Guest Blogging

Thank you Victoria Woelders for inviting me to guest blog in “My Kid’s Locker.”  Loved having the opportunity to try something new and I appreciated Victoria’s extension and invitation to answer a few questions for her blog. This is an excellent way to get to know people in your PLN. Victoria and I first met on Twitter. We have met several times Face-to-Face, but it is always a pleasure to connect with her and others on Twitter to “talk education.” Nothing can be more fun for me.

As Victoria probed me with a few questions “about me,” it tapped into a bit of my why… my purpose. There is no question, for those who know me, that I am heavily invested in education. I love the teaching and learning process. I love the governance role I am currently assuming as school trustee. I also love (and humbled by) my self-directed learning as a doctoral student. This is personalized learning at it’s finest. However, in writing in her blog, I was pleasantly reminded of my teaching practice.

There is no question… I loved teaching secondary mathematics. Certainly, there were good times and not so good times, but overall, I have good memories of my teaching practice. In the last two years of my teaching practice, I can honestly say I was in a state of turmoil. My job assignment changed dramatically from year to year and I was losing sight of my purpose. From a long standing grade 12 and Calculus 12 teacher to a grade 8 math teacher with many students with IEP’s (to teaching science 9).

Furthermore, I was completing the coursework for my doctoral program, my daughter was really little and I was working full-time, and Math 8 at the time was subjected to 150 hours of instructional time. It was a busy/crazy time. Make lemons into lemonade… the extra instructional time lent to my own professional learning as to how I could integrate aboriginal education into mathematics education. I was so lucky to connect up with my colleague and District Principal of Aboriginal Education Kerry Mahlman. We discussed and deliberated over many hours on what to do and how. This was truly a team teaching adventure. Trust was integral to our success.

By the time we had settled on a topic and learning outcome, we proceeded as we knew best… on the fly. I was able to connect up with another master educator, Enid Goodman, our resident Art Teacher to establish what we could do on a $0 budget and the Math 8 students’ prior knowledge of Art 8. Voila… an integration of 3 curricular areas into one. The best gift of all was the students’ engagement. Some of the students self-identified as aboriginal at the end of the unit and created beautiful tributes to Susan Point with their version of Mathematics Embedded and the spindle whorl. This was an awesome edu-experience. If I can do it, anyone can do it.

Thank you Victoria for reminding me of this unique teaching experience. I would do it again in a heart beat. If you’d like to read my GUEST BLOG, go to http://mykidslocker.com/guest-blog-post-by-christine-younghusband/

http://mykidslocker.com/guest-blog-post-by-christine-younghusband/