Emergency Fund Raisers

I was sitting in the movie theater when my cell phone rang. It was on vibrate, and it didn’t disturb anyone near me. I pulled it out, silenced it, and glanced at the caller ID. It was our school district’s emergency notification system. That’s bad. Something’s wrong. When I listened to the message, I learned that one of our high school students had died unexpectedly the night before. This was a notification to staff that we were going to be in crisis mode on Monday. There would be a faculty meeting before school. Counselors would be on site to talk with students. It was important for us to know what was going on before arriving Monday morning.

credit: rogersmj

We started using an emergency notification system four years ago. The idea is to rapidly notify administrators, staff members, and parents in the event of a school emergency or weather-related cancellation. If school is closed due to weather, or students are going to be delayed getting home, or we have a utility emergency at a building, or there’s a bomb threat or other serious security concern, we want to quickly provide our school community with accurate information as quickly as possible. That’s what this system is for.

So when I look at the caller ID on my phone and see the number of the emergency notification system, I know that something’s wrong. This is not going to be a normal day. I can trust that the information I’m going to hear will be important and relevant to me.

But we tend to overuse these things. On Saturday morning, we were in the car when my wife’s phone rang. It was the emergency notification system for our daughter’s school. They wanted to remind us that the PTA is having a fundraiser. If we didn’t happen to see the countless notes that had already come home about it, if we had missed the discussion of it at the PTA meeting, if we hadn’t seen it on the web site, they just thought they’d call on Saturday morning and remind us of this opportunity to support the school.

What is the reaction, then, when a parent looks at the caller ID and sees the emergency notification number for my daughter’s school? There’s an eye-roll, a sigh. What do they want to remind me about this time? They still have to listen to the message. After all, it could be a real emergency. But the sense of urgency is gone.

When we cry too often about the sky falling, people stop paying attention. We don’t notice things that are familiar to us. That’s why students don’t take fire drills seriously. Most will have more than 100 fire drills while they’re in school, but very few (thankfully) will ever see a real fire in a school. So they become complacent. That happened my first year teaching. We had a regular fire drill on Monday. On Tuesday, a student pulled the fire alarm between classes. On Wednesday, a different student pulled the alarm during a lunch period. So when the alarm went off on Thursday, we heard, “are you kidding?” “Not again.” The students weren’t in a hurry. The teachers weren’t in a hurry. Everyone was annoyed, until we opened the classroom door and found the hall full of smoke. Then it became real again.

So I haven’t signed up for emergency notifications from my kids’ schools. I have plenty of spam in by e-mail. I don’t need it in my voicemail, too. If there’s a real emergency and they need to tell me something, a real person is going to have to call me. I hope the school district I work in doesn’t make the same mistakes with our system.

Posted on September 28th, 2009 by John Schinker
Filed under: Front Page, Opinions | 4 Comments »

Talking to Students

Note: Some people have said that they won’t vote for school levies if the schools let students watch the President. If you’re one of those people, please don’t read this. It’ll probably only make you more upset than you already are.

President Obama's Back to School SpeechAnd so, after a week-long firestorm in the political world, President Obama will address the nation’s schoolchildren Tuesday. Or, at least, he’ll address some of them. At some point. Neither the school district in which I live nor the school district in which I work are permitting teachers to show the address live to students. Both have said that teachers may preview the speech later, and use it in a future lesson if it’s curricularly appropriate. I don’t recall any other point in my career when teachers were expressly forbidden to watch a speech by the President of the United States. There certainly wasn’t this level of protest over President Bush’s speech, or even President Reagan’s question-and-answer session.

President Obama is going to talk about the importance of education. He’ll talk about his own experience in a single-parent household having to get up at 4:30 with his Mom to supplement his education. He’ll talk about working hard, about overcoming adversity. He’ll talk about America being a land of opportunity. He’ll talk about personal decisions and the power to make one’s own future. He’ll talk about setting personal goals, and working hard to achieve them.  Looking over his remarks, I don’t see anything about socialism. There’s nothing about Democrats or Republicans. There’s nothing about race. There isn’t even anything about education reform. It’s the least-politicized address to students made by a U.S. president in recent memory.

This summer, I was extremely fortunate to visit President Obama’s grandmother in Kogelo, Kenya. Our team leader, Sharon, asked Mrs. Obama what advice she would give to teachers in North America and Kenya. She replied that teachers should teach the students well, to teach them to have respect, and to teach them to be someone in the future.

I think, regardless of your political affiliation, these are sentiments we should all be able to agree on.

Posted on September 7th, 2009 by John Schinker
Filed under: Front Page, Opinions | No Comments »

Not Everyone

“I have said it before and will say it again….not every one in every district has a cell phone… All these ideas are cool, but technology is not 100% pervasive, despite what we as tech people want to think.” — A Technology Coordinator on the Ohio Techcoords Listserv

Student at Remba Primary School, KenyaNot everyone has a cell phone. Not everyone has Internet access. Not everyone can afford a graphing calculator. Not everyone has a television. Not everyone gets the newspaper.

Not everyone can read at grade level. Not everyone can sit still for 50 minutes at a time. Not everyone can just read something and understand it. Not everyone can stand in front of the class and give a presentation. Not everyone thinks school is going to help them later in life.

Not everyone can get to school on time. Not everyone gets three balanced meals a day. Not everyone is safe when they leave school. Not everyone has a Dad at home. Not everyone has a home for the Dad to be at.

Not everyone has teachers who care about them. Not everyone is allowed to go to school. Not everyone has a school to go to. Not everyone has shoes. Not everyone will make it.

It’s not about everyone.

Posted on September 3rd, 2009 by John Schinker
Filed under: 21:Globalization, Front Page, Opinions | 1 Comment »

Why Integrate?

We knew it would be difficult long before we got there. We were told that Mfangano Island, near Mbita, Kenya, was “the furthest you can go and still be on Earth.” Even in Mbita, a comparative metropolis, conditions were pretty rough in the schools.

The Teachers Without Borders - Canada team visited ten schools the first week we were there. None of them had electricity. Two had generators, but no resources to buy fuel for them. One had a computer lab, but without electricity it was useless. Most of the schools were very basic. Typically, the classrooms had student desks, blackboards, and chalk. Some had old, tattered books that the students would share. It was not uncommon to see 50 learners in an early primary class. By late primary (grades 7 and 8), there were only a handful of students. Most had dropped out by that point. Many schools had dirt floors in their classrooms. Too many students didn’t have shoes.

We were there to do technology training.

The teachers see technology as a way out for their students. They’re desperate to get their hands on computers, and to learn as much about them as they can. For us, though, finding ways to make the workshops relevant was a huge challenge.

How do you teach a group of teachers to effectively use technology when they don’t even have electricity? You focus on learning. When technology was introduced into North American classrooms, it came at a time when transformational changes were taking place. The teacher finally moved off the stage. Students started working in groups. The focus of classroom teaching changed from a one-size-fits-all model to an approach that sees learners as individuals, each with their own needs. Teachers started applying constructivist techniques to their classes. Students started working on projects, developing their own understanding of key concepts.

All of this made it possible to effectively incorporate technology. Without a 1:1 program, the old model of instruction doesn’t really work with technology. Sure, the teacher can do some Powerpoint presentations and use the Internet to find teaching resources, but the students don’t get much out of it.

But none of this happened in Kenya. They’re still in the model where the teacher stands at the front of the class and lectures all the time. So we decided that we could teach a lot of pedagogy, and a little technology, and actually give the teachers some resources they can use. We had eleven working computers (counting the three we brought with us). We divided the teachers into two groups, so we were able to have 2-3 teachers sharing a computer for the hands on sessions, and an equal number of sessions focusing on pedagogy.

To set the stage for all of this, we got Zac Chase to lead one of the first sessions. At the beginning of the day, we had done a “get-to-know-you” activity that had the teachers up and moving around and talking to one another. Then, Zac took over with his “Why Integrate?” session.

So here he is at the Suba Centre in Mbita, Kenya, August 4, 2009. He has inherited this group of 47 teachers that he met about two hours ago. They think they’re only there to learn about technology. This is the middle half-hour of a 90 minute session. The video is not the best quality — he’s backlit, and I was using a handheld Flip camera. The room was very crowded, and it’s sometimes hard to hear. You also can’t see his slides very well. But despite those shortcomings, the presentation is well worth half an hour of your life.

Posted on August 29th, 2009 by John Schinker
Filed under: 21:Globalization, Front Page, Online Resources, Teachers, Teachers Without Borders | No Comments »

Security

Here’s a quiz. Look at these five pictures. Which one was not taken at a school?

dsc_0977dsc_0227
dsc_0026dsc_0220dsc_0440

The first time we visited a school in South Africa, we couldn’t help but notice the security in place. The school was surrounded by an eight-foot fence topped by razor wire. We drove through the gate and pulled up to the school and parked. When we got out, we went thorough another gate. This one was steel bars, only about six feet high, with barbed wire at the top. That got us into the courtyard. All of the classrooms opened directly onto the courtyard. Each classroom had bars on the windows and steel gates with padlocks over each classroom door. The windows facing the outside of the school had an extra layer of wire mesh outside the bars.

dsc_0222We were going to the computer lab. At that door, we found the standard steel gate like all of the other classrooms had. Then, after opening that, there was a bank-vault-style steel door about two inches thick. Once that was opened, the regular classroom door was underneath it all. When putting in a computer lab, Khanya spends about $5,000 US on security. That’s in addition to money the school contributes (typically another few thousand dollars), and it does not include recurring costs like alarm systems and security personnel.

Why all the security? Burglary is a huge problem in Cape Town, especially in the black townships where we were working. Many schools have had break-ins. Many have lost computers or entire labs. At one school, the thieves cut a hole in a brick wall to gain access to the computer lab. In Siyazakha Primary School, they cut through the steel roof. At Phakama Secondary School, they don’t have Internet access or telephone service because someone stole the phone cables running to the building, so they could sell the copper as scrap. The phone company refuses to replace the cable, because there have been more than 100 cases of cable theft in that neighborhood. Their only option at this point is to use cellular-based Internet access, but they can’t afford that.

Muggings are also pretty common in these areas. I don’t think anyone on our team ever felt unsafe, but the teachers we were working with were very careful. Any time we ventured out of the school grounds, there were always at least a dozen teachers with us. So while we never felt threatened, they made sure we also didn’t do anything that would make us easy targets.

As tight as this security was, I was surprised at how lax it was on school days. When we visited the schools, we just walked right in. We were careful to check in at the offices when arriving — we certainly don’t blend in with the local community. But if we had wanted to, we could have just walked into any classroom with no problem at all. Despite the crime problems, children are not targets. In an area where vigilante justice is the norm, everyone knows better than to mess with the kids.

The problems of school security are not easy ones to solve. We suggested that the best way to protect the school is to make it an integral, valued part of the community. If the community takes pride in the school, and values its resources, it will protect it. In these communities, most people don’t have access to the Internet or to computers. If the schools opened up their labs, and offered evening classes for the community, and brought people in to see the wonderful things that they’re doing, they might be able to get more help protecting the school. But that takes a lot of trust, and some planning, and resources they may not have. So it’s still a long road.

Oh, right. The pictures. From left to right, top to bottom, we have Glendale High School, Liwa Primary School, Robben Island Prison, Liwa Primary School again, and Siyazakha Primary School. All are in or near Cape Town. Robben Island is where many political prisoners were held during apartheid, including Nelson Mandela and current South African President Jacob Zuma, among many others.

Posted on August 23rd, 2009 by John Schinker
Filed under: 21:Globalization, Front Page, Teachers Without Borders | No Comments »

« Previous Page — Next Page »