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It’s “check-in” time

 

This weekend’s bitter cold where I live had me thinking about the importance of check-ins. Everywhere I looked, there were reminders to check in: check in with your vulnerable family members and neighbours; make sure there isn’t a pipe break  threatening your business (Bluestreak records flooded); don’t leave your pets outside too long. 

My neighbour, upon leaving for holiday, asked my boys to do a walk through of her house each day, making sure that the heat was on and nothing disastrous had happened. We asked friends of Mr 16 to do the same when we went away.

That made me think about how lucky I was to be able to do that. I have neighbours, and relationships with them. I have family members to check in with (shout-out to my Oma, who was 97 on January 6).

Many in our communities don’t have those privileges. I did my first volunteer shift at our local emergency overnight shelter just before Christmas (that will be another blog post, when I can manage to put it into words). I knew that many in that community  would be moving from whatever warm spot they could find to another during the day, and couch-surfing or at a shelter overnight. I know that I can’t check in on everybody, but I have adopted the practice of carrying extra new warm socks in my bag when I’m downtown, and offering them to those who are asking for money on the street. I have also carried grocery store or Tim’s gift cards in the past. If you have a relationship with people in your local underhoused community, please check in, in whatever way works best for you. Make a donation of money, food or time, or just stop to make sure that someone on the street knows where the local shelter is. This article  has some suggestions in the school context. I occasionally encounter former students in my volunteer work at our local meal program, and I have found that they hugely appreciate me recognizing them and taking the time to check in, without judgement (and yes, I often cry later). 

So, all this thinking about check-ins made me think about those who are returning to school today (or having a snow day, if you live where I do). Brian Aspinall’s brain was running along the same lines yesterday.

And I was happy when another tweeter responded, suggesting that we remember this applies to staff, too.

I need us all to take a minute and think about how this weekend felt. Were you thrilled to have a weekend to cocoon? Knit, read, binge-watch your favourite show (or mixed doubles curling ), bake, prep food for the week? Did you bundle up and get out in the cold, like my husband and kids did, with a cross-country ski? Did you connect with a friend for a hot (or cold) beverage?

Or were you one of those tossing and turning last night, because you didn’t want to go back this morning? One who spent the weekend getting the marking and planning done that you had ignored over the last 2 weeks? One who woke up this morning, and were hit with that feeling of dread about going to work? Or were you in that completely different category, like the woman in my church community yesterday morning, who had a completely unforeseen tragedy strike her family over the break? Did you spend much of your break putting out fires for other people? Were you coping with toxic family time? Are you heading back without feeling you’ve had a break at all? I have, at different times, been in most of these categories, heading back in January, and I’m sure many of you have, too. So, of course, have our students.

Most of us are really good at checking in with our students. We have class meetings, or we start or finish our day with a quick check-in. We meet our kids at the door because we know it makes a difference. We’ve learned that along the way.

 

I don’t think we’re anywhere near as good at creating opportunities for a genuine check-in with our colleagues. We’ll ask the generic “how was your holiday?” or even “Did you have a good break?” as we pass in the hall, but we’re often not truly listening for the answer, and we’re rarely vulnerable enough to give an honest one. It’s not how we’ve been raised, and it’s not easy, but is, without question, worth the effort. If we know that check-ins help our students feel visible, understood and valued, imagine how extending that same care to ourselves would make us feel.

So, there’s my challenge to each of you. Today (especially if it’s a snow day, and you have a chance for a quiet moment), or some time this week,  try – even with one colleague – to do a genuine check-in. Ask how things are. If you know there’ve been some challenges (and really, when aren’t there?) maybe that’s the question to ask. Maybe this is the week to organize a potluck for Friday lunch, just to give people the chance to sit down together. If you have a colleague, as I do, who’s off on long-term disability, or who is off being a caregiver for someone they love, remember them, too. They would probably greatly appreciate someone in their professional life  remembering that they exist. We need to be seen and heard, just as our students do. Check in. It’s important. 

 

Let the sparks fly.

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My #OneWordOnt 2018

Last year my word was fuel. I had been inspired by a late November evening conversation (via Twitter) with Colleen Rose (@colleenkr) and Amy Burvall (@amyburvall) about people whose work kept us going, who provided light in the darkness. I realized I wanted to think consciously in 2017 about who and what fuels me, how I could best fuel my students, and how I could also fuel my relationships with other people. I felt like there were a lot of activities and people that required my time, and I wanted to work on making sure I was fuelling me enough to provide fuel for others. I also knew that I would be heading into a self-funded leave year, beginning in September 2017, and I wanted to make sure that a big part of that time was spent fuelling me for the last 5 years of my teaching career.

And it was in that process, of figuring out how to fuel myself, that I ran smack into this year’s word: expectations – both my own and others – and began to realize that I need to do some exploring of these before I can totally benefit (and pass on the benefits) from the choices I make to fuel me.

I’m a first-born child, as well as first grandchild on my mom’s side. I am a second generation teacher on dad’s side, and 3rd on my mom’s. Couple that with being a first-generation Canadian on my dad’s side, and you know, if you share any of those identifiers, that I have some experience with expectations. If you are also a parent, you know that it can be challenging to not lay some of those (sometimes difficult) expectations on your own kids. Continuing that journey of balance with my spouse is one of the reasons expectations is my word for this year, as my older son is in Grade 11 and thinking about what comes next. I want him to be able to feel free to explore what fuels him without my expectations creating a barrier.

I also want to explore how I deal with other peoples’ expectations of me. Every time I explain that no, I’m not going on a long trip on this year off, and no, I’m not pulling my teenaged children out of school, and no, I’m not going anywhere warm, and no, I’m not doing a Master’s degree, and yes, I’m doing the math PD my board is offering, and yes, I’m occasionally helping out and visiting friend’s classrooms, and yes, I can sometimes be found working on planning in a quiet corner of the board office, I shrink a little. A little bit of me feels like I’m doing my year off wrong, because I’m trying to use it to live my everyday life at a slightly deeper level. I’m trying to use it to put structures and planning in place to help my family and I weather my return to work next September. I need to do some work on why it’s hard for me to advocate for that. Why it’s hard for me to deal with the expectations many people have of what a year off work should look Iike (and trust me that I will never ask another person on leave if they’re travelling).(Check out my #selffundedleave hashtag on Instagram if you’d like to leave your expectations at the door). This is a symptom of a larger issue for me, where I sometimes feel like I’m not living up to some phantom list of other people’s expectations.

Which leads into the expectations I place on myself. I tend to do a fair amount of beating myself up for not being/doing enough. Not a good enough parent, spouse, teacher, planner, exerciser, blogger, presenter, musician, housekeeper (that’s a big one for me, and largely self-inflicted). There’s a lot of shame going on in my head about the expectations I don’t measure up to, despite the many loving people in my world who assure me that I do, and I’d really like to work on letting go of some of that. I know I’m not the only one in the profession who lives with this, and I’d love to hear from others about their struggles and successes.

All of these things of course, tie into how I work in the classroom. How do my expectations of myself affect my expectations of my students. What expectations am I putting on my students, consciously and unconsciously? And how do they feel about that? How do my expectations of my colleagues affect our ability to learn together? One of my husband’s excellent questions on this journey has been about what expectations I’m willing to let go of in the classroom next year, so that I can have a bit more of a life. I have way more questions than answers right now, so that’s probably a good place to stop.

So, onward, bravely, into 2018, hoping to let go of some unhealthy expectations, and find some reasonable ones to help fuel my journey forward.

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My #5BestEd decisions

 

This post is Inspired by the many educators who accepted Jonathan So’s (@mrsoclassroom) invitation to share the 5 defining moments in their teaching lives. Jonathan has collated them here, and they’re very much worth the read. If you wanted to see a differentiated approach to a task, look no further!

  1. Influencers: I’m going to break the rules right off the bat, and say that my first defining moments as a teacher came as a learner, and that had to do with the teachers I was lucky enough to learn from. My pedagogy is heavily influenced by my Grade 13 experience in integrated studies at South Secondary in London, Ontario. This was a multi-disciplinary, scaffolded approach to learning first about our neighbourhood, then our city, province, and eventually country through as many lenses as possible. It involved many of those competencies we’re trying to incorporate today, including communication, collaboration and critical thinking. Final projects were completely passion-driven – I still have the suite of poems I created. It remains my gold standard for what an engaged learning experience can look like, and it was 1985, so it was largely engagement without the “bells and whistles”. Shout-out here to Ian Underhill and Pete Telford, who created and taught the course. Also thanks to my mom and my Grade 5 and 7 teacher, Murray Young, who helped me understand that teaching is about building a community and relationships first, and covering curriculum second.

2.Marrying my husband.:A day does not go by without me thinking about how lucky my students are that I married the person I did. I married someone who cheers me on when I’m taking on a new challenge, but is also willing to call me on my need for approval, and who regularly reminds me to set my parameters of what is “enough” in terms of how much I give of myself to my job. He is my foundation, and works to help me find work/life balance, survive through my ADD and (sometimes)self-sabotaging behaviour, and always, always, work on being a better partner, parent and teacher. I am amazed at his ability to work through things patiently with our teenage kids (when I’m ready to throw things), and I often think that he would have made a far more effective teacher than I sometimes am. I would not be able to be a risk-taker in my classroom and professional life, without knowing I had the abiding love of my spouse to come home to when an activity crashes and burns.

 

3. Becoming a parent. Putting the impact of the arrival of Mr 16 and Mr 14 on my teaching career into words is extremely challenging. It meant that I had less time to give to my classroom, but I also had a richer life experience to bring. I learned what kind of things engaged my own children, and that helped me figure out what might engage my students. When my boys began to attend school, and I started to see the ways their teachers impacted them, I really began to understand how much effect even my smallest action could have on my students, and I became much more aware of the kind of feedback I was giving. I also know (as many of you do) that sometimes I was a less patient parent because I’d been a patient teacher all day, and I love my kids for understanding and surviving that. The boys continue to impact my teaching every day. They share positive and negative learning experiences of their own, they let me bounce ideas off of them, they keep me a little bit in the pop culture loop (I teach Grade 7 and 8). They have made me a better learner, through the things they are interested in, and that has made me a better listener, and a better teacher.

4. AIM: Until the past school year, when I finally took the leap into teaching my own classroom full-time, the only constant in my teaching schedule had been Core French. I would not have been able to do that job for 20+ years without the help of Wendy Maxwell’s Accelerated Integrative Method. When my board opened up a pilot project several years ago, it was a lightning bolt for me – a way to help my Core French kids genuinely dive into expressing themselves in their second language, without relying on machine translations or dictionaries. It also opened me up to using drama, music, and movement more in my FSL classroom than I had before. For the first time, really, in my teaching career, I was hearing hugely positive feedback from parents and students. My students were engaged, my parents were noticing, and it rejuvenated my practice. One of my greatest regrets is that the program didn’t catch on in applied level secondary French – I think it would have made a huge difference. The other big “a-ha” for me through AIM was that I was willing to take on a huge learning curve in order to really make something work. I hadn’t really known that about myself as a teacher until then – and it helped me understand my students more. Many years after that extremely well-done pilot program (un gros bel merci to the late Carole Meyette-Hoag and to Jennifer Sampson), a group of women I met in that PD are still among the teachers I rely on the most for realistic feedback and shoulders to cry on. They were, and continue to be, educational “risk-takers” when it makes a positive difference for their students.

(one of my students’ favourite versions of an AIM song)

5. Powerful Learning Practice: In the 2011-12 school year, I was given an opportunity that changed me as a learner, thinker and teacher. I volunteered to be part of a board team participating in a year-long, action-research-based inquiry, run by Sheryl Nussbaum Beach (@snbeach) and Will Richardson (@willrich45). I had never done anything like this, and I remember almost bursting into tears at the first session, because I had no idea what was going on (there was a speaker, and a backchannel, and…). I was, in Sheryl’s words, immensely “whelmed”. What I came to learn, over the course of that year, with the help of an incredible community of co-learners, is that being “whelmed” is necessary for a learner like me. I need to “get comfortable with being uncomfortable” in order to not get stuck. My experience with PLP introduced me to new ways of reflecting on my thinking, to new people to share with and learn from (a lot), to the whole framework of iterative teaching/thinking, and to really thinking about why I felt driven to effectively integrate technology into my classroom. I started to blog, I started to share my learning about these ideas with my students, I fell into a deep and lasting love affair with Twitter, and I began to seriously think about shifting from Core French to my own classroom, in order to go deeper into critical thinking, in particular. That switch came last year, and could easily be my 6th point. The connected learning I do with my students, the joy I get from my PLN, my learning opportunities attending and presenting at conferences, my willingness to dig into new learning and think deeply about how best that learning can serve my students? All of that had its genesis in my PLP experience and I can never thank the random forces that picked my name to attend enough.

This photostory was prepared by me for my PLP learning cohort.

Like Diana Maliszewski (@MzMollyTL) and Aviva Dunsiger (@avivaloca), I want to think about “what’s next?”. I’m currently on a teacher self-funded leave year, and I think if I were to reflect on my defining moments in the years to come, this may be one of them. The joy of time – to think, to plan, to write (as I’m doing now), to participate in activities that I simply can’t do, as a teacher with a full-time job – is so beautiful it’s a little overwhelming. I’m passionately interested in ways to help myself and my students make our learning visible to each other and the world, and I’m also really interested in figuring out how to make feedback work effectively, both for my students, their parents and my colleagues. Lots to keep learning about as the path unfolds before us.

Thanks for the writing prompt, Jonathan.

If you’re reading this, and haven’t written about your 5 moments yet, please join the conversation.

Let the sparks fly.

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Which of these systems is not like the other, Part 1

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about systemic change lately. While it may seem counterintuitive, a few experiences I’ve had recently have started me thinking that the church in which I advocate for change is changing faster than the education system in which I do the same. This will probably be the first post of a few, as I work through what I’m learning and feeling.

We call our worship community The Open Circle. Photo credit: Flickr user Thomas Hawk via cc

I have the privilege of being part of a worship community that has managed to create the kind of accepting space that I strive to build in my classroom. Our group includes people who might be marginalized anywhere else. We have adults from community living environments, those living with dementia, the under-housed and under-employed, along with a smattering of retired academics and university students. The liturgy, such as it is, includes reading of scripture and prayer but also a piece of secular writing (poetry, rap, song, essay) (an example: An indiscriminate act of kindness) on the week’s scripture theme. The reflection, or sermon, might be led by a clergy or lay person and always includes the opportunity for discussion and exchange of ideas. One reflection strategy we use which I find particularly meaningful is called lectio divina.
In lectio divina, the Gospel is read, and then each person in the circle (yes, we sit in a circle) who wishes to participate speaks the word or phrase that most stuck out for them in the reading. After everyone has had a chance to speak, the scripture is read again, and anyone who chooses to can share why that particular word or phrase was what spoke to them – or they can decide that the second time through, something else drew their focus.

Lectio divina offers me a variety of lenses on the week’s reading. Photo credit: Flickr user Yuma Abe via cc

What I love about lectio divina is the chance to hear the different perspectives of the astounding collection of people I worship with. A community activist in her 80s may respond quite differently than my 16 year old son, or they might discover that the same thing called to both of them. There are no wrong answers, there is no judgement, everyone’s voice is valid. It is, for me, an experience of overwhelming mutual respect and I am humbled by it. It also always leaves me struggling with why this environment is so hard to build in my classroom.
Why does this unconventional worship space work? Because it is driven by the community it serves. It was created because people were looking for a more interactive worship experience, a Sunday morning experience with a facilitator rather than an instructor, a community of co-learners. A traditional church took a chance on running two services at the same time to allow people the opportunity of choice, and to meet a variety of needs.
I know that one big difference between my worship environment and my classroom environment is that I get to make that choice. There is no “religion act” in Ontario that says I must have my butt in some form of pew for a set number of hours per week. The community I worship with is there because they want to be, and many of my students this year make it abundantly clear that they don’t want to be at school. That breaks my heart, and spurs me to continue my efforts to create a space as safe and engaging as the one that welcomes me on Sunday morning.
Which brings me to some of my first questions. If an institutionalized system like the Anglican Church of Canada can start to read the writing on the wall and know that it must adapt or die, why does it seem so hard for the education system to read the same graffiti? How do we work to build a learning space where it is safe to be yourself, and not worry about being marked as different – where all are valued for what they bring to the community? What’s worked for you, in trying to create that kind of space? Your thoughts and ideas, as always, are welcome.

Let the sparks fly.

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Inchworm, inchworm…

Here’s the 4th question for the #ossemooc #innovatorsmindset bloghop series. Thanks, as ever, to Tina Zita for the amazing visuals.

bloghop4

As I let this question bounce around the inside of my brain this week, I was reminded of a song I used to sing to my kids when they were small:

The words that were sticking in my head were: “inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds. Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are.” But when I went back and listened to the whole thing, I realized that the image of the inchworm, based in his numeric framework, cheerfully reciting his math facts that will probably help him “go far”, was also relevant.

We are, in many ways, caught in the inchworm’s dilemma.

As we begin to shift our practice, to take on the innovator’s traits, to ask our students to be co-learners with us, to genuinely question the status quo, we are still expected to come up with something quantifiable to show growth. Something that can go into a data portal, something that results in improvement on a standardized test, something that can have a numeric result assigned to it to go on a report card. Like the inchworm, that’s the existing language we have to work with, and, as classroom teachers, that’s the language that students and parents and administrators (and on, up the chain) understand and expect to see.

That puts us in a difficult spot, because it’s very difficult to quantify the fact that we’ve begun to look at the marigold’s colour, and where it prefers to grow, and what uses people made of it in the past, and the fact that it’s a native North American plant, and what it might bring to our schoolyard gardens and a whole bunch of other things we’ve found out by letting our students go deep with their learning, and show that learning in myriad different ways. Being able to convey the value of that learning, and the growth involved is going to take a lot of deep conversation and reframing for all of us. It’s not going to be easy, but things that are worth doing rarely are.

One of the biggest things I’m taking away from this book study is that we have to start that conversation – whether it’s having students record their thoughts (digitally or analog) after a learning cycle, and sharing those with parents and colleagues, or being brave enough to ask an administrator to let you try and go without numerical grades for a term and use ongoing descriptive feedback and discussion and metacognition/reflection instead. Otherwise, we stay locked in the inchworm’s limited mindset, trapped by the numbers. (As Alfie Kohn writes here)

This March break, I watched my younger son and his friends use a variety of technologies to communicate with each other, problem solve, and plan excursions.  This amazing group of 12 year olds troubleshot audio problems in a transcontinental Skype call; used a combination of Google Hangouts and texting to set up a detailed cross-city bus excursion involving multiple departure points and destinations; and worked through the bumps that inevitably come when people are taking public transit from all different points. They laughed a lot, helped each other through their frustration, and found and solved real-world problems. Exactly what we want for our students, and one way that we could measure the impact of innovative practice. Are these the skills we’re helping develop?

Inchworm, inchworm….

Other people’s thoughts:

Leigh Cassell

Donna Fry

Tina Zita

Mark Carbone

Amit Mehrotra

Stacey Wallwin

Jennifer Casa-Todd

Peter Cameron

Don’t forget you can add your thoughts to this discussion. Comment on a blog, join the Voxer group, chime in on Twitter, or post your own blog on the topic here: https://ossemooc.wordpress.com/

Let the sparks fly…

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What if…?

bloghop3a

image: Tina Zita

This is the 3rd question in the bloghop series for the #ossemooc on-line book study of George Couros’ book The #innovatorsmindset. Chapter 7, which marks the end of the second section of the book, ends with a series of “What if…?” questions.

image: Lisa Noble (highlights mine)

image: Lisa Noble(highlights mine)

As you can tell from the highlights in the above image, I’ve been thinking more about some of these questions than others. The risk-taking question is one that I’m particularly interested in, and often, frustrated by.

I know risk-taking is a huge piece of the puzzle for any learner. I also know it’s an extremely difficult one for me. I’m a gifted student who always played “school” very well, but who shied away from anything that I couldn’t do right the first time. It took the patient coaching of my spouse (also a gifted learner, but one who has always been much more open to learning experientially than I am) to convince me, in my 20’s, that it was okay to not be really good at something the first time, and to allow myself to “risk” in order to gain a new skill. Now, I sometimes see that stance of fear reflected in both my students and my own kids. I try really hard to model my “risking” behaviours and talk about my learning process, at least partly because I’d like to save them the grief and missed opportunities my fear caused me.

I see the fear of failure coming from two very different places with my students – those who don’t want to risk because they’ve tried before and the existing school system has made them feel like they can’t succeed; and those who don’t want to risk because they’re afraid of what will happen if they don’t succeed, because that’s not a place they’re willing to go, or have experience with. I’m realizing that my colleagues are probably coming from very similar places, and if we are going to move forward at all, we have to both be willing to name that fear, and address it. Creating an environment in which people feel safe to do that takes us back, as Leigh said in last week’s hangout, to “relationships, relationships, relationships”. Without taking that first risk to trust each other in our professional context, the safety net won’t hold. How we build that net with the diversity of learners and experiences in our school communities is still one of my biggest questions.

how do we create a robust "safety net" to support a culture of "risking" in our learning spaces. credit: flickr user Rob via cc

how do we create a robust “safety net” to support a culture of “risking” in our learning spaces? credit: flickr user Rob via cc

My other “what ifs”?Those tend to be aimed more inward than outward, and I offer them for your reflection. What if I just stopped making excuses for why I haven’t tried an activity I think looks interesting, and just did it? What’s the worst case scenario? And of course, what if we were easier on ourselves when things didn’t go as wonderfully as we thought they would, and what if we were better about sharing those experiences with our peers – the plateau and the ravine, as well as the mountaintop? How might that change the discussion?

Let the sparks fly!

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Starting a school…from scratch

Going with the philosophy that late is better than not at all, here’s my contribution to the #ossemooc #innovatorsmindset bloghop. We’ve been reading George Couros’ The Innovator’s Mindset, and this is one of the questions:

bloghop 2

image : Tina Zita

As I reflected on what my “dream school” might look like, I realized that my views have been profoundly influenced by the school community in which I have lived, worked and learned for the past 9 years. Teaching a clientele that reaches opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum with very little in the middle has confirmed for me that I can’t really help my students move through Bloom’s Taxonomy without making sure that they have the necessities of Maslow’s hierarchy.

I have also realized, much more than I expected, that a great many of my students’ parents are intimidated by the very concept of school, often due to their own negative experience. If my school concept is to succeed, it has to find a way to get past that fear and negativity and be a welcoming space. A genuine community space, offering reasons for both parent and child to want to be there.

Beginning. then, with those physiological basics at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid – air, water and food.

breakfast program

photo credit: flickr user US Dept of Agriculture via cc

A fully equipped and staffed kitchen, open beyond school hours, that can be used as classroom space, community kitchen (for teaching parents, kids and community members to prepare and share healthy food), breakfast/hot lunch/supper program, or just a space in which to do schoolwork while eating is the cornerstone of my school space. Access to extensive outdoor space, with both structured and unstructured areas, as well as a stream or pond, are my tweak on air and water. Many of my students have nature deficit disorder and regular learning time exploring outside is becoming a necessity.

The next levels of the Maslow pyramid, that delve into mental and emotional well-being, as well as physical, are at the heart of what I’d like to address in my school. As well as meeting physical needs with spaces like an open clothing “swap shop” and regular visits from a team of medical professionals, my school would be equipped to help with emotional needs as well. Intermediate student in crisis, and needing to talk to someone right away? There would be a trained counsellor available. Family needing support to move through a challenging situation? That would be available on site, too. Teachers needing mental/emotional health support – that’s here, too.  In the environment where I teach, many of my colleagues are finding themselves faced with students who need substantially more mental and emotional health support than we are able/trained to give. Having services to address this on-site, as needed, would help us shape a new approach to mental and emotional health support.

Don’t get me wrong – I want bells and whistles, too. Loads of light, flexible learning environments, creation spaces (analog and digital), room to stretch and socialize and laugh and read and curl up and be quiet and make and share and learn! Yes, I want those, too. But I want, at heart, a healthy community to be able to live, love and learn in that space.

What do other people think? Check them out here, and please share a comment, or write your own post:

Paul McGuire

Amit Mehrotra

Patrick Miller

Donna Fry

Leigh Cassell

Stacey Wallwin

Tina Zita

Jennifer Casa-Todd

Joe Caruso

Gary Gruber

Mark Carbone

George Couros

Allison Keskimaki

Anne Shillolo

 

 

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All that I have, and all that I am…

I don’t know where to start! 20 years ago today, I married Terry Noble. Many of you know that my levels of common sense are sometimes not overwhelmingly high, but they were off the charts when I chose my life partner.

Here’s what I know, after 20 years:

We make each other better – smarter, more grounded, able to take chances in our careers and our learning, better parents, better partners, better friends, and we do it all the time, every day in small and big ways;
We believe in one another – at times, more than each of us believes in ourselves;
We could not be the people we are today without the gifts we have both brought to this relationship.

Terry forces me to think deeply about things, to question why I’m making a particular choice, to stand up for what I believe in, and I strive to do the same for him.

He’s also the first face I want to see in the morning, and the last one I want to see at night.

He is my best friend, my partner, my companion, the best dad I could have ever imagined, and my hero for what he does professionally every day.

“All that I have and all that I am” – I promised these to my husband in our wedding vows on August 19, 1995. I’m still learning and exploring what those encompass everyday.

Thanks, sweet boy. I love you more than you know. Here’s to the next 20.

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Feminists in our own House

I’ve shared with many people that an unexpected gift from Twitter to me is the reclaiming of the term “feminist”. I am blessed to have a community of thoughtful people who are willing to talk through the issues of the day, and think about what feminism might mean in 2015. Words matter, and my husband shared his take on this one in this post from his blog.

 

Feminists in our own House.

via Feminists in our own House.

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That guy

This is a post about that guy. You know, that guy.  The one that, if you’re like me, you’ve been thinking about, and probably getting angrier about, over the last couple of weeks. Those are the weeks since the Jian thing hit the fan, and then 2 MP’s got asked to leave the Liberal caucus over allegations of harassment. Yeah, I’m talking about that guy.

 

credit: krembo1 via cc

So who is that guy? Right now, he doesn’t work in my building, but he’s still in my professional life. He’s the one who doesn’t respect your personal space, who brushes or rubs up against you when you’re doing some silly icebreaker thing, and makes a comment that lets you know it’s not by accident, who leans in a little too close to show you something on the page or the computer, who makes no effort to hide the slow up and down he gives you when you’re introduced. The one who will offer the newest, or the youngest, or the loneliest woman in the room a ride home, and you will all try, by non-verbal communication, to wave her off, because you know that’s not a good idea. He’s the one who comes into your classroom for an observation, or professional learning, and gets much chummier with your female students than they (and you) are comfortable with.

You know, that guy.

We all know him. We give other women in our profession the heads-up about him, and when you tell a colleague a story about an uncomfortable situation you’ve found yourself in, she knows who you’re talking about before you name him, because she’s heard about him, or experienced the same kind of thing from him. We try and make sure there’s not an empty seat near us at learning events, so we won’t have to sit next to him. We work really hard to make sure our friends know not to be in a small group with him. We know he’s not safe, and we know he makes us and our friends and our colleagues incredibly uncomfortable. And yet, we don’t tell him.

I am not a shrinking violet, by any stretch of the imagination. People think I’m mouthy and pushy and opinionated. I have told women I work with to lay off the inappropriate comments about male co-workers, but I have not done anything about that guy. When he makes me profoundly uncomfortable with a touch or a comment, I may give him the death stare, and get myself out of that space as soon as possible, but I do not say anything to him. And I am ashamed of that, because it gives him license to continue to do what he does. I am also ashamed, because some of us are doing this in contexts where students see us, and we are modeling a power dynamic for them that I work against all the time.

credit: Peter Rukavina via cc

I was listening to Cross-Country check-up on Sunday evening, making dinner, and yelling nasty comments at the radio, as Rex Murphy (really, CBC?) attempted to have a meaningful call-in about sexual harassment. He was astounded at the number of women calling in to say “yes, this happens, yes, this is real, yes, we are STILL dealing with this crap.” He commented repeatedly on one caller who had impressed him with the strength of her personality, and seemed really surprised that this had happened to her. Because why, Rex? Because she doesn’t seem like an easy target?

This happens to all of us, introvert or extrovert, old or young. Part of why it happens is because we have somehow become desensitized and accepted that this is just the way it is. A colleague I talked to said we’ve put up with it for so long, that it doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to change, so why would we be the one to make noise about it, and open ourselves up to shame and embarrassment, because we’re admitting this happened to us.

So this is my turning point. I have decided that I will no longer walk away. I will look that guy in the eye, let him know exactly what he’s done that made me uncomfortable, and ask him not to do it again, to me or anyone else. If you’re as fed up, and frustrated, and tired of being on edge as I am in this context, I’d love it if you’d join me. It’s time.

 

Let the sparks fly.