Students...

"They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care"

-Anonymous 

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

       I'm very thankful I live in Canada, especially for (but also many more reasons beyond) my education.  Once I'm done university I'll ideally be teaching internationally and then probably return Canada thereafter.
      
       Teaching in the US appears to be a struggle; it seems as though teachers don't get the resources or salaries they need to live off of, let alone successfully teach.

       This editorial in the NY Times describes the very differing opinions of how we view failure in the military and what we do - give more money and resources, compared with failure in education - giving teachers less and expecting them to perform just as well.

Here's a short excerpt and a link to the full article:

        WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
        And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
        Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

Full NY Times Article

A position held a century ago; a position even more relevant today.

"With the advent of democracy and modern industrial condition," Dewey wrote in 1897, "it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be like twenty years from now.  Hence, it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions."

Nothing like good ol' John Dewey after midnight.

A theoretical contribution to education

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

—Jane L. Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire

Mistakes, Learning; a TED video with a simple message

A lot of this stuff is covered in my education courses in school.  I discussed learning goals in a paper on humanistic approaches to music education.
For example:

Task mastery goal seekers are those that use effective learning tactics to acquire new knowledge and skills even if it means occasional failure or disappointing performance. 

Performance-approached goals are principally motivated to outscore others on exams and assignments to demonstrate their ability; conversely, performance-avoidance goals are principally motivated to avoid failure through self-handicapping, avoiding challenging tasks, and cheating. 

Performance approached goals suppress intrinsic motivation and equate failure with low ability and performance-avoidance reinforces low self-efficacy and stunts intellectual growth.  Mistakes and failure need to be treated as part of the learning process, they are not to be looked down upon, but rather as a learning experience and as progress.  Creating an environment where mastery is the goal is the goal. 

What makes a good teacher?

Often, a question that arises in education classes, certainly at the undergraduate level, is, "What (do you think) makes a good teacher?" 

It's rather easy to think about high school, even grade school, and vividly remember the teacher(s) you loathed.  Oppositely; the teachers you loved.  For most people, I think, it's the teachers that were personable, friendly, helpful, a good sense of humour, and very smart are the words we would use to describe the teacher we love.  I could list plenty qualities of a poor teacher, but I'm sure you could recollect some personal instances that make a much better point than listing adjectives.

It's interesting though, because in the world of educational philosophy (that which I am just tiptoeing into), there is hardly any 'evidence' of what actually makes a good teacher.

     Unfortunately, we are as near to discovering what makes a teacher really good as we are to understanding the mind of God, time travel and belly-button fluff. Clearly, teachers need a certain level of intelligence to impart knowledge. Equally, a brilliant scholar who lacks the patience and empathy to explain concepts to a puzzled pupil will not a teacher make.
     Self-evidently, teaching is a practical profession, like dentistry. Some term it a "craft" because it requires mastery of skills that are best learnt on the job, in front of a class. But it is also more than a craft. Unlike dentists, teachers have to inspire as well as fix. Imaginative dentistry is a terrifying, not to say bloody, prospect. Teaching is both process and vocation. It can be bloody, too, but the pain is usually borne by the practitioner, not the patient.
     So to be absolutely clear: teachers have to be bright but empathetic, patient but enthusiastic, practical but creative, imaginative but organised, confident but not complacent, inspirational but grounded. In what precise proportions, no-one has the faintest idea. Neither is there any consensus over where these qualities should be developed (TES Magazine, pages 10-17).

There's a wealth of material I must read through before becoming knowledgeable on the subject, and I hope to expand and share my thoughts, but one of my education professors (mostly for educational psychology), Dr. Bina John, said that the #1 quality for a good teacher is expert knowledge.  That's #1.  Now, that might send shivers down the spines of some aspiring teachers, because I, do not quite feel like I'm an expert at music.   Considering I'm in "education" at university, there's the stereotype (that's slowly dying [fingers crossed]) that people in education aren't experts at anything.  "For those that can't do - teach", etc.

Philosophers are much more concerned with who educators should be.  The Socratic Method is something interesting that I've just stumbled upon and hope to further investigate. 
My philosophy of education professor, Dr. Elizabeth Gould, let us know that "teaching is impossible."  Which, confused quite a few of the students and left us wandering aimlessly in many articles on educational philosophy.  We looked at a lot of Deleuze.  Anyways, she was interested in us exploring 'philosophy as experience'.  Here's the article she had published discussing this concept.  (I'd search your schools database for the article if you want it to look prettier (I just put it on a google doc so it's accessible for all)).

Anyways, I'm not going to expand further because it's late, and maybe the only thing you got out of this post was the excerpt, and a little bit of thinking.  But I was trying to make things a little more personal.  And once I have a firmer grasps on a lot more concepts, this blog will be a lot more useful.

Innovation, compassion, passion

R.A. Mashelkar: Breakthrough designs for ultra-low-cost products  

Getting More for Less for More - Ghandian Engineering

       An inspiration for students to try and achieve what seems impossible.  As per the Sir Francis Bacon quote,

"When you wish to achieve results that have not been achieved before, it is an unwise fancy to think that they can be achieved by using methods that have been used before."

       Building a $2000 car.  Originally, the proposed idea was completely rejected the by the corporations to which they approached.  After a team of 5 engineers were given the problem of building the car with the only parameter being the cost: stretching the envelope in so many ways ensued.  They were able to create an affordable car for so many people who carry their entire family on scooters/bikes.  Creating social transformation, not just economical transformation.  Safety and social innovation.

       Solving the expense of prosthetic legs.  People on less than $2 dollars a day can't afford a $20 000 prosthetic leg.  Nor are these legs useful in walking through marshes or across far distances, climbing trees, and riding bikes.  Designing an artificial limb for these people.  "Jalpur Foot": a revolutionary prosthetic fitment and delivery system.  Quick, custom moulding and on the spot limb fitments (in an hour).  Unreal.

       Discussion on health and cost medication.  Psoriasis Treatment in India solves the problem of $20 000 treatment and 10 year, few hundred million dollar development.  They can treat for $100, development was 5 years and less than 10 million dollars.  It seems ridiculous, but the Bacon quote illustrates that a change of mind needs to take place.  Unreal.

He reiterates Ghandi:

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not enough for every man's greed."

       Getting more and more for less and less for more and more people.  Not about low-cost, but about ultra-low cost and extreme affordability and inclusive innovation. 

Innovation, compassion, passion

Self-regulation is the process of assessing progress in a given task, deciding what strategy will improve performance, implementing the strategy and evaluating again to determine if the set goal has been achieved.

(Zimmerman 2001)

       Too often students are given the assignment to ‘study’ or ‘practice’ something on their own without the under-standing of how to organize, plan, monitor and evaluate their progress while working alone.
       When teachers offer students the opportunity to foster metacognitive skills and assist students when they are uncertain what to do next, learning improves.
       Metacognitive operations that can assist a learner may include predicting, checking, monitoring, reality testing, and coordinating and controlling. 
       Each metacognitive operation requires awareness of current knowledge, and expected outcomes.

(Fry and Lupart 1987)

What do teachers make?

I saw this a while ago and thought it was most definitely worth a blog post.

Theories of Knowledge

       In brief, the function of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other experiences.  The word 'freely' marks the difference between the principle of knowledge and habit.  Habit means that an individual undergoes a modification through an experience, which modification forms a predisposition to easier and more effective action in a like direction in the future... Within certain limits, it performs this function successfully.  But habit, apart from knowledge, does not make allowance for change of conditions, for novelty... for habit assumes the essential likeness of the new situation with the old.  Consequently it often leads astray, or comes between a person and the successful performance of his task, just as the skill, based on habit alone, of the mechanic will desert him when something unexpected occurs in the running of the machine.  But a man who understands the machine is the man who knows what he about.  He knows the conditions under which a given habit works, and is in a position to introduce the changes which will adapt it to new conditions.
        In other words, knowledge is a perception of those connections of an object which determine its applicability in a given situation. ...
       An ideally perfect knowledge would represent such a network of interconnection that any past experience would offer a point of advantage from which to get at the problem presented in a new experience.
     

 Democracy and Education, pp. 395-7

"Education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform."

John Dewey, 1897

An Introduction

I intend on creating a blog about education.  I'm debating whether to share my thoughts here, or on tumblr (another blogging site).  Though, the audience has greater opportunity to interact with a "blogspot.com" address: anyone can comment or reply.

I do like tumblrs for creative things (which is essential to education), page design, and ease of publishing, and the sense that you can post just a photo or short text posts and feel content, but I think practicality wins out this time -- we shall see. 

This is what I'd want it to look like

I am currently in the Concurrent Teacher's Education Program at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Music, piano is my principal instrument.  I intend on teaching in high schools, though, I feel as though I'd like to do some international before I begin teaching in North America (which is where I assume I'll be living).  I suppose I'll come back to somewhere in Southern Ontario (Rural St. Catharines/Niagara is home for me).  

More to come... :)