JUNK MAIL FIRST YEAR #9 PUBLISHED: 3 February 2009

JUNK MAIL FIRST YEAR #9 PUBLISHED: 3 February 2009

PARLIAMENT ANYONE?

A

ccording to my mother I made such a racket when I was born that the delivering doctor stated that I was destined for Parliament. Yeah, right. The closest I have got to Parliament was to visit the House of Representative several times and completing a double BA in Geography and Political Studies. Any lingering desire I ever had of being a Parliamentarian went out the window with the Benson-Pope affair when the use of a tennis ball as a ‘gob stopper’ in his past life (as a teacher) jeopardised his Parliamentary aspirations, and those of all other teachers…

I went through school when corporal punishment was the done thing; I can remember a Nun at our Catholic primary school swinging her rosary beads (they were the big, heavy, black wooden beads worn around the waist, not your delicate hand-held variety) around my legs to impress upon me the errors of my ways (accidentally dropping a milk bottle causing it to shatter on the ground; the milk had gone off anyway as it had sat in the sun all morning and tasted yuck!). Later on, for a crime I can’t recall (how covenient), several of us were made to kneel, for an hour or so, on rice scattered on the floor. We were then made to pick up every last grain using only our hands. At college, dropping a pen onto the floor, thereby disturbing the peaceful learning environment (40+ boys to a class in those days) attracted one stroke of the strap on the hand from the burley Brothers. Cutting across a line up of boys just after assembly in order to get to class on time (whatever… ) was worth two strokes as I recall (even after all these years… ). As was forgetting to stand bolt upright when the diminutive English teacher walked into the room for the very first time in Form 6 (cripes, how come he didn’t have to make me aware of his rules, my options and my rights way back then?!), well that was lunchtime gone, standing out on the quadrangle in single file unable to move and in full view of all the other boys. Our Latin teacher used the strap in a novel ‘educational’ way; when a student (who we would now call a slow or remedial learner) failed to differentiate between the singular and the plural of ‘cow’ in Latin (a crucial piece of information for the current knowledge wave… I still remember the answer; bovus is singular, bovum is plural) out came the leather strap (two layers of leather with a metal centre). Anyway, I digress. He asked the student to extend out his right hand and proceeded to strap him once; he then asked the boy to extend out his left hand and gave him two strokes of the strap… all in front of the whole class who were deathly silent! The boy was now in tears, but that didn’t stop the Latin teacher enquiring of the student if he could now differentiate between singular and plural. If memory serves me right, he couldn’t!

Well-behaved chaps like myself would end up with a dozen notches in our belts in any given year; tell that to today’s Y11 students and they assume that you were part of the criminal classes at school. Oh no, those really naughty students ended up with soooooo many notches in their belt that the belt disintegrated.

If they get me for anything it will have to be for giving a boy 100 lines to write out which read; ‘I must not call a girl a F****** bitch’ which he had yelled across the grounds. He seemed quite pleased to get the opportunity to write out the offending swear words and returned them to me gleefully next day for my inspection. I returned them to him (having first taken a photocopy unbeknown to him) and asked him to get the lines signed by his parents. That took the smirk off his face! But he returned next day, undeterred, with a note on a piece paper written by his parents stating that their son had informed them that he had ‘sworn’ and they had told him off. I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall when, next day, the photocopy of the lines arrived in the mail at his place with a note from me. Rumour has it he is still grounded…

While I have never caned anyone I’m not sure that a short sharp bit of corporal punishment administered according to the rules (and there were rules on administering the cane when I started


teaching!) did anyone any harm. Thankfully, you are currently unable to see my nervous twitches. Over the past 30 years I am sure I have administered discipline in a manner that will in days to come will be seen as injurious in some way or other and not PC. Could we yet see a black list of non-Parliamentary disciplinary strategies consisting of lunchtime detentions, press ups, visits to the RTP room, Dean’s dailies, litter brigade, being sent to Mark Jones etc, etc?

For those of you with no political aspirations, carry on as per usual.

§ CULTURALLY SENSITIVE COMMENTS

Quite a few years ago now I wrote a particularly positive comments on an Asian student’s exercise book. This was no ‘Well done – keep it up!’ comment, but one which was thoughtful and totally personalised. It was three-liner, at least. Clearly the student appreciated the comment as her eyes lit up as she read my comments. Next day I enquired how her mother and father had reacted to my comments only to be told that neither mum nor dad could read English! Since then I often invited Maori students and foreign students to translate my comments on their work into their language where they are able to do this, and then I either write the English version, or simply write, ‘I agree!’ and sign my name. The impact this has on students is really worth the small extra effort required.

Here are some every day Maori translations of common Pakeha comments that you can use. The longer comments are whakatauki or proverb-like sayings, which can also be used to adorn Maori students’ work.

Common comments

He mahi pai! Great work!

Ka mau te wehi! Way to go!

Kia kaha tonu! Keep trying!

Tau Ke´! Awesome!

Pai rawa atu! Very good.

He ataahua au mahi. Your work is beautiful.

He pai au mahi. Your work is really.

Tena Koe mo au mahi Rangatira. You’ve put a lot of extra effort into this.

Whakatauki

Kimihia nga maunga teitei. Try your very best.
Seek the heights.

Ma mahi ka ora. Work brings you health (and prosperity).

The harder you work, the more you get from your efforts.

Tama tu tama ora

Tama noho, tama mate. Laziness makes you sick.

He moana pukepuke e ekengia e ekengia e te waka.

A choppy sea can be navigated; carry on, don’t give up.

Persevere! Stick at it!

§ DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR TEENS? (DO YOU REALLY WANT TO?)

Evolution is alive and well. You can generally see evolution happening in your students as they negotiate their way through most of their teenage years right there in front of you as you teach your classes. As with so many other things in life, having a little knowledge is a useful but sometimes a dangerous thing. Having more knowledge, especially of the in-depth, scientific and relevant variety can be advantageous. So attached please find three interesting articles. What Makes Teens Tick comes from Time magazine published just a few years ago (you can see I’m right up to date with my reading). The original article contained a number of supporting pictures which we couldn’t print effectively but only the picture of the brain was really useful and I have managed to pull out the text associated with the picture; what you don’t get to see are the parts of the brain they refer to, although some of you may be fluent in brain geography. The second article, Inside Amy’s Brain analyses 24 hours in the life of Amy as she gets through a school day. Finally Too Big For Their Brains revisits puberty looking at how it affects the students who sit in our classes and the way we teach them.

I’m sure you will find these articles of interest as they explain some of the frustrating and inexplicable behaviours of the teenagers that populate our classes. Or you may learn something about your recent past… I’m so old and crusty I can’t remember whether we even had ‘teens’ in my day…

§ BUSY WORK vs ENGAGING WORK

For many beginning teachers planning lessons places major demands on their time, energy and creativity. Sadly too many beginning teachers abandon lesson planning far too early in their career and from where I sit at the back of some experienced teacher’s room, it is painfully evident that they have! A well-planned lesson, both in structure and content, is as obvious as a sore thumb! Unfamiliarity with things like the syllabus, the variety and range of the students abilities, the available text books and other resources, an inability to precisely time the various sections of the lesson etc, etc, means that we often include ‘busy work’ in our lesson ‘plan’ which keeps the students occupied and to some extent fulfils the requirements of education. I would describe ‘busy work’ as any task that requires minimal thinking; a mechanical task assigned for no other reason than to fill in time. It is the sort of work that a student can do while talking to their friends about what they did on the weekend. Copying notes from a book, making a poster, gross colouring in, cut and paste for the hell of it, watching a video etc could easily fall into this category if there are no other directives added to the exercise. A regular diet of ‘busy work’ is not educationally healthy because it becomes mechanical and disengaging. No strain, no pain, no gain. Many students enjoy ‘busy work’; from the teacher’s point of view they are ‘busy’ and they can legitimately claim to be learning, but they aren’t. The end result is a student who has become mentally lethargic bordering on comatosed. Eventually, even lifting up a pen and taking out their exercise book becomes something of a challenge. Finally, these students simply switch off. Re-motivating such students takes a lot of effort and time.

Weaning students off ‘busy work’ is not easy especially if such work has become routine. Moving students from “copy down these three paragraphs on how the hand works” (busy work) to “pick out from these three paragraph the key elements of how the hand works” (engaging work) is a step in the right direction because some added processing of information is required. A Top Gun teacher might give the students a collection of objects like a pen to write with, a piece of paper to tear up, a length of string to make a knot out of and a musical instrument to play and then asks them to deduce what is so special about the human hand that helped homo sapiens to dominate the world. Now that would stimulate the little grey cells as Agatha Christie’s Inspector Poirot would say!

Of course, if you leap into this type of challenging and engaging work straight away in period one, day one of the year you are likely to get a class full of students doing imitations of stunned mullet. It takes time and good old scaffolding to get your class there. But challenging your students to think either in terms of problem solving or seeing things from different points of view or taking risks or being creative is part of our job and when done well results in a lesson of real quality. Yes, the pupils have to have some ‘buy in’ but once they are hooked ‘busy work’ is no longer an acceptable lesson format when alternatives exist. I have seen brilliant exemplars of this type of teaching recently.

A Social Studies teacher issued everyone with a photocopy of a newspaper picture showing a black South African lying on the pavement mortally wounded surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Each person in the picture had been numbered off by the teacher and each student was allocated one of these numbered people and asked to write up that onlooker’s thoughts. The remaining half the lesson was spent comparing answers and discussing. Powerful stuff. In an Economics lesson the teacher had brought in five electrical jugs of varying sizes, shapes and design and the pupils had to evaluate and rank each jug from different points of view like price, aesthetics, design practicality, electrical efficiency and safety. The debate was heated, very heated. A Tourism lesson involved evaluating a variety of tourist packages to an exotic location from the viewpoint of a back packer, a family party and a newly retired couple.

Each of these lessons could have been taught in a ‘busy’ style, but they don’t become exemplars that way! Plan your lessons to actively engage your students, not each lesson, but certainly most lessons.

§ I spy with my little eye…

I taught all three of my three children how to drive. One of the things you notice as their instructor is that in the beginning their ‘vision’ is limited to straight ahead and no further than a metre or so beyond the bonnet! Fire engines trying to pass from behind, the car coming in from the right hand side or the little kiddie about to run onto the road from the footpath on the left are not ‘seen’ by the learner driver; dad of course has both his feet firmly rooted to the floor on the passenger’s side where they are no pedals and therefore totally ineffectual in a vain hope of stopping the looming accident.

Experienced drivers develop a 3650 field of vision.

Beginning teachers are similarly limited in their ‘vision’; they often don’t see the cell phones, they miss the ‘rubbish’ being thrown across the room containing a surreptitious note or morsel of food. And watch those students who go to the toilet with their bags… or who regularly (bordering on a fetish) put rubbish in the bin in your classroom… what are they up to? And judging by one young lady I busted in class last week for using a an MP3 player (You’re the first teacher this year to catch me with this Sir! How did your know?”) some students may not have heard much of your lesson all year… Or am I getting paranoid?