Tag: Education

Blog – Sound Pedagogy

Happy Labour Day Monday!  I hope you are all enjoying your long weekend.  My weekend has been jam-packed with course prep and dealing with a sudden surge of patrons at the bar as students move back into town to start the new school year.

I’ve learned to embrace the adage that “if you want to learn something, teach it.”  By this, I mean that there is no better way to learn and master a concept as when you must transmit that information to someone else in a way that makes sense to them.  Not only do you need to know the material inside and out, but you must also learn to fill in gaps as they arise.

At present, I’m trying to finish up my instructional plan for my course.  The first lesson is this coming Friday, and I’m both nervous and excited.  I’m nervous because I fear that I’ll be an inadequate teacher for this crop of mostly first-year students; that their introduction to philosophy will be botched by my inexperience and poor planning.  But I’m also excited, because I have some confidence in my skills, and it’s a new and exciting challenge that I want to face.

student

With less than a week to go, I have 27 students enrolled in my class.  When I look into their various programs, I get a wide range of learners, from science, recreation, business, IT, security, etc.  All of these faces are unique individuals who will need to sync with my lecture material.  My challenge is to teach philosophy to a class of college kids who probably are taking my course because it sounds interesting and they need breadth courses to graduate.  In other words, I need to pluck philosophy from the clouds and bring it down to the “real world” in a way that makes sense to them.  I can’t just stand at the front of the room and pontificate in their general direction.  I’ll need to be smarter than that if I have any hope of them passing the learning objectives.

Instead, I’ll need to engage them dialectically.  I’ll need to choose non-academic examples to connect their experience with.  I’ll need to prove to them that these questions and problems are not only relevant to them, but incredibly important to their lives; they need to take the material seriously.  In an age of constant distraction and competing media on their attention, I’ll need to come to class prepared every Friday afternoon to fight and earn their attention.

Talk about a tall order!

Oh, and because a lot of this material is stuff I wasn’t exposed to in school, I also have to teach myself the course material!

Oh well.  Here goes.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Education – Who do I want to be as a teacher

Before the summer break, I spoke briefly about being hired to teach a college class in the Fall.  On August 4th, I accepted my teaching contract for the Fall term, and thus set in stone the deal I hashed out with the Program Chair a few months back.  With this turn of events, you will probably see an increase in posts about teaching and pedagogy on this blog.  Fear not, I am still exploring the paramedic career, but I still firmly believe that even tangential experience will feed into making me a better medic.  I hope you find these digressions interesting and informative.

Having said that, I’m incredibly nervous about this new opportunity.  It’s a pretty big step for me and it will really test the idea of a patchwork work history.  Normally, people who come to teach will have a lot of career experience, or they have higher terminal degrees (specifically a PhD), and therefore are way smarter than me.  I got the job because of my eclectic work history and my attitude/perspective; or in other words, the Chair liked me.

Now that the contract is set, there’s no going back now.  I’m all-in to teach my first class (tentatively set for September 9th, but scheduling can be tricky at the post-secondary level).  This means it’s time for me to plan out my lessons and start visioning how the course will fit together.  Thankfully, I will not need to build the course from scratch; I will be able to start with the materials left by my predecessor (who, in a marvelous turn of events is a friend and former colleague of mine from grad school!).  Still, there is a lot of work to do on the course.

What also needs some work is to figure out what kind of teacher I want to be.  Here are some of the questions I’ve already started posing to myself:

  • What will my persona be?
  • What are my teaching values?
  • How much unpaid labour am I willing to give?
  • How flexible/inflexible do I wish to be?
  • What style of delivery will I use?
  • What is my power-point strategy?
  • What are my expectations on the experience/my students/the college?

I don’t have formal teaching experience, so I’m trying to figure out who I am and what I’m going to do on the fly.  There will be some wiggle room, a lot of mistakes, and some short opportunities to road test material.  But all-in-all, I’m driven to figure these things out because I’m scared that I’ll fail my students; that I will be inadequate.  Or worse yet, I was a poor choice to be put in front of the students.  I had the same worry in grad school – by me being here, I’m depriving someone else of the opportunity to do great things in their live and career.  It’s a game of trade-offs, only instead of me considering the trade-off between short term gratification and long term benefit, I would be trading-off my employment for the student’s long term success.  That’s a heavy thought weighing me down.

I know I’m not alone in these thoughts.  Plenty of people whom I look up to as teaching exemplars undoubtedly went through the same angst when they were first starting out.  The best thing for me is to act as a sponge and soak up as much wisdom as I can.

I stumbled across one such instance of someone who is wrestling with their teaching identity.  In a recent blog post entitled Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto from the Tattooed Professor, author Kevin Gannon opines on the values he wishes to uphold in order to be the best teacher he can.  The post is short and well worth a read.  There is plenty there he’s learned from experience that anyone can take away.  I’ll certainly be stealing some of his ideas to get me started on the right foot.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

 

 

 

Progress Update

Given that it’s the summer and I’m on vacation from work, I thought I’d take it easy this week and post light with an update on my progress so far.

I successfully completed the biology preparatory course that gives me the pre-requisite credit to apply to most paramedic programs in the province.  I completed the course with a 93%, which I am more than happy with.  As a reward, I will be ordering myself this Littmann stethoscope.

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B001NMT6N6/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=2EKDSURXLF25Q&coliid=I1JSPVHPYV8OI7&psc=1

My fitness progress has not been as successful.  Towards the end of my work contract (May-June), I had a lot on my plate, which I responded to by lowering fitness as a priority.  As a result, my weight-loss has stalled a bit, as has my strength in the gym.  I will be heading to Scotland this week for two weeks, which will keep me out of the gym for a little bit longer, but I’m hoping to make up for that with all the walking we will be doing as we visit.  My goal was to drop to 275lbs by the time I left for my trip, so we’ll say that goal has been busted (I’m currently sitting around 295-297lbs).

Otherwise, there is no other news to report on.  When I return, I’ll start trying to narrow down schools that I would like to apply to and ensure all of my supplementary application materials are in order.

Stay Awesome!

Ryan

Careers: An Answer to the Experience Problem

This blog is primarily about my path to becoming a paramedic.  I take as an assumption that I will at some point enter school, work to receive my credentials, and eventually find work as a medic.  That is the single focus of my career planning at present.

However, I would be negligent if I did not keep an open mind towards other paths and alternate routes.  There are a number of ways a plan can go wrong, and if I place all of my eggs into one basket, rest all of my progress on a few key milestones, there is a good chance I will be frustrated by setbacks, barriers and challenges.  Therefore, on the advice of the paramedic program’s coordinator, I am keeping an eye out to other opportunities that I can invest time and energy into that will pay off down the line.

This passed week, I became one of the latest faculty at my College and will be teaching a philosophy course in the Fall.  Depending on how you stand, that might be the furthest thing from my plan as you can get.  Instead of becoming the student, I just took a part time job as a teacher.  I am excited and incredibly nervous about delivering a course to people barely out of my peer group range, but I think this is a positive experience and will pay off in the future.

This all serves as a preamble to a realization I had this morning on the question of experience in young people.  Job seekers everywhere I plagued with a common problem: how am I expected to have experience for jobs that all seem to require experience to get in?  This problem is the bane of the young person’s job hunt because it is often the biggest weakness in their candidacy when they apply for work.  It is the first thing that selects them out of the pool, and no matter how charming they are in person, a lack of experience is the blemish on an otherwise beautiful package.

It’s understandable why experience is so important to employers.  The are spending huge amounts of money to try and hire people, so without knowing anything about a candidate’s work habits and results, the employer needs some signal that they are not wasting their money to hire someone that will be released after a few months.

How does a young person resolve this issue?  The short answer is you need to learn how to tell a story about yourself.  You need to learn how to stitch together your work history into a story that demonstrates you are a good bet for an employer to take.  This obviously assumes you have experience to draw upon.  If you don’t have that, you need to get some.  I’m sorry, but it’s the only way to progress forward.

Would you walk into a store and buy the first expensive item you’re looking for based solely on how it looked?  Imagine shopping for a high-end purchase like a car or a computer, and you bought it purely on looks.  Generally speaking, you probably will not.  You’ll take the time to study the specifications, the deals, consumer reports, tests, etc.  Employers do the same thing; they look for evidence that you aren’t a lemon.

I’ve now been hired for two jobs at the College having none of the classical markers of experience that were advertised for: I did not have any administrative assistant experience for my current job, and I have almost no formal teaching experience.  How did I pull this off?

I understood what the job required and demonstrated how I already had what the employers was looking for.  In the teaching case, it went like this:

Interviewer: I see you have never taught before at a college.  Do you have any experience?

Me: I know I don’t have the teaching experience you might be looking for, as you saw on my academic resume.  If you are asking if I have experience teaching a 7-1-7 teaching block (7 weeks of lectures, 1 reading week, 7 weeks of lectures, or a 14-week course), then no, I have never done that.  However, I have done all of the individual parts; I have:

  • designed workshop plans and delivered the content;
  • assessed students based on those workshops;
  • written speeches and delivered public talks;
  • designed and delivered a guest lecture in grad school; and
  • acted as a teaching assistant and grader for 5-7 university courses.

I was able to demonstrate that I had experience, even if I’ve never taught a college class before.  This does not guarantee that I will be a good teacher, but it assures the interviewer that I am not unaware of the level of work and care that is needed to do the job.

This is one solution to the problem of job experience.  You need two things to sidestep the problem.  First, you need to have some sort of past experience that you can draw upon from a related field.  You need to demonstrate that you know something, or that you can easily figure the problems out and solve them on your own.  Second, you need to learn how to tell your story.  Lacking experience and having gaps in your employment record do not have to signal the death knell on your advancement if you know how to reframe the problem and still give an answer that shows an appreciation for the question being asked of you: If I were to hire you, how could you make my problems go away?  Really, that’s what an employer is looking for.  Someone they can pay to solve a problem or puzzle for them.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Blog: Preparing for the Worst

My journey towards becoming a paramedic is not without its significant doubts.  I suppose I can take comfort in knowing that many people feel similar doubts when embarking into new career/life-paths.  Kevin Hazzard’s book “A Thousand Naked Strangers” opens with several chapters of how anxious he felt at the idea of being a medic and the responsibility it entails (book review forthcoming).

My fears are certainly not unique.  I have the typical worries around imposture syndrome, whether I can hack it physically, mentally, emotionally, and whether I’m good enough to get accepted into a very competitive program.  I also have spin-off worries concerning whether I will achieve a work-life balance with a future family, what toll my experiences will have on me, whether I can leave work “at the door” when I come home, whether I will be affected by mental health issues caused by work, etc.

Heck, I even worry that I won’t be able to stomach it because I’ve never seen anything graphically bad.  The three worst things I’ve seen are: 1.) a pedestrian struck by a car that I had to then treat; 2.) that time I broke my ankle with a hairline fracture; and 3.) that time I treated a guy who put his elbow through a window in rage.  In each of the cases, there was some blood (and bone from the window), but overall the outward injuries were fairly tame.

I’ve tried to mitigate this by following medical Instagram accounts that shows graphic medical procedures and injuries.  My hope is to desensitize myself from the shock of what I see so I can bypass those initial visceral reactions.  Likewise, I chose to read Hazzard’s book to learn more about what kind of horrible things I can expect to see.

But, there are some things you can’t prepare for.  Or, worse yet, there are things you didn’t anticipate being a problem.

I came across two blog posts recently  (written by the same author on two different sites) that discusses exactly this case.  I won’t spill too many of the details as I think it’s valuable to read the posts for yourself.  But the one I want to briefly mention here is where the author discusses the impact a ringing phone can have.

Imagine what it was like for the first responders at the recent Orlando mass shooting as they worked inside the club around all the deceased victims.  Keep in mind, there were 49 victims who died that night on scene.  49 people with families who likely heard about the tragedy on the television.  49 families who might have called to make sure their loved one was “ok.”  49 families who kept calling when no one picked up.  Imagine what kind of toll that might have on a person as they walk among the bodies.

It chills me just typing this.

There are things I might experience that I’ll never be prepared for.  These are things that worry me as I lay the groundwork to change careers.

Please, go read the blog posts for yourself.

The Sounds of Silence on The Happy Medic

The Worst Things I’ve Ever Felt As A Paramedic on Uniform Stories

 

Blog: Update on Diagramming – Active Learning

Back in my post about diagramming as a study strategy, I made reference to recent studies showing the effectiveness of long-hand writing and its correlation with retention and recall.  One of the  things I love about working at a post-secondary institute is I a.) mix it up with very smart people who teach for a living; and b.) have access to a well-funded library.

I love university and college libraries!  I don’t always make adequate use of their vast resources, but when I need them, they have my back.  For instance, my institute recently negotiated access for its employees to use Lynda.com.  As a nerd who loves to learn, this made me very happy.

Part of my job involves program review and quality assurance, which is outside of my educational wheel house.  Recently, I’ve been exposed to the concept of Active Learning Strategies as a method of engaging students in the classroom.  For instance, a passive learning strategy would be for students to read a textbook and learn the definitions of key words and concepts.  An active learning strategy would have the students read the text, then take those same key words/concepts and draw them in a relationship tree to show how the various parts fit together.

If you have access, I suggest you check out “Active learning strategies: three activities to increase student involvement in learning” by Catherine Wilcoxson Ueckert and Julie Gess-Newsome in The Science Teacher journal (75.9, Dec. 2008; p47.).  There, the authors discuss, as the title says, three alternative approaches to student engagement in the science classroom.  While these approaches assume a classroom, instead of a solo learning project like what I’m encountering, I think you can still extrapolate on the learnings and apply it outside of the traditional classroom.

Stay Awesome!

Ryan

Blog: Hubris and Good Grades

I have a confession: I’m great at BSing.  The polite way of describing this is that I’m very clever.  An awesome way to describe this is I’m resourceful.  But at the end of the day, I’m good at making stuff up on the fly.  I accomplish this because I’m able to absorb a lot of facts and data in a short amount of time.  The result of this is that my output and achievements are not always reflective of the amount of effort that appears to go into a result.

This habit started in high school.  Until this point, I worked hard on my home work.  My parents were very good at instilling (and monitoring) the discipline in me to do well.  In 10th grade, I was given the option to move to an enriched mathematics course because I had performed well the year before.  However, it was the beginning of the end in terms of my mathematical achievement for one very simple reason: there were no homework checks.

You’d think this shouldn’t be a problem, but it was my Achilles’ heel.  No homework checks meant I didn’t need to do my homework every night.  My young mind had missed the connection between progressive practice and performance during assessments.  My grades slipped.  I still graduated high school with good marks; marks that gained me entry into a good Canadian university.  But my work was less perspiration and more inspiration.

I bring this all up because I had an insight last night while studying for my respiratory system test.  Until now, I’ve been progressing through the course at around two chapters* every week.  That performance, comes with a footnote:

  • I registered for the 12-week course for a January start, but I found a loophole that my time wouldn’t start until I wrote the first test. I spent 3-4 months reading the textbook at the public library and was able to get ahead by 4 or so chapters before I “started the course.”

What appeared to be a reasonably diligent pace came because I was ahead of the game.  But, because I didn’t keep pace with the rate at which I was writing tests, I eventually caught up and now I’m trying to read two  chapters per week and write those tests the following week.  In principle, this shouldn’t be an issue.  But it’s proving to be a challenge.

In a real sense, I’m becoming a victim of my success.  Thus far, I’ve done well writing tests, and so when it comes time to prioritize study time, I’m finding myself placing its priority lower than other, seemingly more pressing concerns.  My rationale is “I should be studying, but I’ve done well so far and this other thing I’m stressed about requires my attention to get on track.”  And so, the other thing (relationship time, my two jobs, my volunteer activities, and yes, relaxation) will take priority over studying.  It’s the old Important/Unimportant/Urgent/Non-Urgent matrix.  I’m letting the things  that are Urgent take priority over the things that are, arguably, more important.  This matrix could be the topic of a future article.

What does this look like?

  • Friday – “I work tonight at my other job, so let’s relax because it’s the weekend.”
  • Saturday – “I should study, but today I’ll run errands, spend time on my relationship, indulge in R&R, etc.”
  • Sunday – “I should study, but I’m squeezing more long-distance relationship time in, spending time with friends that I don’t see during the week, dreading the work week, etc.”
  • Monday – “I should start studying/reading chapters for Monday’s test, but I also have commitment x/y/z.”
  • Tuesday – “I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, so how can I squeeze more efficiency into studying?”
  • Wednesday – “How many times can I review my notes during the work day before I write my test, grab a bite to eat, then go to my night job?”
  • Thursday – never used efficiently…
  • Rinse and repeat.

Because I haven’t had to rely on a structured 7-day schedule for studying but am now 70% through the course, that lack of planning has finally caught up to me and is putting me in a crunch.  I’ll have to grind out the last three or so weeks of the course, but this unsustainable practice is a lesson in why it’s important to work hard while also working smart.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

PS – after drafting this post, I read an excellent, short meditation on the difference between IQ and DOT (discipline, organization, and thoughtfulness).  I’m happy that I’m not the only person who wrestles with this.

Blog: Writing Tests vs. Mastery

Last week, I did something pretty awesome.  I scored 100% on my second comprehensive test for the biology course I’m taking.  Comprehensive Test 2 covered the five chapters on the nervous system, the endocrine system, the cardiovascular system, special senses, and blood.  Thus far, each of the tests I’ve written follow a predictable pattern, where the first half of the test is some version of true-false, fill in the blank, multiple choice, and matching questions, then the second half of the test is split usually between short answer and labeling a diagram.  Understanding this format allows me to structure my studying to answer these questions.  I know that the bulk of the points will be found in the diagram and short answer, so if I can memorize the structural components (from my diagramming study cards) and their functions (from my development of mental schemas), I can usually work out the rest through context, associations, etc.  With this approach, I don’t have to memorize every tiny bit of information because I can make educated guesses based on available information.  This is the same approach that is coached when you are preparing for intensive exams, like SATs and GREs.  You don’t need to know everything; you just need to know enough to eliminate the impossible and approximate the answer enough to make a choice.

On one level, this has yielded huge dividends for me in studying.  Thus far, I’ve completed two-thirds of the tests, and in 13 tests, I’ve only scored below 90 on three tests (86, 87, and 89).  Everything else has been 90% and above.  It’s a lot like the pareto 80/20 rule – I focus on the smallest batch of material that creates the greatest value.  It’s efficient – I don’t need hours upon hours of work invested into the project.

Yet, I have a huge nagging problem with this approach.  If I’m being honest, the conclusion I wrestle with is that while I’m doing great in this biology course, the only thing I can be sure of is that I’m really good at writing tests.  But, does that mean I’m gaining any level of mastery over my material?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of mastery and apprenticeship.  I intent to read Mastery by Robert Greene over the summer, and I’ve read So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work by Cal Newport, all of which tackle the concept of learning and mastery of material.  I value going beyond superficial understanding and reaching towards mastery.  In paramedicine, I see this as the bridge that allows you to adapt in the field beyond doing first aid.  You connect ideas and have a deeper understanding of the situation.  You are more adept at observation and can digest more details and facts; you can make better diagnoses because you can acquire and process more information.  At least, this is what I believe at this point.  I could be horribly off the mark.

If my goal is to be House but in an ambulance, then I feel like being good at writing tests gives me a false sense of accomplishments.  It’s too early to determine if I’m “getting it,” but it’s something I need to be mindful of.  One problem with my undergraduate and graduate experience is that I lack the discipline to do truly deep thinking and work.  I am very clever, and have thus far skated by on having a good memory for facts and connecting ideas.  But I also feel like a bit of a fraud, or more charitably, a dilettante.  Being clever won’t be enough to help save lives.  To do that, I’ll need something more than wit.

Study Strategies #4 – Diagramming

My study habits have come a long way since I first entered university.  In high school, there was less of a reliance on reading textbooks for information, and instead textbooks helped explain concepts that were duly taught during class.  The most you would often get out of a textbook was the bank of practice questions assigned for homework.

When I entered university, it was the first time I owned my course textbooks.  I could do what I wished with the pages (assuming I had no intention to resell the book after the semester).  Yet, if you thumbed through my textbooks from first and second year, you’ll see the pages are still unmarked and relatively pristine.  And yes, I am a pack rat and still have my textbooks from 10-years ago.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I began to annotate my  textbooks.  It started with encountering words I didn’t know the definition to.  I would underline the word, then copy the dictionary definition at the bottom of the page.  From there, I began underlining key ideas, starring important paragraphs, and eventually I would jot keywords in the margins to allow me to scan a page to understand what was being discussed.  This practice eventually carried over to my personal reading.  Now, if you open books I’ve read over the last five or so years, you’ll see this practice used fairly frequently.

Studying biology is proving to be a special case, because in addition to reading the text book, I am required to explain how certain systems function, fit together, and are structured.  I’m a visual and systems learner: I learn best when I can visualize a concept and understand how the various parts work together.  So, to learn the body, to label diagrams on tests, and to explain physiological processes, I have turned to diagramming when I make my flashcards.

Studies have suggested that students who write notes longhand have better recall than students who take notes on laptops.  It is believed that the act of handwriting information triggers better encoding of the information and better recall both in short-term and long-term follow-ups.  I believe some of the same processes are at work when you are learning materials from a book.  Underlining or highlighting material for retention is passive and requires little cognitive work to process compared to copying information.

This is not to suggest that there is only one way to study.  Many people have many styles of learning.  What we can generalize from this, though, is that forcing yourself to engage with the material actively (i.e. copying information, summarizing the text, creating flashcards) will help with recall in most people over engaging with the material passively (i.e. reading and highlighting the text).

 

You do not have to be an artist to diagram.  Trust me.  You can still diagram using stick figures so long as the information you are drawing is meaningful to you.  In the example below, I was trying to figure out a way to easily remember all 11 systems of the body.  I broke the systems down into body regions, and memorized the number of systems per region to help me remember which systems were primarily located where.

  • 1 Head – Integumentary (outer skin) System
  • 2 Head – Skeletal System
  • 3 Head – Muscle System
  • 4 Head – Nervous System
  • 1 Neck – Endocrine System
  • 1 Thorax – Lymphatic System
  • 2 Thorax – Cardiovascular System
  • 3 Thorax – Respiratory System
  • 4 Thorax – Digestive System
  • 1 Pelvis – Urinary System
  • 2 Pelvis – Reproductive System
http://rhuckle.tumblr.com/post/136887273846/im-studying-human-anatomy-and-physiology-at-the

The reason I find diagramming helpful the most is because encoding the information becomes easy when you have to create spacial relationships between parts of the whole.  For biology tests, you often are required to label diagrams.  You can try to brute-force the recall by memorizing the individual parts and what order the fall on the label lines.  When you are forced to draw the parts, you must make sense of how the pieces fit together if you are to get the proportions correct.  For all the parts to fit on your diagram, they must be spaced correctly.  This is incredibly useful when you must go back to label the parts, because you know how each part connects by virtue of your drawing them out.

Diagramming can be a powerful tool to help you learn material quickly and efficiently.  It does take longer than simply underlining or copying out blocks of text, but if you invest the time, it will pay off come test time.

Stay Awesome!

Ryan

*Sources

Mueller, P. Oppenheimer, D. The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science June 2014 vol. 25 no. 6 http://pss.sagepub.com/content/25/6/1159