warrington’s blog

Wow! To be honest, I didn’t really see the value in re-doing my autobiography. Didn’t I just do this last year?? How much could I really have changed in 12 short months? Aren’t I fundamentally the same person? I did just think that this was simply another writing assignment that TLITE needs us to do in order to evaluate us and to say that they’re getting us to write some papers. Rubber stamp, bang, you’ve done another paper. Well done. On to the next one.

WELL!! I just re-read my autobiography from last year, and let me tell you that a lot has changed.

Actually, I really wasn’t in a very good head space at the beginning of last year. I had just wrapped up a school year with a difficult class. The atmosphere was poisonous with that one group of students and it was weighing on me pretty hard. I felt like I had failed in the one most important area for a teacher; to maintain an overall good rapport with my students and to let them know that I was on their side. I didn’t blame them, kids are kids after all, but I really didn’t like them very much and I dreaded every H block. I said to myself that I’d been teaching for 15 years, pretty much the same way, and that by now I must know what I’m doing, that if a teaching formula had worked for that long, it must be pretty ok, so if one class was in rebellion, then it must in some way be their fault. That is to say, not really their fault individually, but the fault of this generation of students. I’d been reading articles talking about “the Millennial’s”, an uber-generation of students who’d been spoon fed high self-esteem, who believed that they deserved high praise and reward no matter what they produced, who continued in this vein of high expectations in university and even in the working world, being demanding of their university profs and of their bosses, whom psychologists described as “narcissistic and with an enormous sense of entitlement”. What could be done with such a generation??

Well, I’ve always said that it’s never the students’ fault, that teenagers are what they are and are sometimes difficult to teach, but here I was kind of blaming them for being who they were. I still really don’t think that we’re doing them a service to raise an entire generation to have that kind of sense of entitlement, but still, it’s this generation that we have to teach. They are our clients in a way, and it’s no good trying to swim against the current. I knew all of this last year, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

I registered for TLITE because I really wanted to enter the 21st century, that is, to learn much more about info tech than I knew. TLITE seemed ideal to me. I could learn a bunch of things that I wanted to learn anyway, it would give me the impetus to learn things I wouldn’t get around to without it, plus I would get university credit for it, plus I’d get a pay raise. What was not to like??

What I didn’t know was that TLITE would solve many of the difficulties I was having with my Millennial students. Don’t get me wrong. TLITE is not snake oil and doesn’t cure ‘everything what ails ya’, but it did serve to make my classes more student-centered, it gave my students a cool springboard to do their projects with, and it gave them what they want; the chance to just go ahead and do it on their own. A colleague of mine won a ‘Teacher of the Year’ award this past year. The teacher is nominated by their own students, and he was teaching the same group of students I was teaching last year. In the staff room, he complained about them as much as anyone did, but he had found a way of working with them. Of his own volition, he was doing TLITE-type projects with his classes (actually, I told him that he’d make a great TLITE candidate and now he’s going to apply for it next year). This year, I was much more engaged myself during my classes because I was learning a lot of things that I was fired up to learn anyway, but my students benefited enormously as well. My strong students stayed strong students (don’t they always? no matter what?), but many of my weaker students found a real role for themselves in the tech projects, and a couple of them really struggle with French, but are absolutely astounding in their tech ability, so they were suddenly in the driver’s seat of their group. It was great to see.

After re-reading my autobiography from last year, I realize that I had a much more successful teaching year and that it is largely due to this program we’re doing. Thank you, TLITE.