Art Week

Everyone is stone-crazy around WIS right now, including me. My workload doubled this week, and I have been spending alot of time helping with the spring concert and art festival. I wont have time for a proper posting for a bit, so I figured I would just share a few of my favorite submissions from the elementary students' display. Enjoy!


Hanna Montana! I wonder if a boy or girl drew this one...


A vegetable animal that reminds me of the Beagle!


Painting with water colors is so tough. This was done by a very talented second grader.


This mask just cracked me up because it looks exactly like a black version of my old pal Ben Leon.


Last but not least, and my vote for best in show is 'Anthill' by Pre-K.

See you in a few days!

Caution: Long Blog Posting Ahead

Before we begin, I just want to give everyone a heads up that this is going to be a pretty dry posting about the theory behind my first unit of teaching, so if your looking to be entertained, may I suggest you go here instead.

Well week two is in the bag! With the exception of the odd bump in the road (man, field trips and school concerts can just DESTROY your lesson plans!) my unit on the Cuban Missile Crisis went off without a hitch.

As I only had one class, I found myself with quite a lot of time to really pine over my plans and make sure they were bulletproof on a theoretical level. One thing UVIC really does quite well is fill your head with an arsenal of teaching lingo which you can call upon when the time comes. So when my supervisor came to check out the class, I pretty much hosed him down with jargon-filled, over the top lesson plans. Poor guy didn't know what hit him.

Anyways, the lesson was pretty standard really. It was all built to Bloom's, and so the first day was pretty basic geography, names and dates. Then on the next day we ran an ol' Zero Sum Game to deduce what could have transpired in the crisis. The ladies really over-thought this exercise I felt, which is definitely something to consider in future planning, but they got the big idea in the end. The next day I tracked down the EXComm meeting minutes and arranged them into a sort of play. I assigned the ladies different personalities to take on (ie JFK, McNamara, RFK) and we read through it dramatically together. I was JFK and busted out my best impression (thanks Clone High!) which they really liked. It worked so great! Everyone of them is ESL, but they picked up on all the subtleties and nuance in the speaker's words and again, fully nailed the concepts I was going for.

I couldn't have been happier with the hand I was dealt for my first week of teaching. I made one massive faux-paus infront of them, which they called me on instantly. Did you know the capital of Turkey ISN'T Istanbul?! I would have bet my bottom dollar on that one! Ankara?! Man, I am looking at google maps right now and I still don't believe it.

So now I know that I can really push these ladies mentally. Next week is 'Human Demographics' for my grade 9's and we will be analyzing a really cool art film called Koyaanisqatsi to determine what push/pull pressures we can see placed on the society depicted in the movie. I am going to have my grade 8's read a chunk of Art Spiegleman's hit comic (or 'authentic text' as we high-falutin' teachers call it) Maus to learn about the early phases of the Holocaust. All in all... I am really, really liking this gig!

Anyways, thanks for sticking it out through this one!
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My Marvelous Mentor

With the exception of perhaps the students, the best thing about my time at WIS so far has to be the fact that I have been working with Miss Kristin Hutton as my mentoring teacher. I couldn't have asked for a better fit. Kristin began her teaching career by cutting her teeth a few years ago in some very tough vocational schools back in Ontario. She has since kicked off a career in international education and plans to travel extensively over the next few years before settling back down in Canada. Its like working with the futuristic female version of myself!

She is such an inspirational teacher in so many ways. On a pedagogical level we see completely eye to eye; she has a huge focus on current affairs, building community in the classroom, global citizenship and she hates homework. But what I am learning most working with her is about the personal side of teaching. The rapport she has with students and the way she can navigate being a nurturing and caring role-model while demanding nothing but the best from them is pretty astounding. Maybe it comes a little easier to female teachers, who knows? With out a doubt my favorite thing about her teaching is the little personalized details she injects into her lessons. She superimposes her students faces on a portrait of Karl Marx when studying political systems and surprises them with them in class . She slips them inspirational cards after particularly difficult weeks or really good assignments. She hogs up all of the school newspaper and hallway bulletin boards because she is so freakin' proud of her students' work. Ms Hutton is going to be that one teacher that so many of her students will never ever forget.

One of the things I hate about the PDPP program is the potential student-teachers have of being paired up with washed up burn-outs during their observations and practicums. In my mind, its down right criminal to be mentored by a walking bummer at this stage in your career. You know the type; they can barely wait half a school day before they break and start talking shit about the students, the faculty or 'the system' to the new comer. I am incredibly grateful for everyday I spend at WIS, working with someone who truly loves what they do.
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Sights and sounds of Dresden

So due to the ash-cloud of doom which has europe by the bag right now, I was able to accompany a bunch of the staff on a road trip to Germany this weekend. They were originally supposed to go to Scotland (which I definitely was not budgeted for), and so when that whole plan got ash canned *budum-ching*, I got invited along!

Germany is so nice. Alot less of the eastern european, Stalin-esque architecture everywhere which can be kind of a bummer. Its a country with all of its ducks in a line, ya know? I can honestly say I have never felt safer in a city; Calgary at night is like Baghdad compared to Dresden. And the trains are actually soothing they are so nice! Being on the euro, things were a fair bit more expensive, but like all sly travelers, I can sniff out the deals with the best of them, so it wasnt too bad. Dresdin was blown to smithereens one bleak Valentines day, and they recycled all the stones when they rebuilt it. So its pockmarked back and white everywhere you look. The food was also great; from now on I am eating nothing but fine salami and cheese for breakfast. Last but not least, the German nightlife is also completely worth the visit. I havent had that much fun at a club since the Night Gallery shut their doors!

PS. If anyone can identify the AMAZING trashy electro track in the club video for me, I would greatly appreciate it!

FIRST WEEK!

Holy sweet Jesus, what a first week. Going international for this practicum has to be the best educational decision I have ever made. Its completely reaffirmed my commitment to international teaching! The school community has welcomed me with open arms, the city is unbelievably stimulating and everyday I feel better about the path I have chosen. Here's a list of why life is so fantastic right now;

#1 The Kids: They are happy, bright, worldly and get this... THEY WANT TO LEARN! I sometimes feel like my university education is preparing me for going into battle rather than a classroom. To know that there are groups of students out there who actually like school does a lot to brighten my horizons. I mean they even say 'Thank you' after class!

#2 IB Curriculum: You can basically teach kids anything. ANYTHING. Forget about some weak list of 50 topics that you can never ever stray from. In the IB program, as long as you can get kids to thoroughly show what they have learned, then you can teach them whatever you feel like. Free at last, free at last. Thank god almighty, I am free at last.

#3 Life in Europe: I am about to head out for a road-trip weekend to Dresden. No big whoop.

#4 Jared Barnes: Possibly the world's most accommodating host. I live for free in a swank pad in the middle of the city. Without this guy, I might be keeping a blog on life in Sicamous right now. Yeesh. I can't thank this guy enough.

Warsaw Mourns - Video Clip

Warsaw Mourns

I landed in Warsaw about 24 hours after the death of the Polish president. And of all the places and things I have seen in my life, what I saw in Warsaw yesterday had to be one of the most amazing. The entire city square was lit with paraffin lanterns. Despite the huge crowd that I saw in front of the presidential palace at 2AM, you could have heard a pin drop. It was an entire city in mourning. Irregardless of how individual Poles felt about Kaczynski's politics, everyone here has banded together to get through what is being called the most devastating event since the end of the war in Poland. A new leader has to be picked in the next 60 days, and investigations will begin shortly, but right now this entire nation is unified in their grief. I am so lucky to be right in the thick of such a historic time and place.

YVR -> AMS

My geography prowess is something I have always prided myself on. I have a tried, tested and true mental image of the world burned into my brain which I call upon at least a couple times a day. So when I was sitting there in FlightCenter, buying the ticket I am traveling with today, I had it all laid out. “Hmmm...” I thought, “We'll probably fly due east over the prairies and transfer in either Toronto or Montreal. From there it is straight burn across the pond, nipping the south end of Britain and touching down in Amsterdam. Yep. That's how you do it.” Let's just say Travel Agent is probably not a good career choice as the route I imagined would have taken approximately 107 hours to complete.

No friends, the way to fly from Vancouver to Amsterdam is to fly north! It's a giant arch over the arctic circle, with the apogee of the turn being the far northwest corner of Hudson Bay. That's right. The northwestern corner of Hudson Bay is halfway between Vancouver and Amsterdam! Sweet lord, I live in a huge country. By the way, it's an amazing, completely bewildering flight. You leave Vancouver right at sunset and after only a couple hours in the air, the dark of the night peels away and all of a sudden your in daylight that reminds you of noon, when it is approximately 11pm your time. When you head north in Canada, the other side of the world is really, really close. It was a bitter pill to swallow when I realized that my superior geography skills are deeply flawed; on some subconscious level, I seem to think the world is flat.

It got me thinking about why today is a pretty exciting time to be involved in education. The 'tried, tested and true' ideas we have about schooling are going to be surpassed by far better ones in the coming years. These new ideas will be so much more efficient and conducive to student learning it will make the old methods look archaic and ridiculous. Most of them are right in front of our eyes now, and will seem painfully obvious once we finally adopt them. Sort of like realizing you can reach Amsterdam by a short flight north instead of a long, long, looong flight east.

I promise that is the last corny metaphor you will find here at EducationDiplomacyAnticsCabbageRolls.

President Kaczynski Dies!

I am stepping on a plane to Warsaw in a few moments, hours after the president and most of the upper-cabinet of the Polish government was just killed in a tragic plane crash. The country is in deep week-long state of mourning, and snap-elections are going to be called shortly, according to the BBC. Pretty wild time to be flying into a nation. Hopefully the day I have to spend in Warsaw will go smoothly. Stay tuned.

Bon Voyage

So I have EducationDiplomacyAnticsCabbageRolls up and running now. I guess the first thing i should talk about is why I chose going to Poland rather than staying in uber-pleasant Victoria and teaching here. Well, if there is one rather simple lesson I have learned in my life it's this; always play to your strengths... it makes things easier. I was raised all over the world, and the ability to adapt and reground in new places is a skill that is a direct result of my upbringing. I definitely feel predisposed to the lifestyle that international teaching demands!

The winds of change are blowin' in the field of education. And in my eyes (and from what my education at Uvic has led me understand), this change is going to vastly favor the dynamic over the sedentary. With the exception of maybe Calgary, most of western Canada's urban education job market is locked up tighter than a tick and is pretty inhospitable to newcomers. New teachers have to make a choice; fight against the current or cast your sails into the wind. I don't think I need to tell you which choice I've made.

Anyways, I LOVE the feeling when you're just about to leave on a journey! It can sometimes even eclipse the trip itself! If there was a theme song to the feeling of being Jet-set, it would have to be this little ditty by James Pants! Enjoy!
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