On the other side of the world...

Buh Bye!

2009-07-14T04:19:00.002+08:00

Well, my "fun" with getting the last post up has led me to rather abruptly end my tenure here at blogger.

A number of reasons have me saying goodbye.

1. Wordpress is better.
2. I'm at a bit of a shift in my career, starting off towards a Master's degree.
3. I am presently in the UK - not in HK, as the name of the website would suggest - and I may find myself leaving HK in the next 1-2 years.
4. Maybe with a new start I will be more diligent about posting onto my blog? Heh.
5. If I switch to buying my own hosting space, I only have myself to blame if I don't like the way my blog works.

SO.

Here you go:

http://www.jeffreygene.net

I hope that the three people out there who have subscribed to my feeds will continue to do so at the new site.

Give me a few more days and I should have more up online at the new site.

Oh and - not sure if I'm going to keep on importing the new blog to facebook. I feel a need for a clean break here...

Urban Myths

2009-07-07T07:39:00.006+08:00

Live to you from Bath University, England (national motto: our summer is your winter), I'd like to debunk a popular myth – teachers spend all summer on vacation twiddling their thumbs and picking their noses. Well, that may be true for some / many teachers. But not the great ones. Great teachers got that way because they devoted a significant portion of those vacations to their professional growth, by spending time on their own reflecting and reading up on their discipline and / or at a conference or course with other teachers.

One of my too-honest middle school students told me at the end of the school year, "Mr. Pierce, you're not a great teacher. But you're okay." And I agree with him; I do some parts of the job of classroom teacher darn well, but in other areas I am still woefully inept. And to be adequate is not enough. I want to be a great teacher. So my professional growth for this summer is the beginning steps of a part-time master's degree in International Education from Bath University, starting with two modules: Research Methods this week, Multilingual and Multicultural Education next.

The best sun-bathing weather in England

Here's another urban myth to bury further: those who can do, those who can't teach. From just the one hour orientation session I was jolted awake by all of the different elements that go into an educational experience. There is just SO MUCH that it takes! It's the sort of thought that is always quick to surface whenever I return to the role of a student and start observing a classroom, rather than being the one creating the framework and guiding the flow.

Example Number One: assessment must be fair and standards must be high. Assessment of student work at Bath involves many reviews of marked work to ensure fairness, up to three in the case of a distinction or fail, including one review by an outside examiner's board. Maybe that is standard at the post-graduate level or in the UK, but coming from an American background I was impressed with the pages of detail given to me on Day One about how I'll be marked on assignments I will submit a year from now.

Example Number Two: the little details matter. They jumped out at me from my front row seat…awkward posture, an untied shoe, powerpoints not yet loaded up, presenters who left themselves without a copy of the student handout. None of these small missteps made much of a difference in the end result, my orientation and learning. But I can easily see how there is a point at which the small details would matter, when they escalate into detracting from the learning experience at hand.

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I've had far too many swirling thoughts today to come up with anything else cogent, but there is plenty more to come I am sure. So I'll leave you with a couple of fun vocabulary challenges.

Check out the definition and meaning of the word "cynosure". Seriously how awesome of a word is that?! It's the cat's meow! It's the bees knees! It's the...okay I'll stop. But look them up.

How is a "dispreferred answer" different from a "wrong answer"? (I don't know either but my professor used the term in an article I found via google. She's smart.)

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/8088927@N06/2291156394

PS Did blogger become idiotic since I last posted, or did I get dumber? Because it took me about 30 minutes to find a way to get the post I typed in word into blogger. I had to email it. That's stupid. If I have to keep this up I'm dropping this one and going to wordpress.

I Corinthians 13:11

2009-03-19T23:51:00.003+08:00

Something is going on lately. Not sure what. Been doing lots and lots of thinking over the past half year about The Future. Most of the time, The Future is fun to think about. A new nicer flat. A summer holiday in Europe. A new job. A master's degree in education.

But the problem is when The Future becomes The Present. I've spent the last hour staring at a letter that I've finished which is going to close a door that I had been hoping to go through for some time. Even though I know that I've got a better option in front of me for the next 12 months, even though I've turned this decision every which way for the past month and come back to the same answer every time, and even though I know that I can come back to this same door if I want to in 12 months...this feels odd.

My future for the past month has been completely in limbo, a tabula rasa, my imagination's fun house. But this letter makes that lovely Future a step closer to The Present.

Time to move on with it, Pierce:

"When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me."

On Mobility

2009-03-02T23:58:00.003+08:00

Or, an unexpected benefit to a broken arm.

I've been slowed down quite a bit these past weeks. A horrid missed tackle in a rugby match on January 10 has my left (non-writing) arm in a cast as you can, see wrist to armpit. At time of writing this post, it's been seven weeks and I'm soon swapping the cast for a brace (it's Removable!!! Showers!!!).

It was particularly horrid timing to be forced to move to one-handed typing, what with one hundred student comments to write and semester grades to calculate the week after I put this baby on.

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But now in the new semester, I've gotten back to the joys of creative teaching. Maybe a lot of this has nothing to do with a broken arm and is a sign of getting used to my schedule. After all, I did just finish a semester of one brand new prep and the other two changed significantly from last year. I am also the only returning member of my department, and collaboration takes a long time to develop.

But one aspect of the new semester, my lesson and unit planning, has been greatly improved by the loss of one arm. I've abandoned the computer as much as possible due to how slow I am with one hand. Now I'm doing all of my plans on paper, like I did in the first years of my career. A notebook for each course, full of random scribblings, scratched out lesson plans, and highlighted to-do tasks.

My hypothesis is that now that I'm not planning on google docs I am staying much more focused on my lesson prep. My fingers can't dance away to a website to check out the answer to a random question. I can't write any of the numerous emails I remember I "need" to send. Nor can I take a short break into the quagmire that is Youtube...

It's just my brain emptied onto a blank sheet of paper. A miraculously versatile and efficient tool.

However, lest you think I am reverting to luddism (luddite-ism? is ther a word for this?), you should know that the first draft of this post was written on my cell phone as an unsent text message. Because these thoughts struck me on the walk home, a time when no pen or computer can assist.

"When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver

2008-12-31T11:19:00.007+08:00

A poem about death may seem inappropriate for this season. This is when we make plans, set new goals, convince ourselves that next year, in the New Year, Things Will Be Different.

But today, December 31, is the "death" of 2008. And even though it may seem to be a depressing topic, in this poem about death Mary Oliver displays her amazing ability to infuse wonderment into daily reflections.

I cherish the second half of the poem. Ever since I first read it a few years ago, I knew that I would be returning to it over and over.

Question of the day: What do I want out of 2009?
Answer: I want an amazing year. I don't want to end up simply having "gotten by".

Lastly - even though they're all over the internet, poems are not free. So I've decided to link to a few different sites that have the poem. And also I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND purchasing a collection of Mary Oliver poems. Here's a link - it's worth it.

When Death Comes, Link 1
When Death Comes, Link 2
When Death Comes, Link 3
(they're all the same - just want to make sure you get there okay!)

Teaching & Football, Together at Last

2008-12-26T13:34:00.002+08:00

Earlier this month I read the Malcolm Gladwell article on how to identify / recruit good teachers.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell

A few great quotes. Typical Gladwell - not thinking of anything new on his own, just demonstrating his ability to listen to smart people within a certain field and write about it in plain english.

Basically my own intro to teaching was something like an apprenticeship - two years of working as an "associate teacher", where I was given 80% of a full schedule and also had an assigned mentor and weekly meetings with the other young teachers. It is a much better model than the baptism by fire public school approach.

Also agreed with the point about the unions. They're one (of numerous) reason I don't want to work in US public schools. Teaching isn't really a blue-collar job like most other unionized fields. automatic tenure and the annual increase in salary no matter how well you do your job, bleh. (Caveat - after student teaching, I've not clocked a single minute inside an American school.)

What Gladwell doesn't tackle thoroughly is that the US public system, and teaching in general as a profession, still hasn't figured out a way to fairly implement a different pay structure. There are plenty of failed attempts but to my knowledge not even one success story that's repeatable. One tricky part is side-stepped in the beginning of the article, in the comment that looking at value-added statistics only shows how well a teacher conveys learning that measured by a test. But if you open that door and allow for other areas of expertise, how can you afford the manpower to have a thorough performance appraisal system? The guys watching the video are at the university / district-wide level, not close to the site level.

My prediction is that we'll move towards hologram teachers - great quality courses available online at affordable prices - and that will result in a change in the responsibilities of the adults who work with the students inside the school.

I'm sort of serious about that, too...

Oh and. Happy Holidays to any lurkers out there still hanging on to this barely-breathing blog.

Oh How I've Changed

2008-12-11T08:47:00.002+08:00

A funny "aha" moment this week when I dusted off my resume to touch it up for grad school applications. I'd already worked on it over the summer so it was just an issue of managing space / design.

And to my amusement / horror, I realized that I was still using Times New Roman.

!!!

What a philistine I used to be...

:)

Shanghai Takeaways

2008-09-23T18:06:00.004+08:00

Went up to Shanghai and had another great conference at Learning 2.008.

This time I didn't feel so far behind the learning curve - last year my brain was about to explode halfway through the second day. And this time I presented a workshop. Very similar to what I gave last time at the HK 21st Century Learning. Felt nice to have a standing room only crowd, felt GREAT to have about half a dozen people stick around afterwards to ask more questions / start using their new readers. You can see the notes that people wrote about my preso here (maybe you need to sign in to the Ning first?), and the slidedeck is up here.

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What am I taking away from this? Well, had two fabulous meals - one that cost me 100USD (here), one at a local place that cost all six of us under 50USD.

I found the keynote speakers quite inspiring. David Warlick, Clarence Fisher, and David Jakes were my favorites. Warlick's preso on the future of education was brilliant in every way, from powerpoint to delivery to pacing to energy (it's listed in this post as "Telling the New Story"). Great to see Clarence Fisher in person - I LOVE reading his blog.

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However, it was a bit funny...the whole conference was framed as focusing on the teaching, not on the tools. But most of the takeaways I have relate to the tools. Shoot, even my preso was about a tool that should make life easier for teachers.

The big question in my head is, how do we get to a school full of teachers like Clarence Fisher, where every classroom is organized like the one he describes here?

How does that happen? What does that mean for the school day? More importantly, what does that mean for the curriculum? There are lots of great online learning systems getting rolled out in international schools, and tons of examples of 1:1 laptop schools. But it seems to me that these programs are in some fundamental ways still recreating the structures and hierarchies of a typical secondary school.

Where does participatory culture come into play? Where is the playing field leveled between teacher and student? Where is the school that truly organizes EVERYTHING around the principle that everyone in the building is a learner?

I would love to spend some time reading more of the posts in my reader, going through Warlick's website and scouring it for insight, following Fisher's blog devotedly to see what he's doing in the classroom with these ideas. Unfortunately, given the nature of a full-time classroom teacher's day, I don't know when that time will come.

So that's why I've been looking seriously into going back to the States to spend a year getting a Master's in Education. Figure that's when I'll have the freedom to direct my thoughts towards these big picture questions.

'Cuz right now, I gots papers to mark.

From Learning 2.008: Google Maps Embed

2008-09-19T12:16:00.003+08:00

Up in Shanghai right now, at the Learning 2.008 Conference.

Just going to play right now and see if I can successfully embed this map into my blog.

What is it? It's from Google Maps containing placeholders that I created.

What do I want to do with it? I want to get all of my students in as collaborators on a class map, where we would place important information about people / events in the accurate location.

That's very important for a Humanities classroom. I'll see if I can find a better "finished" Google Map to show what I'd "like" the final product to look like.

View Larger Map

Thanks to Dan...

2008-09-15T19:01:00.003+08:00

...I instantly saw how amazing this was:

Source: http://www.pitchinteractive.com/election2008/

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Anyone who's teaching secondary humanities, please make sure to spend at least five minutes in class (or right before / after) sharing this image with your students.

Why should EVERY humanities teacher use this?

1. If you're teaching American History, and not doing any work on the election, shame on you.
2. If you're not teaching American History, current events needs to be a part of any humanities course. What bigger event is coming up than the fall election?
3. This is an exemplar of how to analyze and represent research data - a staggering amount of it.
4. Unpacking this image is a great exercise in how to analyze a primary source.

This is even relevant to my students in Hong Kong - I am scattering into the curriculum mini-lessons about the US election in my G9 Humanities course to help them learn more about the electoral system of HK, which is probably MORE complicated than the electoral college. AND the amendments to the system are currently a huge item of debate in the legislature / op-ed pages, with major changes proposed over the past two years.

Oh and - if design's your thing - go to Dan's blog and check out everything tagged "design". The guy loves the stuff with an infectious passion.

Reflections on Baby Steps

2008-05-07T21:20:00.003+08:00

Needed to sit down and post these reflections on my presentation now, before it gets absurdly late to do so. Funny how a week back in the grind me in total manic mode. Not that that's a bad thing...

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In prepping for the session, I ended up using Dan's "start with handouts" first tip. I tried to build handouts that had plenty of white space for taking notes, included a few of the key quotes / points from the preso, and were also aesthetically pleasing. Busted out gridlines to make sure everything lined up Just So!

I'd already had the idea to use a sandcastle example to illustrate procedural vs. navigational learning. So when I went to the handout, it just seemed obvious to find a sandbox and slap it on there as a background image. The fact that it was a turtle just made it all that much better. Animals Rock!

I think I overplanned so much on the slides & handouts because I really had no clue what I was in for. And just like in teaching, when you've got a lesson you want to go over really well, you control what you can and cross your fingers about the rest.

Amount of time we're talking about, from researching the preso to building the handout, slide deck, website, and talking it through to my plants? Wow. Gotta be close to twenty hours I reckon.

Another reason I did so much planning was that I didn't know what sort of audience I'd have. Would they be teachers who already dabbled with wikis but wanted more ideas / experience? Or would they be those who are truly fearful of new technology, but were willing to come to a tech conference to try it out?

I ended up having the latter - which meant that they had LOTS more questions than I anticipated, and we needed to spend lots more time going through the specific capabilities / drawbacks of a wiki. Not a bad problem - just meant that I had to go slower and whiz through the RSS section of the preso.

I was really grateful to the IT support staff at KGV, they had a few extra laptops on hand ready to go, which was needed as a number of people in the session didn't bring their own.

Something that fortuitously worked out was that the desks were arranged into pairs. Learning a new tool it is always easier to do when you've got a neighbor to turn to for a quick fix.

I was also glad with how I managed to overcome my nerves. This being the first time I was presenting in front of my peers, I just told myself, "you're about to make ten new friends." So when everyone came in, even though my brain was running through the preso, I shook hands, introduced myself, asked about what school they were at, all that stuff. This also put them at ease with me, giving me a much more responsive / receptive audience.

Why do I think I did a good job? Well, those numbers on my last post should say something. And then when people were leaving, a couple grabbed extra handouts for their colleagues. But what was the best moment by far was the person who seemed to be looking at her handout instead of paying attention to a panel discussion by some BigShots. See, this teacher had excused herself from my session about halfway through - her own laptop couldn't connect to the network, and the pc she was using from the classroom ran out of batteries. I kinda thought it was a polite way of getting out of a session she didn't enjoy. But then, to see her later checking out the handout like she had said she would - sweet.

Although it's possible she was looking up a note she had written to herself on my handout about something completely unrelated...can't let hubris get me too much.

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And of course the big reminder to not get too far ahead of myself was that on Monday I was asked to share some of my preso to the rest of my colleagues. Does it need stating that teachers who have elected to spend a Saturday on a holiday weekend at a technology in education conference are going to be a better audience than a group of fifteen teachers on a Monday afternoon after a long holiday weekend, five of whom are leaving the school at the end of the year, all of whom were told off by the principal first thing Monday morning for not doing the paperwork we're asked to do?

Sigh.

HK 21C Learning: It's Done

2008-05-04T13:20:00.003+08:00

Well, it came and went. My first time to stand up in front of an audience of peers and be granted the gift of one hour of their time.

| View | Upload your own

Here's one way of looking at the preso...by numbers.

28: Number of slides in the deck
4: Number of pages in the handout
20: Number of handouts I brought to the session
5: Number of handouts I came home with
10: Number of people who joined my one hour session
5: Number of people who took an extra handout with them
1: Number of times I saw someone looking at my handout during the panel discussion instead of listening to the Important People on stage
4: Number of static pages I created on a wikispace built just for the workshop
2: Number of static pages I actually needed to build
0: Number of times I presented this to another live person before the actual go-time
3: Key sources of inspiration

9: On a scale of 1-10, how good I felt about the preso.

More detailed reflections to come. Meanwhile, check out the wikispace here:

http://web2babysteps.wikispaces.com/

And to top of yesterday, it ended with a wonderful surprise, something completely unrelated to the preso but completely awesome.

Nice to be on top of the world, ennit.

HK 21C Learning: Almost Ready

2008-05-01T22:15:00.005+08:00

Well, after two online research sessions and two public holidays spent creating a slideshow & handout, I think my presentation for Saturday's HK 21st Century Learning conference is just about finished.

I first posted about this back in February, but it really wasn't until the last couple of weeks that I buckled down and pounded out the workshop.

Titled "Baby Steps into Web 2.0: Wikis & RSS", I'm gearing my presentation at classroom teachers new to / hesitant about using these Web 2.0 technologies. I've designed the session to involve lots of time to mess around with these tools, following the premise that teachers need to be comfortable with using new tools for their own personal learning BEFORE they can use them in the classroom.

I got a lot of help in my thinking from the following three posts:

First, Karl Fisch's great photo of his seven year-old daughter multitasking on a laptop and cell phone provided a perfect visual for a short segment on the digital native / immigrant analogy.

Then, my friend Justin forwarded me Wes Fryer's brief yet cogent piece on how to introduce new technologies to teachers. Provides a nice theoretical framework for the "learn by doing" parts of my workshop.

And lastly, Dan Meyer is the root cause of all my hours spent in front of the computer. Without all of his posts on presentation design to look through, I would not have had anything as aesthetically pleasing and well-constructed as the slide deck and handouts I've (hope I've?) arrived at.

Now's the time to do a few final talk-throughs with the slide deck. Tomorrow I print off the handouts. Saturday, 9.00 AM HK time, it's Go Time.

Coming up soon-ish: the actual preso. Coming up after Saturday: the presentation gets online.

Shakespeare on Facebook?

2008-04-06T16:16:00.002+08:00

Peoples, think with me, please.

7th graders just started to read Romeo & Juliet. Not gonna plow through the whole original text...I've gotta abridge some of it or their brains will asplode.

Skimming through the feedreader last night, found this sentence on LeaderTalk:

The good teacher is encouraging students to create mashups, to build social networking pages devoted to Romeo, to create discussion groups to second guess Juliet, and to figure out why Shakespeare separated lovers in two feuding houses in the first place.

How can I get Web2.0 on Billy Shakespeare? Could I have the students make profiles on Facebook / MySpace? Do we jump into Second Life on this one?

Juliet Capulet, hometown Verona, age 13.
Mercutio, interested in dreams and swordfights.

Or, do I take the profile pages from those sites, pull out the internet cord, and do them the old-fashioned way - pencil on paper?

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Right now my brain is stuck on these three questions:

1. Could this work?
2. How on earth would I assess this?
3. I'm not the first person to think of this - where is it on the web?

(in answer to number 2, seems to me that this needs to be done as we read the play - formative not summative assessment. and number 3 - i guess i just need to be a bit more persistent with my hunting.)

Spring Cleaning

2008-04-06T15:00:00.002+08:00

Maybe there's something in the water, the fact that I've had more than 8 hours of sleep a night for the past four nights, or that I've finally parted ways with whatever flu-ish bug was keeping me down...but I am in the middle of a Cleaning Binge.

OUT:
...two weeks of rubbish, since my maid is on holiday in the 'pines.
...cigarettes - why do they have to be so enjoyable, addictive, and harmful to the body?! if there were cigarettes that didn't poison my lungs i would smoke a carton a day.
...staying up past midnight more than once a week (playing pool doesn't count against this rule).

PACKED AWAY:
...winter clothes - which in HK means anything thicker than a few millimeters and/or long sleeves.
...all those pants & jeans my waist won't fit into anymore. but SOMEDAY i'll lose the inches off my waistline!

DEBATING:
...exercising. i thought that could be my goal for april, to get into a routine, but seeing as it's april 6 and no routine, hermmm...
...whether i should be "friends" on facebook with anyone who has ever called me "mister pierce". frankly it makes me uncomfortable - do these students remember that they've friended a (current/former) teacher? ...then...why am i NOT on a limited profile? sorry, but i don't want to even see a notification that you posted some drunken photos. right now i'm thinking of setting up a separate account that's just for my former students...but that's a tough call to make, as there are a decent number of students i used to teach whom i'm actually glad to keep in touch with and hear from regularly. guess i'm joining a group of folks starting to get fed up with the fact that facebook is everywhere and everyone is on it.

IN:
...a shopping spree to fill out the empty spaces in my closet.
...writing - not just on this blog, but fiction, short stories. there are a few contests out there that give me a clear goal to work towards, and i've still got a few drafts lying around that need finishing up. must admit i'm gutted to find that the Shiva Naipaul Prize, which was my most recent spur for writing, looks to be finished / finishing up.
...reading for fun. since "the wire" finished a month ago, i've yet to start watching another television series (which incidentally has had a positive effect on both my sleep and social life). while i was home sick this week i finished reading "Bone", by Jeff Green - it's a graphic novel, the perfect transition from moving images back to good old fashioned wordsonapage. maybe it's time to reread something from Graham Greene..."Quiet American"?

...and last, but certainly not least:

nine more weeks of Teaching My Ass Off - can't give up on the students, even the ones who have not once tried to do any work in my class. Nine More Weeks. i got this.

Vision of the Future?

2008-03-31T22:28:00.003+08:00

Some thoughts on Web2.0 and how it's helping to professionalize this thing called teaching. Check it.

Jeremy Wagstaff, author of the Loose Wire Blog, just came out with another worthwhile article about the impact that technology is having on education. Don't think that he's saying anything that the edublogoworld isn't, but the fact that Jeremy is picking up on these vibes says a lot. His category cluster on the right hand side of his blog shows that he's NOT part of edublogoland. The largest categories seem to be Software, Security, Internet and Journalism (with dabblings in Luddism and Voting).

You can check out the full article at this link, or you can go right to his blog here.

Especially liked this section:

>>>
Then there are issues with overcoming the traditions and entrenched interests of academia, such as the concerns some lecturers have about their livelihoods if they put all their material online.

Mr. Wiley's response: Adjust to the new reality. He points to the almost "pop star" popularity of some who have posted lecture videos online. Some have boosted class attendance and have raised interest in their courses, while others have overhauled and improved material in the process of submitting it. "What it has done is to expose teaching to peer review," he says (emphasis added).
<<<

Peer Review. Yeah, that sounds fun. A bit scary and daunting, but also full of potential and reward.

Right now, it's the universities that are being directly affected by this. I think that secondary education is still about five years away from facing tough competition from the web. Now, I'm not saying that what's happening on the web right now isn't more interesting than our classrooms. Sad to say that for my students, Japanese prank vidoes on Youtube and "playing Facebook" (to use their wording) is highly engaging, much more so than my mini-lessons on grammar and vocabulary and plot structure.

I'm thinking more that it's not likely that you'll have an activity in class about the development of Ponyboy's character in "The Outsiders" and then a student will walk into class the next day and tell you that your lesson wasn't as good as the one they found online last night. If you think that example sounds far-fetched, go check out MIT's OpenCourseWare site. Don't believe that a freshman could might get so fed up with the lousy lecturer in their Intro to Chem course that they might turn there to find out how to pass their exam? And you better believe that dan's graphing stories lesson is only a long day of work away from becoming a stand-alone awesome intro to linear time graphs.

Speaking of dan, and of peer review, if you're a teacher and you've made it thus far and your name isn't dan or damian, check out this conversation at dan meyer's blog. Want to start that peer review stuff? Raise your hand!

Cute Cats and Porn

2008-03-19T09:27:00.004+08:00

Two seemingly disparate elements of the read/write web that are connected in a wonderful article I just read through.

Can't take any credit for finding it. Decided to clean out some unread items at Bionic Teaching, and this post by Tom Woodward led me to this fascinating article by Ethan Zuckerman about the ways that Web 2.0 technologies are being used to support activism.

Here's the excerpt about porn:

Based on my Tripod experience, I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media - it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test - if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

Cute Cats?

(referring to getting a site blocked) This is a good thing if you’re an activist. Most Tunisians don’t identify as activists and might not be engaged with politics. But, like Americans and Europeans, they’re interested in seeing cute cats being adorable online. When the government blocks DailyMotion, it impacts a much wider swath of Tunisians than those who are politically active. Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones.

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What I'm taking away from this is another reminder that there's a lot of fascinating / eventful stuff happening on the web now. Youtube videos work as a great little reward for a class that has worked hard all lesson, but to be able to receive instantaneous updates from an Egyptian activist via Twitter? That's mind-bendingly / perspective changingly cool.

Thinking out loud, I wonder - How can I get the kids I'm working with NOW, the students who really need language development and organizational skills more than anything else, connected to what else is going on around the world? How can I share with them the excitement of being a part of the global picture while not sacrificing the skills development they desperately need? If they can't write a decently structured paragraph, they can't participate in an online discussion. If they are always losing their homework / notebooks / passwords / thumb drives, how can they be organized enough to have a cohesive online presence?

(I also wonder what the heck is going on with me that all of a sudden I am posting so much more. Not like it was a plan or anything...not like I have more free time now, actually much more involved & overextended at work and at play. Mayhaps it is a result of me actually sticking to them New Year's Resolution-like thoughts...)

Thanks Damian

2008-03-18T22:09:00.006+08:00

Okay, well I think this ain't the first time that Damian has tagged me in one of them memes. The thing is, I'm not that into memes. For one, I tend to not get "tagged" often cuz there's really only two blogs that I've bothered to do more than lurk on - his, Apace of Change, and dan meyer's fantastic math blog. I have an old-fashioned professional learning network - people I trust whom I work with / have worked with in the past.

And for another, I tend to intensely dislike memes. They remind me waaaaay too much of the email forwards I get from middle schoolers. "IF U DON'T SEND THIS ON TO 30 PPL IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES YOU WILL NEVER MEET THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE!!!1!" If you don't get those email forwards, consider yourself blessed.

However there are some other relevant facts: it's 10pm, I've got lots of emails yet to send tonight, and I'm wired on caffeine. So let's start knitting our PASSION QUILT!

Start with some copy & paste la...

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Passion Quilt Meme Rules:
1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.
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So...I kind of ignored the directions. Here's the word I chose to symbolize what I think I think about education at the moment:

CONSTRUCTION

You should check out what that word looks like in different fonts. Personally I picked a bunch at random and gain pleasure from viewing baby kruffy, constantia and pussycat.

However...I am one of those guys who follows the rules, as much as I like to pretend to be a rebel. So here's a picture I like that I found from searching for "construction" in flickr cc:

http://flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/166300185/

I picked construction because...well, did you see what it looks like all-caps in constantia? And that picture is nice. Great snapshot of a journey...incomplete, noisy, smelly, can't see the end...kinda like life, ennit? And construction involves power tools, which are pretty much amazing.

What does it have to do with teaching...well, there's the whole thing that kids have to "construct" their own meaning out of the lessons. I don't buy into that approach wholesale, because in philosophically pure constructivism there's no place for skills development.

And that's a huge part of my job, the skillz. I'm there to help my students hone their skills - linguistic, organizational, social, emotional. I'm working with them to build the strategies they'll have to fall back on throughout the rest of their life. It's like we're on the same construction team, building a classroom full of gleaming high rise skyscrapers.

Another reason I picked "construction" is that I am fascinated with how a school organization is built. It's always interested me to learn how / why decisions are made. And I'm still completely flabbergasted at the awful hypocrisy of institutions built to help children learn can't seem to treat their key employees - teachers and staff - with very much humanity. There's GOTTA be a better way to build an organization than what I've seen in my short career.

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Now, to wrap this baby up. Jeffreygene really doesn't have an online "professional learning network". I'll change the rules again. J-dawg, Kaxmo, Hoov, Justin - you're all teachers in different ways, and you're all awesome. You don't have to do this silly meme. Just read what I wrote and comment, yeah?

But if you don't at least do that...you will get warts on your ring finger in the next year. Really, it happened to my neighbor's cousin's girlfriend's auntie.

False Alarm?

2008-03-16T21:51:00.002+08:00

Well, over the weekend the government hasn't (yet) shut down secondary schools...so appears that my job will continue as usual over the coming weeks.

The day after the primary schools shut down, the headline of the leading English-language newspaper blared, "Disease Experts Claim No Need to Worry!" Apparently the deaths of the past month, while sharing some flu-like symptoms, don't have enough in common to lead the experts to think that there's any reason to worry about a coming bird flu epidemic. Today, the editorial page was full of letters complaining about the shut down / lack of advance notice / etc etc etc.

The general sense now seems to be that the government is engaging in a massive CYA operation. That's CYA, Cover Your Ass. Better to shut down the primary schools for two weeks, let whatever flu-like diseases are out there to wither and die, than to risk there being something dangerous lurking in the unwashed hands of 7 year-olds.

And who can blame them? It's about five years ago that SARS crippled the city (and lots of the mainland as well), and the government got such flack from alleged (or deserved, I don't know as I wasn't here or following it closely) failings during that scary time that Better Safe Than Sorry is the motto.

I was able to scare up some renewed interest from the lil beasties in our class wikispace...if we need it full time, it's there. And heck, dear reader, go over there and make some sort of edit yourself. Or give me some advice about how to spiff it up, get the students more involved on it. Aside from the small minority of lil guys who love me / love computers, the space is not widely used anymore.

And, don't forget to wash your hands! 20 second minimum, get that soap into a lather.

Ruminations on Avian Flu, Day One

2008-03-13T21:44:00.005+08:00

Wonder if any teacher in HK has anything else to say today other than the big news that the schools are starting to close down, in a big way, due to bird flue scares. My phone has been blowing up, with texts from gloating primary teachers to mass updates about the situation from my mobile operator (in Chinese).

Check it out:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7291169.stm

As the article says, all primary schools in the city have closed down effective today through until after the Easter Holiday - next day scheduled for classes is March 31.

However, while our primary colleagues "suffer" in meetings and are busy drinking coffee until March 31, us secondary teachers soldier on with our students. The rationale is that secondary students are more mature / responsible and able to be more hygienic than younger students, thus reducing the likelihood of an infection spreading.

My initial reaction is that I feel cheated - every teacher loves snow days (or in HK typhoon days). Growing up in the Ohio I still remember the thrill of listening to the radio announce school closings, the excitement building until it got to the C's - "Columbus Public, all classes all schools, canceled!" It feels like there's a selective snow day going on here, like the typhoon number 8 signal is raised for primary but secondary is stuck at number 3.

That being said, it would NOT be good news to find out that secondary schools are ALSO closing.

For one, secondary students and teachers would simply be expected to "go virtual" - that's a contingency that my school is in the process of preparing for...a new project that I'm needed to work on, I found out a few hours ago via email. Give me 24 hours, I could get that wikispace back up into shape, and we're good to go. And then...I'm working HARDER to deliver the same 70 minutes of classroom learning per day. I'm getting cramps in my hands from typing a ton, my back and ass are killing me from sitting in front of a compy all day. I get paid the same. I work harder.

AND, while I'm sitting at home or in an empty classroom virtually teaching, the city of HK would go into lockdown mode. I wasn't here for SARS, but sounds like the city became a ghost town. Think investors might think the place is unlucky and shy away for a bit? Think the economy might go into a slide? That's the other reason I'm hoping that secondary schools don't close, because the idea of an avian flu outbreak scares the @#$)(* out of me.

The front page of the paper over the past week has carried the heartbreaking story of a young primary student who caught a flu, went to the hospital, all of a sudden went critical and had to be put on life support, and lastly was taken off of life support two days ago. Sounds like this little guy was a superstar: a real leader, polite and sharp. Every story had a photo of his father and a heroic quote about how the family was "holding out hope" and then later "unable to believe what has happened". I can't imagine how on earth that man is able to face the press. How awful to be front page news like that...

So really, here's hoping that the death toll of this outbreak stays at three. Here's a hope for the status quo to continue.

I'll keep anybody reading posted as events develop.

GOC

2008-03-07T17:08:00.001+08:00

remembered this from dan meyer as a way to spruce up a photo montage...not as a way to teach any kind of learning! so for the guests that visit us tomorrow they get to see this.

Another Project to Work on...

2008-02-24T22:33:00.003+08:00

Clearly I've got my work cut out for me. I may only be 25, but that doesn't mean I can spend the next 40 years loafing around.

Retirement Plans

Next Up...

2008-02-23T16:15:00.003+08:00

Just found out this week about an upcoming conference in HK:

ESF 21st Century Learning @ Hong Kong

(ESF stands for English Schools Foundation, the largest group of English-medium schools in the city; they follow the British curriculum.)

I'm planning on submitting a proposal to lead a workshop there. I've met one of the key organizers, Paul McMahon, at a few other events in Asia, and I've spoken to a small rather informal gathering of tech-minded teachers in HK that he organized last fall. However, I've never done anything like this yet - lead a workshop for teachers I don't know from Adam - so I'm more than a bit hopeful / excited / antsy.

First step is to get my workshop proposal approved, and I've got until March 12 to submit my scintillating ideas. Thinking I'll submit to the "Information Literacy" strand...can't really see the ideas below fitting any of the other strands.

Working title: "Web2.0: Getting the Skeptics Started."

I'd want to share about how I've used this blog and my feedreader as my own individualized ongoing professional development this year. While I've not done a whole lot in my classroom with Web2.0 this year, I've nonetheless learned a ton from lurking around the edublogosphere. So, I could share some practical tips on getting an interested teacher started. Target audience would be the attendees who share my healthy skepticism for all this Web2.0 evangelism going on but aren't ready to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Right now that's not really condensed enough for a proposal, but with a handful of drafts I can see it getting there.

I'd be very very grateful for help vetting my ideas! To the handful of you out there who read my monthly posts, I'm counting on some feedback!

And if I get approval, I will be scouring the "design" tags in Dan's blog...

Happy Saturday! In HK today it is 20 degrees. Celsius. That's like 70 Fahrenheit. I just got back from a run wearing a t-shirt. Why people who have the choice to do otherwise would choose to live someplace that gets below zero just boggles my mind...

"Jimmy Chan"

2008-01-13T21:57:00.000+08:00

I first met Jimmy in a colleague's tenth grade Health class. One of the key tricks in her toolbox is using fictional situations to help students get over the embarrassing parts of her course to move right to thinking through what to do in some tough situations. Jimmy and George and Gloria and Eugene (and a few others) regularly turned up in her class as students who were encountering a typical teenage difficulty. Class discussions focused on giving advice to these "extra" members of class.

Jimmy first showed up in one of my classes when I was stuck for a way to explain the word "taboo" to a class of ninth-graders. "...So there's this kid named Jimmy, and he comes to class naked. That would be 'taboo'. Not to mention instant suspension." Somehow Jimmy often returned our class, albeit still invisible, and still nude. Mostly he came up in those moments when students toss out anything they can think of to avoid the day's lesson. "Mr P, when did you first meet Jimmy? Doesn't he EVER wear clothes? Why are you friends with a naked kid? Isn't that breaking some law?"

Then, at my new school, working with middle schoolers, something changed. Jimmy took on a new life, one that did not focus on a lack of clothing: he became a fully fledged imaginary friend. He grew a last name - Chan - AND a full Chinese name. He's written sample essays for my English classes, but he's still most prominent in lessons on health and relationships in Moral Education. I found out from my students that he has a girlfriend, Gloria Ng. They met outside of a school bathroom. She smokes, but he's a star athlete and doesn't touch cigarettes. He stands up against bullies, but once got a beating for his efforts.

Some of the students here still believe my initial introduction, that he's actually a student at my old school. Jimmy has even been seen a few times, and one day when the students were socializing in my room during a recess they drew his image. Apparently, he looks a lot like the demon from "Death Note".

What's the educational insight from Jimmy Chan? Damned if I can connect him to anything I ever learned in teacher training, or read about on somebody's blog. And I don't think that any of the teacher appraisal systems I've seen have a category on "Makes Up Good Stories" or "Has Extensive Set of Imaginary Colleagues". But despite all that, I think that my ability to bring a class of students with me on an imaginary tale is one tiny part of what makes me effective in the classroom.

Telling stories is all about manipulating the mental space of the classroom. If you can take the kids with you on an imaginary journey to meet this guy named Jimmy, if kids ask you about him in the halls, if they become invested enough in this imaginary friend to draw him on the board during their free time, then something has happened. The collective group becomes willing to try new things in lessons. You gain more power when you ask a class "close your eyes and imagine you're in Feudal Europe." (Post on my four-hour simulation of feudalism coming next...)

So next time you finish a lesson five minutes too soon, introduce your class to a Jimmy Chan. Give them a few broad brushstrokes, let them flesh your friend out. Don't worry - while he is an extra student, he won't add to your marking load...and you just might find that he helps your class learn a few unexpected lessons along the way.

Annual Report, 2007

2008-01-13T18:03:00.000+08:00

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Here's my entry to Dan's design contest: 2007 as viewed through the lens of television.

And here are some thoughts about making these images...

The idea came together when I was miles above the earth somewhere over Siberia. Even though I was seriously sleep-deprived, it instantly made me smile. My graphics don't really pack a whole lot of information into them, but they do tell two different stories - my physical journeys, and my television consumption from the year - and I'm pleased with that.

It was pretty clear to me as I conceived of the theme that I don't have the design skills necessary to make this set of images as sharp as I would wish. I think if I had more data / time / skillz I could have pulled more information into the arc of my story. Knowing that wouldn't happen, I focused on communicating the core storyline. I kept my fingers crossed that my design wouldn't look like something a middle schooler would make, and I think I did manage to do that..barely.

But man, I would love to know how to do something like the first graphic by Mr K; it took me forever on Excel to get the color bands inside the television the appropriate respective size. And what a crappy looking TV...mebbe I should've taken a photo and edited it? What's salving my ego is that I know I've got a clever storyline, something completely different to the other entries.

Well, thanks for another thought-provoking competition, Dan!

Caution: Post May Contain Resolution-Type Substances

2008-01-06T13:27:00.000+08:00

Well, I'm back in HK. And guess it's appropriate to post some type of New Year's Resolution-ish thoughts...it wouldn't have been right to have any resolution-type thoughts while I was still in the US of A, on holiday.

Had a fun return trip...fun if you enjoy not sleeping for about 48 hours and after all that getting home to find that the door to your flat is stuck and won't open. It took an hour for me to find someone to help. The locksmith showed up, busted out some WD-40, and presto! I was home, how anticlimactic.

Slept about 10 hours, through the night, a good sign that my TradeMarked FailSafe Jet-Lag Solution will work. (It's simple - just switch your sleep cycle to the new time zone starting 24 hours before you fly). Woke up and went for a run - how's that for a good start to the new year? During said run, at 8am on a Sunday morning, I had to dodge bazillions of pedestrians, people walking in droves to the HK Stadium. How's that for a welcome back to HK?

I came back and drafted out a nice long to-do list. Four different categories: Pleasure, Pain, Work, and Shopping. I think it'd be a good thing to do, to keep up with those different lists and try to monitor how much I do on each one.

Priority Items for the week:
Work: Mark Papers; Prepare students for Semester Exam
Pleasure: Complete an entry to Dan Meyer's latest design contest.
Pain: Run/Swim twice more this week, Stay Away From Cigarettes
Shopping: Get some double-A batteries. I'm all out!

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I'll be back up in the next week or so to share that entry to the design contest. It's grabbed my brain by the horns and won't let go!

Would you hire this explorer?

2007-12-09T23:18:00.000+08:00

Last month I started a file with International Schools Services (ISS), one of two leading recruiting agencies for (would you believe it) international schools. It's the sort of thing that you have to do if you're thinking about moving across the world, from HK to, say, Luxembourg. Or wherever.

So, here's one of the essays I wrote for that application.

What do you think - would you hire me? What do I sound like?

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Narrative I: Please write a statement describing the personal and professional qualifications and experience you have that will enable you to be successful in an international school overseas. (200-400 words - not to exceed one page)

Name: Jeff Pierce

I often wonder what is different about me, what is special. I grew up in a two-story yellow-brick house on the north side of Columbus, Ohio, spent my summers playing baseball, my autumns rooting for the hometown football team, and winters indoors shooting hoops. But then at 20 years old I crossed the Atlantic to volunteer at an orphanage in Morocco, and two years later I went the other direction, across the Pacific, to begin my teaching career at an international school in Hong Kong. And I’ve done very well overseas, adapting quickly to two very different settings and to lifestyles completely foreign to anything I experienced growing up. What personal qualities have helped me to not only survive but thrive in an international setting? Wow, what a question…

The short answer is that I’ve always been an explorer. I’ve always wanted to find out more. The same impulse that caused six year-old Jeff to pick up rocks to see what new creature would scurry away also made it hard to say no to an offer to move across an ocean. That spirit of exploration sustains me, making every day in a foreign country an adventure, a chance to taste a new food, learn a new word or make a new friend.

And that same spirit of exploration drives me forward in my professional pursuits. No lesson is ever the same the next time you teach it. Every class has its own special character, every student responds to the class dynamic and to the texts in a unique way. How could an explorer not love this job?

In addition to the ever-changing classroom dynamic, teachers must be life-long learners. In four years on the job, I have participated in the following diverse workshops / trainings: a creative writing course for teachers, the Klingenstein Summer Institute for promising young educators, an Understanding by Design workshop led by Jay McTighe, MYP Level 1 Training in both Humanities and Language A, and the Learning 2.0 Conference, exploring the future of technology in education.

While I love all the new adventures both overseas and in the classroom, I do all this without forgetting that I am paid to teach my students, that they have skills they need to acquire. My job is quite simple: help my students become better learners than they were when they entered my class in August.

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PS I'm a bit antsy about posting this - don't want a potential employer / ISS / a dishonest teaching rogue to find this page and get into any sorts of complications. I suppose that probably somewhere in the fine print of my application to ISS I might have easily signed off on being allowed to republish this essay in any format.

But...what is the point of the interwebs if I can't share this online?!

Middle School / Sex Ed

2007-12-09T22:56:00.000+08:00

All I'll say regarding an apology for being quiet so long is that, like so many other teachers, I've just not been making the time to sit down and reflect on what's going on.

But then on Friday I wanted my 7th graders to spend some time reflecting on what I'd taught them in Moral Education about Sex and Relationships. And, the best way to get 18 twelve year-olds to do something quiet like write or read for an extended period of time is for the teacher to do it, too. So, I sat down with them to write out my own reflection on the unit. Here it is.

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I learned...
"Normal is different for everyone." That's the main point of a sex-ed video we watched together, and it really is true. Some of these 7th graders are already acting out on their crushes and dating and kissing, but they won't hold hands in school. The 8th graders, well, are some of them experimenting with anything further than that? Probably. 6th graders...wow, they're really still in primary, still for the most part oblivious to it all.

Another eye opener is how much talking about sex embarrasses them. Can't get through a single lesson without at some point the class dissolving into laughter. I will never forget about the stories they came up with when I introduced our two imaginary classmates, Jimmy Chan and Gloria Ng, so that we could talk about specific situations without putting anyone on the spot. The students decided that they met outside of the restroom. Huh? Then, there was the time I asked them if they thought that Jimmy & Gloria should think about having sex. K__ shouted out at the top of his lungs "YES!", then fell out of his chair because he was laughing so hard.

But they aren't just embarrassed in front of the opposite sex. For about 20 minutes one lesson we split into boys and girls, and the boys went nuts. One of them brought up masturbation - in Canto slang, "shooting the airplane". The whole 20 minutes was spent with them laughing and making "firing" motions from their crotch.

I have to come to the conclusion that with this age group, there's really no possibility of a serious conversation about sex, at least not in a group setting. The point of the unit needs to be to give them answers to the questions they aren't willing to ask in front of their peers, or, as Doc J, my 12th grade religion & moral ed teacher always said, "Give answers to the questions they aren't asking yet".

In their journals, and one on one, they're willing to ask more of the questions that they won't share in front of their peers. We're moving on from sex ed to other topics - right now it's something brief on families - but I'll always let them ask questions about the topics we've already discussed. So I'll wait and see if any of our previous topics, like smoking or drugs or sex ed, come up throughout the rest of the year.

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To any readers - what do you think? Does my approach sound right? Do you have any recollections from middle school, that twisted and confusing time, that jibe with what I'm saying here?

Cheers!

Venturing Online...

2007-10-04T21:27:00.000+08:00

[cross posted on "b209", my students' online presence]

Just wanted to put out a short post about what has been happening in the two weeks since I started this online project with my students.

After I gave a lecture on technology, and challenged my students to 1) update our class wikispace daily and 2) find and post links to other schools / resources related to our topics of study in history, they've really taken off. A couple of enterprising / click-happy 7th graders added some great main pages to the wikispace ("What did we do today" and "The Wikipedia"), and the whole wikispace is getting about over a dozen updates a day.

I'm not sure how much longer the novelty of a class webpage will last, so I'll be investigating a way to invigorate the project with something new towards the end of October. Seems like many edublogging teachers give their students their own blogs, or connect their class with someone else on another side of the world, but I think that is a project best saved for the new semester as it would entail lots of time on my end to set up. And after all, this web stuff is really just a supplement to our regularly class activities.

For now, I'm going to let me students know that I'm sending an email to all of their parents so that parents can check up on their children's homework nightly. Think that might reduce some of the edits, as some of them are a bit frivolous, but I also hope it will make the students take the project more seriously as they realize that these pages are posted on the whole web, for everyone to see.

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Also, I wanted to share on this post the resources for my technology lecture that I gave last week. Hopefully below the embedded slideshare will work and you can see the slideshow. And I'm also uploading a copy of the handout I gave, and including a copy of the original class slideshow in case it's useful to any other teachers out there. Student Handout

The credit for the ideas comes from the Learning 2.0 conference on technology in education I attended in Shanghai last month. Three sessions stood out to me and greatly contributed to what I shared with my students. First, there was Alan November and his phenomenal lecture on "Teaching Zack To Think". But I was equally impressed with two teachers from South Island School, Ian Williamson and Kieran Ryan, because of their thoughtful models of how to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies into the classroom. And the question that got my presentation going was from Gary Stager, on Ten Things To Do With a Laptop. All the links above go to the discussion pages from these workshops, on the Ning website. The conference was truly interactive, a great experience that will probably and unfortunately set the bar way too high for all my professional development in the future.

Well. Thanks for coming by and reading up on this!

Zeus on ADHD

2007-09-18T20:29:00.000+08:00

Let me say a huge thank you to everyone who was kind enough to read and/or respond to my widely expansive thoughts about "What Comes Next".

First a clarification about "jeff" and "happiness". Then comes a few teaching thoughts.

My mom wondered why I was writing about "happiness" and not something more lasting like "joy". Mom, guess that's the part of the book I didn't summarize...great eye for detail in picking that out!

Basically, Gilbert sidesteps all of the semantics and uses the word "happiness" in a completely subjective sense: happiness is whatever an individual defines as bringing them pleasure. Ironically, by defining happiness as subjective to the individual, that's the only way that psychologists can conduct experiments on it. (Okay I'll stop going down this rabbit hole...sorry...) To me: happiness = what will bring me the most lasting fulfillment. Which is why I've started to exercise more & eat less rubbish food. And think seriously about my future.

The current thoughts on "what's next":

This weekend I started to feel the flip side of the enjoyment that comes from toying around with all these ideas...something like the ants-in-your-pants, about to get on a long plane flight sort of restlessness. Except in this case, the anticipation is going to rise and rise for the next few months, because I really think the smartest thing to do is to keep as many options open for as long as possible.

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Well. On the teaching front, my brain is exploding. Yesterday, I made this website. Okay for a first draft of a course website. But I just can't stomach it as a main page...perhaps that's partially thanks to Dan for always harping on about design being a part of a good teacher's toolkit. Wikispace may have a great function...but it's design is blech, like it's aimed at the Blues Clues audience.

But on top of general gut reaction, today I found this, and this, and this, all amazing course websites. So as soon as I get a chance, I want to scrap that first draft.

And then I kept on clicking links I found at the Learning2.0 website. Infowhelm? Man, 48 hours up there was such a rush. 8 sessions, almost 200 total presentations!!! Check out what Kim Cofino wrote - why try to summarize it when she did such a fab job?

I found tons of great links, like this, and this, and this. And I put the links and notes I think about each of them into one or both of these two software programs: Microsoft's OneNote, the Zeus of Post-it's, and Personal Brain, the poster boy for ADHD mind-mapping.

And...

...then it was time for class. Crap, forgot to make photocopies!!!

PS. J-dawg: wai, write your comments onto my blogger page, not on facebook la! it makes me feel better if more people can read what you say...

Option Three: What's Next

2007-09-13T23:16:00.000+08:00

First, let me preface with some bullet points from "Stumbling on Happiness", by Daniel Gilbert.

+People make their decisions about the future trying to maximize their future happiness. This is why you don't eat McDonald's every meal, even though it tastes so damn good.

+People are horrible predictors of what their future selves will enjoy. And Gilbert is not talking about those mornings you wake up groggy & hungover, look at who's next to you in bed, and say wtf, but the times you buy a heavy metal poster at the store thinking it is the best thing since sliced bread only to take it home and realize it doesn't fit in with your Ikea decoration scheme.

+Even after being made aware of WHY you are going to make bad predictions about the future, even after hearing in detail all of your imagination's blind spots, and the fascinating experiments that reveal said blind spots, you are still going to make bad predictions.

+There is no magic cure, no 12 step program, to coach / train your brain into NOT making these mistakes.

My consolation: I figure that I would be pretty happy with 90% of the "future selves" I have conjured up over the past few months.

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Now I'm going to get visual with this post. And of course, with my male left brain, this means I am going to bust out some charts. Later there will be bulleted lists: yessssss!

A rather confusing mind map, created via Personal Brain*, centered on the thought, "What's Next":

Organized by geography, my future self seems to have a few simple options, spanning the whole freaking globe:

I. Stay in HK
II. Back to USA
III. Go Someplace New

Then throw in all the different professional options...

A. Teach Middle School
B. Teach High School Somewhere
C. Get a Master's in Education
D. Learn Cantonese
E. Write!

...add in all the mixing and matching, leaves you with...like...way more than 20 choices! (better or worse than this?)

I + A = stay where I am now, at a very young school, a great place for challenges & opportunities & growth
I + D + E = attractive life on easy street that I don't think my protestant work ethic gene will allow...(plus the devil would take my idle hands and bring about a holocaust ala Heroes)
I/II/III + A = a return to a style of teaching I miss, with students who are capable of (for the most part) controlling their hormones / impulses and able to concentrate (to some degree) on the task at hand
II + C = the next rung on the career ladder? don't have a master's in education...have toyed with the thought of going for administration / doctoral work...but just not feeling ready for that much commitment to school, not now...
I + A + C = figure out a way to get some release time from my job while maintaining a visa and take online courses / enroll at Hong Kong U
III + D = move away from the largest city that speaks a language = not the most sensible way to go about it
III + E = the next Bruce Chatwin? (minus the whole AIDS thing I hope)
III + anything = another cool place to learn about and explore

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As I type this, I think that part of my "wrestling" with these future choices is simply a form of mental masturbation. Because damn it sounds so cool to do lots of these things.

This very moment? I am leaning towards I + A for next year, then the two years after that doing I + A during the school year and II + C over the summers at Columbia's Teacher College.

Thoughts from my four (more?) readers? How is a young man to deal with all the cool ideas he can cook up? How to choose?!?!?!

...........................
*Personal Brain = very useful tool, great for mind-mapping and for all those random links that you don't want to forget about but will get lost if you just pop them into your bookmarks or delicious...big downside: it costs 175 USD. pissed i got hooked on it before i knew about the pricetag...so you've been warned if you click here to find out more.

time flies like a banana

2007-09-11T20:57:00.000+08:00

So...what to put into this post that has been sitting around for a long time...

Option One: a short summary of all the work I've been doing lately, both the rewarding & frustrating, as well as the very pleasant Real Life activities I've diverted myself with, ending with, "well it's a school night & i'm an old soul so time for bed!"

Option Two: explain in detail my goals related to Technology and The Intertubes this year, how I want to use it in my class, and my hopes for the upcoming Learning2.0 conference in Shanghai. (still have to finish those sub plans for Friday...eeek!)

Option Three: the road less traveled? ramble about the different career / life options i have facing me, with a contract to be signed or not by end of january. This post would be interrupted by at least one tangent towards "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert, a fabulous fabulous book if there ever was one.

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First to reply with a choice, one two or three, within a week I'll have a post up for ya. (If anybody's still listening, that is. I have no idea how Dan pulls it off...are there 25 hours in the day on the west coast?? HK doesn't sleep, but I sure need to.)

A bit of an Overload...

2007-08-23T20:23:00.000+08:00

Well. Tonight I sat down, thought I'd try to widen my blog-reading-horizons a bit. Since I teach such a large number of mother-tongue Chinese students who are at varying stages of language acquisition, I thought it'd be smart to look around for other blogs on that subject. And while I was looking around on the web, why not try to find some sample wikis? Everyone's talking about them, and my admin is very supportive of any new initiatives.

Whoa.

Gonna take me a while to sift through the buckets and buckets of information I just found...and all from just one simple starting point.

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And in the meantime:

...one more working day before the students arrive in full force
...my classroom has nothing on the walls
...all my books and papers that are still strewn about into my idiosyncratic piles
...i suppose i gots lots more planning to do
...i do intend on having a life as well.

So with that - gonna get my add-addled brain off to the pool where it can shut off for 40 minutes.

A Creation Story

2007-08-18T17:47:00.000+08:00

Day One. How do you begin the year?

(you can find this post on the Firstday Wiki as well, under history.)

Once there was a teacher who moved to Hong Kong. This is the story of the lessons he taught in the first week of class. In creating these lessons, he stood on the shoulders of a giant of a history teacher. (That's how a lot of stories about great teaching begin, by the way.)

His job was to teach English and History and Religion to a room full of 16 year olds. 80 minutes of every day, they were together.

And this is how it started.

"Our first unit is about Native American Culture. History, Literature, Religion, we'll study all of it. Ready to get started? Good. Here's a story. It’s called the Walam Olum. You need to share your interpretation with the class. Get into pairs or groups of three. You’ve got fifteen minutes."

"Mr. P...there are no words on this handout."

"Oh, right, I left them out. I thought that would force you to be creative. Get started!"

"Mr. P, what about a syllabus?"

"You'll get that later. C'mon, let's go!"

And on the first day, there is Instant Engagement.

After the students have shared their interpretations, and the teacher has shared the "real" story behind the pictures, it gets Personal. As they leave the classroom, they are given a blank non-lined notecard. The teacher looks each of them in the eyes, shakes their hands one by one, and thanks them for coming. "I've got one favor to ask of you. It's important. Please bring this notecard in tomorrow with four pictures that tell your own personal creation story. Oh - and don't put your name on the card."

When the sun rises on the second lesson, the notecards are traded around the room. "On the back of your classmate’s notecard, please write down your interpretation of the story. Then get into groups of four and share your interpretations; the author of the story also gets to share!"

As the class adjourns on Day Two, the students have a good idea of who their peers are, they've been constantly engaged, and they're still not quite sure what this young teacher's deal is.

And if any of them forgot to bring in their homework on day two, they've learned that this guy doesn't assign pointless homework assignments. “If I ask you to bring something in, it's because we NEED it for the lesson. Yes that's right, go sit in that isolated desk until you finish the homework you were supposed to have done.”

Translator’s note: this homework policy is Easier Said Than Done. Many sources indicate that this teacher often is unable to stick to his preferred policy.

On the third day, the teacher finally relents and passes out a piece of paper that says “Syllabus” on the top. The front side looks familiar, with bullet points and a few percentage signs. But the back side is just like everything else that’s happened so far in this class, definitely not what the students are expecting:

Expectations for Each Student Can Be Summarized by the Following Hopi Sayings:

“Don’t Go Around Hurting Each Other”

“Try to Understand Things”

Then the teacher asks another one of those annoyingly open-ended questions: “Try to Understand Things. What skills did we use while we were Trying to Understand the Walam Olum?”

In the following discussion session, the teacher will make sure to touch on the following key points:

Interpretation of text

Collaboration

Primary Source Analysis

A quote from the teacher is relevant here:

“I've used a variation on this activity twice, once each year I taught that course. Since then, I've discovered that the Walam Olum is believed to have been fabricated in the 19th century. And that just makes it better! Just save the truth of the story for later in the unit - how does that shocking revelation not dovetail beautifully with the sad story of 19th century Native American history?!”

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Folks - anyone have any questions? comments? kudos? ...candy?

Hope you enjoyed the reading, because I loved the writing.

Good Luck Teachers!

off the cuff

2007-08-13T22:30:00.000+08:00

listening to: my usual GapKids in-store muzack.

what i'm thankful for: the times when my administrators remember that i am a learner as well as teacher, and get me up and moving / involved in what could otherwise be a two-hour butt-numbing session. and that amazingly comfortable pair of boxers i will never part with, for the sessions that do attempt to meld my butt to a plastic chair.

what i'm going to do RIGHT NOW: sleep.

4 Slide Sales Pitch

2007-08-10T08:25:00.000+08:00

Okay, so here is the design brief again, from dan meyer:

Instructions

Design your slides. Use Keynote, PowerPoint, Photoshop, a discarded tray liner from Whitecastle, whatever. Just keep the size below 1920×1080, a constraint which will affect none but the most diehard designers.
E-mail your name and blog address (if applicable), to dan [at] mrmeyer [dot] com. Attach your slides.
Post any reflections on the process in the comments below.

And here is my submission to the contest:

What a fun thing to do! Very challenging task, only given four slides and one week and really no design training or experience. It was fun to try to think of what to choose for each of the slides.

The idea of maps popped into my head, ending with some kind of twist on "Here Be Monsters". And rather than try to encapsulate all of what I do and love and is on my facebook profile, I just aimed to produce a flashier illustrated version of my resume.

I couldn't find a decent map image of Morocco, so that made my choice for slide 2 easy. And I haven't agonized over the copy the way I would have liked to...nor did I really spend a lot of time choosing the fonts. But I did spend one evening manipulating Google Earth so each of the images was just right.

But hey - maybe I can give myself a break if I don't think this is perfect. After all, I am in week one of pre-term meetings. That whole thing called a "job".

Demons of a Young Teacher

2007-08-05T12:27:00.000+08:00

Today is the eve of goin back to school, sort of. Tomorrow is the first day of a week of pre-term meetings, followed by two weeks of teaching a jump-start program for some of our weaker students. The real D-Day, when the invasion of students will begin in full force, isn't for three more weeks from today.

Nonetheless, I'm feeling the jitters, the adrenalin, but it's not the students I'm worried about. It's the Teaching Demons.

"History often repeats itself", they say. With that in mind, I reckon I'll bump into some of the following 'Acolytes of Hell' over the course of the year.

The Demon of Overwork:
Planning out units, daily lessons, marking homework, leading a service club and attending committee meetings haunts both dreams and weekends.

The Perfectionist Demon:
Won't let you half-ass any of the above tasks, and when you DO half-ass something, an inevitable occurrence until God extends the day to 25 hours, your confidence as a competent professional slides down the drain.

The Procrastination Demon:
Traps and snares with the temptation to explore the interwebs a bit longer, "just to look for a better way to teach that unit on the Crusades...". What a forked tongue this demon has, you think, as you find yourself clicking on yet another standup comic on youtube at 11.30pm, your lesson plans nowhere close to finished.

The Rubbish Diet Demon:
This demon works its way into your soul as you drink more and more coffee to cope with consecutive nights of less than five hours of sleep. Then it craftily replaces the FDA-approved Food Pyramid with the following food groups: caffeine, nicotine, sugar and "whatever takes the least amount of time from preparation to clean-up".

The Demon of No Life Outside of School:
This hellspawn's name says it all. And then you end up saying, "I'd love to go out tonight but..."

Do note how the Teaching Demons work in concert with one another. I believe that the 'Agents of the Evil Headmaster' are the true cause of what teaching professionals term "burnout" but is perhaps more better recognized by its various symptoms such as exhaustion, depression, nervous tics, pulling all-nighters, temporary insanity, and seizures at the sight of a pile of marking.
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Folks, the one thing that keeps me irrationally optimistic about the upcoming school year are the Guardian Angels of Teaching. If you've any experience working with kids and you've read this far, please comment with the names & blessings of any of these benevolent beings.

Design Contest - Yay!

2007-08-04T14:37:00.000+08:00

In response to this post by dan meyer, who continually comes up with stimulating thoughts.

I skimmed his post, went about my morning, and came back home still chewing on how to fit who I am into four slides. That's the mark of a good post!

Mind you, not sure how much of the credit dan deserves - after all, the university of chicago came up with the four-slide idea. But once I saw the word "contest", my y-chromosomes delivered a command my brain can't ignore: "win!"

I've got my doodle topic for the upcoming week of pre-term meetings set. Hope that anyone who reads this post will think about entering as well! What a fun challenge.

Thanks, dan!

-jp

Learn Before You Leap

2007-07-28T20:44:00.000+08:00

Well, so much for twice a week posting. Guess that's the summer for ya! I've been keeping busy with...well, television shows, a bit. Took a break from the city over a weekend, spent some time out on Cheung Chau Island, love that place.

Anyways, today's topic, "learn before you leap", is related to my growth as a Technology

Now I have no technology training, and I'm not sure if I have any particular qualifications to teach the subject other than being logical and as a male holding the belief that I have an innate ability to Solve Problems by Tinkering with Stuff. Last year my principal asked if I would help to teach the technology courses, and I found myself with half a teaching load of middle school technology. I threw myself into the task, loved it, and am teaching more of it this coming year.

Teaching International Baccalaureate Technology for middle school focuses on this thing called the "Design Cycle". Basically the idea is that you can use the steps of the Design Cycle to solve any problem you encounter, to complete any task, from making a website to baking a cake.

Below is the image of the Design Cycle by IB - key is how they've presented it as a cycle, the steps are things you go back and forth through, not just check off a list.

It's the sort of thing that sounds simple, right? Maybe too simple...I found it hard to really teach my students to Investigate thoroughly, and to be able to use each of the steps when they were needed.

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Well, after this weekend, I think I finally "get" how to use the Design Cycle.

Why? Because I caught myself using it.

I had a problem I couldn't solve: add a photogallery to a website. So first I Investigated: I searched for other examples on the web, having to refine my search a number of times to find the best possible formats for my photogallery. And as I searched, I crossed off possibilities from my list of potential solutions (Evaluate). At the end, I had two options. I Evaluated each of them, found one of them had a key defect, and chose to pursue the other option.

Still left in my mini-Technology project is the implementation of the chosen solution; I can already tell from skimming the site that I will need to install two new programs before I can upload photos (guess that would be Planning). And once I have the programs downloaded, I need to learn how to use them (Investigate again). At the same time, I will need to Design the way I want the photogallery to look; no point in learning how to make a slideshow if I don't think that will look good in the overall Design.

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Reflecting on how I'm completing this project is also leaving me with more ideas about how to teach the Design Cycle. Last year, I gave out a few big projects that had every step of the Cycle included; kids couldn't help but approach it like a checklist.

I see now that each of these steps is not really a big phase; they are more like umbrella categories that have lots of small skills inside of them. For example, refining keywords as you search the web is an important skill for Investigating. Evaluate is not a one-off end of project task; it is kind of like opening your eyes as you swim to make sure you're not veering off the mark, or checking your watch as you train for a 5K.

Musing out loud...technology is still fundamentally a project-oriented class, where real-world solutions / creations are the focus of the curriculum. So perhaps I'll aim to teach these smaller skills in bite-sized openers to lessons, then let students spend the rest of the time on their project.

Also, this is definitely a case where a teacher Thinking Out Loud could be very beneficial for students. Modeling use of the Design Cycle = key.

Maybe I just typed out the outline of that Think Out Loud lesson, huh?

:)

Thanks for reading,

-jeff

PS Click here to see my other site. Not close to professionally done, but I've done my best on it. And, the photogallery is as of July 28 not up there, is it. Still gotta implement my chosen solution.

On Moving Images

2007-07-13T23:55:00.000+08:00

I started to write up a comment to Dan's blog, and then it suddenly got really long. So I wondered if "bletiquette" (blog etiquette? I think it sounds funny...probably someone more of a dork than me has already invented a word for this...) would necessitate putting said long comment onto my own blog.

On Moving Images. You ought to read the background to this post - dan has posted a really interesting video here, and written a response to some of his comments here.

Now, I don't know about US English standards (only did my student teaching in the land of the free, left right after that), but in the UK moving images (media of any and all size / shape / form) is now a part of the national English curriculum. (However while I'm literally on the other side of the world, in Hong Kong, I work at a school that basically gets to make up whatever curriculum it wants. I think we're part of WASC: Western Accreditation? Something? Schools? Coalition? Company? beats me.)

This doesn't mean English teachers are supposed to show the film of "To Kill a Mockingbird" while reading the novel, and tell the kids how the movie is "wrong" because it isn't the same as the book. It means that films, television, commercials, even videos found on youtube, is a form of media to analyze as seriously as any other form of literature, like a novel or play or poem.

Dan makes a strong case for using the film because it helps him to "surprise" his students. And that's true. Since this film will seem cool to the students, since it is from youtube and humorous, that all helps a teacher in relation to the thin-slice (love that analogy dan) we could call "teacher understands students and their culture".

But using a film like this, using a different media, in any class, no matter the subject, isn't that just sound teaching? Information sticks in the brain when it arrives in multiple varieties, multiple forms. Giving the students some kind of anticipation guide, pausing the clip, asking them to talk to a neighbor, not showing the ending and watching it a second time - that would be a GREAT use of a period.

And...information sticks in the brain the MOST when you have to do something with it, so that makes Christian's idea of having students film their own clips a good one. In theory. But a film project is not something to be undertaken lightly, to be handled in anything less than a full-on unit. I'm thinking around four to six weeks to do it right. I had a fabulous set of students for a fifteen hour summer course, and we spent about a third of the time on how portrait photography - check out the amazing project we took part in, the 100 People Project - I'll post more later. If you take a decent skim through dan's posts, you'll become aware of how important tiny details can be when it comes to presentations / media design. Making a thirty-second short film involves an awful lot of specialized skills, all the way from storyboards to the camera work and ending with syncing up music & editing.

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Dan - you wondered earlier why you got so many posts on a blog entry over a weekend? Well I am writing a lot more now because I am on holiday. During the school year, I have no energy to do this kind of thing, to read a lot of cool thoughts on teaching and write my own ideas down. But right now, just because my students are gone, doesn't mean I'm not thinking about teaching every day.

Guess next I'll write about...the 100 People Project. Jolly good show, that.

Why the difference between 11 and 16 is bigger than 5

2007-07-11T20:34:00.000+08:00

Over lunch a friend asked me, “Knowing what you know after teaching your first year of middle school, what would you have done differently? If you could somehow send a message back to yourself in July 2006, what would you say to help yourself prepare for the year differently?”

My immediate thought was that I should have told myself, “You’re in for a wild ride, bucko, so just get ready to deal.” (The school I joined last year is attempting to do a LOT...I have plenty of interesting educational tidbits to share on this blog.)

But then I thought it over, and I think it would have helped me to I think the one piece of advice that would have helped me the most this year was, “Pretend you are entering your first year of teaching.”

Because I went into the year thinking that I knew what I was doing. Sure, I’d never taught middle school before. But I’ve got two years of high school under my belt. And about ten years of doing volunteer work with middle schoolers? Of course I was ready for the year!

What’s the difference between teaching a 16 year old American History and teaching an 11 year old Roman History? I thought it basically boiled down to covering less content, assigning shorter essays, making tests less difficult. Maybe have a few more “fun” classroom activities, a couple of projects like “turn an everyday household item such as a shoe into a model of the Colosseum”, that sort of thing. And phase out from my vocabulary the five dollar words and the twenty dollar sentences, and all obscure references to Abraham Lincoln.

The word “hubris” should have been scrawled in the margins of my planner last August…heck, it should probably just float around behind me, like one of those bad-luck rain clouds.

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“Pretend I am entering my first year of teaching.” See, those ideas up there are alright, they’re on the right track. But that doesn’t mean that I knew what I was doing, that I could walk into a middle school classroom and teach with confidence and expertise. I don’t know if there’s really any other way to truly learn how to teach than to just get out there and do it.

So this past year, I just did it. I planned a lot at first, leaving work at 8pm, coming in on weekends. And I would typically find that after one or two lessons I needed to completely redo my plans for the rest of the week, because I had not realized the students didn’t know how to sit next to the opposite sex without someone committing an act of physical violence, or that the article I had photocopied had five words per line that they didn’t know, or that half of the students didn’t know any way to take notes other than “copy down everything teacher puts on the board in any random fashion”. Every lesson, every week, I found something new that I hadn’t realized they didn’t know. I found all kinds of skills they didn’t have, in all kinds of areas…skills I took for granted when teaching 16 year olds, skills I had “known” middle schoolers wouldn’t have; but I didn’t truly realize how their absence would affect my teaching.

I like to think I know a little bit more about teaching middle schoolers now. (I’m saying this cautiously, aware of the floating neon sign, flashing “hubris”, above my head.)

Middle schoolers cannot do some things. They don’t: have long thoughtful discussions with some degree of abstraction / nuance, sit still for long, consistently act mature. If they are shy, you would sooner find your lost contact lens in a swimming pool than get them to speak up. Just turn off the fans, ask your question again, throw an eraser at the boy in the back who is now practicing kung fu on his neighbor, and hope that the poor child has the courage to repeat their sentence.

But once a guy like me who loves to ramble has dealt with the fact that he won't be able to make any comparisons between Spartacus and Malcolm X (or even Professor X), there's a lot of great things about working with middle schoolers.

The age group seems to display some wonderful traits. They can: come to class every day with a positive attitude; be extremely supportive of their peers (although five seconds later they are capable of turning around and being downright nasty); display an amazing curiosity and willingness to try out new activities. And, they don’t seem to worry too much about their marks. The letters “SAT” only describe what they did after they entered my classroom. This was such a breath of fresh air after working at my previous school.

True anecdote: yesterday I bumped into a student I used to teach at the grocery store. While his mother was checking out, he came over to talk to me. He's going to be a junior next year. One of the things he asked me: "C'mon, Mr P, tell me - what did you get on your SATs?" What was the score I got on some bloody test I took one cold winter Saturday seven and half years ago. Pretty soon kids won't know that the thing was out of 1600 once, so I can tell them some bs about how you can't compare the tests anymore.

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Well. I’d better stop this post before it becomes a novel…probably already too late.

I’ll see if I can get one post per week up here…would be nice if I could write up two of them, seeing as I am not doing much else right now aside from swimming regularly and watching at least four episodes of House / Prisonbreak / Lost / Six Feet Under per day. (but not of each series - that would be a lot of television, even for a summer holiday.)

Cheers!

holding pattern

2007-07-05T22:27:00.000+08:00

It’s been about a week since I finished my last day of teaching, and I love love love having free time. I’ve been able to go down the list of “things to do when I can relax”, the list that I usually add add add to during the school year and never start chipping away at until my holidays.

Thoughts on education.

Maybe I could start at the beginning. Why am doing this? Why am I a teacher?

(I typed out some of answers, and they were boring and/or cliche.)

So....how about just some snapshots of the year, the highs and the lows?

(The lows sounded too melodramatic, and I never got around to the highs.)

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Guess this is the post that wasn’t. I would like to be able to write something cogent and organized and thoughtful (with subtle wit) about my education career thus far. But it just isn’t happening.

According to “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” – I am behaving like the stereotypical Martian Male. I have some problems: I am really not sure what to make of my career as a teacher thus far, and I have no freakin idea where it is going; I also don't really know what on earth I am doing in Hong Kong. So, as a true Martian, I am going to my cave to solve minor problems (or to watch other people’s problems) until I stumble onto some kind of solution.

So, I’ll read about the problems in the Middle East, try (and fail) to complete some of the brain teasers in the paper, and watch another movie. Think I'll watch a Canto Triad flick, I love those.

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Looking forward to writing some about teaching! Watch this space, it’ll happen. I mean it.

Some Photos

2007-06-29T23:36:00.000+08:00

Looking out of my window across the way. Friday June 29, 4pm.

My empty classroom. Room A501. One day before the final move to Cyberport. June 28, 5pm.

Waiting in Central to cross Des Voeux Road. Friday June 29, 7pm.

Looking down Ka Ning Path (the road that goes behind my school). June 27, 10pm.

Back on the horse?

2007-06-25T19:48:00.000+08:00

In April I finally started to use Google Reader - and with it all sorts of fascinating blogs. (While I admit the word "blog" still makes me shudder...).

I suppose I have Jeremy Wagstaff to thank for that - a Technology Columnist for Wall Street Journal Asia, he visited my school with his wife and a class of mine had a fabulous time sharing what they were learning with him. So I started reading his blog whenever it was updated...and then got annoyed with having to check it all the time.

What he writes about is how to make technology make sense to normal folk. And since he had written about how he always checks his blog feeder (Google Reader), I decided, wtf, I'll check it out.

Now, two months later, I only need to go to one bookmark to find all sorts of fascinating thoughts on teaching.

And I don't even go to CNN for news, either, and I don't buy magazines like the Economist or New Yorker with regularity - a friend of mine whose job is to sift through the news to prepare reports for the government on current trends has added me to an email list. I get about twenty emails a week from A. - on fascinating things from Hong Kong to education to global warming. (Which I still think is a hoax.)

But teaching.

I love reading Dan Meyer's blog. I feel like I read somewhere that he is a teacher with a similar level of experience to me (~3 years). Maybe I'm wrong. But the guy is young. And he pours his energy into his high school math lessons. And he writes about it all with intelligence and wit.

Just followed a post of his to H.'s blog - sounds like another young teacher who is similarly intelligent and thoughtful. And...H. apparently had been on a blogging sabbatical for a while.

So that made me think...

Back on the horse?

Write a bit more on here. Why not? I have lots of things I think I think about teaching. And lots of things I think I think about life as a foreigner. And while I haven't read nearly as much as I used to, I have started to watch a lot of good movies and shows. (Finally getting around to buying those 5 HK dollar / 65 cents US DVDs while traveling in China helped that trend a lot. Although I am still pissed that the second season of Prison Break is scratched and won't play the second half of the season.)

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So. This is the opening post. Has nothing to do with teaching. Guess it's just the inside of my brain, on one single thought. Man I wish my brain would sit still sometimes.

This opening post shall conclude with an anecdote, about living in China. It had been a long time since I've used this blog - so I had to put my password back in, etc. And since I live in China, apparently Blogspot changed something in their software so that the language defaults to the language of your ISP address. Thus, all of those opening screens were in Chinese. Thanks to my rudimentary skills (I recognized the characters for "chinese language" and switched it to "english language") and guesswork, I'm back surrounded by my English.

More on teaching, and not just the lessons, but working with new colleagues at a new institution, later. Think I'll start with my reflections on my first year working in a middle school. But who knows what will come out when I sit down.