From Graffiti to Bullying

Thanks for the gentle nudge, Anneke.  I really appreciate that you are writing at times other than when I ask you to!  I thought your presentation of Graffiti was one of the most engaging we have seen across all the PEEL presentations--something about drawings/diagrams that engages more than mere words.  I'm sorry you missed Barbara Coloroso's amazing performance, and I'm very sorry that you experienced bullying yourself for as long as 7 years.  Small wonder that you could write so insightfully and at length about the problem.
Do you know how many people are reading your blog?  It looks like you will have a very impressive documentation of your year, which is exactly what I was hoping for (even though you had the blog before I had the assignment!)
Yours,
Tom

Alternative Responses to Bullying

I was unable to attend Barbara Coloroso’s talk about Bullying in the evening of Peace Day at McArthur, and I was very disappointed since this is a topic that I feel strongly about. So I picked up some available information from the Faculty of Ed. to read about bullying on my own. I was stuck today by a very consistent line of thought in all the articles I read: STOP the bullying.

It struck me as an interesting and positive response to bullying, but maybe not the most successful response. I’m not suggesting for a second that we shouldn’t worry about bullying; bullying has pushed far too many kids into terrible depression and tragic suicide. Bullying is absolutely a tragedy of our schools.

But it is also no simple problem to solve: there are many forms of bullying that are almost impossible to detect (from the teacher or parent’s perspective), let alone stop. I do agree that it’s important to try to decrease bullying, but even more importantly, I believe we need to be teaching kids how to respond in a healthy way to bullying when it happens - because it happens. It doesn’t help students - who have watch unsuccessful after unsuccessful attempt on the part of teachers to end bullying in their school - to tell those kids that the only solution to their pain is to stop the bullying. When trying to eradicate bullying just isn’t working, I believe that with good supports at home and/or school, students can not only survive the bullying but also thrive and grow through those challenges.

I write from the experience of approximately 7 years of verbal/emotional bullying. Some years were better than other years, and there's the maybe years after the fact that might still be classified as bullying. But in the worst years, I greatly regret to say that I had some experiences of being the bully as well. Those years had a profound impact on my life in both positive and negative ways. Every person’s experience with bullying is very different, and I can only speak from my own experiences, but I hope and pray that I’ll be able to support the struggling students in whatever school I teach in, and share the lessons I learned through bullying with them.

Bullying, especially over the long term, can inflict painful emotional wounds that are not easily repaired. But it can also be a huge opportunity for positive growth. For example, there is a powerful lesson about determination and stick-to-itiveness that students with adequate support can learn. Often, parents move their bullied child from school to school to stop or flee from the bullying. In their attempt to avoid the bullying, the child learns that he failed in the 1^st school to be liked and accepted, failed in the 2^nd, failed in the 3^rd – in effect, the child learns that there is no where in this world where he belongs – a thought which can tragically lead a child towards suicidal thoughts. I was very fortunate, however, to be able to remain in one school. Even though I experienced bullying there, I had the positive experience of knowing that at the end of my elementary school experience, I was not a failure. I learned that can make it through difficult things without giving up or running away. I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for running away; sometimes the bullying really is just too severe for the child to handle, and leaving the school is necessary. But whenever I encounter a long term challenging problem, I am so grateful for the lessons I learned while being bullied: that while this may be hard, and it may even be hard for a long time, there is no reason why I won’t be successful in the end. With the right supports and encouragement at home and school, I believe kids can use bullying, an inherently negative experience, to learn a positive skill such as how to persevere through life’s challenges.

In addition to learning determination, with support, I think students can learn self-awareness and self-control over their own cognitive patterns through the experience of being bullied. For me, the main trigger of bullying was not the stereotypical bullying due to ethnicity, disability or economic background, but simply my own social awkwardness. I’ve always been awkward, and I’m now quite happy to say that I always will be. But I wasn’t always okay with my awkwardness. Here, bullying first taught me a negative lesson - to bully myself for days over one tiny social mistake. But years of experience with bullying gave me an opportunity to practice being aware of my self-bullying and purposefully challenging and changing my thought patterns. The typical thought pattern I first learned was, “I did this stupid thing. I am such a terrible person. No one could ever want to be around me”, but being aware of those kind of self-bullying thought patterns makes it possible for the student to see just how ridiculous they really are. With time and practice, students can learn to reframe their thoughts into, “I did this stupid thing. That is pretty funny. And my friends probably think it’s funny too.” Reframing situations has been for me a very challenging thing to learn, and there’s been plenty of times when I still slip into the original thought patterns that I learned. But the self-awareness and reframing skills that I learned as a means of survival during the experience bullying are very helpful to me in the everyday whenever I face not-so-constructive criticism. I’m still learning of course, but nine times out of ten, I can now say I actually really like my awkwardness. It’s a funny unique part of me that I value, and I wouldn’t give it up for any amount of “fitting in”.

Finally, the most powerful lesson that I believe can be learned through bullying is empathy. In our society, people who are hurting often work very hard to hide their struggles, and sadly they are too often successful. Students who have experienced bullying know the subtle signs of emotional pain because they have been there. For the rest of their lives, they have the incredible opportunity to genuinely empathize with others in a unique way. They can be naturally drawn to the person who is lonely in the crowd. They can come along side people who desperately need someone to understand what they are going through. For me, bullying opened up the wonderful world of working with people with disabilities. One of many examples of this was my friendships as a child: I naturally became good friends with another girl who was struggling with exclusion and bullying – years later she was diagnosed with aspersers, and I’ve greatly valued the understanding of autism that she taught me ever since. Those experiences with bullying have shaped my whole career path in a very positive way towards working with people with exceptionalities. I hope that I can not only see the students who are struggling emotionally and socially in my school as a teacher, but that I can also teach them how to grow through those experiences to deeply empathize with others.

Bullying is a very difficult issue to eradicate, but I do believe that in situations where attempts to stop bullying just aren't working, there are alternative solutions. I believe that bullying can be turned on its ugly head and used to benefit the child rather than harm him or her. It is so important that we do not look back on our experiences of bullying with contempt or bitterness, nor encourage kids who are bullied today to see themselves as victims, but rather that we teach them how to cope and grow through the experience. Bullying is 100% wrong. There’s no doubt about that. But it happened and it happens. I believe that a very essential aspect of my role as an educator is not only to try to stop bullying, but also to equip children with the supports and tools to grow positively from the experience when is does happen. I hope and pray that someday, even if my students can’t say “Ms. T’s class was so awesome”, they can say, “It was a hard year when I was in Ms. T’s class, but she stood by me, did everything she could to support me, so I learned a lot about life that year, and I’m a better person for it.”

Graffiti Method of Teaching

On monday, I had a wonderful opportunity to try out Graffiti teaching with the ideal class - a room full of passionate Physics educators. The Graffiti method came from the website PEEL in Practice (http://peelweb.org/index.cfm?resource=pip), and I applied this method to a unit review of optics.

We started our class with a bit of introductory discussion about how everyone's weekend was, what they did on the weekend, etc. Then I explained that this was a review class, and I divided the class into 4 groups (2 or 3 students in each group), and gave each group a sheet of paper with a moderately challenging question that had multiple answers. The questions were:

- What is reflection? Explain using an analogy.
- What is your favourite electromagnetic wave? What properties and/or applications make that wave your favourite?
- What is refraction? Explain using an analogy.
- Choose an application of the lens. How does the lens work in that application?

The group talked and decided on an answer, which was written down in pretty coloured markers on the pages of paper. After about 3 minutes, the papers were rotated to different groups. The new group was then told that they could "cheat" off the previous group - they were encouraged to use the previous ideas combined with their own ideas to answer the question in the best way possible. The papers kept rotating until every group had a chance to write.

Then I switched up the groups and redistributed the papers. The new groups' task was to summarize what the class knows about refraction, reflection, electromagnetic waves, or lenses depending on what sheet they received, and present this summary in 1 minute to the class. This is what they came up with!

Finally we ended with some discussion about how effective the class found the Graffiti method, and I received some very helpful feedback. The "students" told me that they felt rushed - they would have appreciated 5 minutes instead of 3 minutes to work together as a group answering the questions. They said that they felt engaged and involved in their learning, and they appreciated the different colours and the freedom to draw or write on the paper. Some of the "students" especially liked the fact that they were allowed to "cheat" off the other groups' ideas - this made exchanging ideas more fun. They also appreciated the relaxed start of the lesson with a little chat about the weekend before launching into the activity.

Interestingly enough, the Think, Pair, Share method of teaching which happened to follow my Graffiti lesson is strikingly similar. It was interesting, however, to see how very differently such a similar teaching style could be taught very differently by another teacher. In his lesson, he used Think, Pair, Share as a unit opener to get students to think about a concept, and he appealed more to the auditory learners whereas I went straight for the visual learners. It was helpful to see how a similar method could easily be tuned to different learning styles almost unintentionally due to our own personal learning styles.

Beautiful painting!

Thanks for sharing your latest work of art, Anneke!!  I like it a lot.  What do the two sisters think of it?

Interesting that we talk about art helping with other subjects, but rarely see physics that way.  I guess we have to go for physics for its own sake.  And doing physics seems quite a long way from doing art.  You have two wonderful teaching subjects!!

Tom

Personal Creative Practice

In my art class, we’ve been talking mostly about the why of art education – instrumentalist theories which describe how art education assists students with other academic subjects such as math and english, and essentialist theories that explain why art is important for its own sake. Mixed in with our discussion of art education theories, our professor has also slipped in his own words of wisdom as a teacher.

One such piece of advice that particularly stuck out to me was to maintain our personal creative practice. It seems obvious, but I can see it being very easy for me to get so busy planning lessons and organizing student art shows that I run out of time to actually make art myself.

In light of that, the picture of the two sisters I was painting this summer is finally dry!

It was a really fun piece to paint – they are both such beautiful women. I hope this painting can capture some of their radiant personalities.

First Day

What a great way to start off this year of teachers college! Bagpipes and the town crier opened the education year, and by the afternoon we were learning useful tools for teaching. Our Physics teacher used the Predict (and explain), Observe, Explain model (POE) for teaching, but with a particularly great strategy during the prediction aspect.

The problem he presented to us is illustrated below:



The three ramps shown above each descend by the same amount. Which ball, released on the left side of the ramp, will reach the right side first? Or will they all end at the same time?

The great part about how the professor taught this lesson was in how he asked students to predict what would happen. With a room full of rusty physics teachers, everyone was nervous about giving the wrong answer, as would be the case for our future high school students. So, rather than asking us what we thought would be the fastest ramp, he asked us, "If someone were to believe that the first ramp would yield the shortest time, what might they use as their reasoning? If someone were to believe that the time would be same no matter what ramp the ball went down, what might be their reasoning?" etc. It took away the fear of being wrong, and enabled us to engage in a productive learning discussion.

I do believe this will be a great year :D

ps. So how do you think someone would be reasoning if they chose the blue ramp to yield the shortest time? The yellow one? The red one?