she could punish students who are skipping tests in order to give themselves more time to prepare for them.  Our principal emailed all reminding everyone of Growing Success, but this didn't stop a science teacher from jumping in with our written-in-the-1950s student handbook which still contains escalating penalties (including handing out zeroes) for late or missing work, even if that is directly contrary to Ministry direction.

In my last round of IT testing for my grade 10s I left each chapter test available for three tries, and students could take it open book if they wished.  When you finished the test it would even review it for you and tell you what the correct answers were and why, if you could be bothered to do that.  Ample class time was provided to review the material both on screen and hands-on.  You could not design a more equitable and differentiated approach to learning computer technology.  Our class average on these three tries/open book tests/wildly-differentiated and in-class supported tests?  11.07/20 - that's a 55% class average.  Even when you differentiate and build in equity to support assessment in COVID-world classes, many students won't bother doing any of it anyway, and this is in an optional subject they chose to take!  I turned down the weight of those results, not because I think my subject doesn't matter, but because the COVID malaise on students is real  (it's real on staff too, not that anyone cares) and holding them to pre-pandemic standards is neither compassionate nor pedagogically correct.

If someone wants to skip a period to get more study time in, let 'em.  What would be even better is having open and honest communications with your students to the point where they can simply ask for extra time rather than feeling like they have to skip because they know you won't give give it to them   They probably won't use their extra time anyway and the result will be what it is.  Clinging to schedules and testing that only examines rote memorization (another issue in STEM that produces A+ students who don't know how to apply what they know), is the kind of undifferentiated and tedious 'learning' that made me despise maths and science in high school.

After COVID swept through our family recently, my son returned to class only to get no lunches for days on end (while still recovering from the virus) as he took test after missed maths test.  When he didn't do well on them we had to intervene and ask for some compassion.  Why do S&M subject teachers believe that curriculum comes before differentiation based on circumstances (especially IEPs!), or even basic wellness?  We're all in exceptional circumstances.  I suspect these teachers believe that this 'rigour' makes them a credible and serious discipline of study.  I'm not sure how you change that rigid culture founded on privilege, conformity and exclusion.

My maths trauma in high school sent me on a crooked path before I was finally able to come to terms with my intelligence and abilities; it made me doubt myself and misaim my expectations.  I'd hope public education would do the opposite of that, but it still doesn't.  We've got too many classes still predicating success on hours of homework using undifferentiated and repetitive rote learning under the assumption that everyone has the time and inclination to find success in that.  It's even worse now two years into a pandemic.  During quadmesters it was particularly acute with students in S&M heavy quads telling me they were expected to do 4+ hours of homework EVERY DAY - even as the working ones were forced to take on extra hours as 'heroic' front line workers.

In my classroom I aim to find every students' talents and help them find digital pathways that will support them in our technology driven economy.  My senior classes are supposed to be 'M' level post-secondary bound students (which is why they cap me at 31 like an academic calculus class), but in actuality the majority of my students do not attend university and good percentage go straight into the workplace.  We also frequently have essential level and special needs students finding their way in our program because we differentiate even when the system holds us all back with an inequitable distribution of resources.  My stuffed classes serving all pathways help make grade 12 academic physics classes with a dozen students in them happen because those very special kids need that credit for university.

In order to find student strengths I focus on foundational skills like practicing an effective engineering design process, which is more about organization and self-direction than it is about technical details.  I could drill them on tests about technical specifics and fail the ones who skip rote memorizing reams of facts for a variety of reasons (they can't afford the time, their IEP doesn't allow them learn like that, etc), but then I'd be doing exactly what was done to me in high school.  That'd be a jerk move.

"You! Yes, you! Stand still laddy!"

When we grew up and went to school

There were certain teachers who would

Hurt the children any way they could

By pouring their derision

Upon anything we did

And exposing every weakness

However carefully hidden by the kids"

We don't need no education, but we all need direction to help find our strengths... especially in STEM.

Academic Gatekeeping In a Pandemic

What's our job as teachers?  Curriculum police?  Guardians of the ivory towers of academia?  Throughout the pandemic I've had students telling me tales of woe around their core subjects (English, maths & science), all three of which are seem to be chasing curriculum at all costs with radically reduced resources, most especially time.  They seem intent on making up for these shortcomings by burying students in work at a time when many of them are frazzled to the point of ineffectiveness.

In a normal semester you take 75 minutes of instruction a day, have another hour of possible enrichment at lunch or before/after school, and then have time after school for homework that reviews small, 75 minute segments of new learning.  Even in those good times that homework expectation gets my back up.  Teachers who dump an hour of homework on a student each night are part of a cabal that believes that students should spend five hours a day taking in-school instruction and then another four hours a night doing homework (students take four subjects per day).  These nine hour days aren't sit-in-an-office-and-stare-out-the-window situations, they're paying focused attention while developing new knowledge and skills hours, which makes them very tiring.  Even at the best of times that homework load isn't humane, nor is it equitable.

Public education serves everyone and doing so
doesn't make it anti-excellence. A system that
selects the top students based on their socio-
economic status isn't equitable, nor is it doing
what public education is supposed to be doing.

Got a job?  Got other family commitments? The homework cabal doesn't care.  Their job is to shake the tree of dead fruit and only send the most privileged specimens on to the glorified halls of post-secondary academia.  This is in direct conflict with what I believe the function of public education to be:  to maximize the potential of every student and point them towards a more fulfilling life that makes best use of their abilities.  The fact that the socio-economic privilege that supports the homework cabal usually falls to white, hetero-normative, cis gendered, neuro-typical, male students isn't their problem; academic credibility must be maintained at all costs!

I was once one of those dead fruits.  I have no doubt that I struggled in high school with maths and science because I was also working full-time hours in order to help my parents pay their mortgage through senior high school.  Being undiagnosed as neuro-atypical didn't help either but calling a student lazy and unfocused is much easier than identifying their neuro-diversity or acknowledging socio-economic disparities.

I can recall my core subject report cards commenting on my lack of focus, but then I was working until mid-night every day before coming in to school the next morning, though that didn't stop teachers from bracketing me as a weak student and directing me out of university bound pathways (I've since earned 2 degrees).

During the pandemic our typical six month semesters have been crammed into 10 week quad-mesters, each week being a drink-from-the-firehose two and a half hour marathon in-class session followed by another two and a half hour marathon remote learning session, whether you've got the tech and circumstances at home to do it or not.  What was once a classist, inequitable system has doubled down on that approach during COVID19.  Now that we're fully remote again for the third time those inequities are further amplified.

Mountains have been moved to try and address the digital divide, but sending a Chromebook home isn't going to resolve generational socio-economic dysfunction and systemic-repression, and digital literacy has much more to it than whether or not you have access to a computer.  Our unwillingness to make digital fluency a foundational skill in our classrooms has put us in a situation where we are expecting  students to complete over half of their instruction in a course in an environment where the vast majority (teachers included) barely have a working knowledge, let alone fluency.  While fully remote it also makes wild assumptions about student and teacher home lives and what they are able to achieve through the bottle-necked, undersupported and overburdened medium of elearning.

We're currently in another wave of COVID19 prompted by a dysfunctional Ontario government and I'm coaching students in a series of virtual Skills Ontario competitions while instruction is fully remote..  Extracurriculars are nearly impossible this year with the viscous schedule and unapologetic work loads that teachers desperate to meet curriculum requirements are unloading on students.  One of my competitors just dropped out because his calculus class (in addition to virtual instruction all day) is expecting late night homework marathons every night.

If you usually give an hour of homework for a seventy-five minute class spread over six months in a normal semester, you're handing out over four hours of homework per day every day in our cramped quadmestered schedule where every day is the equivalent of 4.2 days of normal instruction.  Core subject teachers with their mandatorily loaded classes seem particularly determined to drive students through their full curriculum by depending almost entirely on overloading students with an avalanche of work.  When your subject is guaranteed to run regardless of how you approach it, that academic credibility seems to become an excuse for inequity.

This academic gate-keeping seems particularly acute in the core subjects where rigorously dictated curriculums have teachers worried about students in future classes if they don't have the fundamentals down.  This year I've had students from grades 9 to 12 tell me that they can't do my course work on the week I'm teaching them because their English/maths/science teacher left them homework for their off-week.  So much for us all being in this together.