Playing Hi-Tech Pretend and Union Understanding

 This is another "I have two things to say and can't choose which to focus on" post.

Playing Hi-Tech Pretend

Even though a lot of our focus in school these days is on our upcoming concert, learning is still going on. For the kindergarten students I see, we've taken a fun turn that incorporates music and drama and media. Our term theme is all about imagination. I brought in a mysterious package and the students guessed what was in it. 

It was a trumpet. With a lot of mouthpiece washing, we allowed students to try playing the trumpet. I loved seeing the look of surprise and delight on the students' faces when they were able to produce a sound. There was some direct teaching involved on the difference between buzzing their lips and merely blowing air. They loved it!

They discovered that playing a trumpet is not that easy. We talked a bit about where they hear trumpet music and tried to recognize trumpets in music pieces. I set up a booth in the class and library with a green screen and invited students one at a time to select a background and pose with the trumpet.

It was a great opportunity to look at how media create versions of reality, to be playful, to make noise, and to pretend. Here is one of the photos (with student faces blocked). 

Union Understanding

Friday, December 8 was Federation Day. I attended virtually this year. There were a lot of lengthy and powerful talks by people. Instead of my usual "summary / 3 key points / so what and now what" format, I'll just make a few sentences about each section. Please excuse the quality of my photos. I took them of my computer screen while listening.

Helen

Our ETT president, Helen Victoros, made her opening remarks. She reviewed some of the terms of the recent central tentative deal. I appreciated her honesty that the ETT Executive is not unanimous in their opinions of the deal. 

Randy

What is the state of Ontario's finances? It's not as dire as the provincial government would have you believe. Randy Robinson is the director of the Ontario office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. He gave a detailed overview of the numbers that matter and how they are spun. (Thank you Karen Jutzi for the image and post below, from Facebook.)

Jesse

Jesse Wente is an author, broadcaster, and to quote the ETT website, "Indigenous advocate and pop culture philosopher". Some of the important ideas he shared were: We need to focus on being (a more Anishinaabe concept) than Western notions of doing. Are we ready to sit in circle with Jesse's children? The soft stuff (empathy, media literacy [yes, he said media literacy]), the "hall stuff" is important. Be future builders.  

Me (and Chelsea)

Chelsea Attwell and I ran a session called "Magnifying Media in the New Language Curriculum". We had a very large group of people log on. I kept taking photos to actually note the number of participants. (If you can't see, those numbers go from 58, to 281, to 308 to 315.) Now, I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that everyone was hanging on our every word. Attendance was mandatory and I'm sure a lot of folks had the computer on while doing something else. Another worrisome moment was when we didn't have host privileges and people forgot to mute their microphones and we could hear people ordering food and playing music. Thankfully, a last minute email Chelsea sent rectified the situation. Big thanks to James and Daniel and Mila for the conversations afterwards. 

It was lovely to see familiar names at the opening plenary. I hope everyone got something out of the day. Big appreciations go to all those people who organized a workshop, as well as the ETT Federation Day organization committee.