SOMEBODY Moved Avi's Cheese, But We're Not Sure Who

Picture of Cheese located here

Often, our own personality quirks stand out to us in the actions of others, so this week I am reminded of my friend and colleague Avi, with whom I teamed for many years teaching Active Physics and Physics I.

Avi has many positive attributes as a teacher, foremost being his sense of humor. A lot of my personal style of teaching was adapted from his approach. I often tell people (especially new teachers) that 90% of teaching is stealing, and I'm only half kidding. Well, maybe less than half.

Looking for the Finance Officer
Picture of Detective located here

In any case, one of Avi's quirks was on display perhaps 10 years ago, when it came time for our annual check out with the principal, back in the days when this had to be done with paper signatures, kind of like a scavenger hunt, but with the librarian and SBTS ( a particularly coveted prize).

When Avi's turn came for the final signature, our principal said goodbye for the summer and tried to give him a book. I don't think it was Who Moved My Cheese?, but it was something like that.

Avi, though, HATES pop psychology, self-help, and motivation type books, something many secondary teachers (and our former principal) love. The thing is, instead of just taking the book graciously and not reading it, like me, uh, I mean, like a sensible person, he refused to take it. He made a stink when he didn't need to, because in his mind, it wouldn't be ethical to take the book, implying he would read it, and then not.

I still laugh thinking about this, but it was brought to mind this week as I decided to create a commotion on the EDIT 762 message boards, calling into question the value and validity of the research on quality in blended and online learning in particular, and just online learning as a whole.

And For My Next Post...
Image of grenade found here

I might have been better served to just go with the flow, do the assignments, and continue to use humor (even of a slightly subversive bent) to motivate myself and gently tweak the assignments. Instead, much like the year that I responded to an assistant principal's structured interview question about how I incorporated "learning styles" based curriculum into my classroom by noting that I didn't, because the idea is flawed, citing Daniel Willingham of UVA, I went ahead and pulled an Avi, effectively challenging the foundation upon which the course was built.

To be fair, I suspected that the response would be positive, and attempt to address my concerns, and that it might even start a good conversation, but there's definitely a little Avi in me. Not THAT much, but still.

In any case, I think the iNacol standards we look at this week seem to be pretty solid. As is usually the case, even "new" ideas in education tend to be older ideas repackaged slightly (don't get me started on Kagan), but I think there are some good ideas there, even if many of them are just good teaching, like "The online teacher is able to respond appropriately to the diverse backgrounds and learning needs of the students. (iNacol Teacher Standards, 2011)*

I also think that having a set of standards is essential to good practice (even if I question the validity and volume of the research behind them), because the absence of such standards can lead to disaster. Coming back to an example I've used before, the above quoted standard seems obvious, but the chapter I reviewed in EDIT 762, which was a review of research on special education students in blended and online learning environments, found that very few districts had any kind of policies in place for sped kids, and it was a common belief that if a particular special education student had difficulty in the online environment, then he or she simply should not be online (Rice and Dykman, 2018). That's ridiculous (and illegal), and standards would (hopefully) keep this kind of attitude/approach out. Besides... it's pretty difficult to say something is quality without standards to judge it by, even if the standards are shakier than we would like. We work with what we have, and we can always strive to improve as we can.

Physics Cat meme *** found here

*This is not the correct APA citation**, but as this is just a blog post I didn't want to take the time to look up the proper formatting.

** I've never understood why APA is so prevalent anyway. Psychology is the softest of sciences. Why would the format be used in Physics, for example?

*** I wanted to use this image to make T-shirts for the whole Physics department at MVHS, but was told that it might be disturbing to the other disciplines. I can't imagine why.