My Dad came into the city today to do a couple things and he stopped in to check out the bidding on an auger, it ended up going higher than he expected so he didn’t buy it, but I was pretty blown away by how advanced the technology is for local farm auctions.
The auction is done with a live-feed and the prices are updated throughout the process with a large button that you can click on to bid, once you’ve registered for the website.
I have known about the text messages that he gets from the elevator on grain prices for a while and have always had some fun about those.
I was raised within a farming community, and I spent a lot of time on all kinds of farms, and I still have misconceptions about the technology being used today.
I’m not even talking about the engineered crops, sprays, and the incredible variety of machinery, I’m just talking about the incorporations of technology into what the farmer does.
We have a sprayer that runs off of a satellite system. Since so much money goes into fuel and supplies, the satellite system tracks exactly where you have been, you attach it to the steering wheel, and it drives for you. It’s pretty incredible; all you have to do to configure a field is to loop around the outside a couple times, and then the satellite does most of the work from there.
It’s pretty helpful because it can be tough to tell exactly where you’ve been in all of the dirt, with the sun glares, the rolls of the land, and eventually you get tired of looking back at where your “wings” are.
If technology can be incorporated into the farm world – if old men can learn new tricks with grain stalks in their mouth and dirty, oil-stained work clothes on, looking at the sun rise and set like it’s the only clock that matters – then it should definitely be incorporated into a classroom.
The excellent Nick Barnes and Matthew Bresciani came over and we did our tenth tech task in podcast form. You could say that we set the bar pretty high with our last podcast (incredibly, incredibly high in fact), but you could also say that we pulled a hamstring before we did this one 🙂
Nah, just kidding, it’s great like always – we hope you folks enjoy!
I had my last piano lesson session on Sunday with the wonderful Kenna at the University and she has set me up well to tackle the song that I hope to play with a little bit of elbow grease.
Asides from the piano though, other conversations rattled around and we talked about how difficult a problem it can be to teach for the students that pick certain things up fast and the students that take a little longer with some stuff, and to do it at the same time.
We are obviously generally the only person available to teach content at any time as the teacher in the classroom, and while I was not actively thinking about this problem I thought of a couple things to consider, and they involve complete fundamental changes at the start of the school year.
1.Why don’t we illuminate the curriculum for the students? What if the entire first couple of days in the school year we went over what we are going to be learning in each of the subjects? I don’t think I was ever aware at all about the upcoming material that we were going to be taking in school, but why not show them the stuff behind the scenes? If anything the only problem would be that the students could challenge us as teachers – but isn’t that a good thing? We could even show them how their learning is going to link up to what is going to take place in their next years.
Curriculum is set up to be like learning each letter of the alphabet – start at A, then learn B, then proceed to C, and etc. By the end, the students will have the alphabet of learnings deemed acceptable to enter the working/secondary schooling world, and we’ll have done our jobs as schools. So we could show them what the plan is for the year (C) and tell them we might miss some and some might switch, some might get added, but we are going to be working our way towards the next level (D). This would empower the students to know what’s up.
2.After seeing what we are to learn, we can get the students set up on independent learning projects of their own choice. The students can even group together once in a while, but the most important part is that the students would have new challenges that they would set up themselves. It would be in an extra binder, and the students would have to list what they are curious to find out about, or they could list projects that they would like to start on. Depending on how serious the students are going to take them, a lot of freedom could be given in their free-work projects.
A student could want to write a movie script, and research why people snore. Then these would each be listed, and when the student has available time they can check in and work on either. Their progress would be checked and if they fooled around too much and never took it seriously enough, their rights could be revoked temporarily. When they are finished something, more could be added. A student could want to write a comic or record a song or make a presentation or design a hairband. Anything that is creative that the student is genuinely interested in doing themselves.
When would the students do these projects though?
3.As long as a student carried a certain average in a subject, they can bypass the general lectures, do the work quickly, then get back to their projects. Obviously no teacher is perfect, and no student is going to grasp and remember everything, so why are we always so worried as teachers about the students working on their own? Why does it matter if they’re listening if they’re not learning?
If they mess up a concept in math and fail an assignment, they will no longer have free-work time until they can catch back up. If their average is not high enough, they cannot have as much free-time work.
We always learn about how much more valuable the need-to-know content is. So with biology or social studies, why don’t we show what work will be expected, then lecture to whoever wants to listen? If people want to approach things on their own they can, but for some things the whole class will be expected to be involved.
As long as students are not disrespectful about their free-work, and they are not disruptive to the class what would the problem with this be? It sounds good to me: To first write down what the math assignment is, THEN go over how to do the math assignment.
Extra – all kinds of systems can be set-up initially, like free-work presentation time and rewards for accomplished goals. The most important part of course would be to have the students choose exactly what they want to try learning about. They will know what the learning plan for the year would be, and if they wanted – they could even try to set up a unit for the upcoming curriculum themselves. Or improve on what the teacher has.
Expected classroom behaviors and consequences would be worked on a lot as in any classroom. Peer-teaching would be rewarded with free-work time, and I feel like there is some potential in this idea to develop into a working scale. To translate this idea to the classroom.
This would help the faster students belong in their classroom and take the pressure away from the slower students to fake learning, or pressure learning.
Many creative things could be created, many new skills could be developed, school could become an even more positive concept, and it could all be done with the freedom of student choice.
What are schools around for in the first place? To develop capable learners, to develop classroom communities, to prepare students for their upcoming challenges, and to teach basic content. Right?
Feel free to poke holes in anything or give more ideas to everything. Thanks for your time.
I really think our biggest challenge is in turning around all of the casual racism that is prevalent in our current culture in Saskatchewan.
There is a reason that things are why they are in a sense of macro-thinking towards what has happened since the colonization. Generational trauma being the most notable. So it is important for us to really get a good grip of what took place to cause it, and to educate our students and the people around us about it.
A good starting point is the Guns, Germs, and Steel book by Jared Diamond:
It really explains what the Europeans had to their advantage when the colonization took place, and it gets a little science-y at times but it’s an eye-opener.
I think another thing that could really help is to delve into world history in the 1500-1800 period. There’s colonization, pirates, privateers, inbred kings and queens, the slave trade, and much much more in that period, and it’s really shaped things on a global scale that our current circumstances are still 100% connected to.
As an example, look into the incredible transfer of wealth from the Mayan, Inka, and Aztek to the Spanish and how it launched the whole idea of pirates. Why do some European countries have such abundant, incredible artwork from this time period?
Yeah it’s a lot of research/reading to do, but one brick at a time.
You can’t just show up and expect your class to hold hands and sing songs about how every culture is important, and then racism is solved altogether. You have to really learn this stuff to educate them about it. The older generations missed their shot at learning about a fair and balanced history perspective with First Nations peoples, so there is a lot of casual racism from our and the students’ role models that we are going to need to overcome.
So I have a good friend that decided to try light photography as the new skill to develop for this class, and she posts some pretty cool pictures through it.
I like to draw so I really wanted to try it out too so we got a big meeting room at one of the hotels I used to work at, and all that I went in thinking was that I’d draw cute birds flying in the air and maybe some feathers – but light photography is tougher than it looks!
If you’ve ever tried drawing on a piece of paper with your eyes closed, you’ll know how difficult it can be to place things, but when you add in flashlights that sometimes acted up, limited time frames for the pics, and moving around in the room and trying to keep a picture on a consistent plane, it was a lot.
Luckily Cynthia mastered all the technological aspects and we had some time to try some things out. I told her that as soon as we left I’d have a ton of ideas that I wished we would’ve tried, and sure enough I’d like another crack at it!
I was thinking of more detailed pics where the light drawings were the feature, but you can really layer a lot in if you consider the pictures and poses by themselves, then you supplement them with the light stuff. Next time.
All in all though, a really cool experience and a lot of fun, thanks to Cynthia!
On…. Thursday? I watched that Moneyball movie and really enjoyed it. It was just a solid front-to-back movie with a lot of great stuff in it, and the most notable aspect going away was how perfectly the song at the end felt.
The only other time that a song has captured the feel of a movie perfectly at the ending (that I can remember) is in The Wrestler. The way that the screen goes, and the song starts was the right closure of the story to me.
Besides ending songs, a lot of times movies will have great soundtracks that cover each mood of the story perfectly. Vanilla Sky had a notable and amazing soundtrack, and Judd Apatow always seems to have great soundtracks that align very well with the script.
I’m just a big believer in music and love it when artistic mediums can align and work together.
As incoming teachers, we’ll have opportunities to layer music into our classrooms. A lot of research has been done into what kinds of effects that music can have on us.
Music: It ended Moneyball and the Wrestler perfectly for me. It’s helped me connect to so many moments in stories. My iPod can capture my mood throughout the day, and the song I wake to as my alarm can affect my mindset for the day.
Music could be considered the evolution of poetry in our modern society. I believe that it is incredibly important for us to consider adding in a layer of it into our future learning environments.
I’ll post The Temptation of Adam by Josh Ritter because the lyrics are just so clever.
So I guess I’m the day 1 person to come up with a post on the experience of volunteering through the Arts Cares program:
We showed up downtown in a modest looking office building and walked into a nice classroom for adults. We were working with refugees that were familiar with very little english.
The classroom has an excellent teacher that seems very patient to help the process, and the immigrant students all are eager to learn more through the program. They’re excited to be there. The ages of the people in the classroom range from their mid 20’s to 60’s-ish.
And the way this connects for me is this: we spent the afternoon reflecting on our first day experiences, and the most notable one I had today was the long winding grey hallway in one of the Regina Open Doors Society buildings (we toured the three operations downtown).
For classroom content it seems like it rotates mainly around the simple processes that we go through as Canadians, that are alien to the other cultures of the world. Such as income tax or what ATM’s do. When I spoke to the people in the classroom I tried to keep my words basic, but found that as soon as I was making sentences that patches were being missed in comprehension, while polite smiles remained.
These are the immigrant adults that come over, and the majority of the class has been in Canada for a couple years. In education, we work with younger EAL students. It was an eye-opening experience working with refugee adults.
They’re basically walking through grey hallways all the time, and only small bits of the things that they see make sense. We toured around with them and stopped at postings for work training programs, and talked about the different aspects of all the buildings, and I spoke to them in sentences that probably didn’t make any sense at all.
So everything that they experience seems to be very grey and cloudy and confusing, yet they retain an amazing toughness, patience, and enthusiasm to learn to fit into their new place.
I guess that what I’m saying is that the main thing that I’m going to take from today is the patience for the grey hallways. When things get confusing I get frustrated and try to force answers. And here these refugees are confused about pretty much everything, they’re completely humbled by a total culture change, and yet they can inspire with their uncanny patience.
Just waiting for things to come along and connect, and keeping positive that the grey hallways will make way past the fog, to brighter things.
One lady couldn't point out where she was from on the map
Between coaching bantam football and watching this movie years ago, I decided to start the process of becoming a teacher.
This movie inspired me as they take 20 boys from Baltimore that are “at risk” and send them all the way over to Baraka for a different education experience. Not everything goes perfect but it makes you think about who the kids can be in the classroom.
They were selected as they all were frequently in trouble, yet showed flourishes of talent in school. I can somewhat relate.
The entire movie is uploaded on youtube and you can watch it for free. It is also interesting in the sense that some of the concepts behind this project can somewhat relate to the concept of residential schools. Only it is definitely an extremely difference case altogether.
bidding on an auger, it ended up going higher than he expected so he didn’t buy it, but I was pretty blown away by how advanced the technology is for local farm auctions.
I have known about the text messages that he gets from the elevator on grain prices for a while and have always had some fun about those.
We have a sprayer that runs off of a satellite system. Since so much money goes into fuel and supplies, the satellite system tracks exactly where you have been, you attach it to the steering wheel, and it drives for you. It’s pretty incredible; all you have to do to configure a field is to loop around the outside a couple times, and then the satellite does most of the work from there.
Mr.Fiege 