my sister.

October 20, 2017. Thirty-seven years and a few months ago, I was three years old and she was a newborn. I remember my parents carrying her into the house for the first time.   Seven years ago, she ended her own life. Today’s the anniversary.   Yesterday, Dallas Yellowfly of 3 Crows Productions presented “Qwalena: The…

Assessment Overhaul

So one of my major challenges this year is attempting to overhaul my Big Picture on assessment to include our “curricular competencies”. For those outside of this province, the cc’s are a sort of orthogonal set of skills we want students to demonstrate that are, for the most part, content-independent. Here’s my summary version of…

A New Year

Time to play blog-post catchup now that my summer server migration woes are finally mostly resolved! This year I’m teaching full-time at an ‘Integrated Arts’ high school, covering Math classes from grades 10-12 as well as a Science 9 (later) and Photography 11 / 12. I GET TO MAKE MATH ARTSY ANY TIME I WANT…

My Pedagogy

I needed to write up a statement of my teaching philosophy for a job application I’m submitting shortly, and it just seemed like the sort of thing worth sharing. So here you go. Constructive comments welcome.   My teaching philosophy centers on my core values. I highly value practicing compassion and empathy for students; I…

Inform: Things, Kinds, and other Words Of Very Definite Meaning

Inform’s definitions make me pause. I want to write a short post summarizing some main ideas: Things, which are sort of like objects; Kinds, which are sort of like classes; Actions, which are sort of like, well, functions with side effects; Values, which I guess are also like objects? Or instances? Or just values? If…