Risk Taking

Taking A Very Personal Risk

/ Dave Eberwein / 6 Comments

Learning something new can be exciting — it can also be intimidating. A story I am about to share with you today captures both of these realities.

Several of my blog posts have talked about taking risks — about taking that chance at a new idea or new way of doing something to be better.

It can be uncomfortable. Sometimes, it can be downright frightening.

I’ll start with an example of a fairly low-risk professional learning journey I took last year. I wanted to learn more about racism — what it looks like and how it weaves its way into our language, decisions and actions. I immersed myself in the topic, wrote a few blog entries about it and even shared my learning journey with my Board of Education and others in the school district.

I learned a lot, but I felt pretty safe while doing it. Admitting that I don’t know everything about a topic is usually easy for me, so learning more about racism, while important, wasn’t super risky.

But, there WAS something I worked on last year that was intimidating — something that actually had me doubting myself along my learning journey.

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Painting a Picture with Numbers

/ Dave Eberwein / 2 Comments

Numbers are a great place to start a conversation. While they never tell the whole story, they do offer a launching point.

Take a look at the ones above.

They represent some statistics on an important topic — a part of a story from across our province and country. And while they don’t offer a complete narrative about the topic they do help to paint a compelling picture — a picture that reaffirms for me why schools need to be an important place of understanding and acceptance.

The topic I want to talk about today is also a polarizing one in our communities. My experience has shown that few people are without a strong opinion on the topic.

Let’s begin today’s discussion by looking at the two largest numbers …

1,000,000

  • The approximate number of persons in Canada who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer or questioning (2021)

75,000

  • The approximate number of persons in Canada who identified as trans or non-binary (2018)

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The Sky is Falling … AGAIN

/ Dave Eberwein / 11 Comments

Education is a place where we regularly hear fears about things impinging on our schools. This is particularly true when we talk about technology. Whenever a new technology approaches we sometimes hear negative reactions from the community. Technology is great until someone says it isn’t.

“The sky is falling. Save yourself!”

Let’s review some of the historical examples of technology fear:

This Trendsetter from the 70s Changed Math Classrooms Forever
  • Calculators – when these new electronic devices became widely available and affordable in the mid 70s the fear was that they would make students illiterate in math.
  • Internet – this innovation provided more immediate access to information as compared to the antiquated Dewey Decimal System card catalogue in the library. It was going to create chaos in our classrooms with rampant plagiarism.
  • Online Learning – this new type of virtual instruction was going to completely negate classroom teachers and change education into simple, rote memorization.
  • Wolfram Alpha – Introduced in 2009, this new website allowed users to generate answers to mathematic problems by using the site’s formulas. It would make learning math irrelevant and allow for rampant cheating.

None of those catastrophes happened — more on this in a bit.

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