Befuddled

Yesterday, I was putting together a PowerPoint presentation on Remembrance Day Since my dad was born during World War II in a small province in the German-occupied Netherlands, eventually liberated by Canadian troops, I decided to include his story in the presentation.

To help tell his part of the story, I inserted a scan of my dad (age 4) and my uncle (age 3) taken in 1945. Growing up,I’ve seen that picture dozens of times. But this time, as I looked up after loading in the picture, it looked different. There was my three year old uncle in 1945, with my 18 month old son Matthias standing beside him. The ressemblance between my dad as a kid and my son was uncanny.

It was one of those moments you understand why history is important. The story of my dad and the liberation of his village 64 years ago is one that still impacts him (and me, and my son) today. The story of what the Canadians did and why, and who they helped needs to be told for many more years to come because it remains relevant.

I watched in fascination this Saturday as my 17 month old son climbed the stairs from the basement to the main floor. He’s blissfully unaware that our insanely steep stairs have been the undoing of more than one adult more sure footed than him, and possibly a mountain goat or two. Even if he knew, I suspect, he would have climbed those stairs because he wanted what was at the top: his mom. (Hey, he prefers mom to dad, but ego can handle it.) =)

My son, Matt, made me think of two of my colleagues at school. Our youth pastor, not really knowing what he was doing, filmed several students, cobbled the interviews together and showed them at one of our chapels. While it wasn’t an expert presentation, the kids loved seeing themselves on the screen and our youth pastor enjoyed the learning experience undetered by any errors he made.

One of our Grade 5 teachers is trying to get her students blogging. She’s navigating administration requirements, technical hurdles, and blogging companies that don’t respond to help requests, but she seems undiscouraged. She wants her students to have access to something new, cool, and educational. She is undeterred.

Innovative teaching requires a vision of what you want to accomplish and a dogged determination to reach the end goal. With that in place, you can learn to climb the stairs.

I got to go to four different inservices late last month. Two of them were part of Manitoba Ed’s Summer Institute. A lot of sessions in all sorts of subjects were offered each day for a week. We had staggered lunch breaks, and ours was nearly last. That meant I got to walk the halls while other workshops were in session.

I found it curious that nearly all the sessions had the teachers/students sitting in desks in nice neat rows, with the instructor at the front writing on a blackboard (or white board). There seemed to be little interactivity, and little creativity in the delivery of most of the sessions.

I couldn’t help but observe to myself that it was really no wonder that some complain there’s little original teaching going on. When you can’t risk doing something a little risky in front of colleagues who are there to learn to teach better, well, when can you take the risk? It’s a lot harder to take risks when your teaching contract is at risk, or when there’s grumpy parents, rambunctious kids, or standardized tests looming. In these sessions there were a lot of eager teachers, mainly led by other teachers.  The greatest risk anyone took was that if they tried something and it didn’t work they wouldn’t be asked to lead a workshop again next year.

The people at these sessions were there to learn better teaching techniques. Shouldn’t better techniques be modelled?