Alien Pedagogy

This year I’ve been way ahead throughout the year, until the last two weeks.

Falling behind really affects my performance because it’s something that I can directly control. Yet as that pile of work gets larger, it gets harder to start working on it — this causes the pile to grow… This not only causes stress, but also costs me confidence and motivation.

So here are some of my strategies for keeping ahead of the workload:

• Talk to students – Working with students is my primary motivation for teaching, so talking about how they’re learning helps me to take on the pile of marking, prep, etc.
• Things – I find this application superior to just using the iCal. I invest time in planning how I’ll work during the week.
• GTD. Although it’s self-help, a lot of Allen’s executive productivity-principles can be applied to teaching.
• Know when to work – For me, working in the morning and evening are when I can be hyper- productive.
• Exercise – I run, lift weight, and play sports each week. These activities increase my energy.
• Drink a lot of water. Eat healthful food. Monitor your sleep cycle.
• Readers and blogs – Even when I don’t talk to other teachers, reading about their experiences is comforting.
• Just work – Sometimes getting caught up has nothing to do with motivation and efficiency. It’s just working, so get to it.

At I write this, I’m not all the way caught up but I’m close enough to blog about it.

One of my co-workers has heard students express enthusiasm for my class. She wants to observe me.

The thing is, the reason the students think so highly of the class is that learned through unusual activities and reflection in September. That first impression created an association at the start of the course that has kept students invested in learning.

Motivation in the bank.

Now, we’re working on small details, things that don’t come so quickly. The pace is slower, and it’s not the best time of the year to observe.

For example, we spent half an hour expressing comparison-contrast analysis of Romeo and Juliet and “Romeo and Juliet in Bosnia” in compound and complex sentences yesterday. The students were willing to engage in the process, even though my sales pitch was “Now we’re going to try to express comparison-contrast analysis in single sentences!”

I’m cashing in on the trust and the motivation that I banked at the start of the year.

(For the record, that sentence-writing activity was productive. We began with simple comparisons, moved to plot/ character comparisons, and ended with text-to-text comparisons. There was a ton of 1:1 teacher-student interaction during the activity, which drove the process and produced learning.)

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about basketball. We won the last game of the season (57-19), though it was our only win of the season. Still, it was the best way we could have won the season.

I found myself very proud to watch my team playing so well by the end of the season. I could see their growth as basketball players and as a team.

Some goals for next year:

• I will try harder to create a sense of team identity / spirit next year. This year I focused on persistence, but I think next year I’ll go for a sense of creating memories by creating good plays. Maybe “What will you remember by the end of this season?” will be my sales pitch.
• I really want to focus on basic skills at the start of the next season.
• I need to learn more about the dynamics of the game before I’ll improve as a coach.
• I also need to learn the more minute rules.

Some reflections:

• Grade 7 & 8s are very different than grade 9s.
• I had so much support from my P/E staff as well as my student manager.
• There’s a great deal of good that comes from competition, but I have also seen sport drive people to act rather horribly.
• I am very a competitive player but when it comes to coaching, I think it’s more important to produce sportsmanship than victory.

It was good to coach, but it will also be good to have that time back for preparation and marking.

Ncara introduced me to this series of lectures — streamed and free — through her twitter account. I think I’ll enjoy watching these lectures (though they’re very long and sometimes plodding).

What a great resource, right?

The only problem is that if I don’t really commit this website to memory or record it on my blog or twitter account, I’ll forget it.

Worse, I find it very difficult to track down information that I’ve taken from edublogs or twitter accounts. Twitter doesn’t offer a search engine for the updates your account takes on. Even blog search engines rarely turn up what I’m looking for.

Perhaps it’s that my aggregator doesn’t have many filing functions.

It’s been a while since I mentioned running, but I finished the Standard Chartered Marathon this morning.

My buddy and I never did get up to ten kilometers while training and I was dreading the run, worrying that I’d not finish or that I’d have to walk because my knee gave out. But we both ran well.

The race began very early so I had to wake up at 3:00 a.m. However, it was inspiring to run through Hong Kong at night with a thousand others around me.