Today, I’m feeling grateful for YouTube. It feels funny that I can remember the babyhood of YouTube even though so many people I spend time with every day cannot (because they weren’t even born). I remember thinking, “Who is going to watch random strangers doing inconsequential things in their living rooms?” Turns out, almost everyone! Read More
Tag: teaching
A Message to the Anti-Masker
To the anti-mask woman I encountered recently in Shoppers Drug Mart, You don’t know me. We haven’t had a conversation, even though I was tempted to start one. I simply witnessed you entering a busy Shoppers. I was right behind you as you came through the automatic doors, breezing past the hand sanitizer without slowing Read More
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Pearls of Grade 3 Wisdom
I teach a group of Grade 3 French Immersion students English for 40 minutes a week. They are mostly a very sweet and funny group. We’ve been working on poetry, including a poem with a template called “I Am.” The first two words of each line are given, and then they fill in the rest. Read More
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A Little Faith in Humanity from Remembrance Day
Hi, lovely di-hards. It’s been an emotional week, n’est-ce pas? Right around this time last Tuesday, there was a disbelieving dread building on my Facebook news feed. I could hardly bear to look at the actual stats. My daughter had strep throat; we all slept badly, and felt ill the next day – on so many levels. Read More
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#NaBloPoMo, Day 19: Questions excellentes
Today at school, we talked a little bit about Paris. I showed my Grade 4s and 5s that little boy and his dad – not just because the vocabulary (très, méchant, gentil, fleurs, maison, etc.) is right on point, but because when they see a child, they instinctively relate. Two days a week, I have Read More
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#NaBloPoMo, Day 12: Teachers
I am what they call a “planning teacher,” which means I am always teaching the students from other people’s homerooms, when their regular classroom teacher is doing his or her planning. At the moment, I work with four different groups of students in Grades 4 to 6. This job means that I get a unique Read More
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#NaBloPoMo, Day 2: Perfect Storm
It’s not just Monday. It’s the Monday after Halloween, a few days off the full moon. The kids had a three-day weekend (Friday PA day). And we just changed the clocks. School was a bit wacko today. It would figure that – less than 24 hours after I’d mentioned how well the kids were sleeping Read More
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Be The Calm
It was a busy summer. Just so you know, that’s the usage of the word busy where it actually means overwhelming-and-sometimes-stressful-enough-to-make-me-think-I-might-lose-my-marbles. And that’s despite summer vacation, and my school being closed for renovations. We bought a house in June, right before end-of-school craziness; we beautified and sold our house in July; we packed in August, and moved on Read More
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100 Happy Days – Day 4: Silence
There are two kinds of silence that made me happy on Day 4. One was in my 5/6 Core French class. They are a class that is, as a group, not great at self-regulation. Many of them have great difficulty stopping themselves from saying whatever they feel like saying, whenever they feel like saying it, in whatever language (i.e. English, Read More
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Why Teacher Incentive Pay and Standardized Tests Don’t Help Kids
The Fraser Institute, a Canadian public-policy think tank, has just released a study recommending something called “teacher incentive pay”, based on student achievement. The idea is, teachers would be paid bonuses based on high scores in their students’ standardized test results. This, they say, is key to Canada staying competitive on the world stage. Read More
