You hardly ever come across Kryptonite

There are some things in this world that just can't be resisted. They are often physics based, like the attraction between magnets, the pull of a pure vacuum or gravity. Others come down to our will. I believe I will conquer gravity before I am able to master the lure of a buffet breakfast.
I will often walk towards the buffet, adamant that it will be a one plate affair, after all, I exercise regularly to try and keep in acceptable shape, why waste it on a few moments of weakness in a hotel dining room. On that walk, my resolve is always strong. Even as I load my plate well beyond the limits for which it was designed, I justify it by knowing that it will be all that I will be eating for some time and we all know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Alas, it matters not of the quality of the mountain of food I consume, I will come ashamedly back to the bain marie's, as if there were little sirens beconing me, 'it's a buffet, you can have as much as you want, don't miss the opportunity' they sing.
There is no doubt that food is the Kryptonite to my goal of getting super lean. Food however is far more plentiful than the kryptonian mineral, which is bad luck for me and Lex Luther, and just like the green stuff to superman, a buffet breakfast is bad news for me.
It's not just the buffet to tell the truth, it's any promise of 'free' food. Of course it's not free, but the second plate always seems like a bonus. I have the same problem I guess with staff morning tea's and meeting food. Any bonus food is irresistible. It's not that I can't afford my own food, it's not even that I'm hungry, just that its bonus food. I don't even have to like it truth be told.
It's been the case for as long as I can remember. I think my first memory of this phenomenon was the all yo can eat Pizza Hut deal. Even then I can remember thinking of 'all you can eat' as a challenge. Every time I'd walk out feeling sick, saying never again and not believing it. It was at Pizza Hut that I realized that no matter how full you were, you could always fit in some soft serve ice cream. I later found at another venue that this holds true for mini dim sims. It's much harder to avoid encountering mini dimmies than Kryptonite.

Can I be a Good Leader While Promoting Ultranet?

I am a leader in a Secondary College and take my role very seriously. When I make decisions or implement new programs it comes after much research and extensive consultation. I take this course because as a leader of a group of professionals i feel it is my duty to provide my staff with the best resources, ideas and processes available. As a result I maintain the respect of my colleagues and know that I have done my utmost to provide teachers with the tools they need to provide a high quality, authentic education. Similarly, I am diligent in staying in touch with new innovations in web tools. There is little I enjoy more than showing teachers and students new web tools that will make their work easier and more effective.
The statements above make up a part of why I consider myself a leader. While my decisions and directions may not always be right, despite my thorough research, I always attempt to do my best for teachers and students.
Therefore I ask, can I consider mysellf to be a good leader if I am promoting tools that I know to be sub-standard.
This post is not to discuss whether or not the Ultranet is an adequate tool or not. It is not. Anyone who has any experience with the brilliant Web tools available knows this to be true. The question is, do Victorian teachers engage in it regardless of its many limitations.
As mentioned, I research the tools that I engage in and promote to others. This has been the case for the Ultranet. I have used it and am a lead user. I find it terribly clumsy and unintuitive. It is my strong opinion that secondary students will be highly reluctant to engage with the Ultranet. Secondary students are heavy web users. They know how tools are supposed to work and have little tolerance for things that don't work. I have researched further than my own experiences.
A major source of information on the Ultranet comes from Twitter, following the ultranet hashtag. Viewing this conversation you see that the major theme is the multitude of things that either don't work at all or don't work properly. Amongst these tweets are an equal mix of complicated fixes for the problems and suggestions to log it with the help desk. There are also the disturbing tweet series of someone sharing the work they have achieved. This work has clearly taken far longer than it should as the tweeter explains the processes. The disturbing part often comes soon after when they tweet they have lost their work or no longer have access to that section of their page. I find it disturbing because I am soon to be asking my staff to invest inordinate time working on this tool I know to be inadequate.
There are of course postive tweets. Most of which come from Ultranet coaches. If the ultranet coaches are well versed in the ways of the web, which I assume would have been a requirement for the role, they must feel terribly conflicted.
Other positive tweets come from some very admirable, hard working teachers. However, even though their achievements seem herculean due to the processes required to achieve them, I always think how the same thing could have been done using another tool in just minutes and with a better result. It also saddens me to think of what they could achieve if not lumbered with the ungainly ultranet.
Another source of feedback on the ultranet comes from speaking to others at the coalface. I have not spoken to one single secondary teacher who believes that the ultranet is a postive thing for our profession. Many agree that the idea is sound, as I do, but can not overlook the inadequacies.
So I ask again, with my opinion clearly that the ultranet is not good enough for students or teachers, can I be a good leader while promoting this tool. I do not believe so.
Already the ultranet is taking away the good will for technology that members within my school have built over many years. Each time I organise for my staff to be PD'd on the ultranet I see more credibility erode. This too will happen when we ask students to engage in the ultranet. It will reaffirm their belief that there is a huge gap between us in our use of the web.
Can I be a good leader and promote bad tools? Can I say I only want the best for my students and then ask them to use poor technology when good is at hand? Is it time teachers made a stand or do we all go along for the sake of politics at the expence of our students?

The Horse Has Bolted

Enough is enough, journalists have to shut the 'gate'. This has become a case of Gategate. Tonight I heard, in response to a political party's costings being a bit dodgy, journalists had labelled the news as 'CostingsGate'. Really, is that the best they could come up with. I imagine the alternatives were probably AdditionGate, calculatorGate or perhaps Fudging the figuresGate.

However, journalists lack of imagination for their craft is only half of my frustration. Suffixing a term with 'gate' originates from the original Watergate scandal. Younger people may think that this was some massive scandal about the state of water. It was of course, the scandal resulting from the break in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington DC which resulted in the resignation of President Nixon. Nothing to do with water at all. Or perhaps the whole president standing down thing was just a diversion from a massive water scandal that was successfully covered up. I'll say no more on that, they might be still watching.

Back to journalists. Stop it. If I hear one more gate reference I may well go crazy and the students at my school may have to declare a LoopyGate scandal in reference to my altered state of mind. Here are a few of the many many examples: Tigergate, Monicagate, Utegate. I won't go on, there are hundreds. I will mention my favorite/most hated though. This one refers to two formula one racing car drivers who may have lied about driving to team orders while under safety car conditions. What did they call this "scandalous" lie. LieGate of course.

There are so many more creative things these scandals/interesting blips on the radar could be named, after all journalists are meant to be experts in manipulating the language. If it continues I would support editors around the world instituting a comprehensive YourFiredGate initiative.

A long way from the Galapagos

As Darwin discovered when he jumped off the Beagle and onto the pristine shores of the Galapagos; in nature the strongest survive. Those who are best equipped are most likely to find a mate and propagate, strengthening the species. This may be true for the Galapagos finches and tortoises, but the process of evolution stops in my community.

No other species on the planet actively works against evolution like we do. We support those who can not support themselves. When they propagate, we support them further and the cycle often continues.

As a teacher, what concerns me is that despite valiant attempts to differentiate curriculum the trend in many classrooms is teach to the lower end or, at best, lower middle. Students are coming into secondary school at age 13 with a reading ability of a 6 year old. This might make them the best reader in their home for some. These students can not do the class work at their year level, so the answer is for the teacher to provide work at a level that they can work to. In any given class there might be 10 distinct ability levels. How does the teacher cater to this?

But this is exactly what teachers attempt to do. Heaven forbid a student might find out that they are lacking in some area. We cater to their deficiencies, tell them they can achieve anything and never let them get a scent of failure. At least, that is, until they leave the safety of the school yard and face the real world.

If only someone had got to the Galapagos before Darwin and bent all the shrubbery down for the poor short neck turtles to eat, they wouldn't have had to bother with evolving longer necks. Unfortunately if the shrub bender let them fend for themselves after turtle adolescence they would have starved to death as Galapagos amphibians have a far poorer social security system than in my community.

I have no answer to our anti-evolutionary pathway. Of course we should support the less able, I just wonder about the sustainability of going against a natural process that seems to have done quite well for quite some time.

Come for a ride in my Trabant

Students across Victoria will be rejoicing in the fact that they have a long weekend. Teachers however, will be turning up to work to experience the wonder of the 'Ultranet', for most it will be their first look.
The Ultranet is a fantastic idea, it was even better 6 or so years ago when work first started on it. The dream was for the Ultranet to do all of the amazing things Web 2.0 was offering teachers, but to put it into a safer environment for the students. What eventuated was the online equivalent of communist cars.

The communist leaders could see that transport was a good thing, it was obvious, but sadly not everyone could access this means of getting from one place to another. "We will build them a car" they said, and they set about doing so. What eventuated were the distinctive communist cars such as pictured to the left. These machines were not good. They were poorly engineered death traps. In fact, during the war enemies of Germany considered the cars driven by the Nazi's as allies as they killed so many of their drivers. To say that these cars were not as good as others which could be purchased around the world is quite an understatement, they did however, intermittently, transport people which was of course the core business of the car.

So too, the Ultranet does provide some of the core functions of the wider Web 2.0 toolbox, if you are lucky enough to be online while it is not in the shop with techies looking under its bonnet. The tools are there, they're just more cumbersome to use. In a Web 2.0 car you adjust the seat back an inch by lifting the lever and lightly pushing back until in position. In the Ultranet car you undo the bolts, take the seat out, drill new holes in the supports and then screw the seat back in. Firstly however you'll have to run down to the hardware store to get new bolts as the holes are now a different size. But in the end, you are sitting where you want to be.

It is only early in the production of this model however, and first runs always have some bugs (Did anyone else have the terrible first model Holden VN?). The concern for me is not the current issues. The concern for me is that the automobile industry is innovating at great pace; hybrids, electic cars, fuel saving technologies, emmission controls. So too are the techno geniuses at google and the like. Web tools are already far ahead of the functionality of the Ultranet and moving forward. My greatest concern is how big will the gap get?

No Rush

My school is looking at putting in an alternative program for Year 9's. We have plenty of reasons for this. Our data clearly shows a decline in many key areas of their studies and engagement and connectedness are seriously wanting, among other things. While our data and anecdotal evidence is certainly cause for action, we agreed that it would be prudent to see what the wider research was saying.


What the research was saying was clear. All research that I have come across so far has described a teaching model far different to that which we are currently running. What concerned me most, was not that we were running programs that contridicted the evidence, but that the evidence has been around for so long. I found very little difference in the information from the Middle Years Research & Development project (MYRAD 2001) and Theories of Adolescence, a study by R Muss, (1975).
The above picture is students from Geelong Grammar's Year 9 Timbertop campus in 1965. Has it been working for the for the last 45 years? The Queen thought it was good enough to send Prince Charles there for two terms in 1956. Many other private institutions have significant year 9 programs that offer students authentic learning experiences. I have also found a number of public schools that are starting down this line in one way or another, however many are underwhelming.
So why is my school only just embarking on this mission after so many years and so many studies pointing that way? Unfortunately, it seems to be the Department's modus operandi. How long would a company survive in the marketplace if it ignored best practice for half a century or so? One of my current concerns is the over filtering of internet content for the students. It is my belief that students need to learn to negotiate the full internet experience. It scares me that someone may research literature on filtering in 2060 and wonder why the powers that be haven't been listening for the last 50 years.

Logophobians don't write blogs

For this blog a knowledge of some phobias may be of assistance:
Logophobia - Fear of words
Ligyrophobia - fear of loud noises
Triskadekaphobia - fear of the number 13
Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia - fear of the number 666
Altophobia - Fear of heights
Phobophobia - Fear of phobias
WARNING: do not read this post if you have phobophobia

It would seem logical that those who were afraid of words would not write blogs, unless they were a touch masochistic. A shame really, I imagine a masochistic logophobe would have plenty to say. I may well be mistaken however and evidence from my own profession of teaching may suggest that it may be more common than reason would dictate.
It strikes me that more and more of my colleagues are going out on stress leave of late. I'm not talking about a couple of mental health sickies here and there. I'm talking long term, bona fide stress leave. Now, I understand as well as anyone the stressful nature of the teaching profession and it is here that my concern sits. Teaching is stressful, that should be no surprise. If you are not good with stress, do not be a teacher. Even more so, if you are not a very good teacher and not good with stress, you should be getting out like a ligyrophobe at an ACDC concert
It got me to thinking how is it even possible. At the time of leaving my previous school there were two teachers who had been getting full pay for a year because, surprisingly enough, things just didn't always go perfectly. Kid's are like that you know.
I can't imagine there being too many accounting firms with a hexakosioihexekontahexaphobe and a triskadekaphobe sitting at home picking up a full paypacket because the sequence of 6's and the pairing of the digits 1 and 3 came up just too often. Or imagine the pilot rocking up to his first day at Qantas. As he boards the 380 airbus looking at his itinery he says, "Oh, this won't do, didn't I tell you about my altophobia, I'm more of a flight simulator man.
No, teacher stress leave seems like a bit of a rort to me. It worries me that I feel that some teachers are starting to factor it into their retirement plans. It worries me, but it's not stressing me out just yet, so I guess I'll be at work again Monday.

Here is a few things that may help keep the stress away, courtesy of teachers index.com
http://teachersindex.com/stress.html