Union Math

Them Unicorns looked up from the rocks and they cried

And the waters came down and sort of floated them away

And that's why you'll never seen a Unicorn... to this very day.

The Irish Rovers: Unicorn Song

I'm showing my age here but there you go.  That song came out two years before I was born and it was played in our Norfolk sea-side house regularly when I was very little.  It was playing in my head as I read an astonishing email from our local union executive this week where they repeatedly congratulated themselves on the system they now claim to have had a hand in creating in response to the pandemic.  This is suprising as earlier they claimed that things were happening without their input or consent, but historical hind-sight lets you rewrite the narrative to make it look like you did something, I suppose.

This self congratulatiory email went on to state that teachers should be assigned a maximum of 225 minutes of student instruction daily, and 75 mins of preparation time.  Having never been provided with these things I'm at a loss to explain the rhetoric in any rational terms.  So deaf has been our union that I've quit as our local CBC representative after numerous emails and calls for clarification and support went unanswered, even when I was advocating for other members.  I'm pro-union because I know what would happen if One Percenters had dictatorial control, but our union isn't particularly egalitarian either, though it likes to make noises like it is.  The longer I look at OSSTF the more classist it seems, so I shouldn't be surprised that their support only appears to apply to certain members. 

Our president says we're lucky we don't teach in other boards, which isn't very 'help one another' of him, but I've found that a sense of comraderie isn't very resonant in our small, white, privaleged district.  From throwing other districts under the bus while pandering to provinicial liberal bias to fighting for clear and transparent communication with members, I've found our local a difficult beast to deal with.  And this from a guy who was once mentoring under the district president and attended many weekend trainings.  A guy who regularly shows up to policial protests, tries to present our profession in an honest and postiive light to the public and has volunteered at the school and district level for over a decade in a number of roles.

The problem with the district's current belief in this fantastic schedule is that it conveniently ignores specific situations where the board doesn't have the resources it needs to make it happen.  I think the board made a good decision under no direction or leadership from a broken ministry of education in setting things up as they did, but we then needed a local union ready to work to protect its members when the specifics of the plan could not be met.  What we have instead are a group of self contratulatory district types with a strangle hold on control of our local who are more interested in putting out emails that sound like they were written by our employer than they are in making sure all of their members have access to the same plan in terms of work expected.

What we need, unless qualifications don't matter, is to agree that any teacher working in a classroom should be familiar with the curriculum and qualified to teach the subject they're teaching.  Ironically, in the same email we were told not to do any writing jobs for TVO's upcoming elearning program because there is no guarrantee that a qualified teacher will teach that material - that's exactly what's happening now in our district and we are waving a victory flag about it.

I did some maths this morning to try and work out who exactly is teaching 225 minutes a day as per our local cohorted covid teaching plan:

Someone ignorant to the job might read this as teachers only working 225 mintues a day, but that's 225 minutes of instruction.  You can't just walk in and do that.  You have to prepare what you're doing and also mark the results.  Teaching is more like presenting in media as a DJ or TV presenter - the part you see is only a small part of the job as a whole.  When you see radical differences in instructional time the 'under the water iceberg' part of the job is also magnified.  I'm having trouble sleeping and I'm often up at 4am marking or prepping for my red-all-year schedule because it's the only time available to do it.

You have to fall into a very specific catagory to luck out and get the union advertised 225 minutes of instruction.  The tricky thing about equity is that it needs to be equally distributed.  Having said that, even the 225 minutes of instruction is no cakewalk as you've got to create two sets of material (one remote and one face to face) and then deliver them in two places at once all day every day.  Re-writing and splitting the curriculum into a never-before-taught format on the fly is difficult enough but there are other political factors diminishing the effectiveness of that remote elearning half of our curriculum.

As you might guess, I've been given 6 double cohort sections this year and have never once been given a qualified face to face relief teacher.  Teaching technology means you need to have a tech qualified teacher or students have to stop hands on work for safety and liability reasons.  Hands-on work in class is at such a premium this year (we only have 52.5 hours of it compared to 110 hours in a regular class), that tech teachers are simply staying in class in order to protect what little tactile time students have - of course most tech teachers have small, single-cohort class sizes, but not me.  I get capped the same as a university bound calculus class.  Before this all kicked off admin said to us that they expected we'd all wave off relief support anyway in order to 'let our kids keep on learning'.  The worst thing you want to be in a pandemic is a unicorn, just as in the song, you can expect to get ignored, left behind and drown in the indifference shown to you by your union.

I'm the only person in my building qualified to teach what I teach and this isn't an academic subject that might be taught out of a text book.  Technology, like French or other skills based subjects, needs to be taught by people who know how to do the thing they're teaching; you can't fake it.  Usually the union is all over this, but they're evidently blind to it this year - unless you want to try and escape this nastiness by writing elearning courses for TVO (yes, I've applied).

The union has a long term hatred of elearning and have been dismissive of it outright.  Elearning is a challenge, and I've been involved it in since its germination, but if done right it could offer a differentiated approach to learning that could serve some student needs (that's what we're here for right?).  What you don't want to do (that this government is intent on) is Walmarting elearing into a cheap and pedagogically ineffective wedge that weakens the entire education system.  You don't stop that mean-spirited, self-serving narcisism (the Ontaro PC party has donors who are ready to leap in with charter school options) by refusing to participate in it.  What we need is a union researching best pedagogical practices in elearning including which students it actually works for, and then advocating for that.  The 'keep everything analogue' approach is dangerously out of touch and a sure way to make both the educaiton system and the union itself irrelevant.

Union footdragging on elearing pedagogical effectiveness has made a mess of half our 'class time' with our students.  Double cohorted teachers don't get to support their own class in elearning.  If you're one of the lucky ones you've got a collaborative, technically savvy, qualified colleague who is helping you manage that, though you're still responsible for all the planning, prep and review of work - though that gets hazzy too as we keep turning down exectations (no new content, no assessment and now no attendance) in our online cohorts.

We aren't turning off all these aspects of learning in elearning for pedagogical reasons, we're doing it to lessen the load on remote learning support teachers as per union direction.  This means we're now trying to pack a 110 hour course in 52.5 hours of face to face classroom learning in a dramatically accelerated schedule with little chance for review or differentiation.  This is difficult in any course but in tech courses that rely almost exclusively on tactile, hands-on learning and which have been instructed to allow NO HANDS ON WORK remotely for liability and safety reasons, it reduces pedagogical effectiveness to well under 50% just based on time alone, I won't get into how difficult it has been to get parts in as the pandemic has worn on.

Eleaarning could have been leveraged make this time-crunch work better from a pedagogical perspective.  The first (obvious) step would be to ensure that all tech classes or other specialist taught courses are single cohort in order to ensure both teacher familiarity but also provide qualifiied and meaningful remote support, but that would neccessitate a local union that is fighting for all members, even the ones who teach specialist courses.  It would also require a provincial union that isn't intent on belittling elearning as a tool in Ontario education's toolbox.  We've got dozens of teachers not teaching and providing toilet breaks for people in the building so the money and teaching talent was there, it has just lacked focus.

The result of this game of smoke and mirrors is a steady deterioration of remote learning expectations since this year of pandemic teaching began.  Every time we go fully remote we seem to lose leverage in the remote half of our regular in-school day.

This politically motivated intentional ignoring of remote elearning has resulted in many classes (I'm told by students) who have little or no remote elearning work at all.  There are single cohort teachers doing 120 minutes (2 hours) of face to face instruction in the morning and then simply walking away from the remote half of the course.  Students in that class are earning credits and grades based on less than half the normal class work and can't possibly be coming anywhere close to regular curriculum expectations, but when it suits the political angle the union wants to take on elearning, it's all good.

The other result of this wildly uneven scheduling of work is that some members are being waterboarded by a brutal workload that can include more than twice the instructional time (along with all the prep, marking and logitistical time required for it).  When I pointed this out after my first double cohort double class quadmester and suggested I should have lightened remote support expectations in the quadmester where my prep period resided (something we could have worked around with a more evenly distrubuted schedule instead of clinging to the old one), I was told by admin that wouldn't be fair and everyone has to do the same duties.  That's exactly the moment my union should have stepped in and shown how much extra work I'd already done, but they'd rather pat themselves on the back for a job well-done for a small percentage of their members.  The equity must be great if you're lucky enough to have it.

I don't think the current situation is a failure of the school board.  I think they made difficult choices as well as they could with no support or leadership from the ministry.  What we needed was our local union to show up and help mould that plan into something that is actually fair for everyone involved and differentiates based on availablity of qualifications.  More supported, credible and consistent elearning expectations should also have been developed and evolved over the course of this year, but our union's poltiics can't get out of its own way when it comes to elearning, even when it results in members being hurt by wildly unfair and inequitable work expectations.

I look forward to the next email that looks like an advertisement for my employer and shows no awareness or concern for member circumstances.  It's probably sitting in my inbox right now.  I'm pretty sure I pay the same dues as everyone else, too bad the support isn't equal.

You'll see green alligators and long necked geese
Some humpy-back camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born
You're never gonna see no Unicorn.

This unicorn with his rare teaching qualifications isn't just dealing with another double cohort double class quadmester.  This time around it's double cohort double classes with stacked multi-grade senior classes, which means even more prep (grade 11 face to face work, grade 12 face to face work, grade 11 remote work, grade 12 remote work), and all packed into a single class capped at 31 students - like a university bound academic class, except my class of 31 includes 10% essential students, 35% applied students and over 50% of the class has an IEP (tech tends to attact students with special needs because it doesn't expect them to sit in rows reading out of the same textbook).  The unicorning going on here is starting to feel less like benign neglect and more like systemic bias intent on extinction, which any technology teacher in Ontario education can tell you is nothing new.

***

Here's another way to look at the wildly uneven work expectations many teachers are facing.  Aren't you lucky if you're in the green?  I wish we had a union to address it...

Yep, you may well be working more than twice as many face to face instructional hours as other teachers in the same board.  You'd think someone in an office somewhere would want to do something about that, but evidently not.

Someone might come back at me with "yeah, we'll I'm also teaching online!"  So am I, all day, every day while I'm also teaching face to face all day every day.  If you want to throw the simultaneous elearning/remote expectations on top of this it gets even less even.

Competitive Urges and Real World Expectations: How to Differentiate For Experts

One of the ways I differentiate my courses in order to cater to students who will become digital engineers and technicians is to find opportunities to compete in skills based competitions.  Not only does this offer them advanced study in specific areas of computer technology, but it also provides curriculum material that often trickles down into my regular course work.

In the fall we took our first run at the CyberPatriot/CyberTitan IT security competition.  Cyber-security is a high demand field we don't produce enough of in Canada.  With a very strong team of seniors we made big steps forward in each round figuring out how the competition works and what we needed to focus on to get better at it.  Once we knew to focus on Windows and Linux operating systems and Cisco networking, we got a lot better.  By the final round we'd fought our way up to the sharp end of the competition and ended up finishing in the top 10 out of 90 odd Canadian teams.  We're off to Fredericton in May to see how we fare in the national finals.

I've been looking at ways to bring cyber-security into my curriculum and this ICTC run competition has provided me with a pile of material on all levels of IT security from the desktop all the way up to networking.  In the meantime, I've got four students who are national finalists, which looks mighty fine on both a job and post-secondary program applications.  The team isn't a mono-culture either.  One student is aiming at software engineering, another at information technology, another at teaching and the last isn't ICT focused but is a strong, multi-talented student who can solve esoteric problems well.  They also work well as a team, so we're looking forward to seeing how we fare in the finals in New Brunswick.

Meanwhile, we've got four students aiming for Skills Ontario provincial finals in Toronto in May.  Unlike last year when we tried to commute into the GTA for the event (utter misery), we are lining up hotel rooms and staying overnight, so everyone will arrive early and well rested - no seven hour school bus commutes for us this time.  We've got last year's bronze medalist at IT and Networking who is angling for a higher finish, last year's 7th place electronics student in the hunt for a medal and last year's 10th place web developer looking for a top five finish.  I've also got a ringer for the first ever coding competition at Skills Ontario provincials.  Like the CyberTitan competition, I've been able to lift a lot of useful course focuses out of Skills scopes.  Our electronics have diversified and become much more complex thanks to our competitor's work in skills (and I love that she's beating the boys in a predominantly male competition).  The web development we started last year is going to provide much of the coding focus for our new grade ten computer class that starts next year.

I get a real charge out of competition.  I used to coach soccer at school but now I spend my time focused on supporting technology curriculum.  The differences are many.  Instead of only catering to students who are wealthy enough to not work and have the free time to play games at school all week, I find myself supporting a wide socio-economic range of students, which I find more gratifying.  In the process I've been able to show many of them opportunities and post secondary pathways that they hadn't considered before.  I didn't manage to produce a single professional soccer player in years of coaching, but I've managed to help engineers, technicians and digital artists begin their careers.  Of course, I don't get paid to do any of this, but finding students and helping them develop into competitive provincial and national challengers is one of the favourite aspects of my job, even though it isn't actually my job.  The hardest part is convincing them that it's possible; doubt is the hardest thing to overcome.

Meanwhile, in the classroom this semester I'm running yet another round of capped at 31 students software engineering (it's tricky to stuff 31 student computers into a classroom, but I manage it).  I started this course three years ago as a bit of a joke, but I couldn't run it like one, the opportunities it provides are too real.  Our school started offering courses in hockey and camping and I jokingly suggested I make a video game course if we're giving credits out for recreational activities.  I spent much of my youth playing hockey, camping and video gaming, so why not?  Of course, I didn't get high school credits in those things, but I digress.

Our software engineering class has become an applied coding course that focuses on engineering process rather than the mathematical minutia of coding, which I leave to computer science.  We start with IEEE's Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) to get a handle on best practices in real-world software building, then we learn 3d modelling in Blender and scripting in C# in Unity in order to prepare everyone for some game development.

This class has produced published software since the first year it ran and has allowed students to produce digital portfolio work that has gotten many graduates into some of the most challenging post secondary programs in the province.  Like the competition opportunities described above, software engineering has turned into an intense but demanding real world opportunity that allows senior students to step up and demonstrate leading edge digital skills.

We've just finished the training portion of the course where the grade twelves introduce the grade elevens to SWEBOK, the basics of 3d modelling and the Unity game development platform.  With these basic skills in place everyone then reorganizes into startups and proceeds to develop software titles for the rest of the semester.  This time around we've got a mini putt VR simulator, a VR based survival game called Grave Dug, a nostalgia arcade title called Devil's Hollow, a two player cooperative asymmetrical puzzle game called Shield and Staff, an atmospheric stealth title called Instinct and for the first time we're also developing a non-interactive title focused on 3d animation that should offer our 3d artists a less restricted and more experimental approach to modelling without the complexities of interactivity.  We hope to use VR (Tiltbrush, Oculus Medium) and our Structure Sensor 3d scanner to produce less Blenderized looking models and experiment with our design process.

My senior computer technology (TEJ) courses also focus on real world problem solving.  We cover CompTIA industry testing for A+ technician in 3M and NETWORK+ administration in 4M, and both courses also do in-school tech support.  We're also building VR ready systems for our board SHSM program to distribute to other schools.  Working in real world situations with live problem solving and deadlines is something my students find invaluable, whether it's in class or in competition.  It gives them strong portfolio work (check out our ever expanding collection of 3d models, in 3d!) and prepares them for the intensity of life outside of the rubber walled, failure-not-an-option world of high school.  It's a lot of extra work, but I didn't get into teaching computer technology in order to be able to spin the same lessons out year after year; the constantly changing nature of the subject area is one of the reasons I chose to do it.  The real world challenges and intensity of competition keep things interesting for me too.

Freddy Falcon by CWcomptech on Sketchfab