Living in today's society, especially as a person who grew up during the fastest technological evolution of human history, everything is now on-demand. On-demand food, entertainment, water, information, all of it. We've come to expect instant responses from every corner of our lives. How far we've come.
When I was born, it was the age of the h-track and record player. TV was offered in black and white and in color, depending on the tv you bought. Cars were gas-guzzling and boat-sized and fast-food was only at McDonald's. Telephones were attached to a wall and the receiver to a cord. We were also in the middle of the Cold War so the Russians (Soviets at the time) were bad and Germany was split in two by a huge wall. Nuclear war was an actual possibility.
By the time I was my daughter's age now (8) I was watching the Cold War come to an end on tv with the Berlin Wall being torn down and fast food was springing up everywhere. Telephones didn't use a rotary dial up any more, they had push buttons. The first cell phones hit the market, but were so big no one would use them today. H-track was long gone but records and now cassette tapes were how one listened to music. Color tvs were the norm and a new device, called a VCR was a bit hit, allowing people to watch movies on-demand, in the comfort of their homes for the first time. We even owned a huge microwave that replaced the old popcorn maker I had mastered growing up. We thought about the future and how people would eventually be able to make a phone call and actually see the person on the other end!
In the next ten years things would change even more. Devices became smaller, more energy efficient. Rechargeable batteries were a wonder. Cell phones got smaller and smaller, and computers hit the scene, but initially looked more like today's servers than the desktops we have now. They were slow, did hardly anything and the internet was in its infancy. But consumers demanded better and more of these products so tape cassettes gave way to CDs and CD players, TVs became flatter but bigger and with a better picture, Microwaves became a mainstay in people's kitchens and fast food became plentiful. After a couple of years, clunky computers eventually gave way to laptops, and internet speed went from painfully slow dial-up to wireless, thus connecting the human species in a way we had never before been connected. Some people thought it was a fad (ha!). Suddenly I could talk to strangers in Australia, the southern USA and even Europe in a second. Within a couple of more years I could talk to someone half a world away face to face. The world went from feeling very large to very small in a matter of 20 years.
So is it any wonder kids today have no patience? We, as a society, have shown them to demand the faster, more efficient new thing. Kids no longer need to look up in an encyclopedia the information for a school paper, they can find it with the touch of a button on Google. Kids will never know the richness of a record player's effect on music or remember each other's phone numbers. My daughter can watch whatever she wants, whenever she wants, even movies that are still in the theater. Traditional recipes for biscuits are being lost because we no longer bother to make them from scratch. Eventually, I predict, everything will be voice-automated so kids won't even need to learn how to write on paper. Is this a good thing? Yes and no. Its the aim of every parent to make their children's lives easier than their own. But have we gone too far? Are things too easy? I see value in struggle. I see value in having people learn from trial and error how things work and won't work. But in today's society of instant access, do kids really have opportunity to struggle? Are we quashing a generation or two of their creativity because they have had everything handed to them in pre-packaged freshness?
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I believe our society is the modern version of Rome. We have strived to and become the modern pinnacle of human achievement. In North America we live in (comparatively) the lap of luxury, with time to debate the philosophies of life and universe and the latest celebrity drama. But we all know what happened to Rome, if you don't, just Google it.
Friday, May 1, 2015
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Personnel Review...aka Parent Teacher
Tonight is my most disliked event at public school, the spring Parent Teacher. As a former teacher I have sat on the other side of the table many, many times so I know what the teacher's goals generally are with each meeting. That doesn't make me like it any better as a parent.
The first Parent-teacher of the year is essentially a recap of the orientation/meet the teacher meeting a month earlier. They tell you about themselves a bit, then go into the goals for the whole class then how my child fits into those goals. Usually, its at this point where we all acknowledge my sweet little girl, while a happy, pleasant and hard working child, has some reading difficulties. It's not that she doesn't know what to do when she comes to a word she doesn't know, she just doesn't have the patience to use her skills to properly decode the word. Then we discuss any resources available to her, hear some promises to "see what they can do" since my child doesn't have severe reading issue and isn't a behavior concern, she doesn't demand the same level of resources as other children. Then that's it. Our 10 minutes are up. The spring meeting is typically a different story. It's at that time when teachers are looking at how the children are doing as a whole and start (yes, at this late stage) to get concerned about my child moving on to the next year (although every single child is pushed through up to the end of grade nine, unless parents scream and yell against it). There's talk of summer reading and extra resources for the last 2 months of school...before she goes off and has a break of two months, basically forgetting what she's been taught and any gains are lost. Useless.
It's this year especially that I find this particular parent teacher useless. My child will be changing schools next year, with the rest of her classmates, and I know nothing that is said in this meeting will be carried forward into the new school in September. Her cum card will follow her, as will her two bullet point (!) IEP, but that's it. No one meets with the other school to discuss the children on IEPs and what resources they would need. They wait until the children are in the classrooms and either failing or behaving badly before they even look at their files. This is typical in public school. When I taught it wasn't until December that the resource teacher would even ask for input on a child's IEP. It usually wasn't until then that I would even know if a child had a learning issue, unless I took it upon myself to find out, a process that involves you getting permission to see these records then going into either a card cabinet or computer to find the file and review it. Then lets assume the teacher even has training in special needs/learning difficulties and can understand what the impact is of having a child with a non-verbal, comprehension issue with a university level math in the classroom or can interpret a psycho-educational assessment. I once found out that a girl who had been in my grade 11 history class for three months wasn't actually shy, as her other teachers had told me when I asked if she participated in their classes, but couldn't speak more than a few words in English! That would have been slightly helpful to know!
It's especially frustrating because I taught children with learning difficulties and disabilities for 7 years in a local private school. I wrote over 600 IEPs (typically between 3-5 pages in length), updated them twice yearly, attended resource handover meetings between schools and adjusted every grade in the NS curriculum to accommodate for varying levels of student understanding in the classroom. I know what my child can and can't do and I know she's getting all she's going to get in regards to resources in the public school. That's why this particular parent-teacher meeting is so ridiculous, because there's essentially nothing they can give my child that will make any significant difference in her learning over the next 2 months but the teacher will act panicked and very worried and will totally stress me out for no reason, but it will make them feel better in the end for "bringing this issue to our attention"....yeah, like we didn't already know.
The first Parent-teacher of the year is essentially a recap of the orientation/meet the teacher meeting a month earlier. They tell you about themselves a bit, then go into the goals for the whole class then how my child fits into those goals. Usually, its at this point where we all acknowledge my sweet little girl, while a happy, pleasant and hard working child, has some reading difficulties. It's not that she doesn't know what to do when she comes to a word she doesn't know, she just doesn't have the patience to use her skills to properly decode the word. Then we discuss any resources available to her, hear some promises to "see what they can do" since my child doesn't have severe reading issue and isn't a behavior concern, she doesn't demand the same level of resources as other children. Then that's it. Our 10 minutes are up. The spring meeting is typically a different story. It's at that time when teachers are looking at how the children are doing as a whole and start (yes, at this late stage) to get concerned about my child moving on to the next year (although every single child is pushed through up to the end of grade nine, unless parents scream and yell against it). There's talk of summer reading and extra resources for the last 2 months of school...before she goes off and has a break of two months, basically forgetting what she's been taught and any gains are lost. Useless.
It's this year especially that I find this particular parent teacher useless. My child will be changing schools next year, with the rest of her classmates, and I know nothing that is said in this meeting will be carried forward into the new school in September. Her cum card will follow her, as will her two bullet point (!) IEP, but that's it. No one meets with the other school to discuss the children on IEPs and what resources they would need. They wait until the children are in the classrooms and either failing or behaving badly before they even look at their files. This is typical in public school. When I taught it wasn't until December that the resource teacher would even ask for input on a child's IEP. It usually wasn't until then that I would even know if a child had a learning issue, unless I took it upon myself to find out, a process that involves you getting permission to see these records then going into either a card cabinet or computer to find the file and review it. Then lets assume the teacher even has training in special needs/learning difficulties and can understand what the impact is of having a child with a non-verbal, comprehension issue with a university level math in the classroom or can interpret a psycho-educational assessment. I once found out that a girl who had been in my grade 11 history class for three months wasn't actually shy, as her other teachers had told me when I asked if she participated in their classes, but couldn't speak more than a few words in English! That would have been slightly helpful to know!
It's especially frustrating because I taught children with learning difficulties and disabilities for 7 years in a local private school. I wrote over 600 IEPs (typically between 3-5 pages in length), updated them twice yearly, attended resource handover meetings between schools and adjusted every grade in the NS curriculum to accommodate for varying levels of student understanding in the classroom. I know what my child can and can't do and I know she's getting all she's going to get in regards to resources in the public school. That's why this particular parent-teacher meeting is so ridiculous, because there's essentially nothing they can give my child that will make any significant difference in her learning over the next 2 months but the teacher will act panicked and very worried and will totally stress me out for no reason, but it will make them feel better in the end for "bringing this issue to our attention"....yeah, like we didn't already know.
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