Describing Vancouver to a Time Traveler

Describing Vancouver to a Time Traveler

Do you know what Vancouver looks like? Let me tell you Time Traveler. Vancouver is a beautiful city unlike your dusty and dirty planet. Vancouver has fresh air.  Downtown Vancouver has many skyscrapers. Sadly, Vancouver has lousy traffic and a little crime. We have a lot of water.  One of the many bridges is called "The Lions Gate Bridge." The mayor in Vancouver is Gregor Robertson. Do you have a hockey team on your planet? We do! Our team is called "The Canucks." There are two famous universities in Vancouver; The University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University. Does your planet have shopping malls?  We do!   The most famous shopping mall in Vancouver is called Metrotown and it is the second largest mall in Canada. The most famous park in Vancouver is called Stanley Park. The Vancouver Aquarium is located there too! The tallest building is called Shangri-La. If you enjoy skiing, I recommend that you go to Cypress Mountain because it is the biggest mountain in the city.  There are many ways to get around without a car in Vancouver. You can travel by Sky Train or Sea Bus. To put all this simply; VANCOUVER ROCKS! 

Written By:  Jason The Great (Jacqui's Deer Class / A Wrinkle in Time Unit)

Technology and Play in the Classroom

If you’re an educator, and you haven’t heard of Sir Ken Robinson, stop what you’re doing right now and go watch his TED talk on Creativity in Education. Click here. Seriously, go now. If you have seen it, then you know that he is an impressive speaker who is an expert on fostering creativity in the school system. Recently, thanks to his twitter account, I watched another of his videos. This one is only about two minutes long, and well worth your time.

Perspective is not easy as a teacher. We can become bogged down in the day-to-day details of the classroom, and forget the generational differences between our students and ourselves. His point about technology is impressive. Why would our students be any more impressed with the internet than we were with electricity? It’s not technology to them, it’s just part of their world.

Tapping into technology can be daunting in the classroom; I myself have a SMART board in the class that I don’t use enough. Recently, I gave my students a project where they had to write a story, and use www.prezi.com to tell it. Prezi is a free website that functions much like PowerPoint, except there is much more control over the aesthetics of the presentation. I set up my kids with computers, walked them step by step towards creating a new account, and once they had opened one of the basic formats, I gave them their instructions. Before starting on their stories, though, I told them to play with it for 15 minutes.

Within 5 minutes, one of my shier students had discovered how to incorporate pictures and videos into his presentation, and was teaching the other students how to do it too. He had suddenly become a leader in the class, and by the end of our session, each student had tailored their presentation to their own personalities before even beginning to write.

One of the greatest difficulties in using technology is setting up safe parameters for our students to use. They need to be able to play around with it, but it’s so easy to not understand or get distracted on the Internet. If we set it up properly, and let them have free reign, it won’t take long until they’re better at it than we are. After all, it’s not technology to them.

I wonder, though, at how they’ll react to playing around with other websites? Twitter? Or even facebook? What are your experiences with technology in the classroom?

Head on over to the Little Mountain Website for more information.

Poetry and Learning

Poetry and Learning

I have to admit that before I begin a poetry unit, I feel a little anxious.   I always worry about how my students will respond to learning limericks, haiku, free verse, and concrete poetry.  For some unknown reason, I have always believed that students will dislike writing poetry or find it difficult.  Despite my worries, I recently taught a poetry unit to a few classes, and I am happy to report that I could not have been more wrong about my students distaste for poetry.  My students did not just take to the unit, they loved it and I loved seeing my students being creative and sharing their art with others.   I am proud of all of the writers I have had the opportunity to teach and ultimately, learn from.  I am happy that I was wrong about poetry units and that I am always learning from my students.

Sincerely,

Jacqueline Stewart

Limerick

Haiku

Concrete Poetry

Playing and Failing as an Educator

            I have discovered, in recent years, that I am terrified of failure. The nervousness in my gut when I try something new in the classroom is now so expected that I had stopped noticing it. That anxiety was part of the process, one of the many emotions I feel from day to day as a teacher. It didn’t occur to me to examine it.

The other day, when I mentioned my fear of failure to my father, he said: “Welcome to the club.” I don’t know if he meant to say that this was an inherently McLean tendency, or if that’s just part of being human. Maybe both.

I discussed in last week’s post how important it is to let students play in the classroom. Part of playing, however, is the inevitability of failing. If you play video games, which statistics indicate you do, you know as well as I do that a game where you can’t fail is too easy, and gets boring fast. On the flip side, a game that is too hard will lose our interest. We have to find the sweet spot of difficulty in playing, and it’s the same in education. Part of playing in the classroom is the acceptance of failure from time to time.

It’s easy to say this from the lofty pulpit of a teacher. I’ve told my students many times that it’s alright to fail, that failing is how we learn, and that the greatest minds in the world accept failure as part of the process. But still I feel that anxiety when I try a new lesson, or when something goes wrong in the classroom. I used to think that working with failure means to ignore it, but now I’m not so sure.

I think that to really harness the full potential of playing then we need to create environments where failure is acceptable, and not just ignored. There is wonderful energy in the fear of failure, and if it can be harnessed towards improving for the next time then it can be a force for progress. An essential aspect of this is creating a safe environment to fail, from the administration all the way to the students. If I am afraid to fail in my environment as a teacher, I will not play with new ideas, and the class will stagnate. If I am afraid to fail, my students will be too.

It’s important for students to fail, but it’s just as important for teachers to as well.

Be sure to head on over to the Little Mountain website for more information, and read up on our awesome teachers!

Playing with English

           This month at Little Mountain, we’re talking about play – how we play, when we play, why we play. Taking the time to let students play is a central part of my own philosophy as a teacher, and it is also one of the hardest concepts to defend. It’s difficult to measure the success of play, and yet after years of teaching I am convinced of its importance.

Whenever I plan a class, I ask myself two questions:

“Am I giving students enough time to play with what I’ve taught them?” and “Am I giving them proper feedback?”

It’s easy to forget how important it is to play in the classroom, especially in language classes. I could give my students endless worksheets about grammar and verb tenses and spelling, and I’ve certainly worked in educational environments where that is encouraged, but that can only go so far. Writing is an incredibly difficult skill, and it needs to be practiced in unpredictable and enjoyable environments. Worksheets can help students learn the irregularities in the English language, but the greatest growth I’ve seen in students is when they’re given a blank piece of paper and a silly question. “Would you want a pet dinosaur? Why?” “Finish this story: My class was going normally when suddenly my teacher turned into a frog, then…” “If I gave you 3000$ for the weekend, and you had to spend it, what would you buy?” The ideas they create are wonderful, but, more importantly, they have to constantly adapt their writing skills to new challenges. They have fun and they learn.

The flip side, of course, is that students need immediate feedback. Play for playing’s sake is of course important, but we get faster growth if the writing is looked at and talked about. When someone hands in a short paragraph, I read it quickly and highlight their strengths, as well as one area I’d like them to work on. It doesn’t take long for either party, but we do this over and over. Next time, the students remember the advice because they’ve already taken ownership of what they write.

When we give students the time to play with their writing by keeping them on their toes, they grow rapidly as writers. But of greatest importance is the fact that they’re having fun. When we give them worksheets, they may learn a grammar rule or two, but when we ask them silly questions, they may just learn to love writing.

 Don't forget to head to www.lmacademics.com to read more about play!

Speaking of Health...

          There is nothing worse to me than someone who is boring. I would rather be sad, angry, or in great discomfort than be bored. Luckily, I find most people interesting, and it’s rare that someone is boring enough that it affects me. What I’ve discovered, over the years, is that staying healthy doesn’t simply mean just eating well and getting exercise; it means surrounding myself with friends who support and challenge me. Boring people may be supportive, but they are rarely challenging, so I probably don’t want to spend much time with them.

When I meet a new person, or if I am put into a new situation, I have been told that I get very quiet. This is strange for me, since I consider myself opinionated and deeply invested in the livelihood of others. The reason I stay quiet is because I am waiting until I understand the personalities and relationships in my environment. What kind of humour do they have? What different experiences have they lived through? Do they have crazy opinions? I am attracted to the personalities of those who are confident and have lived their lives strangely. They are the people I want to learn from, whom I want to challenge, and have them challenge me.

Bernard is an interesting person. We know this because he has a beautiful moustache.

One of my goals, of late, has been to say truthful things. It’s harder than it sounds. How often do we say we have to go, when in fact we just want to leave a conversation? How often do we tell harmless lies to not offend someone? Thankfully, I keep good company, with people who will challenge me if I say something that isn’t true. I think if I kept boring people around me, I would hold myself less accountable.

I am blessed to be surrounded by people who are interesting, honest and thoughtful. They keep my mind healthy and my conversations sincere. While I think the desire to keep away from boring people is universal, we all need different people in our lives to complement us. What kind of people do you surround yourself with?

Head on over to www.lmacademics.com to read this in Korean and Chinese!

How Do You Stay Healthy?

Here at Little Mountain, we’re growing moustaches and talking health. I didn’t think about my health at all until a few years ago. I had lived my life without noticing how I looked or what I ate, mainly because I had yet to notice any consequences. Then one evening, my wife (girlfriend at the time) and I were celebrating something. I don’t remember what it was, but between us we ate an embarrassing amount of cake. Like a whole cake. It might have been a whole double cake, one stacked on top of the other. Not important.

Because of the overdose sugar, I bounced around the room and acted strangely for the better part of an hour. When I finally calmed down, my wife looked at me and said:

“Mark. Either we eat better, or we go to the gym.”

Instead we did both.

She signed us up for a gym the next day, and for a week I cut sugar from my diet. The change was noticeable almost immediately. I felt better. I looked better. I probably even smelled better. It was the beginning of an important shift in my lifestyle.

Around the same time, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. If you haven’t read it, the premise is this: small changes can have big effects. Once I started eating better and exercising, I noticed all sorts of other things that I wanted to change. I began dressing well. I was more mindful of the words I chose. I started writing novels. This small change, this simple act of dropping sugar for a short time and going to the gym a few days a week, altered my outlook on life and pushed me towards self-betterment.

Of course, since Hallowe’en has just finished, the weather has been awful, and Christmas is just around the corner, I haven’t been as healthy as I would like to lately. But I now know that I can’t go long without the gym, and there’s only so much junk food I can eat before I don’t like the way I feel. Living healthily is not just an immediate concern; it’s about feeling better for longer.

That’s just me, though. Everyone finds different ways to feel better. What do you do to stay healthy? Or do you regularly eat cake and feel wonderful? If that’s the case, then we can’t be friends.

For more info, go to www.lmacademics.com.

Why I’m Growing a Moustache

            One of my deepest, oldest desires has been to grow a beard. I would love to have fiery red hair all over my face, thick and beautiful like a Viking, to keep me warm during the winter and manly during the summer. They’re remarkably attractive. Unfortunately, I inherited my father’s genes, and whenever I grow anything, it’s barely noticeable. Still, once a year, there’s a month where I get to try my best anyhow.

            Of course, I’m not growing a beard this year. I’m growing a moustache. It will barely be visible and it will look awesome. November is a great time of the year, when men feel comfortable growing facial hair of all shapes and sizes, and women wait patiently until their husbands, boyfriends, brothers, and friends shave. All in the name of a project called Movember.

            Movember began in Australia, as a way to raise awareness about prostate cancer. The logic? Only men can get prostate cancer, and only men can grow facial hair. The rules are simple: men must shave completely on November 1^st, and as the month goes on, trim their moustaches in their favourite style. The movement has almost reached 1 million participants, and it’s expanding fast every year.

            I grow my moustache for two reasons. First, it’s fun. Moustaches have gone out of style since the 70s, and there is no other time of year where it’s excusable to have hair below your nose. Every other month of the year, I miss it. I miss fiddling with it, and I miss getting food stuck in the hair. Second, it’s for a great cause. There are so many great charities out there, but this is one that I feel passionately about. As a man, it’s reassuring to know that there’s a concerted effort out there to promote health for men.

            Please take the time, and go to http://ca.movember.com/team/603461. Donate to the Little Mountain Learning Academy Movember team. Bernard, Bill, Jose, Mark, and Ryan will be growing moustaches as a group, and we hope you considering donating whatever you can.

            We want to hear from you. What do you think about Movember moustaches? Are you excited to see all the manly expressions of manliness? Or are you counting the days until they’re all gone?

Welcome to the Little Mountain Community Blog! Stay tuned for posts from our teachers, our tutors, and our students.