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.