5 People I met at Rockridge Secondary (home of Practicum)

5 people I met at Rockridge Secondary

Terry Dooley - TOC for Math 9.  Irish, very festive.  42 years teaching. He was in the UBC program when he was just married.  He said that the program was quite stressful for him at the time - he was a newlywed and the UBC program was intense.  They had little money so everything together was quite stressful. He was an elementary teacher for 30 years at Ross Road Elementary.  He is 72 now. He’s been a TOC for 15 years. He is a very talkative and friendly man - a very nice guy. He mentioned that he knew many of the students from his many time TOC’ing at the school.

Tracy  - Tracy is admin support at Rockridge.  Tracy helped me to get the wifi account set up.  She patiently sat with me for at least 30 minutes while their very slow internet tried to chug some life into my computer.  Tracy was very nice. She mentioned that she will miss their VP who is planning to leave in November. He provides a lot of tech support for her.

Linda Froese - Linda teaches French and Math.  She is at Rockridge on a short term contract but would like to get a full time posting.  She sits next to me in our small office. She was a software engineer in undergrad and then many years ago, she switched to teaching.  She is originally from the East. She told me that she wanted to get an MBA but it just never worked out. She has a child who is transgender and there has been a lot of stife and difficulty around the child.  Linda continues to advocate and support her child.

Michelle Ahoy - Teaches 8, 9 ,10  math. I visited her classroom to view a Grade 9 classroom (different from the one taught by my SA).  She used more of the interactive approach for teaching the content. However, when I talked with her after class, she said that it is very difficult to teach using a problem solving approach.  She talked at length about how the students coming up from elementary school don’t have the foundations of math. They don’t add, subtract, multiply and divide well enough for students to then move into the problem solving approach.  She said the problem solving approach doesn’t necessarily teach the foundations and it could potentially just confuse the students more. So this is a vicious circle, because if the students can’t comprehend the content if I teach using problem solving approach then what is the point.  

I suspect that Michelle perhaps assumes that we will teach the whole subject using problems and this is not the goal.  We could give a few problems and then move into how those problems relate to the content.  

Students here are used to being ‘fed’ the information.   It seems they are not accustomed to thinking during class, they merely take notes and move on. 

I also observed…

Scott Lawson - I visited Scott’s classroom for a Biology 11 class.  Scott was very energetic and actually implemented a lot of cool ideas in his classroom that they teach us at UBC.  For example, he uses really big portable whiteboards and 1 marker for every two students. He has their names on popsicle sticks that he draws to randomly select students in class, he uses some cool technology to project worksheets and write out answers.  Scott had a lot of great ideas and felt like the math department could branch out a bit more in their use of alternate teaching strategies. He mentioned also that Rockridge has an engineering program where students spend 1 day/week taking a combination of math, physics and other subjects to create and validate engineering ideas and concepts.  Very innovative and interesting!