Tag Archives: new

New start – second week at Melbourne High School

Photo courtesy of Jose Cuervo Elorza on Flickr

As far as new starts go, this one feels good. Not one to go with the flow of things usually, change for me is often like a dentist’s visit I want to avoid. I admit the first few days weighed a little heavily with new procedures, finding my way around, new names and the loss of friends and familiarity of my old school, but one day into the second week and I’m really enjoying the experience.

Today we had 2 interesting visits in the library. At lunchtime Adele Walsh, Program Coordinator for the Centre for Youth Literature, came to talk to our Reading Group about The Inkys’ shortlist. (Sorry, I have forgotten the name of the lovely person who accompanied Adele and also shared her experiences of the listed books). Some people talk about books in a way that makes you want to drop everything and read all of them simultaneously, and this was one of those times. When you can talk about books without sounding like an academic, and without relating plot or analysing characters (without mentioning teenage angst!!), then you have the students listening with interest.

After school my head of library had arranged for Simon Shaw from Apple to come and talk to teachers about iPads as tools for learning and teaching. I’ve been to sessions about iPads before, and Simon’s session was probably the best one I’ve been to. There was no hard sell, just a focus on how teachers could do what they already do only better on the iPad, and a range of impressive apps, plus a hands-on session using iMovie. It was good to see a decent turnout too.

Wednesday I will be running an after-school session on Google apps. I have a serious problem when faced with ‘presentations’ and hope to improve with more practice. The research and preparation I do is excessive. Basically, I find it difficult to select a realistic portion of what’s possible. I’m sure the ridiculous amount of research is a procrastination technique. Finally, yesterday, I decided on what I might talk about and what I would exclude. At the moment this is all sitting on a page in my wiki – and looks awful. When I have time I should put this into a slideshow. If you’re brave, here it is. It’s not exhaustive but I wanted to showcase a range of tools. It’s difficult to prepare things like this when you have no idea of what your audience knows or expects, but hey, whatever.

Tomorrow lunchtime I will be meeting with the group of boys I’ll be working with as part of the Creative Writing group. I have inherited this group from my predecessor, and I’ve heard people refer to this group as the Competition Writing group which is an obvious clue in terms of what they do. I had a quick chat to the school captain who is a leader of this group today – lovely boy. I assured him that I didn’t want to change anything they were already happy with, but what did he think about also creating a blog so they could have an audience for their writing. Happily, he thought this would be a good idea. I’m really looking forward to working with these boys; I’m sure there is much passion and talent amongst them. In terms of the blog, I thought it might also be a space for any of us to share anything and everything about writing. Just now I received a Facebook update from the Facebook group, ‘The Wheeler Centre for books, writing and ideas’. I want to include this in a post to encourage the boys to join the group, and to show them what Facebook can provide besides chat.

The Wheeler Centre Facebook group also put me onto Australian Poetry, a Wheeler Centre resident organisation which is celebrating National Poetry Week with a different theme every day this week. There really are so many wonderful programs happening locally, and it will good to share these.

Well, that’s it from me. Just checking in after week 1 in the new job. My blogging has been slow lately, and this has a lot to do with the unsettling leadup to leaving one school and venturing into another. At this point I feel that I will have the opportunity to get involved in some interesting projects, and look forward to telling you about it all.

Have good days!

The old and the new

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I’ve been meaning to scan some old photos and pictures for a long time, and today I finally did. This picture lives inside one of two autograph books which belonged to my maternal grandmother. I love these books because they’re full of hand-drawn pictures and poetry. Some of the poetry is the typical verse which would have been popular as choices for autographs, and other poetry has been written especially for my grandmother. My grandmother was German but born in Russia, and lived there until she and her family fled to Germany during WWII. And so the entries are in Russian, German or Ukrainian.

The pages of these books contain history – dates, names, warm wishes and sincere words from people who were once young and are now long gone – but they are precious to me also for their lost art of handiwork.  There’s a thrill in being able to feel the paint on the page, to see the brushwork or ink, and think that somehow the traces of people long gone are kept alive within these pages.

Here’s a page from an illustrated poem written about a time when my grandmother’s father was separated from the family when he was working in Siberia. In this picture you can see my grandmother as a young girl, her mother holding her baby brother and her father rushing out to meet his family, happy to see them. And the whole story is written as poetry.  How special is this!

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Things have really changed since the times of these autograph books. Even the fact that I can scan, crop, save and upload these pictures demonstrates how technology has created possibilities. We may lament the fact that people don’t have the fine motor skills to draw as well as they used to, or the time or inclination to write poetry by hand, but we have different options for creativity. If students can’t draw, this doesn’t stop them from being able to create computer-generated art or animation. I love the fact that this generation is revisiting things from the past – art and music – and are remixing, reorganising, reinterpreting these in a new way. 

Here’s a Second Life animation take on Yeats’ poem, The Stolen Child, by Lainy Voom. Andy Fisher found this for me; thanks!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9hnUYV06t4]

The autograph book demonstrates a lovely collection of shared sentiments, but at the same time, this generation is collaborating in newly found ways to create.

Change hurts but we don’t want to get stuck to the chair

Even sitting in the same room but moving the chair to face the opposite way gives you a different perspective on things.

Today our team of 5 joined other Australian teams and our leaders, Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, for the first face-to-face Australian meeting for the Powerful Learning Practice program. Will and Sheryl spoke about how the world is changing but how schools are not. We’ve had this conversation many times at school. It always seems like a difficult challenge, one that weighs us down. It isn’t going to happen. We push and push but the resistance is too strong. But somehow, today, the same challenge wasn’t as threatening. It seemed understandable. I remembered my own recent beginnings with technology. No, back even further, times in my life when the comfortable and familiar were disrupted by change. My first child, moving overseas, my first online experience for a post-grad degree, things like this. We all have them. It’s good to remember these times, and sensible to expect them to happen again. We’re not different to those people who protest against change, except that we’ve climbed over onto the other side of the fence. Some of us have sprinted over, some have struggled over and got our pants caught on a nail, and others have climbed under.

Sheryl reminded us that we need to develop flexibility and patience when things don’t work out; we need adaptability. I’m thinking that we’re like some sort of evolving species as we try to move with the times. We’re not comfortable when we start growing extra legs; it hurts!

But when change freaks me out, I have to remind myself that I also like moving the furniture around. It gets boring sitting and looking at the same view. There are new configurations to be discovered.