Demonstrate This!

11 years ago, or so, in my first year of teaching, it was one of those years, and I was rendered surplus to my school. I knew it was just a seniority game, and bore no reflection on my performance, and the strong, fierce, nurturing women in my department all assured me of the same, and kindly talked about their loss. But emotionally, I still felt as though I’d been fired. One of those fierce women took me aside and said, “Katherine, if you need external validation, get out of public education. You won’t get any. It will have to be enough for you that you know that you are doing a good job. No one else is going to tell you.”

A year later, I took a leave of absence from the grey building where I’d landed, to pursue grad studies in Computer Applications in Education. This was in 2000, for those of you following along at home. I knew that the World Wide Web and other internet protocols were having and would continue to have a significant impact ( I wasn’t using the word revolution then) on the way we read and write (and think!) and teach. I wanted to take a step back to figure out how this all played out.

When I came back to the classroom in 2001, there was still a position at the school, and in most (all?) schools in the board, called “Network Administrator,” I think. Ours was a creative, intelligent, free-wheelin’ thinker who worked tirelessly with me to get someone on the other end of the TDSB network to open a port through a firewall so my students would have access to an Educational MOO hosted at U of T. I also did some work with students blogging, and another class created a hyper-linked annotated version of the Scottish Play, which we put up on angelfire. (Remember angelfire?)

The next year, the board declared the Network Administrator positions redundant across the board. School networks would now be centralized, imaged and serviced centrally. I took my marbles and went home. I knew how difficult it was to do was I had done when I had on site help. Now there were four people centrally assigned to give this support to at least 200 schools. I decided that I had enough work to do just learning how to do this thing called teaching with pen and paper.

I did propose to the gifted program at the school that I had specialized knowledge in digital pedagogy and poetics, and, as I was teaching one of the gifted English courses at the time, I would be able to offer an enriched digital literature course, perhaps co-ordinating with their computers science and math studies, which they were taking at the same time. But they expressed no interest in what I had to offer. So I took a few more marbles home.

But I still surveyed my students at the beginning of every year, asking who had computer andor internet access at home. The first year that the survey came back with 100% home access (it seemed to go from 2/3 to 3/3 in one year), I reintegrated computer technology into my teaching. I’d been blogging for 5 years. My students had never heard of such a beast. And so we started. Again.

I guess it was around that time that I ended up on a committee with a wonderful, savvy Computer Studies teacher with bright eyes, a quick wink and a smile. I didn’t know at the time what it meant when she would get a job as an Instructional Leader in Information and Communication Technologies for the Board- I mean, I didn’t really understand what it was that she and the people she was working with were doing. I was just sad that she was leaving my school.

But she would drop me a line from time to time, asking if she could reference what I was doing with blogs in the classroom. And I was starting to give a few presentations here and there, at my school, for board sponsored PD days. And I got a few gift cards in return. Sometimes.

And so things went on. And then last year this woman invited me to submit an application to join TACIT, a group of teachers who are early adopters, innovative practitioners in ICT,  who are then supported by the ICT Instructional Leaders, given super-rich Professional Development, and then asked to bring their knowledge and skill to the wider body of TDSB teachers by offering workshops. So I did. And they did. And that would have been enough for me. Meeting with colleagues, true colleagues, rich professional development… all so good.

And then, I was recommended by the ICT leaders to be one of 300 demonstration class teachers, a new initiative in the board, where teachers are invited to watch a classroom in action, and then spend the rest of the day debriefing and strategizing. It’s a very powerful initiative. And it’s an honour and privilege to be asked.

So, the hitch is that the demonstration class has to be a morning class, and this semester, I have my creative writing class in the morning.

And so. I’m dusting off my long shelved digital dreams. And planning a digital poetry unit. That’s right. A whole, goddamn unit. Chew betcha.

It just feels as though everything is coming together.

And although I did take that advice way back then, and have always counted it enough to know for myself that I was doing a good job, there’s something about being  treated like a professional, and being recognized for the work you do with something other than a mug… well, you know it brings out the best in me. It makes me want to be an even better teacher.  And makes some of the other bitter pills go down a bit easier.