Unlearn16: Class is in Session - The One Where I Teach Through the Learning or Learn Through the Teaching

00:00:00.000 class is in session hey you doing and welcome to unlearn 16 class is in session you just get me

00:00:10.000 today guys you just get me but but you're going to get an introspective me for a second because

00:00:16.480 i've been talking a lot about metro prep academy in toronto and and saving the school and how

00:00:22.640 ryan and i are going to change it and all of the goals and all of the things i'm doing all

00:00:26.480 these renovations you guys go check out but I think I need to spend a bit of time and this is

00:00:32.960 the hard part thinking about and and deciphering what we didn't do well what I didn't do well

00:00:42.760 in the past what um teachers as a whole don't do well um what education doesn't do well what I can

00:00:52.340 fix if I can fix it. But first, you know, there's no way for me to sit here and say everything we've

00:00:59.640 ever done or everything I've ever done and the school's ever done has been perfect. Of course

00:01:03.360 not. So I'm going to go back and I want to sort of highlight some of the things that I don't want

00:01:10.440 to replicate and sort of take acknowledgement of the problems that they could have presented or

00:01:17.140 were created. And at some point, sometimes the good things that came out of them, right?

00:01:23.540 When I first started here, this school was very, very Marx-driven to the point where we had this

00:01:28.620 Marx board that was up. Everybody's averages were up. And for the most part, I didn't even question

00:01:35.960 it. I was young and I thought, okay, well, this is what private school did. And that eventually

00:01:44.740 fell by the wayside. And it didn't just fall by the wayside for no reason. It's not that we just

00:01:49.120 got bored putting out marks. The reality was, I don't think for most students that your average

00:01:57.540 is a driving factor in A, your confidence, or B, you actually doing better. So listen,

00:02:07.660 we have to do marks. Anybody that's like, oh, we should do away with marks, it's ridiculous.

00:02:11.440 We live in a system in which when you get into university, it is mark driven. You have marks, you have in the States, SAT scores. We can't get around that until there's a complete overhaul.

00:02:25.140 But there still needs to be a way to sort of try, and this is the key word, try to get at somebody's capacity, somebody's potential, somebody's work ethic, somebody's drive, somebody's passion.

00:02:43.100 There needs to be a way to kind of gear that.

00:02:45.140 Otherwise, there's no way to sort of allow and facilitate, you know, students to go into different disciplines. 0.52

00:02:53.640 And when I say it out loud, it still sounds silly.

00:02:56.200 It sounds like this mark is the be-all and end-all.

00:02:59.100 This grade is the be-all and end-all of who they're ever going to be, which is just not the case.

00:03:03.720 But what we found out, and when I look back on it, is kids that are driven by marks have some stuff they need to deal with.

00:03:14.380 And kids that the mark itself, the grade itself in that competition causes them to collapse have different things to deal with.

00:03:22.840 but they both have issues and they both have sort of a different way of motivating themselves that

00:03:30.460 we still need to tackle. And I feel as though we need to reconfigure, redress the way in which

00:03:40.000 we focus on the grade. And I've said this before, you know, somebody, a kid getting an A in a class

00:03:47.060 isn't necessarily cause for a parade.

00:03:51.020 The kid busting their butt and getting an A in the class, 0.85

00:03:55.880 throw out the streamers, right? 0.99

00:03:57.780 The kid that busts their butt and gets a C, streamers. 0.96

00:04:03.240 Because I think what we need to start doing is understanding 0.79

00:04:06.720 that work ethic, that perseverance,

00:04:11.420 that continuously learning from your mistakes

00:04:14.220 and getting a bit better and getting a bit better

00:04:16.220 and getting a bit better. This is what has inherent, beautiful value, right? Because

00:04:25.220 making mistakes and stinking at something, but doing it anyway, guys, that's, if you can have

00:04:35.040 a 16 year old that knows how to do that or is capable of doing that, there's not going to be

00:04:41.500 anything that's going to stand in their way because they're constantly going to get better

00:04:45.260 at whatever it is they're doing. The individual that it comes easy to and never has to be

00:04:49.920 challenged and never has to throw down and never has to dig deep, I'm not saying that they're

00:04:55.120 going to be, but those individuals will eventually come up against it. And when they come up against

00:05:01.140 it, I'm not going to know as an employer, as a teacher, how their character is going to handle

00:05:07.060 that setback, how their consciousness is going to handle defeat and failure. Are they going to

00:05:14.940 crumble? I don't know. But I do know the kid that busts their butt, gets the C, takes the class

00:05:23.200 again, gets a B, takes the class again, gets an A. That kid's proven something different. 0.97

00:05:29.500 They really, really are. And I think there needs to be space for that as well as grades. Listen,

00:05:35.320 achieving a certain grade is important. And it does have value. I just don't think it has all

00:05:40.860 the value. So I was very happy when we decided to, you know, chuck that. We don't necessarily,

00:05:46.760 you know, put that as the driving force of the school. So that was one thing. I think

00:05:54.740 me as a young teacher, I used to yell way too much. A young teacher has two gears, I think.

00:06:06.260 you want to be everybody's best friend and the class goes out of freaking hand and hopefully

00:06:12.520 you can reel it back in or you do which nobody does by the way which everybody always tells you

00:06:18.820 to do which for the first three months you don't smile has anybody given that information or that

00:06:23.800 advice when they started for the first three months don't smile why so they know you're serious

00:06:29.640 well guys I was the former right um I had classes I mean they called us by our first name they came

00:06:38.580 and go as they saw fit my classroom management never got tried because I also had by the way

00:06:46.380 when I first started I was teaching 19 year olds so full-fledged adults here um who really cared

00:06:51.980 about their grade it was a double cohort year so I didn't need to put a lot of external pressure on

00:06:56.660 them. They just put it on themselves and sat down and did what I asked. And we had conversations.

00:07:00.840 We were so close in age. It was like just debate, discussion. But a few years in, I've had classes

00:07:09.200 that have made me rethink the profession. I had a grade seven class one time that it was right

00:07:15.980 after lunch. And every day I'd come into that class and I adored them individually. But together,

00:07:21.900 they were napalm. They were catastrophic. And every day they'd be like, Joe, we're going to

00:07:31.400 be good today. We're going to be good. Because they really wanted to be good. They weren't bad

00:07:35.660 kids. They really wanted to be good. And about halfway through, I'd have indigestion, and I'd

00:07:40.940 be ready to call it a day from my teaching profession. And every day, those same kids

00:07:45.380 would walk out and say, don't worry, Joanne, tomorrow's going to be better. And I often think

00:07:49.000 back on that class? Because that was maybe about five or six years into teaching. And how would I

00:07:53.720 have handled it differently? Because there are some classes, and this is essential teaching,

00:08:02.000 forget the material, forget all of that. If you can't manage a classroom, you can't get the

00:08:08.800 information across. So I often think back about that class and like, how would I have handled it

00:08:13.080 differently? Would I have separated students? Would I have singled them out? Would I have taken?

00:08:16.980 but there were in this particular class it was like these kids were acting up and I calm these

00:08:21.820 kids down and then these kids would act up and then these kids would act up these kids would

00:08:24.800 act up again and then it would be back it was it was like they tag teamed me and every once in a

00:08:31.980 while I do think you get a class that is you know so so difficult in their composition in their

00:08:41.280 in the parts that make up the whole, that I honestly believe you need to change the composition.

00:08:47.920 And by the way, class composition can be changed with one student. You can take one out, you can

00:08:52.720 add a new one in, changes overnight, which I find fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. It's not just

00:09:00.340 about the kids in the room, it's the dynamic of the personalities in the room. So how would I

00:09:05.700 handle that differently now. Talk to the parents more. Have the parents in. Have the parents in

00:09:12.120 with the student. I think if you have the time, and I realize I'm talking from a private school,

00:09:18.180 but if you have the time and the capacity to have the student sitting in front of you,

00:09:22.080 the parent sitting in front of you, and meeting the thing head on, you also end up forging an

00:09:27.540 understanding and a bond with that family and that student, which sometimes makes those individuals

00:09:34.860 want to try harder, maybe not be the kid that's piping up when they have the chance,

00:09:42.960 right? You forge that. The more that you can forge a connection, and again, student and family,

00:09:50.060 because the quickest way you're ever going to learn about a kid, spend 10 minutes with their

00:09:53.780 parents and their siblings or their grandparents or whoever's in their lives, for good or for bad,

00:09:58.740 guys, it's a brilliant insight into who they are. And if you have a better insight into who they

00:10:03.660 are you have a better insight into what dynamic you can possibly create in the classroom in order

00:10:09.660 to minimize distraction and maximize learning what i've realized is i shouldn't have taken

00:10:16.060 politics in university i should have taken psychology i think child psychology when i

00:10:22.060 when i think back child psychology and adolescent psychology which are two different different

00:10:26.460 things that should be teachers college whatever else is going on in teachers college throw it out

00:10:32.620 But child psychology, adolescent psychology, understanding driving forces of behaviors, of different learning abilities and difficulties, of how to combat those, of how they connect to a student identity, about how family and issues within the family can manifest within the student in your classroom and what you can do about that and how you can get that.

00:10:56.480 Are you kidding me?

00:10:58.300 I can't get to the War of 1812 until I get all of that.

00:11:01.460 And the only reason I've gotten half decent at it, and I do say half, is because I've been doing it for so long.

00:11:08.560 But that should really be the driving force.

00:11:11.500 So when I talk now, and a lot of people are like, oh, you have such a great perception.

00:11:16.700 It's not because I came with it.

00:11:19.160 It's not because I was born this amazing critical thinker.

00:11:22.240 It's because I've lived 23 years of figuring it out, of failing.

00:11:27.800 And when I say failing, there are kids that I couldn't get to.

00:11:31.460 right? There, there are kids that have flipped their desk in my classroom. There are kids that

00:11:35.600 have wished horrible things onto my house. There are kids who have been, you know, go to different

00:11:43.140 schools or, or, you know, have gone through it, never to set foot back in my classroom again.

00:11:49.420 And I look at that and I'm like, those are my failures. So what did I do to cause,

00:11:56.340 maybe not to cause. It's not like I'm taking all the weight on my shoulders.

00:12:00.920 Number one, you're the adult. Number two, you're the teacher. Number three,

00:12:06.740 you need to be, as a teacher, you need to be the person that is constantly looking for roads of

00:12:12.040 mediation and mitigation, as opposed to solving a problem once it's happened.

00:12:17.980 And that's what I got good at later in my teaching career, is seeing the train going off the rails,

00:12:26.340 really early on and being able to mitigate the off-road. You know, I had a student

00:12:33.680 who would get frustrated, right? He'd get really frustrated. And if I let it bubble over,

00:12:40.000 it would, well, we'd end up having to call his parents and it would be a thing.

00:12:45.820 In his last couple of years at Metro, though, I could see it coming. I could be like,

00:12:50.060 catch his eye shake my head sometimes take him for a walk outside and say you're not feeling

00:12:58.780 good here right he'd be like no or he'd say whatever he said i said okay let's just take a

00:13:03.720 breather let's take a breather and take it down a notch because nine times out of ten those

00:13:08.200 explosions those either verbal or you could see them like manifesting physically they all come

00:13:14.740 from anxiety, insecurity, and frustration with not being able to do what's been placed in front of

00:13:22.060 them. And kids, as well as adults, find it very, very, very hard to ask for help. You know, all

00:13:29.200 these parents are like, just ask for help. Why don't you ask for help? Just go to your teacher.

00:13:33.860 It's really hard for them. It's hard for them because they don't want to do it in front of

00:13:36.760 their peers. So you got to figure out a way to have conversations with students before that

00:13:41.800 happens, right, before they're going to pop off or give up or, you know, get quiet and recede,

00:13:52.140 you have to figure out strategies to do that beforehand. And again, all of that is helped

00:13:57.400 with meetings with them and their families. And you need to figure out how to get ahead of the

00:14:03.160 game. Because if you can get ahead of the game, I'm not saying every student walks out here with

00:14:07.260 an A, but every student can walk out thinking, oh, but I accomplished something I didn't

00:14:12.020 accomplish yesterday. So if I can get ahead of it and I can say, well, that's not going

00:14:16.540 right, right? And that worked really, really well. Here's my problem. Here's my current

00:14:22.420 problem. I don't know if any teachers agree with this. My current problem, the kids that

00:14:27.620 pop off, the kids that get angry, the kids that are outwardly disruptive, you can see

00:14:33.120 those kids coming a mile away. And those kids tend to take energy and your attention as they

00:14:39.740 should. All students deserve that. What about the kids that get quieter? What about the kids

00:14:45.680 that recede more, that close off more? What about the kids that, you know, just quiet? It's like

00:14:54.580 quiet quitting. It's like you have people in the workforce right now who are quietly quitting,

00:15:01.300 who are just doing what they need to do because they don't feel engaged,

00:15:05.500 because they don't feel supported, because they don't feel acknowledged or respected,

00:15:09.020 so they just do the bare minimum until they can get the heck out.

00:15:12.460 Well, that's a failure of mine then.

00:15:16.100 But those kids are hard, very, very hard to see, right?

00:15:22.500 How do you differentiate between a kid who doesn't want to try

00:15:25.520 and a kid who doesn't understand enough to try?

00:15:27.340 especially when they're probably not going to be willing to say anything they're not going to be

00:15:33.960 they're not going to be forthcoming especially in front of their peers younger kids better

00:15:40.860 you get to the teenage years and those kids all they care about and I don't mean this in a negative

00:15:48.260 way this is enough in a child and adolescent development way their peers matter more by far

00:15:56.340 way more than the teacher, way more than their parents, their peers matter the most.

00:16:02.960 They're supposed to. Their peers are supposed to matter because they're supposed to differentiate

00:16:07.240 from their parents. They're supposed to be individuate. They're supposed to become adults.

00:16:10.740 And this is the painful transitional time, right? It's all supposed to happen.

00:16:16.540 That's why your friends, of course, your friends matter. But what matters more

00:16:20.160 is how can you still maintain an outlet or a safe space

00:16:26.540 to verbalize when you're scared, when you feel inadequate,

00:16:31.300 when you feel incapable of achieving, 1.00

00:16:36.360 when you feel flat-out stupid. 1.00

00:16:39.480 Who do I go to? Who can I go to? 1.00

00:16:44.440 And that's the magic of a solid school.

00:16:50.160 that's it. It's not about AP course. It's not about a good basketball program. It's not,

00:16:56.420 it's not about the right uniform, although hoodies do matter. It's about,

00:17:02.180 and I don't even know how you, how you quantify this. It's about, have you created a school

00:17:07.860 in which the lion's share, and I use that term because our mascot's a lion, the lion's share

00:17:18.220 of students feel safe enough to do that and utilize that, and they've gotten better because

00:17:24.960 of it. That's something that is priceless. That is a way that you really do grade, or you should

00:17:35.020 grade and quantify and judge a private school. I've often said, because we have a lot of people

00:17:44.000 that will come in here and say, how many kids go off to university? Well, 99%. Why is that your

00:17:51.460 question? It's a wrong question. You're asking the wrong question you should be asking. Of your

00:17:57.980 students that go to university and college, how many of them are successful there? How many of

00:18:05.640 them are successful there and then go on to utilize that and become successful adults? Because this is

00:18:12.360 where the seeds have been planted? That's a great question. That's a really good question. Give me

00:18:18.520 the statistics on that. Because I think for a very long time, Metro Prep, and most schools,

00:18:27.520 right? Most high schools for sure, consistently just measure, do we get them into university?

00:18:34.280 It's a wrong question. So I'm going to try to change that. I am going to try to figure out a way

00:18:40.700 to track and to understand how our students do to have more that's why alumni support and

00:18:48.620 connections really matter it's about you went from here did we give you enough where did we

00:18:55.400 drop the ball and that's where those reflections are quite important right if you can have

00:19:01.140 um those really good kind of connections and figure out if a student will sit in front of

00:19:10.380 and be honest right and i think i'm going to bring that back i think i'm going to as vice principal

00:19:17.020 i'm going to bring that back i'm going to have students sit and talk about what they need more

00:19:23.020 of what fails them now a lot of students are going to say i don't want to write tests okay

00:19:31.420 listen nobody wants to write a test but there's a there's a skill set and a lesson that needs

00:19:36.940 to be learned there if you want to go to college university there's something there you need to

00:19:43.180 learn how to engage in that confidently you need to know how to prep for that you need to learn how

00:19:49.020 to handle the anxiety and the stress of that you know other kids will say well i don't want to

00:19:54.060 write an essay again there are skill sets that are difficult in high school but necessary and that's

00:20:01.260 why it's probably better to ask students once they've been to university or college.

00:20:07.640 Like, I understand not every kid goes to university and college. I get that. Metro Prep Academy is a

00:20:12.580 university prep school. If you're coming here, it's because that is your goal. Okay, so let's

00:20:16.840 just deal with that on the front end. Because the kids that have gone off to university,

00:20:23.120 those are the kids and been successful or not. Those are the kids that can say,

00:20:27.560 You need to do more of that. Or this is what they're doing at university. Now you need to

00:20:32.200 adjust. You need to change this, right? For a very long time, I remember not liking extra time on

00:20:38.540 tests because I'm like, but there's a need to have, there's this objective. When you're young,

00:20:48.620 you're stupid. You think there are objective realities in the world, which they're just not. 1.00

00:20:52.220 When I was young, I used to think that an hour test, the time itself and the timing

00:20:58.920 has a value put upon a student.

00:21:03.280 So when you see every student operating in that specific timing, you're getting an objective

00:21:08.460 sort of answer about, do they know the information and can they do it under the stress, under

00:21:14.500 the weight of a time?

00:21:16.480 And then what I came to realize as an intelligent person who's actually taught for a very long period of time is a student that can memorize and recite in 60 minutes isn't necessarily the most intelligent kid in the room or the most capable student in the room.

00:21:35.700 It's just the student who has learned or has the capacity to fit in that box and fit in

00:21:42.940 the way in which we test.

00:21:44.420 And we all know, sure, they can go off to university and still do that, but then what?

00:21:49.760 When they get the third and fourth year of university, they're doing their PhD or they're

00:21:55.900 in business school, now what?

00:21:58.240 Now what?

00:21:59.140 Because very rarely in real life is somebody sitting over you with a stopwatch asking you

00:22:05.080 to do your job. Maybe as a teacher, I don't know. So what am I testing there? And there's no

00:22:16.720 objectivity in using a sit down, write this test, fill in these questions, answer these multiple

00:22:25.740 choice. There's no objectivity in that because I've already decided the lane in which I'm going

00:22:32.560 to teach and test, by choosing that test format, I've already been biased. I've already implored

00:22:41.680 a bias on how that kid should be tested. And the funny part is that strategy isn't the way

00:22:49.380 it works in the real world. It really isn't. When people talk about education not being blah, blah,

00:22:55.940 blah. Listen, education is absolutely useful. I think, though, we should be learning a little

00:23:01.860 bit more about, and we are, and we're starting to adapt. I think sometimes we go too much the

00:23:07.420 other way, but we're starting to adapt to does this have real world application in use? For

00:23:16.640 example, public board doesn't take off late marks. What? It's ridiculous. The number one thing that

00:23:24.020 we should be teaching kids in high school, the number one thing, how do you effectively time

00:23:27.660 manage. You have to. You also have to understand when you're trying to teach those kids how to

00:23:33.200 effectively time manage that they're not adults. They don't have control over their lives. So when

00:23:38.660 they make time for something and then their parent says, we're going away, or we're having

00:23:43.960 your grandma's coming over, or you're babysitting tonight, or, or, or, and all these other things.

00:23:49.600 It's not like an adult where for the most part, you can control your time. Teenagers don't control

00:23:54.780 their time. And a lot, in a lot of cases, their parents and grandparents and siblings infiltrate

00:24:02.100 that time and disallow them to sort of put in place the time management that they had already

00:24:10.440 planned to. So you got to take all those things into consideration, all of it, as a teacher of

00:24:16.480 high school student. That does not mean you eliminate them having to understand time management

00:24:23.600 and them having an, and this is where it comes back to what I was saying. You sit down with

00:24:27.740 their parents at the very beginning of the school year. And if a kid can't go home because too much

00:24:32.880 is going on, you talk to the parents, say, listen, I think it's best if they stay here for a half

00:24:36.860 hour and really work and focus on doing this. Um, and most parents think it's fantastic.

00:24:46.320 You also have to take into account that a lot of kids other, like have responsibilities,

00:24:51.140 jobs um they take care of their families they take care of ailing siblings or parents or

00:25:00.080 grandparents um they have other responsibilities in their world and you have to take that into

00:25:06.200 account their primary job as a teacher sees it should be learning but that's that's not the way

00:25:13.460 the world works and that's not the way their life works so you have to figure out because those

00:25:19.400 kind of students, by the way, kid that works 30 hours a week and still gets a B in grade 12

00:25:24.900 physics. Oh, I'll hire them seven days a week and twice on Sundays because that kid's going places.

00:25:31.700 Forget the grade. Look at how they manage, right? Look at how they multitask. Look at how they

00:25:38.820 prioritize and do what needs to be done. And they don't give up and they don't let go and they don't

00:25:44.560 throw their hands up in frustration and walk away from the whole thing. That is impressive.

00:25:50.920 So as a new beginning to Metro Prep, I really want to figure out ways to maximize all those things,

00:26:01.720 to step away from the old guard, to step away from the old, you know, standbys of the way we've

00:26:08.720 always done it, not to step away from accountability and responsibility, but to ensure that that

00:26:15.580 accountability and responsibility is evenly distributed, is fairly given, and completely

00:26:23.800 understood as expectations at the beginning of the semester.

00:26:29.500 I'm not saying we're not going to make mistakes, guys. I'm not saying that everything's going to

00:26:34.480 be perfect from here on in. What I'm saying is this, figuring out the brilliance and the potential

00:26:41.680 of an individual and not letting that unique qualification that makes them them, don't smudge

00:26:52.520 that out. Don't dampen that. Figure out how to expand it, how to embolden it, how to make them

00:27:00.660 feel stronger in it and then and then help them achieve everything they need to achieve in a world

00:27:10.140 full of structure and expectation and rules that they might not like but they're going to need to

00:27:16.700 have a handle on how to dive into it and utilize them anyways and on that note i will see you guys

00:27:26.300 next Tuesday! Same bat time, same bat channel. Dismissed.

Unlearn16: Class is in Session - July 23, 2024

The One Where I Teach Through the Learning or Learn Through the Teaching

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