Author Archives: evelynoconnor

An Open Letter to Ruairi Quinn

Posted on September 29, 2013 | 38 comments

Dear Minister,

My daughter Hazel (5) and I recently had an interesting exchange concerning our education system which I feel compelled to share with you. To grasp the true beauty of this exchange, please take a moment to study the image below.

Hazel: What are the kids doing mammy?

Mammy: They’re thinking inside the box.

Hazel: I thought they were sleeping?

Mammy: (spluttering into mug and laughing) some of them might be!

Hazel: I’m going to draw in eyes so they look like they’re awake.

Mammy: OK, good idea.

Hazel: Can I draw in the boxes?

Mammy: Yep

Hazel: What do you want them to be thinking?

Mammy: (who is also a teacher) Anything they want!

Hazel: (drawing) This boy is thinking about a cat zebra.

Mammy: Wow!

Hazel: (whispering) …and he’s dreaming about being on a boat!

Mammy: (smiling) What are the others dreaming about?

Hazel: (drawing slowly, concentrating, until finally…) A dog with a bunny tail, a stripy cat, an alien and this girl is thinking inside the circle.

Mammy: Why is the teacher cutting the circles into boxes? (WARNING: leading question alert:) Is it so that they all think the same thing?

Hazel: They’re not all thinking the same thing so it doesn’t matter if they think in circles or boxes. (Putting down pen decisively) Can I have some chocolate buttons?

Mammy: ok sweetheart, but only if you give me a hug first!

——————

A few days later my daughter started school. I want her time in school to be wonderful. I want her teachers to care about her education. All of my experience tells me that the vast majority of teachers she encounters will care about her and about her learning, even if at times she doesn’t particularly care about her learning herself.

Five days into Junior Infants as we sat at the table doing her modest homework, she told me she needed to practice her sounds and her new letter but she didn’t need to do her colouring because the teacher wouldn’t look at it.

Some parents would tut tut at this revelation, I only smiled because:

(a) I like the sound of this teacher. The phonics matter, the colouring not so much. Time and resources are finite, and this teacher has 30 five and six year olds in a mixed class of Junior and Senior Infants. That is not something I would sign up for! Yet every night as my daughter is falling asleep she is practicing “guh guh guh, sss sss sss, ah ah ah“. The teacher is doing a bloody great job and she’d better watch out or I may just hug her at the parent-teacher meetings!

(b) Hazel is already looking for shortcuts. Lol! Less than a week into her formal schooling, she has internalised the notion that if there is no audience, then there is no point. This scares me as a secondary school teacher, because for me to give each of my students just ten minutes of my time a week would amount to 33hours 2o minutes. But what each of them writes in a week would take a hell of a lot longer than 10 minutes to read.

[c.f. my calculations from a previous blog post on the new JC English specification:

22 hrs class teaching,
33 hrs individualised feedback of 10mins each x 200 pupils
12 hrs class preparation (a vast underestimation)
5 hrs subject department/croke park/school self evaluation/literacy and numeracy/ICT
3 hrs extra-curricular

= 75 hour working week
= hospitalisation]

However, despite the challenges my job presents, very occasionally it seems like you, Dear Minister, understand the difficulties teachers face.. On the 8th of September 2013, a Sunday morning, I was sitting at our kitchen table preparing classes for the week ahead with the radio on in the background. I heard your dulcet tones and asked my husband to lean over from washing the dishes at the sink and turn it up. I was so delighted to hear you say something positive about me and the work that I do that I scribbled down your words, then typed them and tweeted them to the world. (If you need help with your PR in future, please don’t hesitate to contact me!)

The following evening I had hoped to take part in #edchatie for its 100th anniversary but it had been a very long day. We don’t often say it to the world but teaching – like nursing and social work – is mentally, physically and emotionally exhausting and as you already know, we now work under “extremely difficult circumstances”. I fell asleep putting my daughter to bed.

Nonetheless, I woke up just in time to catch the last five minutes of the twitter chat. The topic was “Why Teach?” and people were finishing the night reflecting on what was the best part of their job. Due to my tardiness, my only contribution for the night was this:

So if I love my job, despite the challenges, and you think I’m doing a good job, why am I writing to you? Right now, as you observed, we’ve got an excellent system (cf: http://brianmlucey.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/why-do-we-hate-teachers/).

Well, since our decision to reject the Haddington Road Agreement, I feel you have forgotten your earlier wisdom. In fact, it’s quite ironic that at a time when anti-bullying procedures are being put in place in all schools, you attempt to bully us into submission by threatening us with compulsory redundancies. It’s even more ironic to listen to you and your spin doctors telling us to “think of the children“.

I do think about my students. All the bloody time. I twist myself up in knots trying to think of new ways to do my job better.

For me personally, and I can only speak for myself, this is not really about my pay. And no, we’re not rich and yes we do have a house in negative equity, in Ennis, that’s worth at least €100,000 less than it was when we bought it. I drive a battered ’06 Toyota Aygo which may or may not pass the NCT next January. My last holiday was to London for the weekend and I stayed with my sister. We’re not wealthy and of course no-one wants to take a pay cut. But we’re managing and money is not what motivates me in life, so we just get on with it and every month that there’s money in the bank at the end of the month is a good month.

For me, personally, this is not about money, this is about my working conditions. It’s about the fact that your government seem to want to make it impossible for me to do my job to the best of my ability.

There are two things which are finite in my job: resources and time. When both of these things start to shrink, I get worse at my job and it upsets me. A lot.

Let’s start with resources. You’re tired of hearing us rabbit on about class size but we won’t shut up because class size matters. The more students I teach the harder it is to offer them individualised feedback yet all of the research states that continuous quality feedback is the hallmark of great teaching and real learning.

The other resource all schools need is TEACHERS. A friend of mine who teaches in London recently told me they have 52 staff and 400 pupils in his school. We have 34 staff (including our wonderful school secretary and caretaker and our cleaner who works part-time) and 475 pupils. That says it all really. That’s 18 more staff for 75 fewer pupils. They have lab technicians and a full time IT person; they have someone in charge of curriculum and innovation. When teachers take on extra duties their teaching hours are reduced to allow them the time to work on these initiatives without compromising the quality of their preparation, teaching and feedback. In Ireland, rather than give more time, we used to offer more money. Now, with the moratorium on posts of responsibility we offer neither time nor compensation.

Right now alongside my teaching workload I’m working on our school’s Literacy Strategy, working with colleagues on a whole school approach to IT, I’m Head of the English Department, I’m trying to get to grips with the New Junior Cycle English specification – as yet still in draft form – due to be implemented from Sept 2014 but in-service has yet to commence; I’m liaising with the local radio station to give Transition Years an opportunity to learn about broadcasting and I’m trying to tune out the voice of my daughter who has said more than once in the last few weeks “mammy, you’re always working” after I have yet again fobbed her off saying “I just need to finish this sweetheart“.

So it’s taken me a while to write to you Dear Minister because I’m busy and I’m tired. I love my job but your policies are making it very very difficult for me to be good at it. Today I’ve got poetry essays to correct and a daughter to play with and washes to hang on the line and classes to prepare for tomorrow and I have yet to eat breakfast but you’ve been on my mind so I decided to get this letter out of the way first. It hasn’t been easy to write but I’m glad I did. There’s a mantra I have stuck up in my classroom “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. I’m saying it’s going to be worth it“. Writing my thoughts into words has been worth the effort because it will give me the strength I need to resist the negative propaganda which will engulf our profession in the next weeks and months and possibly even years to come.

Next Wednesday I have the privilege of returning to my Alma Mater NUIG to address the first ever gathering of the newly established Education Society so I need to prepare my presentation for that. I doubt I’ll have time to veg in front of the X-factor tonight. I’m not being paid to address the Education society (like everything else in education, they are no doubt chronically underfunded) but as I said already, money is not what motivates me.

Next Friday I’ll be heading to Dublin immediately after work to attend a CESI meet and to prepare for Feilte, a showcase of innovative teaching organised by the Teaching Council for World Teacher’s Day on Saturday. I won’t be breaking the terms of the ASTI industrial action because these are not Croke Park hours, nor are they nationally mandated in-service. Believe it or not, events organised by teachers for teachers are enjoyable and VOLUNTARY. Yes, despite the profound mistrust of teachers evidenced in the notorious and soon to be defunct Croke Park hours, when you trust us and give us a choice, we actually volunteer for CPD. It’s forcing us all to be in the same place at the same time doing the same thing (i.e. Croke Park hours) even though our needs are completely different that we hate and find patronising beyond belief.

I was also asked to go on national radio next Friday morning to discuss World Teacher’s Day and to offer some balance to the relentless negativity around teaching which has swept through the media since we rejected the Haddington Road Agreement but I turned them down because they wanted me in studio, which would mean taking a full day away from my classroom. I’m not willing to do that. If they’ll do the interview over the phone, I’m game because I do think it’s important that the public gets reminded that we’re not the enemy. Teachers are just ordinary people, many of us parents, trying to do a good job. And if we say enough is enough, allow yourself to think outside of the box for a moment and consider that this might not be about money. This might be about far more important things than that.

Meanwhile industrial action looms and you will dig your heels in and we will dig our heels in and God knows where we’ll all end up. It’s sad really because we both want the same thing. We just don’t agree on how to achieve it.

Sincerely,

Evelyn O’Connor.

38 Comments

Posted in Discussions, Teachers

Tagged "An Open Letter to Ruairi Quinn" Evelyn O'Connor, "Most Influential Blogpost" "Edublog awards"

Sample Poetry Paragraph

Posted on September 19, 2013 | 3 comments

What are the essential ingredients you should try to integrate when discussing poetry? To me, they are

Themes / ideas
Techniques
Feelings – poet
Feelings – reader / personal response
Quotes
References (paraphrased)
Links to other poems
Linking phrases (to create flow)
Context and/or biographical detail (where relevant)

Now check out this sample paragraph of critical analysis and see if you can figure out which colour refers to which of the elements listed above.

(ps. If you were in my class when we did this exercise today, just a quick warning, the colours are different so don’t allow that to confuse you when you’re poring over this trying to do your homework…)

“Living in Sin” offers a fascinating exploration of male/female relationships. As with “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”, the poem is built around a series of contrasts but this time Rich embraces free verse; the entire poem flows down the page in a series of lengthening run-on lines. The woman in the poem (presumably Rich herself) soon finds “dust upon the furniture of love” when she moves in with her lover. Her preoccupation with household chores (she “pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found a towel to dust the table-top”) is cleverly juxtaposed with his laid-back demeanour; he “shrugged at the mirror, rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes”. She brilliantly evokes her frustration as she focuses obsessively on dripping taps, grimy windows, empty beer bottles and leftover food (in many ways this reminds me of my own mother!). However, rather than simply blame the man (as she had previously done in AJT), here she begins to question the deeply ingrained gender roles which programme women to notice clutter and dirt. I love how she also recognises that obsessing over housework is somehow foolish (she is being “jeered by the minor demons”) and she admits that she envies his ability to prioritise his creativity (she admires his paintings, particularly his “cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse”). Ultimately however, her anger and resentment at being reduced to nothing more than a ‘housewife’ boil over (like the coffee pot on the stove). I found the final image in the poem haunting and terribly sad, as depression sets in “throughout the night she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman up the stairs”.

3 Comments

Posted in Studied poetry

Tagged leaving cert poetry, sample poetry paragraph, writing about poetry

J.C. Consultation Conference

Posted on September 17, 2013 | 23 comments

Get a cup of coffee.

This is even longer than the last post on the new Junior Cycle English specification!!!

We began with Seamus. What better way to begin, with a room full of English teachers. Roy Foster (who did a beautiful job of remembering Seamus Heaney in the Guardian) inspired a recitation of “Clearances” by Declan O’Neill and for a moment we were all united by our love of language, of beauty, of genius.

Finian O’Shea, the keynote speaker, was wonderfully engaging, even when the questions he posed were challenging and sometimes downright scary. What do we do in an era when reading is in decline yet the literacy demands we face daily are ever on the increase? My mind immediately jumped to this article my husband John showed me recently (albeit UK based) stating that only 13% of parents read bedtime stories to their children every night. Only today our first year students completed a survey on their reading habits (we’re gathering baseline data for our Literacy and Numeracy Strategy) and a whooping 53% of them “rarely or never” read outside of school work. It’s enough to make a grown woman cry, particularly if that grown woman is an English teacher. However, it pays to remember that despite being beaten over the head repeatedly with Ireland’s poor showing in the most recent PISA rankings (as though we the English teachers were personally responsible for the ever diminishing prevalence of reading as a leisure activity in our society), not everyone agrees that PISA offers us anything useful at all, except a stick to beat teachers with.

Here’s the critique of PISA http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6343921
And here’s Ruairi Quinn beating us over the head with that stick http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/change-one-thing-pupils-should-learn-to-read-so-that-they-can-read-to-learn-1.1529561).

Anyway, back to the conference. Finian offered the following list as the things we need to be thinking about as English teachers:

1. Literacy skills – explicitly teaching vocab. Understanding not just spellings. Checking for comprehension.

2. Texts – examine the meaning of the word ‘text’. Lots of information comes at us these days in a non-text based format. We NEED to engage with the digital space, to expose them and us to multimodal texts. To interrogate them.

3. Reading and writing skills – we’ve been fighting this battle for a long time fellow English teachers. Now is not the time to give up. Just gotta keep on keeping on.

4. Discussion and presentation skills – hence the new focus on oral skills in the specification for Junior Cycle.

5. Listening and viewing skills – this links in to the idea that “texts” now refers to more than just the printed word!

6. Critical thinking skills – it always comes back to learning to think and learning to learn.

He also spoke about the HOW of making this happen – the student as an active agent, learning as a developmental process, the importance of drawing on prior knowledge and experience, environmental based and local learning opportunities, guided activity, discovery and practice, gradually removing reliance upon the teacher, collaboration and cross-curricular links. This is a journey I’m on at the moment, day by day trying to be less the sage on the stage and more guide on the side for my pupils. I can tell you from experience, it’s a bloody steep learning curve, a kind of two steps forward, one step back marathon rather than an overnight transformation, but one which is bearing fruit, for the most part.

For further reading Finian suggested “I read it but I don’t get it” by Chris Towani and “Babies Need Books” by Dorothy Butler (out of print). Given the stats above about how few parents read to their children every night, I think it might be the parents not the English teachers who need to read this latter gem!!!

The workshops part of the day included:

Planning for First Year English
Responding to poetry in the First Year Classroom
School Based Assessment and Moderation
Oral Language in the Classroom
Junior Cycle English in the Digital Age

Each of us signed up for two workshops and attended one before lunch and one after lunch. I enjoyed the “Oral Language in the Classroom” session but to be honest it felt more like in-service than consultation. Yes, we could all see the value of using multimodal texts in our classrooms, and the example of the “RTE Doc on One” series was welcomed by everyone in the room as a good starting point when seeking out texts.

But we didn’t really get clarity around what the “oral presentation” might look like, nor did we get answers to what we felt were quite pressing questions:

can shy or weak students record their presentation or does it have to be delivered ‘live’ in front of peers?
can presentations be digital?
are group projects acceptable?
can oral interviews be used for assessment purposes?

For example, if students wanted to make their own collaborative radio documentary, could this be used for assessment purposes, even though each student must be assessed individually? The specification seems to contradict itself in that there is a focus on collaboration within the JC framework yet for assessment purposes each individual seems to have to offer work for assessment in a stand alone capacity.

Due to the phrasing of the specification, there is a danger that teachers will narrowly interpret the oral language presentation as only valuing students’ ability to stand in a room and speak. We wanted an answer to the question “is that all that counts?”. We wanted to know if pre-recorded (or re-recorded until they got it right) digital segments (podcasts and films and videos and poetry readings) would be acceptable but we got no definitive answers.

A kind interpretation says that’s because the consultation process was still open. A kind interpretation says they don’t want to be too prescriptive because that goes against the very spirit of the new Junior Cycle.

A more cynical view is that we got no answers because they simply don’t know – or worse still, they’ll leave it up to individual schools to decide for themselves! Then watch as schools end up competing with each other! Not good. Yet I want to have the freedom to make decisions locally based on what’s happening in my school and in my locality. I guess I can’t have it both ways!

So my final thoughts on the oral dimension of the new Junior Cycle spec are as follows: if I can do it my way, this part of the new spec really excites me but if the spec is left as it’s written, I have visions of classes up and down the country sitting listening to presentations for weeks on end as each one is delivered in real time to a restless, bored audience by disgruntled surly teens. God spare us this hell I say!

Lunch was a delightful encounter with familiar faces from INOTE – Fiona Kirwan and Mary Farrell and Roisin Moran and a lively chat with a few teachers and Junior Cycle Support Service peeps I hadn’t met before. As usual I talked way too much and I’m sure at least a few of them left the table thinking ‘thank God I don’t work with her, she never shuts up!’ but I’ve long since made peace with my verbal diarrhoea so what harm!

Also, if my comment about familiar faces above seems really cliquish, let me assure you I didn’t even join INOTE until 2011, it’s just once you chat to a fellow English teacher at a few events, most of the time it very rapidly feels like you’ve known them your entire life. We’re cut out of the same cloth us lot! To join the conversation (it’s not a clique, seriously. I’d never have gotten in if it was!) just sign up here: http://www.inote.ie/?page_id=371 and you’re in. The conference is coming up on the 19th October and as far as I know there are still a couple of places still available (schedule of events and bookings are available here: http://www.eckilkenny.ie/inote/). Better still, join the closed facebook group for brilliant exchanges of ideas and resources. It’s got 226 members and is growing all the time!

After that I met up with some of my twitterati buddies @fboss and @levdavidovic and poor Fintan couldn’t get rid of me for the rest of the day!

We headed off to the workshop on Junior Cycle English in the Digital Age and I was delighted to meet more of my virtual twitter friends Kevin Cahill (who was giving the workshop) and Eoghan Evesson. Kevin gave an engaging, passionate and robust overview of where we’re at with tech and asked us to consider this in groups and suggest where we might go next. He’s a great public speaker, a fired-up educator and if I was back in school, I’d want to be in his class.

Again, if this sounds like a cult, I apologise, but twitter has offered me accessible and invaluable CPD from the comfort of my own couch for the past two years and I would truly be lost without it. If you want to lurk but not contribute, just go to www.twitter.com/search and type in #edchatie (it stands for ‘education chat in Ireland’) to see why I’m raving about it so much. I also got to sit with Patricia Maguire, who I’ve never met before, but she’s active on the INOTE facebook page and blew us all away last year when she described a project her students did to recreate Romeo & Juliet in real time on facebook. I was impressed with her virtual self already, and her real self is even more impressive, in a very modest, self-effacing way. She seems to do amazing things with tech in her classroom. To be honest, I just really wanted more time with these people to see what they’re doing in their classrooms and how they’re doing it. Teachers teaching teachers offers amazing scope for professional development and the teachers I met were the best part of my day.

Nonetheless, there are still massive problems to be overcome with integrating digital skills and using digital media in our classrooms. Our schools are under resourced when it comes to tech so parents are being asked to step into the breach, again; our teachers are crying out for more training; our equipment is in many cases falling apart and, almost comically in this day and age, we do not have IT technicians in our schools. We have a secretary and a caretaker but we do not have an IT technician in every secondary school in the country. Think about this for a second. What other organisation with in excess of 400 individuals in situ – in some cases 600, 800, 1000, 1,200 – is expected to just muddle through when the tech breaks down. It’s not comical, it’s tragic and insulting to our profession. Only the day after the conference my projector threw a wobbly and suddenly I was facing the prospect of teaching without my extra limb for who knows how long before the damn thing would be fixed again. We have a guy who comes in once a week. Praise be to Jesus he was in today and managed to fix it but if he had needed parts I’d have been at least another week teaching back in the stone age. I know this sounds like whinging; that’s because it is whinging. But it is legitimate whinging! Don’t ask me to integrate tech in my classroom and yet leave me wallowing in conditions that militate against my every effort. I need more devices, I need wifi in my classroom… I could go on but I won’t. Because I know what you’ll say – there is no money. Sigh!

One really positive aspect of the afternoon session (and there were loads – this was my favourite part of the day!) was that Kevin was able to give us more clarity around the oral presentation aspect of the new JC spec – basically, he asked if digital formats would be accepted and the answer, my friends, is YES!!!! Whoop, whoop! I almost hollered with relief at this news!!! Assessments can be digital – well hallelujah and amen to that 😉

The plenary session provided an overview of the consultation process thus far. I was going to offer a link so you could read the short and succinct interim report, but it’s disappeared off the juniorcycle.ie website, so, oh well! Never mind!

Basically Hal O’Neill said the draft specification wanted to assist teachers in making decisions about students’ progress which is why they had included annotated examples in the draft specification. I personally find the annotated examples a bit irritating and patronising. English teachers don’t have a major issue distinguishing between grades when assessing students work. We do it all the time. We know what an A looks like, and a B, and a C and a D. Our issue is not professional incompetence. Our issue is with extremely large class sizes and lack of time to offer the kind of individualised and focused feedback that everyone who knows anything about learning knows makes all the difference.

If you’ll humour me for a moment let me quote from my original response to the draft specification:

“to give each pupil I teach 10 minutes individualised feedback a week:

200 x 10 = 2000 mins or 33hrs 20 mins

Experienced teachers know that you can’t really offer this during class time – once the roll is done and an activity started (and this is assuming you don’t do any whole class teaching) you’d get around to 3 pupils maximum. That means neglecting 90% of the class while giving your attention to 10%. To assess and offer feedback on one piece of work would then take up ten class periods but to cover the curriculum you’d need to have long moved on from whatever that exercise was before ten classes had passed.

So my job starts to look like this:

22 hrs class teaching,
33 hrs corrections (but in reality, senior cycle essays take about 25mins to correct not 10 mins)
12 hrs class preparation (many weeks this is a vast underestimation)
5 hrs subject department/croke park/school self evaluation/literacy and numeracy/ICT
3 hrs extra-curricular
= 75 hour working week
= hospitalisation.

Anyone who knows anything about me at all knows that I am a complete workaholic, but even I know this isn’t healthy”.

I get really fed up when people suggest, either directly or indirectly, that it’s some kind of laziness on my part when I raise this issue or that my reluctance to assess my own pupils is somehow evidence that I’m not really ‘professional’ at what I do. That my concerns about paperwork are unfounded; that my anxiety over assessing neighbours kids and colleagues kids and maybe even some day my own kid is evidence that I’m some kind of luddite.

They do this in other countries you know, I keep being told.

I’m sure they do.

But this isn’t other countries.

This is Ireland.

We are very insular and very local and have a long history of bribery and corruption and brown envelopes and a pushy middle class who don’t care what they have to do to get ahead…

I’m not unprofessional.

I’ll tell you what I am.

I’m scared.

I’m scared my job will start to look like this: http://theuphillstruggle.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/an-open-letter-to-michael-gove/

I’m scared I’ll get so fed up I’ll want to leave teaching, the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do. And I know change is hard and I know change is inevitable and some of the change I really really see the value of and I want to be at the centre of making the learning experience better for my students. But I wish we had more teachers, smaller classes, more resources, more training, more time. That’s not the fault of the NCCA. I like a lot of their vision for the future and I really like the trouble they’ve taken to offer real and meaningful consultation. Just this evening I was online for the webinar they organised to – yet again – hear the thoughts of English teachers on what we like and what we want clarified and what our concerns are.

It’s fair to say at this point if you’re an English teacher and you haven’t had any input into the draft specification for English, it’s your own bloody fault because you’ve had more than enough opportunities over the last few months. Maybe not in person – I know lots and lots of teachers who were irate not to get a place at the conference – but certainly online.

Speaking of which, when I arrived at the conference I had a few minutes of thinking I’d have to turn on my tail and leave, as I was a last minute addition to the list of attendees. They had no record of me at the desk and I had to pull out my email and prove that I wasn’t just a total chancer looking for a day off work. Instead of a printed name tag I had this little number but I was just grateful they let me in:

As I was taking my leave of Fred and Fintan, I got to speak briefly to Anne Looney. She’d read my feedback (I felt reassured that they’re listening!) and I joked about sneaking in, with my fake looking badge on show for all the world to see. Anyway, she didn’t kick me out or anything, she said she’d reserved a few places all along for teachers who had offered particularly detailed feedback on the draft specification. I guess mine was just so late arriving I only got in by the skin of my teeth.

By hook or by crook, I was glad I got to go even though it meant an insane week: Croke Park hours Monday evening; work then Dublin Weds/Thurs; work and funeral in Ennis Friday; and back to the big smoke on Saturday for TEDxDublin. No wonder it’s taken me this long to process the day…

POSTSCRIPT:

I’m putting this here because the comments section won’t allow me to embed photos:

To clarify: I taught for eight years without using any edtech. I like to think I did a pretty decent job. I would never in a million years judge another teacher’s methods, nor consider them a luddite or a dinosaur for not using tech.
However, if I’ve moved on and now prefer a blended approach, the system should keep up with me, not hold me back. If other teachers want to learn more, the system should support that, not hold them back.
Also, before some bizarre misconception around my relationship with books somehow becomes fact, I worked in The Best Bookshop in Ireland whilst in university and learned as much if not more about books in the shop as I did in college:
http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/best-shop-2013/best-bookshop-charlie-byrne-s-1.1518556
This is my study:

And yesterday these arrived for our book club:

Love of tech and love of books compliment each other beautifully. They are not mutually exclusive.

23 Comments

Posted in Discussions, Teachers

Tagged Consultation conference, english, ireland, junior cert, Junior Cycle, Junior Cycle Reform, new junior cert

Write a speech Ted!

Posted on September 15, 2013 | 12 comments

I love Ted.

I love Ted so much I’ve taken to watching Ted whilst cooking dinner, sitting on trains and even whilst lying in bed.

Not this Ted:

This Ted:

Every year Leaving Cert students can write a speech for the creative writing element of their exam. The composing element of paper 1 is worth 25% of their final English grade so getting to grips with what constitutes a good speech is vitally important.

As I sat in the Bord Gais Theatre yesterday, blown away by the inspiring people and ideas who flooded the stage over the course of over 5 hours, I couldn’t help but feel that this was exactly how my students should be spending their Saturday. Luckily for them, the talks from TedX Dublin will be up online in a few weeks and in the meantime they can select from hundreds of thousands of talks on Ted.com. Yes, I know, I know! This may be hopelessly wishful thinking on my part. I’ve seen their eyes glaze over when I start expounding, for the hundreth time, on the wonders of Ted…

I’m also pretty certain there isn’t a single person on the planet who has ever written a mind-blowingly inspiring Ted talk in an hour and twenty minutes, which is the amount of time our students have to write their four to five page speech under exam conditions. But students and teachers can only work with the hand they’re dealt, so leaving exam conditions and timings aside for a moment, here’s what struck me yesterday about the essence of delivering a really engaging, inspiring talk.

1. Great talks are – at least occasionally – funny! Fiona Newell provoked a gale of laughter as she introduced the ugliest creature on the planet, the blobfish:

And stand-up comedian extraordinaire Robin Ince had some choice words for us on the Piglet Squid!

Many of the talks dealt with serious topics, but the speakers were all aware of the need to connect with the audience and recognised that shared laughter is truly the best way to achieve this connection. Kevin Thornton was particularly funny describing an early morning walk picking wild garlic which somehow became a naked photographic self portrait on a fallen tree trunk interrupted by voices in the distance which, as they moved closer, turned out to be his girlfriend’s parents! Eek! Yet rather than judge him for being a complete and utter eejit, we warmed to him, rooted for him, felt more inclined to listen to his message. Why? Because when a speaker is self-depreciating, is willing to laugh at themselves despite all of their achievements, we, the audience, respond.

2. Great talks provide you with visuals! Cathal Garvey’s home made centrifuge attached to a domestic electric drill made us all believe that biotech is truly possible outside of the lab. Dave Smith’s 5 storey robot lodged so powerfully in our imaginations that when the audience wrote a collaborative story with Sean Love from Fighting Words later in the day, this very same 5 foot robot became the central character. The video footage of Lisa Dominican with her daughter brought tears to my eyes, the bond between them made visible once Lisa found a way to help her daughter communicate despite her autism. As a student in an exam scenario you can’t show these visuals on a big screen so you need to turn the visuals into words, as I have just done. No visuals = boredom for the audience, or at the very least a blank imagination which will quickly wander off on a tangent – I need to pee! I like her dress! I wonder who the next speaker is…

3. Beginning, middle and end: Each of the speakers had a clear structure for their talk. All had a thesis, a central idea woven throughout, whether it was Easkey Britton’s faith that surfing can break down social, cultural and gender barriers; or Fergus McAuliffe’s hilarious defence of communicating complex science using the language of storytelling; or Constantin Gurdgiev’s slightly scary vision of the future of human capital; or Niamh O’Mahony’s passionate belief in the power of technology to improve our health.

Each talk (1) offered us a clear and engaging outline of the topic (2) identified the challenges presented and (3) offered some solutions, some clear vision of a future different to the now and some questions that need further exploration. Many had a call to action – now that you’re heard me speak, this is what you need to do next…

4. Write what you know: Each of the speakers had vast experience and expertise to share. This is one of the greatest (and most unfair) challenges our students face. The exam demands that they must talk with authority on a topic they may not know very much about. The advice “fake it til you make it” springs to mind, but it does still profoundly depress me how dependent your final grade in Leaving Cert English is on whether or not the essay titles suit you or not on the day. Then again, I’ve always said (tongue in cheek of course) that the ability to bullshit, confidently and convincingly, is an essential skill if you want to be good at English. Under exam conditions if you can rely on a vivid imagination to help you invent specific examples and believable statistics then you’ll be grand!

5. Concrete and personal examples: all of the speakers drew on a variety of sources to back up the points they made. Including quotes from their heroes; alluding to great writers like Darwin and Roddy Doyle and Dave Eggers; offering personal anecdotes; and throwing in statistics and charts for good measure, they convinced us because the points they made were grounded in concrete examples.

6. Novelty: One thing I’ve never consciously considered before when speaking in public is the value of novelty. When Shane O’Mara took to the stage with his zombie slides, carrying the joke to its logical conclusion and beyond, the audience were entranced. He was just so damn funny, so immeasurably silly and yet so thoroughly engaging, in his presence you could not help but find the structure of the human brain utterly fascinating. Linking complex brain disorders to a zombie-like state was a stroke (sorry!) of genius. I was just sad his talk ended – I wanted to know more about these freakish psychological conditions which so closely resemble the behaviour of zombies.

So what’s my take away from the day???

I love Ted.

I love Ted so much I’ve taken to watching Ted whilst cooking dinner, sitting on trains and even whilst lying in bed.

Maybe you should too.

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Posted in Composing, Discussions, Teachers

Tagged Fr.Ted, how to write a speech, how to write a Ted talk, Leaving Cert English speech, Ted.com, TEDxDublin

Story Spine #2

Posted on September 7, 2013 | 1 comment

During the summer I made the difficult decision to take a hiatus from mentoring the Concern Debating Team. I was sick quite a bit last year and my lovely GP gently suggested that if I set myself Realistic Achievable Goals instead of attempting a bad impression of SuperWoman, I might find myself getting flattened by chest infections and laryngitis a little less often. However, none of that made me feel any less guilty or any less sad. I love the wild expansion of knowledge that occurs as we research; the heated discussions at lunchtime about how exactly to tackle the motion; the buzz of the debates themselves.

That’s not why I’m writing this though. I’m writing this blog post because one of my debaters wrote an incredible tongue-in-cheek story spine that helped me to make peace with my decision. It speaks volumes of her talent and maturity and compassion and was a timely reminder for me that kindness is a two-way street between teacher and student.

“Once upon a time there was an English teacher who had the unfortunate luck of being cursed. This curse rendered her almost entirely incapable of uttering the word ‘no’ and also had the effect of disillusioning her to believe herself capable of handling infinite projects, unhindered by the constraints of time.

And every day, the requests would bombard her in quick succession – a quick radio piece, did she have time to give her opinion? A grade on an overdue essay, because, I swear Miss, I just left it at home last week; supervising a TY project, and oh! cheers Miss, I knew you wouldn’t let us down! And every day a yes fell from her lips without any intent, just a knee-jerk reaction.

Until one day, the curse was broken. Realisation hit her like a truck; she was not obliged to say yes. She recognised that unless she could pull a Hermoine Granger and get her hands on a Time Turner, it was simply not possible to do everything she was asked to do.

And because of that, she bid her beloved and favourite-ever-of-all-time students on the debating team adieu.

And because of that, there was heartbreak, quickly succeeded by a frenzy and flurry of confusion. Where to find a replacement? Was there one? Was this the end? Oh, Shakespeare himself could not dream up a tragedy of such devastating proportions!

Until finally, their fate was accepted. The Mount Saint Michael debate team was, alas, no more. The loss was felt keenly by all four people who knew it existed.

And ever since that day the English teacher is filled with regret and sorrow, wishing she had seen that this team should obviously precede family, work and all else in her endless list of priorities.

The bitter end.

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Posted in Discussions, Teachers

Tagged 'English teachers', ireland, kindness is a two way street, story spine