Monday, April 19, 2010

No Excuses!

"Make room in your hearts and minds to grow, not only as an educator, but as citizens of a global community." (Graduating education student)

For the past couple of years, I have had the pleasure of supervising physical education student teachers in local elementary and high schools. Every year at the end of the supervision, I get an email from the office of student teaching [OST] asking if I would like to attend a special culminating activity entitled 'Journey's End- Journey's Start' for graduating students. And every year it falls on the same day as another engagement. This year it didn't and I typed it in my icalendar right away, figuring it would be a great opportunity to meet with other supervisors and students from the faculty of education.

So I arrive in one of my favorite rooms at McGill, Moyse Hall, and settle into one of the chairs, waiting for the keynote speaker to begin his talk on the theme of 'Teacher Leadership and Youth Action: Community Engagement and beyond! Now, I won't lie, I am not one to be completely attentive around 3-4pm and it's usually the time where my body is screaming for a nap. I had to admit, I found myself fighting to stay awake on what should have been an extremely interesting talk about the role of community for new teachers. As usual, a non-education professor, took a seemingly practical theme of community and explained it in a manner that left me wanting to hear it from the mouths of the graduating students.

Luckily, 2 students rescued the great theory and described an initiative they had run that put theory into practice to make it understandable and useful. These 2 students decided that they wanted to run an initiative to support Fondation Maman Dion and the Quebec Breakfast Club. They decided that they wanted to run an art auction of student work and enlisted the help of every graduating education student. With the help of 7 interested organizers, the students ran into multiple challenges including governing boards, uninterested teachers, no power as student teachers, and scheduling issues. Their recount was both realistic and honest about the obstacles that both new and experienced teachers have to go through. At the end of their talk, the two students summed everything up with the slogan, 'No excuses'. They surmised that now that they are teachers, there are no excuses for not partaking in a larger community of activities, running initiatives, and using local organizations to teach students to care about their community.

The slogan of 'no excuses' really struck home with me as I find myself often surrounded by teachers who don't have time, don't have energy, don't have the resources, etc. I often find myself shaking my head at why some of these people are teachers if they are not going to give 100% in everything they do? Likewise, I often shake my head when people as me why I bother volunteering my time for APEQ. It comes down to two things: 1. I care. 2. I have no excuse not to. If teachers don't devote their time and energy to one or two (or possibly more for the extra keen!) initiatives, who will? It's high time we change our thinking to "I have no excuse not to do ____________."


Finally, a few other thoughts came to mind at the end of this presentation:

1. Why are physical education students not required to attend? I find it hard to believe that they still send students out to practice teach for 7 weeks and then don't bring everyone back together for one last reflective day or workshop. Seems to me that this sort of goes against everything they teach us about reflecting upon our experiences....

2. We really need to get out of using 'stage', the Quebecois version of practicum or field experience. To put it politely, it sounds bush. I used to think that one of my old professors was being ridiculous when she emphasized how unprofessional it sounded to use this in a sentence or read it in an assignment. Until today, when the word 'stage' was used umpteen times.

3. After listening to many student teachers complain about how they should be paid to do their field experience and how it was unfair that they had to run intramurals at lunch or coach afterschool, it was refreshing to see students see that they can run small initiatives with small and big outcomes. More importantly, it was beautiful to see teacher still naively aware of how the student is at the centre of all that we do and all that we teach.

No excuses :)


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