Core Values

The school I work at has a number of core values. All of them are good and worthwhile, but of the seven only one really sticks with me.

Every Child Matters.

If every child matters, what does that mean for our classrooms, our teaching, our curriculum? How will this affect the way we treat students?

I don't really know the answers, I just try every day to make sure

Is it time to change my mind on technology class?

In my role as Technology Coordinator at a k-8 school I have been pretty adamant about one topic.

For the last 10 years I have insisted that we not have a technology curriculum and that we not have separate technology classes. I believed that all teaching of technology should be integrated within the regular classroom.

I believed this for a number of reasons:

• Any technology skill we taught in elementary school would be entirely out of date by the time a student would actually need it. 
• Teaching a skill in isolation, without context, is a poor way of teaching. Student retention was low.
• Teaching how to use any specific piece of software was a bad idea as the software would be different within a couple of years.
• It was better to teach a skill at the moment it was needed. For example: If you were about to have students complete their final draft of an essay or creative writing piece that was when you would teach word processing skills not two years prior.

I've been reading and watching and listening to what other schools have been doing lately and I wonder if my position is now wrong. 

Here are the things that have made me question my stance on this topic:

• Digital Citizenship has become very important at the k-8 level. Students at my school are showing up with phones and data plans by grade 5. iPods are everywhere and we've gone 1-1 in grades 7 and 8. Our students need these skills now.
• Coding. Is fluency or at least familiarity with coding becoming more important?
• Lagging teacher skills. Is the average classroom teacher struggling to keep up with the rapidly changing technological landscape and therefore is there an increasing need for a specialist teacher to teach these skills?

I don't quite know the answer. I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on the topic.

The Case for Christ Student Response #6

In the first term of this school year my grade 7/8 class has read The Case for Christ: Student Edition by Lee Strobel. At the end of the study of the book each student was asked to answer one of the questions posed in the chapters of the book. I told that I would be sharing their responses online. So, throughout the rest of the year I will be posting their work. Please note, I have not edited these responses, they are exactly what the student handed me.

Was Jesus Crazy to claim to be God

People have thought that maybe Jesus has a mental instability, .

making his remarks to be God false. But there has been a lot of evidence that Jesus really was God, and died on the cross. There are some signs of mental instability including,inappropriate emotions like depression from no known cause, out of proportion or irrational anger. Misperceptions or paranoia like, fearful of imagined threats. And also thinking disorders including, Can’t carry on a logical conversation, irrational.

As it seems our society is is believing in spirituality. That can mean a lot of different things. It can be fascinating what psychologists can believe in now a days. They can believe in things like shamans to try and change lives.

It has been said that Jesus could have been hypnotizing everyone into thinking he was doing miracles. But could Jesus hypnotize all those witnesses all at one time?

Jesus fed 5000 people with 4 pieces of bread and 5 fish would all of those people be able to get hypnotized at the same time. So there is a lot of witnesses to Jesus miracles.  

Some people even thought that Jesus never claimed to be God; in fact, they will challenge christians to show them in the Bible where it is written that said that "Jesus was God".

Learning is Learning

I'm trying to be mindful in my class of when learning is happening.

I had a student come up to me the other day and ask to print out their work on paper and use a highlighter instead of doing it online.

There was a part of me that wanted to insist that the student do it my way.

But if the student is learning, does the way they are learning it matter?

It took me a moment, but I said yes. 10 years ago I wouldn't have.

What is natural communication?

I'm in the middle of reading this book:

I highly recommend it. I've talked about pendulums before. I know that I have a tendency to be on the side of technology as a positive thing. Therefore I always try to read any critical analysis I can find. This book is doing an excellent job of raising key issues that parents need to pay attention to when it comes to technology and children.

However, I was reading one paragraph and one sentence really jumped out at me. Here's the paragraph from page 64.

It's the last sentence that really struck me. "The immediacy of connecting as we do in texting interferes with the natural neurological and psychological process of communication." The word natural is what hit me. Earlier in this paragraph the author is referring to phoning someone and writing someone a letter. It appears to me that she is suggesting that those modes of communication are natural.

Except they are not. One is the product of the technology of a landline and the other is the product of the technology of paper, pen and the post office.

I wonder if so much of our fear, misuse, and misunderstanding of the newer digital technologies are just because they are new and we don't know how to handle them yet.

The Case for Christ Student Response #5

In the first term of this school year my grade 7/8 class has read The Case for Christ: Student Edition by Lee Strobel. At the end of the study of the book each student was asked to answer one of the questions posed in the chapters of the book. I told that I would be sharing their responses online. So, throughout the rest of the year I will be posting their work. Please note, I have not edited these responses, they are exactly what the student handed me.

Did Jesus fake his death?

      Based on what we have discovered there is no physical way Jesus could have faked his death. Jesus was tortured and spit upon. By the time he even got to the cross He wasn’t in great condition. He was already half dead when put on the cross. He wore a crown of thorns, he had to carry the cross all the way there. He was punched, kicked, and just exhausted. But that’s only the beginning. I think by this point he would have wanted to die.

       When Jesus got to the place where He would be crucified they whipped him. So he was hanging on by the last few strings of life. When he was finally put on the cross they drove a 5 or 7inch long spike into his wrist, damaging many nerves into the hand. Then they would put another one through the feet. Jesus would have had to stand on his feet to prevent suffocation, but that would have caused the nail to rip father through his feet. He was literally bleeding out.

       After many hours of agonizing pain his hands and feet would have been torn up, his back would be scraped up from the cross plus he was whipped. His suffering finally ended with his famous last words “it is finished.” One of the Roman soldiers stuck a sword into his side. Which would have caused him to bleed out if they didn’t patch him up. He was also lying in that tomb with all those injuries and no medical attention.

      I think that you would have to be crazy to not believe that Jesus died on the cross for us. If you still think that a human man, could have survived all that torture I don’t know what will convince you.

Bibliography goes here:

Strobel, Lee, and Jane Vogel. The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: ZondervanPublishingHouse, 2001.

The don't make them like they used to.

So I was doing some work around the house over the Christmas vacation. We had an old laundry tub in the basement that was starting to leak. It wasn't just any old laundry tub. It was made of concrete! I tried to get the thing out of the basement on my own, but that wasn't happening.

This it what it looks like from the bottom when I am partway through smashing it into pieces.

Not only was it made of concrete it was reinforced with wire. It's not quite rebar, but it sure was hard to cut. I ended up having to go and buy myself a pair of bolt cutters in order to cut through it.

Once I finally got the thing broken up into pieces small enough to carry to my van I was able to get the laundry room back in order. It actually took less time for me to install the new laundry tub than it did to destroy the old one. Here's the new one:

It takes up less space and is securely bolted to the floor. Granted, it isn't as solid as the old one. It is made of plastic after all, but it will do the job just fine. What's more, when the time comes for it to be replaced or moved, it won't take a sledgehammer and blot cutters to get it out of the house.

Whenever I write about these projects around the house on this blog I try to tie them into education. Here is what I've been thinking since I finished this project.

I think our education system is like the old laundry tub. We built it strong and well. We built it to last. But it's got some leaks. It mostly works, and we can try to patch it. But at some point, it's going to have to go. Taking it out will be hard.

We need a new system, one that still does many of the same things in the same way. (The laundry tub is still a laundry tub, I even re-used most of the drain pipes for the same tub.) But it needs to be lighter, more flexible and adaptable so that when we need to make changes it won't be so hard. Because we are going to need to make lots of changes since we don't really know what comes next.

The Case for Christ Student Response #4

In the first term of this school year my grade 7/8 class has read The Case for Christ: Student Edition by Lee Strobel. At the end of the study of the book each student was asked to answer one of the questions posed in the chapters of the book. I told that I would be sharing their responses online. So, throughout the rest of the year I will be posting their work. Please note, I have not edited these responses, they are exactly what the student handed me.

Did Jesus Fake His Death

Some of the reasons why Jesus was put of the cross is that the Pharisees . Some people say that Jesus might have faked his death, but some believe that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the grave.

Getting put on the cross back then was a slow and very bad way of killing people. People about to get nailed to the cross would lay down on the cross that is on the ground and the executioner would take large spikes(nails) and drive them down into the hands and the feet of the victim. In the bible it says that the spikes or nails are put through the hands of Jesus but it actually means that the are driven through the wrists because the bone is strong enough to hold more of the body weight. People die on the cross because of suffocation, it is when some of your organs start to fail. It is hard for the body to breath when all of your body weight is hanging on just by your arms, so to stay alive for longer the victim pushes up with his feet to take a breath. When someone does push up with his feet it will hurt a lot just to get one breath and to keep doing it over and over again.

It would be hard to steal the body from the tomb that Jesus was kept in because there would have been guards and the stone that sealed the tomb was really big and would be hard to roll away. Nobody really knows the exact amount of guards that were guarding the tomb at the time, they would have made sure that nobody would be able to steal the body inside. The rock would weigh a lot and they would have needed a lot of people to maybe roll it away.

Another theory is that when Mary-Magdalene and Mary found the tomb empty, they could have went to a different tomb and not Jesus’ tomb. But another theory that sort of goes along with this is that the two women could have imagined that they saw an angel telling them that Jesus rose from the grave, but there could have been just a caretaker of the tomb that told them that Jesus wasn’t in that tomb.

The NIV bible says, there was a violent earthquake and an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, rolled back the tomb and then sat on it. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. Then the angel said to the women, Jesus has risen from the dead, just as he said, now quickly go tell his disciples.

Bibliography goes here:

"How Did Crucifixion Kill." The Guardian. N.p., Thursday Apr. 2004. Web.

Strobel, Lee, and Jane Vogel. The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: ZondervanPublishingHouse, 2001. Print.

Attention Spans

I was recently reading The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly and I was struck by one paragraph in particular that I found on page 282, although I recommend the entire book.

We spend a lot of time worrying about attention spans at school. I wonder if the problem isn't attention spans.

Legitimate Cameras

A while back my youngest daughter, all of 7 years old, said something interesting.

We were talking about cameras. Somewhere in our conversation she said something like, "It's not a legitimate camera if it can't put pictures on Facebook."

What kind of world are our children growing up in if something is only legitimate if it can be online?