What I Did On My Blogging Hiatus

It’s been a busy and fruitful year and a half since I last wrote. Teaching highlights:

• I finally got my teaching to play nice with the rest of my life — down from an abominable 80-100 hours of work per week to a manageable 60 (hint: standards-based grading was part of the solution, not the problem).
• I noticed that standards-based grading and inquiry-based learning (I aspire to something along these lines) were not just challenging my students understanding of “right and wrong answers” on tests, but also their understanding of “right and wrong” moral behaviour in the world.  No, really.  I saw a sharp uptick in classroom conflict (about course ideas), out-of-class conflict (about everything else), and tearful moral crises.
• I found a balance between inquiry-based learning and you-have-to-know-this-because-employers-say-so that lets me sleep at night.
• I urgently started learning and practicing ways to help students enter peacefully into disagreement.  My classroom management got 100 times better, partly because I improved our beginning-of-year conversation about community agreements, partly because of these unusually useful online courses, partly because I got better at noticing and encouraging these “intellectual traits“.

Not-Directly-Teaching-Related Highlights

• I took a semester off using my contract’s deferred salary plan, from January – June 2014
• I learned to camp solo in the backcountry, including some winter trips
• I successfully applied for a reduced instructional assignment for the current academic year — this means 50% work for 50% pay (so my workload is now a charming 30 hours per week)
• I studied community-based conflict mediation techniques at the Tatamagouche Centre, Pendle Hill, and a few other places
• I spent a lot of time hiking, snowshoeing, skiing, kayaking, and snorkelling
• I joined a band that plays Turkish and Balkan music for folk dance parties.  No really…

Topics I May Write About Soon

• If you can’t get disagreement, does that mean it’s the wrong question?
• How can we “spread the no” — so one person isn’t left alone raising a point?
• Single-system thinking vs. multi-system thinking (and how to convert between them)
• Making the process of abstraction visible and student-directed
• Do students have trouble distinguishing between “there is none” (zero) and “we don’t know how much” (null)?
• Peak-to-peak amplitude “isn’t a subtraction… it’s just a difference.”  What does this mean and where can we go with it?
• What are all the possible things that “DC” can mean?