The last week of school before Christmas break. I am ready for it and the students very definitely are. Attendance has fallen off even further this week, as have student energy levels. Still, one student has returned from injury and it is good to have him back. Yet my best student seems to have vanished without a word; I am afraid that something has happened with her daughter that is demanding all her attention.
This morning I managed to get in a 4 mile run, my first real run since Las Vegas. It felt very good to get out. I wanted a rest but was really starting to miss my daily runs.

Too many things going on in my life all at once. it has probably always been this way but right now it seems seriously oppressive. Running, remodeling the house on the farm, maintaining the house in town, school, seeing the chiropractor for my back, church, etc. The winter that has settled in on us hasn't helped; it has been very cold and stormy very early. It has all been good but a bit too much at times.
Very tired at the moment; also wired and unable to do anything about it. My wife and I flew down to Las Vegas last Friday and on Sunday I ran a very strong, fun half-marathon. I am quite happy with my 2:06:53 considering how the weather has interfered with my training over the past month. I was able to hold to my own schedule the night before the and the morning of the race, so I got to the starting line feeling good. I found a friend from Saskatoon to run with at a pace that suited me and I was able to hold that pace throughout the race and even pick it up a bit. I felt strong right to the end and probably could have gone a bit faster. But that is okay. 56th out of 241 in my age group is not bad at all, I think. The course was very flat and taylor-made for a fast time. Running in the crowds was very different for me and I was busy constantly staying out of people's way and passing, passing people right up to the finish line. Right now it is storming outside and definitely not acceptable weather for running in. Yet I want to go for a run, now!
Work on the house is going very slowly, and things like the trip to Las Vegas make the process slower but that is okay, I needed the break.

I need to get a new post up and to continue regular postings for a variety of reasons. First off, I have committed myself to at least weekly posts as part of my professional growth plan, but I also have been working hard at the running, and the schoolwork, and had a great run on Saturday as a member of Team Credenda in the Sask 50k-Ultra Relay. I ran the middle leg of 16.8km and had a respectable time of 1:39:34, which I am comfortable with if not overjoyed by.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, today is Married-To-A-Runner Appreciation Day. Certainly my wife deserves my appreciation for all the early leavings, my trips to places for races which she can't join me on and her year-in, year-out support. She will be going with me to Las Vegas in December and hopefully she will enjoy that trip.

I ran my third half-marathon of the year on September 12, and had a good run, with a time of 2:08:00, my best of the year though not what I was hoping for. Made some mistakes during the race and in the couple of days preceding, but not complaining. It was a good fun run, and a good time to see a lot of friends that I only get to see once or twice a year. Good weather for the race, unlike in P.A., the temperature stayed cool, and the wind didn't kick up until almost all the half-marathoners were finished. Now looking ahead to the Sask Ultra Relay in October. Should be fun.

Finally I am getting a new posting up. It has been a long time coming through this crazy busy summer. Took several weeks off from the computer almost completely through the summer; it was much needed. I was more burned out than I thought I was. A short, intense and stressful summer, worrying about Mom and trying to get the house on the farm into some semblance of readiness to live in. Keeping up with my running was a lot of work but very productive and a great stress reliever. Trying to make my garden grow in all the rain and cool weather was good for lots of laughs.

Mom will be 99 in early October and her health is not good but her attitude is awesome. She is very ready to die and go home to be with her saviour, but at the same time she keeps right on fighting the good fight and is so incredibly cheerful all the time.

The house of the farm is coming along slowly. I have the subfloors all done except for some touchup stuff and a last bit of drywalling, taping and mudding to do. Then the flooring guy can come in and do his thing: he is waiting for me. Ah........ there just aren't enough hours in the day or days in the week.

Still, it is good that school has started again. I am really excited about my classes this year. Psychology 30 and Native Studies 30 will both be my 3 time through the courses and I feel that I am starting to get a real handle on them, also starting to do a fair bit of rewriting of the curriculum to meet new research and/or changing times and events. Energy and Mines 10 and Math 10A both look to be a lot of fun, and it is definitely good to be teaching math again.

Ran my second half-marathon of the season on Sunday, in Prince Albert. A hot(for me) day and I melted in the heat over the last 6 km. Went from running only to walking a lot. 2:12:05 Not anything close to what I wanted but I put everything into it so I am happy with the result. My problems really started on Saturday when I spent all day out at the farm sitting on the flooring peeling up old Linoleum. My Quads were killing me that evening, and I know that the Ben-Gay eased the pain but didn't solve the tiredness. Still, very much a fun run and, as always it is good to see old friends and make new ones. The Credenda team did well, Lori G. running a strong 10k and Steven C. doing his first ever Half-Marathon. Now to seriously focus on getting ready to do the Half at the Queen City Marathon in September. I would very much like to get under 2:05.
On other fronts, school is finally over and grades are in. What a super year it has been! I have not had this much fun teaching, nor worked this hard, in years. I certainly see lots of areas where I can improve my teaching, and the content of the curriculum. So I have lots of work to do before next year starts. I feel like I especially need to learn more about using the technology as an integral part of the teaching, yet I am altogether too aware how little mastery some of my students have of even the basics of technology, although they are not generally as intimidated as some of the site teachers are. But back to my original thought; I need to learn more and become more comfortable with the technology tools, rather than asking the students to use them when I am myself shaky in their use. Typewith.me being a good example. I was trying to do things with it that it couldn't do and not teaching the students how to use it. My bad!

School is winding down, but as always, as it winds down it speeds up. Putting together final exams and creating review materials for the entire semester are both relatively stressful activities. I am always concerned that I am asking too little or too much of the students. Still, it is a rewarding time as in so many courses that pieces that have seemed so disparate all start to come together. When the students start to assemble the bigger picture and get beyond the small fragment to the whole then so much of the learning jells. That is an exciting time for me as a teacher to see that happen.

On other fronts, I ran the half-marathon in Saskatoon last Sunday as part of the Saskatchewan Marathon. The weather was chilly and windy but at least it was not raining or snowing as had been forecast. the race itself was great fun; I ran a 2:08:59, which was well short of my 2:05 target but a lot better than what I thought I would do. Now to slowly ramp up my mileage to about 40 miles per week. I am running the half-marathon in Prince Albert on June 20th, so no great ramping up before that. But after that my next race is the River Run in S'toon on August 15th and then the half-marathon in Regina on September 12th. Probably traveling to Seattle in July and I don't think there will be many races to run there, not in July. Who knows, I might luck out!

A shock to realize that it has been almost a month since I have written anything in this blog. School has been very busy, with the end of the year coming sooooo fast and so much to do. Work at the farm has come to almost a complete standstill as we wait for ordered materials and contractors-- need to start pushing on that stuff harder than I have been. Also, the weather hasn't been the best for that, warm but a lot of rain. But it does mean that I have been able to get almost all my my perennials transplanted out there, although the roses seem to have been winter-killed. So I think our hope of getting in this summer is not likely to come to pass.

School has been both really fun and really stressful of late. Getting to the end of the year means a lot of time spent encouraging the students not to quit, trying to keep their engagement levels up. It also means writing final exams (and then grading them). it also means the start of planning for next year, which is exciting for me as I will be teaching 2 Math 10 classes next year using the new Saskatchewan Math curriculum. They look like fun. it will be good to be teaching math again. I really miss, much as I am enjoying the humanities stuff I am doing. Either way it is fun and I am learning so much!

My running has been going well lately and we will see just how well on the 30th when I go to Saskatoon for the half-marathon. I'm hoping for a 2:05 but as usual will be happy to finish and not get hurt. While my speedwork has been right where I want it, my long runs have really been a struggle; not sure why. We will see what my scheduled 8 miler tomorrow feels like.

It has been too long since I wrote anything and I need to get at it, but my brain is so blank. School, the farm have been consuming all my time to the exclusion of almost everything else. Except my running of course, though it has suffered a bit also. Still, another test coming up! I am running a 10k this weekend at the Saskatoon Police 10k/Half-Marathon. I am hoping that my training will allow a 57 minute time. In any event, I plan to run hard and have a lot of fun!

On the political side of things, I am totally entranced by the current brawl over long-gun registry. While I realize that a lot of what is currently being said is grandstanding, some of the 'hate' and violence/inflammatory language seems to be meant to be taken seriously, and that scares me. I would like to think that we are a nation of law and a people who believe in the rule of law. Garry Breitkreuz apologized for what he staffer wrote but his apology seemed to be pretty close to an affirmation of what had been written originally. Do our legislators approve of violent and unlawful responses to opposition to their opinions and desires?

Easter break and time is flying soooo fast. Frantically trying to do all the things that I can't get accomplished during a normal week, hauling loads of stuff out to the farm and trying to get the house ready for the contractor starting on the 12th.

I still have some schoolwork to get done before Monday, primarily homework and mid-terms graded and mid-term grades ready for posting. I also need to call a few parents. However, my planning for next week is almost complete, about 95%, so I am feeling good about that.

I am very disturbed by the U.S. Federal Court decision this week on the authority of the FCC( Federal communications Commission to regulate the internet. If this decision holds up and legislation is not passed to provide that authority, I really do think that net neutrality will very soon be a thing of the past, which will end up making entities like Credenda much more difficult to keep functioning. While Credenda itself may continue to have the needed access and speeds, most of our students will not and that will make their successful participation difficult if not impossible. My wife thinks that I need not worry so. She thinks that popular opinion and consumer power will keep something approaching net neutrality a permanent reality; I am not so optimistic.

On other more trivial issues, why is the media spending so much ink on Gilles Duceppe and Tiger Woods? Is it because their readers really think these topics are more important or is it because the media corporations don't want to spend the times and money to do the investigative reporting needed for the more serious issues facing us in Saskatchewan, Canada and the world? I certainly don't know the answer but it is frustrating to find so much time and ink wasted on such monumental trivia.

Wow, it has been awhile since I wrote anything! OOPS! So much for good intentions of getting something posted every 3-4 days.

Spring is here, the weather is warmer and the running is going great! My mileage is slowing creeping up and so is the speed. If I can just keep from injuring myself, which is so much easier to do as I get older, especially via over-training. My body needs more recovery time than it used to. So I am doing more slow runs - recovery runs I call them - and only doing 1 long run and 1 or 2 tempo (speedwork) runs a week. So far so good.

I ran a 10k in Saskatoon on March 7 on a treacherous trail ( meaning I slipped on the the ice once and measured my height on the trail and still won my age group and finished strong. Felt great! Have another 10k coming up in Saskatoon on April 25.

On other fronts, school is going well, I think. I am certainly enjoying it a lot and learning a lot from the students as well as the web 2.0 stuff. ELA B10 and Psychology are especially fun. I really enjoy the work we are doing in ELA and the students that I have there. In Psych I am learning so much about psych from my own research, and then sharing it with my students. Whoohooo!

It is Wednesday and I am still chewing over the New York Times article, also the actions of the Texas Board of Education textbook decisions, and my needs as an online eTeacher. They all seem to coincide/collide in some fashion. I am excited by the idea of really being able to train teachers with the same skill that engineers, physicists and architects are trained. I am pretty bewildered by why so many people cling to the idea that teachers are 'born not made.' I would guess that they use it to justify their unwillingness to explore and learn new things themselves: if they were born a teacher then they were given all the skills they needed to start with. Certainly I have know a lot of teachers who do not learn new things and are proud of the fact, though I must admit that for some of them it is a result of the inoculation they were given in their university Education classes by some truly appalling instructors and curricula.

My needs as a eTeacher are different than those of a teacher in a brick-and-mortar classroom, not completely different, but many of the techniques that I learned and honed for years are no longer available to me. I relied heavily on interpreting body language, expression and tone-of-voice, none of which are available to me now. Hopefully they will be in some fashion as the technology available to me and my students improves. I am finding that being an eTeacher requires a whole different style of teaching and interacting; often I feel like a first year teacher all over again.

What is going on in Texas appalls me as an historian and as a teacher who tries very hard to instill in my students a sense of ethics and of the need to always be truthful and open in a pluralistic, multicultural society. Where to start? I think I need to start with the concept of democracy, the responsibility of members of a democracy to respect the views and opinions of those in the community whom one disagrees. This can be done without demeaning, demonizing or otherwise abusing the other. It can also be done without having to resort to distorting or lying about historical fact. There is more than enough interpretive effort involved in studying any event that there should be no need to resort to lies or distortions. How can a teacher teach ethics if this is how they see the the people who design their education behaving like this?

Found a really strong article last week in the New York Times Magazine on Creating Better Teachers. Teacher training, certainly in my experience, has been pretty much of a hit-and-miss thing, with an underlying assumption that teachers are larger born not made and that content knowledge is the most important part. My own experience over the years starting with my first round of teachers training in California in 1973-4 was that my University instructors were essentially worthless, had not been in the classroom in years, or never in some cases, and had nothing of value to communicate.

I was very lucky that I was able to spend most of the year in the classroom with 3 different mentoring teachers watching them, learning and practicing. A great deal of what I have been able to learn about teaching since then has been learned from colleagues and from simple classroom experience. I have been privileged to team-teach sometimes and have learned so much from it as we fed off of and critiqued each other constantly.

It has also been my experience that while content knowledge is important it is not near as important as the ability to communicate that knowledge. Many, if not all, of us who went to university experienced professors who were geniuses in their field but could not teach anything and did not really care: "I present the information, it is their job to learn and if they don't it is their fault."

Getting back to the NY Times article, it was good to see that serious research study is finally being done in this area. While I believe that the majority of problems that we are experiencing in education are not issues of content or testing(!) it does seem to me that better teacher training would help reduce the struggles our students are having.

I see that I haven't written anything in a goodly while. Time to start again. Things on the teaching scene have been great but things on the running and political scene have not been. Also the seemingly endless string of gray dreay looking days outside hasn't helped.

However, I have been running, though not as consistently as I would like. I seem to vbe plagued with a string of minor but nagging injuries this winter, probably as a result of the inconsistancy of the running - the plantar fascitis reappearing, a groin pull and ongoing pain from my sciatica. blech!!! However, in the last 3 weeks I have gone into Saskatoon to race and have been very happy with the results considering the lack of training etc. I ran a 7k on Feb 21 in a nasty wind and on March 7 a 10k on a wet and icy trail. In the latter I had a horrible time, fell on the ice and still won my age group!!!! whooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!

Mind you, instead of running the day after the race I decided to go cross-country skiing, thinking that the season is nearly over, and the trail was so poor that my little toes both turned black under the nails. So here we go again.

On the political side things haven't gotten much better. The Olympics were a nice diversion;I thoroughly enjoyed watching them and seeing the athletes from all over, and the Canadian coverage was so much nicer than the American, showing generally more than just talking heads and Canadians. Much as I don't like him or his politics, it was good to see PM Harper watching the events from the stands, to appearances like any other person except for the Mounties visible in the background. I can't imagine Pres. Obama, or any American President doing this.

And life continues. After a long spell of very cold weather it has decided to warmup. And of course my computer (the hp laptop) has decided to go on the blink. I now have to redo all my lessons for Monday and Tuesday on my Mac.. from scratch... This is going to be a long frustrating job as all my notes and old whiteboards are on the pc.

Done!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It was indeed a long frustrating job and took essentially all of Sunday to accomplish. Off this early morning at 6 am to bring my troubled pc to Credenda offices in PA for sorting out.

Out of my little corner, the world continues to go its own way and I keep reading the 'news' and wondering where and how it will all sort itself out. I see the United States sliding blithely and obliviously into either disintegration(I think most likely) or ongoing life as a 2nd rate power in the world, like Russia is today. While much is right and good about it, the things that are not are so big as to overwhelm the good. I am also afraid that the US will drag Canada down with it, and more afraid of what will happen to the rest of the world while the US goes down thrashing and flailing about.
The good: (1) the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well; people all over are brimming with new ideas
The bad:(1) living with fear as a driving force in national life and politics produces only reactions no action; the physical infrastructure of the country - roads, bridges, highways, railways, water and sewer, trash disposal -- all continue to crumble and hardly anyone seems to notice. (2)The public education system, elementary, secondary and tertiary, all are sliding into disfunction; much of the elementary system, especially in urban centers is already pretty much a total failure. The secondary system does not seem to be far behind and the tertiary system, which has been a world leader and able to make up for the failures under it, is itself starting to crumble badly given the various financial crises it faces, and the nature of much of the funding that it does receive.(3) Congress has almost ceased to function as a viable entity, it is so tied up in partisan warfare and drowning in lobbyists and their money.(4) The seemingly overwhelming power now being wielded by big business, with the result that democracy, political and economic, suffers badly. Small voices, often with very important and valuable things to say, get cut out of the conversation as the 'independence' of the media vanishes. Will net neutrality survive the next few months and if it does not, the great commons that is the internet will vanish with it.

Aaahhhh. Back in the work saddle after a nice 2 weeks off. Ready to go again. Ran a lot over the break, for me that is. Have run 16 of the last 19 days, mostly 3-4 milers, with only 1 6-miler. The weather has been too cold to gone for really long runs and drywalling, etc has taken up a big chunk of my energy. But they have been great runs for the most part, especially out at the farm with the deer and the elk to watch -- no moose thankfully.

Have been doing a good bit of reading: 2 books especially that have grabbed me are John Ralston Saul's 'A Fair Country' and Alex Ross's 'the Rest Is Noise.' I am not at all sure that I agree with everything that Saul has to say but most of it I do like and he has given me a lot to think about, both about Canada and the United States. That Canada is a Metis nation and that gives it a unique shape and identity in the modern world seems obvious to me but at times he really seems to push the concept beyond it's legitimate bounds. He beats on the nation's elite pretty hard, and for the most part they undoubtedly deserve it. But he does seems to belabor the issue for far too long and into thickets that he finds it hard to get back out of. While he, I think, clearly identifies Canada's national inferiority complex, he misses the fact of the US also having one vis-a-vis Europe, though in the American case it is much more schizophrenic.

Overall I thought it a very good book and hopefully a serious national conversation starter for where we as a country are going and why. I would like to have a discussion of it involving the Aboriginal community and their own perceptions, as they, like Hispanics and other minorities in the United States, are becoming major players on the national stage in their own right and not just the old "What are we going to do with/about them?"