I have often felt that when I am teaching, time moves much more quickly than when I am doing admin or other activities. It also seems to me that when my students are really engaged and excited about a lesson, it makes the lesson seem shorter. If a lesson falls a little flat, it can seem to take forever.
The old adage “Time flies when you’re having fun” has actually been tested and proven genuine. The Time-Emotion paradox as it is called is the subject of a recent article.
The passage of time seems to vary depending on whether the subject is in an unpleasant or pleasant context. It drags when being criticized by the boss but flies by when discussing with our friends. That is the time–emotion paradox: why given that we possess a sophisticated time measurement mechanism, are we so inaccurate in our temporal judgements when experiencing emotions?
Back when I was staying in the UK and working outside the field of education in a consultancy role I used to find my office days dragging by rather slowly. I thought that this was because I found this type of job less enjoyable but it turns out that there may have been another factor in the Time-Emotion Paradox at play. Another study suggests that spending time surrounded by young faces also speeds up perception of duration;
The present study investigated the perception of stimulus durations represented by elderly faces or by young faces. In a temporal bisection task, participants classified intermediate durations as more similar to a short or a long reference duration. The results showed that the durations represented by elderly faces were less often classified as “long” than the durations represented by young faces.
I always suspected that teaching was the recipe for job satisfaction.
Just answered a request for information on linkedin by a journalist for education.com who is preparing a piece on teaching kids to protect their digital identity.
I explained that I encourage kids to view their online presence as a “brand name” like Nike. They should aim to make sure that everything they say online is consistent with the “brand” that they want to put out there and they should also make sure that nothing they put onto the web could cause somebody (a recruiter/dean/lecturer) to reject their brand in the future.
I proposed some general questions that kids should ask themselves before they post something on Facebook/Twitter/MySpace/Blogs;
How would I feel if my Mum read this?
How would I feel if the guy from Harvard read this?
How would I feel if a prospective employer read this?
I know it sounds a bit joyless to expect young teens to think so far ahead but what a lot of teens don’t realise that for the first time in human history there is a permanent record of what they say to each other.
From the excellent Change.org education blog, Clay Burrell asks why controversial topics are allowed to be touched on in chronologically distant literature – incest in Hamlet and Oedipus the King, underage sex in Romeo and Juliet – while modern literature on similar topics is unwelcome in the school library.
Topics like teen pregnancy, abusive relationships, and peer pressure are exactly the kinds of things we should be discussing with our teensto prepare them for the world which they will face but any literature that is in a modern setting seems to provoke fear in some parents.
From the comments;
We choose to be (un?)witting accomplices to dailycontemporary tragedies by only teaching the ancient, irrelevant ones.
After a recent year back in the UK, I found that my hectic schedule had left me little time to really connect with my two daughters; especially my youngest who tended to be much closer to her Mum. I then remembered the concept of “date nights” discussed in Stephen Covey’s excellent “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. In The Seven Habits, Covey – a father of nine (!!); so I guess he might know what he’s talking about – describes how, when his children where growing up, he took each of them out on individual date nights with just a few simple rules;
1. Your child chooses the activity. (Regardless of how dull you might think it to be.)
2. Only one child comes at any one time. (This is so important; I find that when I go out with both my daughters, my tendency is to allow them to just interact with each other while I allow my mind to drift elsewhere)
3. Only one adult comes. (For the same reasons; if I brought my wife along, I’m pretty sure our attention would be split three ways.)
4. You join in the date with an open mind. (No judgements, no expressions of boredom or frustration – you might be surprised.)
Did it work? It did – and still does – for me. My relationship with my youngest has come along leaps and bounds. I also find that the conversations that you have on the “dates” give you an insight into the lives of your children that you might otherwise miss out on.
In the process of our evenings together, I have discovered interests, fears, and personality quirks in my girls that I might never have noticed in our regular daily household routine. For me, that’s more than worth a couple of evenings every week (although I have no idea how I would work it with nine kids).
I have been having lots of fun with my new video camera recently and created this promotional video for our school’s stand at the recent Education Expo at Botani Square.
As is probably apparent; I am only just getting the hang of the technology, I am using Ulead 11 and am starting to find it’s features a little limiting, plus I only had about an hour on a Friday afternoon to get enough footage. (Just thought I would get my excuses in before you watch the clip.)
From Thursday the 19th to Saturday the 21st of February I had the pleasure of being a facilitator for the Sampoerna Foundation Teacher Institute in Jakarta. We had a great group of educators from as far away as Sumbawa and Kalimantan as well as many from schools around Jakarta.
On the day of the worskhop, all particpants started off by setting themselves up with Google Reader accounts and loading up with feeds from top educational blogs. Everybody also signed up for a Delicious account and we added eachother as a network which allows us to look at the pages and posts that each of us have bookmarked.
I then gave a brief introduction to some of the most important Web2.0 tools including Wikis, Blogs, Nings, Google Earth, Brainpop, and Youtube. Participants then chose a tool that they wanted to investigate further then explored it and reported their findings on our Workshop Wiki.
Participants then brainstormed topics that they planned to teach over the next few weeks. They worked in pairs to create a lesson plan that would incorporate the appropriate tool for the lesson objective. So often I hear teachers saying that they would like to use blogs or some other tool in the classroom; this enthusiasm is great but it is key to remind teachers that it is not about the tool but about how you use the tool. There are so many tools online that for almost any lesson objective, there is a Web 2.0 path to achieving that objective and that certain tools are best suited to certain learning objectives.
We rounded off with a discussion on AUPs (Acceptable Use Policies) and finding the correct balance of empowerment and control in how our kids connect to the internet and to eachother.
The entire enterprise has been a real eye opener for me and has given me an insight into how so many schools are at so many different points on the same road. Despite challenges of budget, facilities, or staff motivation, we are all innovators; the front line in dragging education kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Some of the common issues that many schools are facing included;
“How do we convince senior administrators of the value of Web2.0 in the classroom?”
“Our network administrator blocks Youtube – what to do?”
“Our internet is never fast enough. How do we use these tools without reliable access?” (Been there!)
“ICT is treated as a separate subject, how do we bring it into the classroom?”
It has been a long road for a lot of our teachers and has been a process that has forced us to take a long, hard look at our practices in planning a collaborative curriculum and integrating lessons as we move away from a single subject approach towards thematic inquiry in the classroom.
Achieving the standards necessary for PYP authorization has been an all-consuming task – it will be great to build on this success and start working on some other areas (improving technology uptake across the school, developing our laptop program, developing a digital citizenship scope and sequence) that have had to take a back seat as we have pushed towards certification.
A big congratulations to all the hard-working teachers and school management who have helped make this happen!
A recent study at the Tufts Medical Centre in Boston says that the immune system at birth is like an unformatted computer; it needs to be instructed and the only way it gets that instruction is through being used and tested.
“(Dr. Joel V. Weinstock)… said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they “also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us.”
“Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat. Children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases.”
Although my wife and I encourage hand washing before meals and after bathroom visits, we have always been a little skeptical of the value of an over-sanitized environment. (To our great shame, we apply the deeply unscientific “five-second” rule to food that gets dropped on the floor! You know the one: “If it’s been on the floor for less than five seconds it’s still okay to eat”)
On a similar theme to my post The Science (sic) of Dermatoglyphics; I have been an avid reader of Dr Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science”blog for a few months now. It is an often angry and consistently hilarious weekly Guardian column that exposes dodgy health experts and bad statistics in the UK press (frighteningly, there seems to be more bad science in the national press than accurate data). Over the years, he has taken on nutrition experts, HIV deniers, and the (surprisingly shifty) vitamin industry. He recently won a libel case brought against him by a German vitamin magnate who denounced AIDS drugs in South Africa and persuaded many to use (his company’s) vitamins instead.
The site also contains a link to a small (but growing) section on educational resources. The section starts with a nice explanation for why we should teach good science through debunking bad science;
“Torpedoing bad ideas is the perfect way to teach good science because science is, after all, about critically appraising the evidence for a given claim.”
Over my years in education I have helped choose teachers both for my employers and for my own projects. One of the biggest challenges faced when looking for teachers in Indonesia is the issue of qualification.
As a national plus school where English is the main medium of instruction, we generally try to employ teachers who have studied overseas or at least those that have an excellent standard of English, normally acheived through a degree at a top-end university. The problem for us is that the sort of teacher we want with the level of English and international mindedness we require is rarely the sort of teacher who has studied for the Indonesian Teaching Degree (Akte 4).
A recent article by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker suggests that we needn’t be too concerned about the lack of a formal qualification. Quality of teachers is by far the most important factor in the quality of education at a school ranking above issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, but new research suggests that a teaching degree is no predictor of who will make a good teacher;
A group of researchers… have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
So if the teaching degree doesn’t help us predict which applicants are going to be great teachers, how should we hire? Gladwell has some intriguing ideas;
It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher.
I love this idea! Cost issues aside, the concept of nurturing a group of trainee teachers through a few years’ of apprenticeship during which we decide who has the ability to be a great teacher and during which the trainees also get the chance to decide if teaching is the profession for them. In fact, it is similar to a previous program at my school (since phased out) of taking on new teachers in an assistant role where they had a few years to prove themselves capable of moving into a lead teacher position.
The piece goes on to compare the teaching apprenticeship system to the gruelling process through which big financial firms choose their financial advisors;
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children? Link
