DFI Week 8

Sadly I didn't get to do a blog in week 7 as I was pulled out of the course back to school for relief (big issue on the West Coast right now, we're struggling desperately for teacher numbers). So let's dive into week 8.  

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

The 'Empower' section gave me things to think about, some of which I hadn't thought about since I was teaching adults. I kinda want to go back and watch Dorothy's section again, as my brain was still feeling like it was soaked in treacle during the first part of the day, and I felt like there was valuable stuff in there that I just couldn't access. 

Empowering people from 'working poor' backgrounds is a major point of interest for me, because I worked with so many 'working poor' adults in the UK. People on zero hours contract; with 10 hours on contract and 15 hours regular 'overtime' which could be snatched away if they didn't sing the company song; people working for minimum wage trying to raise three kids alone, who didn't get paid for their PPE or travel time. Empowering people is such a big thing for a teachers, more than some of my colleagues realise, I think. 

When the going gets tough, especially in high schools, the final option is 'opting out' from education.

And that's exactly what so many of my adult learners did.

I used to ask all my new sign ups (because they had ALL failed maths/English at school, or they weren't eligible for my courses) the reason for their lack of achievement at school and it fell into one of about four categories:

1) I didn't understand the work

2) I had other things to think about that felt more important than work (love life, self expression, socialising...)

3) I had other things to think about that WERE more important than school work (issues at home, poverty, earning money, health concerns...)

4) I didn't think I needed it so I stopped trying

The students in group 1 were often hard workers, because this was the second chance to be able to understand the work after a lifetime of struggle, but they were often the first ones to quit if the going got tough. But the ones who came from groups 2/3/4 ... they knew, because they had learned the hard way, that they needed this knowledge and these skills to get by. They were often aged in their 20s, adolescence was finally over and they were ready to get on with real life, which needed qualifications and pathways and options to earn more money. 

I look at some of my students now and my heart breaks to think that they are headed that way.

There will always be some that we can't help no matter how hard they and we try. Bless them all. They are the true minority. But there's a large chunk who could, and would, and will realise eventually that they should, but it might take another 10 years to get to the right headspace.

If we don't work hard to push the relevance of education and empower our students to achieve, they won't fail, they will leave. The number of Y11 students who leave at the age of 16 without making any progress towards NCEA Level 1, never mind Level 2, is something that fills me with dread. These tamariki have so much potential and they're not fulfilling it, and we're not giving them a route forward that empowers them to achieve in education. 

How to we tackle that? That's a huge question. One that I don't even have the first word of an answer to yet. 

...That felt like a big head splurge and I'm not sure how much of that was relevant, but I'm leaving it all there anyway. Those were the thoughts swirling in my head after today's session. 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

I felt like today addressed more of the things I can do as a teacher, as in actually being in the classroom with my students, rather than the behind-the-scenes management side of my job. I feel like that's taken up too much of my time and attention over the last year or so, so it was good to get back to focusing on the kids again. 

What did I learn that could be used with my learners?  

Oh wow, I loved learning about Binary. 

For the first time I feel like I could actually use that to teach a lesson on it now, which would be awesome for logic skills. 

Makaore gave us some awesome and useful visual tools which I will definitely be putting to use.

I also had no idea that Binary dates back to the 1600s! We think of it as being something intrinsically bound up in computers, but the idea is actually a lot older and lends itself to tech-free/practical lessons as much as it does to theory lessons. 

I wrote my name in Binary...

The Binary Alphabet will be super useful - this is something I will try using with my classes to make some posters that can go up on the wall of my classroom.

Makaore also gave us an idea of how you can use visual tools (via a whiteboard or spreadsheet) to demonstrate how numbers are written in binary form. 

I made a little spreadsheet resource to go through this, as a reminder for me and a tool for my students.

But now what I want is to have jugs of different sizes to fill up with water, and which ones do you need to completely fill to have X litres of water?

Or draw squares on the classroom floor for people to stand in, and decide which ones need to be filled in order to generate the correct numbers. With red/green flip cards of 'yes/no' or 'full/empty' to use for each one, which we can then translate to '0/1' to write in binary code. 

I feel like this could be genuinely engaging in a maths lesson for teaching about logic, patterns and strategy. 

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow in my personal life?

Honestly, learning about Binary code and how it works, how it's written, has given me such a big boost. In the past when my students have mentioned it, I've glossed over it with 'well it's a language made of 0s and 1s, and computers use it for programming, so you learn about it in computer science classes' and I've always felt like that was a bit of a cop out and a clue that I am 'not a proper maths teacher'. My lack of degree in maths has never felt like more of an issue than when I encounter stuff like this. And now I have some tools to begin to address that. Which feels AMAZING.