timcalvin

So you want to be a teacher.

Filmmaker Werner Herzog has quipped that to be successful in his craft, one should not go to film school. Instead, he recommends some of the following skills:

Lock picking
Document forging
Multiple languages
Martial Arts

His argument hinges on a simple truth: in the act of making a film, these skills trump the theoretical offerings of a formal art school. And while thinking of this, it seemed clear that there were things you should know and study that they weren’t teaching in education school.

To that end, I’ve put together a list of the skills and areas of study that I feel are crucial to being a good teacher- but that aren’t taught in any typical education program.

Statistics

And not some simple statistics-for-education. A real, honest to god statistics course. Knowing how to interpret data is crucial- both so you can see the actual meaning of what you’ve gathered, but also so you can see when someone’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

Acting

If you think teaching isn’t an act of performance art- stop. Withdraw from your program and give up. You are not presenting yourself as you teach- you are presenting a created version of yourself that best allows you to teach. That’s acting- and you’re going to be doing it six hours a day, five days a week, 180 days a year. If you’re uncomfortable with that fact, this job isn’t for you. Walk away.

Design

Students deserve materials that are well designed- and that’s not just a matter of them “looking better” mind you- good design addresses having the form help the function. I know that Comic Sans is listed as a font on your machine but trust me- it’s not. Not only is it hideous and an abomination- it’s not very readable. It is not in the best interests of your students no matter how “nice” you think it looks. A decent design course can help give you the sensibilities to make better choices.

Conflict resolution training

I took a 32 hour course in restraint training- physical restraints, that is. In my time in conventional classrooms, I never once had cause to put hands on a student. That’s a good thing. What was most interesting about the course was that it spent MORE time on de-escalation techniques than on the actual physical holds. In fact, the mentality was that if it comes to a physical interaction, you’ve already lost. Everything is about slowing things down and calming people. That part of the training I used nearly every day- with students and staff.

Film making

Digital delivery is a given today- you need to be adept, comfortable, and effective at making short films. There isn’t any more “that’s not my job” or “it’s too hard” or whatever. Consumer grade computers capable of digital video editing have been around since at lest 1999- learn how to shoot and edit video. It’s a thing now.

Project management

Dealing with projects spread across some 120 students in various states is as clear an example of project management as I can think of. Learn some tools and techniques to be able to deal with that sort of volume of creation.

I can’t even tell you how many times lock picking was useful in my teaching career- and having some solid A/V experience let me do a lot of things I wouldn’t have been able to any other way. Or how being able to circumvent a firewall/filter was crucial to teaching a lesson. But the above list, I think, represents more along the lines of how we should be thinking about educating teachers. Lateral thinking should be encouraged, rather than the step-by-step adherence to the latest regulations.

I’m not sure I could recommend going into the field to anyone right now- the deck seems so heavily stacked against the ability of good teachers to do what they do best… It’s too big a subject to tackle in this post, I know. There seems to be so much emphasis on “making sure” that “teachers are doing their jobs” (as dictated by a group of distinctly non-educators, mind you…) that there’s no room for good teachers to do their thing.

Still. If you’re in the process of entering the field, and you’re wondering what elective courses to round your program out with- there’s my pick.

Building a Game (Part 1)

I have young children, and for reasons I won’t delve into here, they need some special attention paid regarding their vision. As such, and in an effort to enrich their play, I’ve embarked on a project to introduce them to RPGs. Roll Playing Games are exactly what you think- you assume the roll of a character in a game and play from that perspective. The most famous of these is likely Dungeons and Dragons, but there are many, many others. Think of it this way: if you were to play Clue from the perspective and in the roll of Colonel Mustard¹. THAT’D be a RPG.

My kids are small, and even the most stripped down version of DnD has a rule book 100 pages long (the full version, near as I can tell, is 320 pages). So it should come as no surprise. Indeed, when researching what game I might introduce, the general consensus was that we should build our own. Fair enough. I wasn’t sure about their ability to grasp some of the more abstract concepts, so I chose to test the concept with a game structured around our house and our family. HouseGameProto(crop)

This is the first game board we made. The layout of based (roughly!) on the floor plan of our house, “x” on a spot makes it “special” (and you draw a card for that…), and mostly, you go about the tasks you do in real life- go to the living room or kitchen, walk around, make messes (lose points!), be polite (add points!). And that’s it. There’s no narrative or ending, but it was enough to gauge their interest in the format. Time to get more ambitious.

I wanted to keep a few things in mind:

These are little kids, and as such, the game should be of a finite length²
The game should be re-useable
The game should be adaptable
The game should be as familiar as possible
The game should be hackable

With all that in mind, I drew up this board:

It’s not perfect at all- and that’s ok. It shouldn’t be precious, because I don’t want any hesitation to change it all around. I made it a fairly generic “maze” layout, and I added a coordinate system. That will allow me (as I run the game) to place obstacles and rewards in various spots, to be discovered as they play. It’s a sort of miniature quest. The complexity of the journey can be dialed up or down based on the nature and frequency of these additions- a few easy monsters with copious resources at first, then more monsters and scarcer resources. Speaking of resources…

I opted to stay fairly low-tech with much of this. That’s a recycled chunk of foam core for a board. The manipulatives- the pieces- needed to feel familiar to the kids, but also be versatile enough to function not only for this game, but for future variations and new games. So…

This is the start of the collection. This will grow a ton in the next week or so, as some Amazon orders or parts come in. But for now, that’s a pile of Lego Minifigs, some counting bears, a handful of tiddlywinks, some small treasure chests, and a home-made die. I’ve got a bag of “pirate jewels” coming (for treasure…), 100 dice (D4, D6, D8, D10 (and percentile), and D20), as well as a couple hundred blank cards. Most of what that’s for is obvious, but the blank cards are key: those will get turned into set of stacks, each stack on a theme. For example, in the “Monster” stack, each card will specify what kind of monster and any other parameters (how strong it is, what kind, etc…). If you hit a “monster” square in the game, you draw a card to find out details.

I’m excited. From a learning perspective, there’s a lot to do here- the kids are not only going to play the game with me, but they’re also helping me to build it. That’s a lot of cutting and glueing and talking and making lists and and and. It’s a proper project.

Updates as we make progress.

¹ Why don’t we play Clue this way? Sounds WAY better.

² I’m looking at you, Monopoly. And Mousetrap.

Sit Rep

Some things I’ve been making progress on:

v1 of the EDC bag project is done (into sketching for v2)
nothingfuture-logo “monster” stickers v1 arrived!
v2 of the NF camera straps are in testing
new nothingfuture website well in progress
Got my Luxi lightmeter in (from Kickstarter)
I’ve been having great luck with BulletJournaling- two months in now
Slowly learning color correction in Resolve
Evaluating my current workflow (re: still photos)