Category: Block 1 Blogs

There was a lesson that I learned twice, once from the Ozobots, and again through the beaded tweets.

The lesson was something I “know”, but somehow it doesn’t catch in some new circumstances.

The lesson is: Be attentive to the details.

The means that I managed to fail to achieve this result was both amusing and reminds me to make reminders in teaching.

In the Ozobots there were difficulties that the bot had in recognizing the different commands. Some looking into it made it obvious that the bot had some restrictions that were not in the basic instructions. Intersections and commands could not be too close, commands could not have their colours intersect at all, lines had to be a certain width and have a certain degree to the angle they could properly recognize. With all of these I decided to be more intentional and attentive to the details in the upsoming activities.

The next Monday we had the Beaded Tweets Activity. In this I decided to be very intentional. I decided to carefully choose my word to use, “smccart”- my first initial and last name to be possibly used in a present for my parents. I carefully counted the number of each bead colour I would need, and then double checked each letter before I added it. This was the result.

There is one issue with the result however. I had intended to write “smccart”, but in choosing the letters M, S, R, T, I had been going from the bottom right of the page and looking up, where with the letters A and C I had gone from the top left and down. I only realized that the page was split between the capital and lower case letters after having finished the beading. What I got then was “SMccaRT” which would have been fine if there was a meaning to the capitalization, but there was none.

The meaning I chose to draw from this is that when someone is making a mistake there’s a possibility it’s because they are not even considering that there is an issue. If they do not even understand that there could be a problem then why should they be concerned over the possibility of a problem arising. That gives some perspective on the importance of ensuring that people understand the issues that could arise. There are a few methods that might be chosen:

Show that there could be issues and explain to a greater detail where the issues might show up.

Explain the handouts that students get. Use one example of going through it so the students are required to see the different elements arising.

It might also be helpful to look over what people choose, making people have their project looked over before they start the parts of the project that might be difficult or impossible to reverse.

Have the students have a peer to peer overview of what they’re going to do. This might cause some issues of a peer’s tastes influencing what is “wrong” but it should allow for the unintended choices to become more intentional instead of a surprise.

Allow for students to make mistakes and learn. This can result in negative emotions, so use at your own risk.

The Blanket “game” was a wonderfully enlightening experiences

Build up (potential to adapt it into the experience of others? The embodied experience has potential to show most perspectives).

The blanket game is a perfect example of embodied learning through experiencing space. The first element that I learned from within the experience is the size of the room. It feels much larger when the tables are moved, showing that a place occupied has its percieved potential lowered. If you percieve a place as full then changing it for your needs would be easier.

Placing out the blankets and standing on it led me to believe that the blankets would be folded and “push us off”. That made the initial purge from disease a bit more surprising despite previous knowledge of the transmission of disease across the Pacific being a cataclysmic event. Whether or not someone would get more from being a part of the first purge and seeing the rest from the sidelines or staying within for longer is something I can’t rightfully say. Seeing the experience from the outside I think was more interesting than being within, since seeing the others trying to maneuver through the instructions gave more time for me to reflect. Consecutive reductions in the ‘people’ and the ‘land’ symbolically give an experience of what is lost, though it seems blunted compared to what it could be. Giving a more visceral experience of the loss and its slow and consistent grinding down of culture could be a far more horrifying thing to depict, though the experience is designed for children in an experience they don’t have much reason to ‘opt out’ of. Since even some fellow teacher candidates had significantly powerful experiences then this level might be enough for what is intended.

A meme taken from reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/distressingmemes/comments/15i6pyr/all_going_to_waste/)

The experience of embodying the experience of a people group with an activity rather than the simple narrating of the experience or providing writings of those experiencing it seems to be a great idea. It’s likely possible to use this to show other experiences of land loss. An example from English history could be the enclosure of common land into private property or the experiences of conquered peoples everywhere. It might be more difficult for experiences that have some time between their persistence and the present, but it would seem possible.

The Fire Circle was an enlightening experience, and the most interesting thoughts I’ve had had almost nothing to do with the event in itself. Since the event was taking place on a day that was ‘sub optimal’ for the event (miserably raining) I thought a lot more about the connections that we people have with the land, and how we enjoy to sever them whenever the land does not serve us.

During the break (before the drum event) there was some discussion as to whether the event could be migrated inside. This argument has some reason to it. If the outside state is undesirable and there is another environment to move the event to then it would be better to have it where it is less undesirable. The key word to be wary of is ‘better’ since it refers in this case only to the comfort of the people. If a drum circle is an event where we can connect to each other and the land then how does our comfort improve this situation. I believe that it does not, and the contrary, suffering is far more binding than comfort.

There should be little reason to argue that suffering binds people together more than comfort since there is a great degree of reasoning that supports it. Soldiers who outlast Boot camp, who have gone through a great deal of suffering, have camaraderie far greater than many others. People who study together for a difficult test, have too much work assigned to themselves before things start to go wrong, or are in a dangerous situation have a much stronger bond with each other.

Running out of space for a full telling I will simply state that me and a few friends went tubing one day and ended up needing to walk for around six hours back to our vehicles. We were far closer together in that time than nearly any time before, and I would believe that it is because that there was a great deal of (lower level) suffering there.

Modern homes are things that divorce us from the land. Even if they look nice they still are nicely climate controlled and allow us to encounter the wildness of nature on our terms. Looking at a wintry wonderland through a double paned window with a hot cup of coco and a heated blanket is not the same as experiencing the winter itself. But it gives us a false feeling that we are connected to nature. When nature forces us to change our behavior, be it heat, cold, or a loss of water of electricity we suddenly feel as if we lose something we are entitled to. Should we not instead adapt ourselves and our buildings to the change of seasons, as was done by many indigenous peoples? If we are to understand the land then we ought to at least suffer a little to learn it, which is something the rain on the fire circle taught me.

The rain did not stop the fire, though it tried its best.

The first thing worth really thinking about was in the preamble. Being the bedrock upon which students rely is a reminder so simple and obvious that it often needs to be made. You cannot help someone else as well or at all if you are actively falling apart.

This means that if you are the converse, one of the people being helped, it is critical to be aware of the potential stressors of those helping you and to mitigate those stressors as much as possible.

This draws into the later talk of Niigan Sinclair and his explanation of the troubles of building a fire. Creating the spark and building it up into a more resilient fire can take hours with thousands of tries that are exceedingly repetitive and soul draining at the worst. Beyond the understanding that the important and necessary activities are often difficult fire making is more like the action of rebuilding trust that was broken. To rebuild trust in what has been lost to the failures of the educational profession to indigenous peoples we will need to do the difficult work. It is very likely that all the work we do will have no visible difference but the underlying change is necessary to build the foundation of reconciliation.

Another point that stood out to me was the difference in what was ‘private’ and public information. When Mr. Sinclair mentioned his families’ different perspectives concerning menstruation I was quite happy that I had decided to view it asynchronously since I was very much in the camp of the Catholic Grandmother and find the topic significantly awkward to discuss in public. That the beginning of menstruation was held in such high esteem is something that is outside of my direct experiences, beyond advertisements that hide the fact behind various quirky metaphors.

Needless to say I have a few more topics to ponder following Niigan Sinclair’s presentation and will happily find another speaker for the next Pro-D event, if such a speaker will be forthcoming.

How great is the technology we have… To take the work of a day and shrink it into mere seconds…

The PGPL has some interesting uses within the paradigm of Teaching. Beyond the resources designed for education, including many that would be exceptional for primary students. For secondary students and high schoolers the resources are less numerous as something tactile. As a method of adding more difficulty personally I decided to not choose a resource that would be easy to use, such as the kits or the novel study collections. Instead I chose to look at something from within the main body of the library, the adult non-fiction section.

This section is difficult to use without the inclusion of the BC curriculum. After reviewing the math curriculum the concept of reading clocks, within the Math 4 curriculum, took my interest. Undoubtedly clocks would have some available books and have the option for a tactile and involved activity. Coming across the few books on clocks, those not being one the upkeep and repair of them, a book on the history of civilizations through clocks gives an opportunity to show how clocks are used with far more depth than a simple needed, giving students an opportunity to extend as well. The first chapter and sundials were highly interesting, as were the others, though they were less curriculum applicable. After seeing some concepts of a 24 hour clock that seem to match up with a sundial the choice was inevitable. There would probably be an arts and crafts book giving the instructions on the making of a sundial, but a web page is more easily shared if the students wanted access for their own use. Even without using the resources designed for teachers the information that can be shared is immense at the PGPL.

Returning to the topic of using the library resources it seems like untapped potential. A web page detailing the history of clocks would be easy to share and use, though would not be more certainly reliable as a library book. The internet is unreliable in the particulars. The reliability is also expressed in the adaptability of the librarian to provide additional help if asked. To have a professional be able to gather and make available resources on differing topics into a single bundle for you to peruse and take what’s needed is a chunk of research time that is outsourced to those to whom the task is their expertise. Their willingness to help is even greater when considering that they are available to have tours of the library and are willing to help students produce their library card for their own personal use, which seems to be an imposition from the outside. This all ignores the library as a workspace, which would be useful to focus on productivity if its reasonably close by.