The Confusion Zone

Theme by Anders Norén

https://www.psycom.net/quiz-results/?qid=9_3

ADHD

(Photo is my results from psycom which is obviously NOT a diagnostic tool)

When we talk about ADHD we often picture a very hyper 8 year old boy, distracted in class and distracting in class. It was thought for a long time that ADHD was much more common in boys than it was in girls. However, that is not the case, it just manifests differently in boys than it does in girls.

This term, as I’ve explore my brain and my mental health. I’ve started wondering if I’ve had ADHD all my life, and I won’t lie, it was partially because of the TikTok algorithm that got me there, though someone with ADHD and my therapist also suggested it to me.

There are three “types” of ADHD Hyperactive ADHD and Inattentive ADHD, and combined. Women and girls tend to present with inattentive and it used to be known as ADD. The signs aren’t always obvious because those with inattentive ADHD aren’t usually disruptive, they may daydream, they may even be the teachers pet.

ADHD isn’t very well named. Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, firstly it caters to that first group, secondly, it is named after how it affects others, not how it affects the person who has it.

From the probable dozens of videos I’ve seen by creators with ADHD, a common theme is that they follow the dopamine and positive stimulation, and any task has the potential to produce dopamine, which explains why some children with ADHD don’t have trouble in school. Praise from teachers and parents provides the dopamine their brain needs.

From what I’ve watched, those with ADHD really experience two states. Executive dysfunction, and Hyperfixation.

Executive dysfunction is the inability to do a task because you don’t have the dopamine to get you to do it. You WANT to do the task but you don’t, you sit and worry about the fact that you are not doing the task. On the outside it looks like the person is lazy because how hard is it to clean your room, on the inside not so much.

Hyperfixaton is when someone has found something that is providing a ton of dopamine to their brain and therefore, for some time it is really all they want to do, think or talk about. For instance, playing a video game at all hours of the day despite knowing you need to do other things like study, shower or eat.

So really, if we were to rename ADHD it would be better called Executive Dysfunction Disorder.

If we break it down this is how we tend to recognize someone with Hyperactive ADHD or Inattentive ADHD. From ADDitude, a site with many professional resources to those dealing with ADHD in themselves or loved ones, those with Hyperactive ADHD may:

  • fidget
  • have trouble staying seated
  • run and climb when inappropriate or feel restless
  • be unable to play/engage quietly
  • is unable to stay stull
  • talks a lot
  • interrupts
  • has difficulty waiting their turn

Wheras those with Inattentive ADHD

  • have trouble paying attention to small details
  • gets distracted during tasks and activities
  • doesn’t seem to be listening when spoken to
  • Doesn’t follow instructions
  • Has trouble finishing tasks
  • Has trouble with organization of time and space
  • Avoids tasks that require sustained mental effort/procrastination
  • Loses things
  • Easily distracted by external stimuli
  • Forgetful

It all boils down in the end to stimulation and dopamine.

However, many people, even professionals still look at ADHD as primarily something that looks like Hyperactive ADHD, and if a student is doing well in school, it is unlikely they will get a diagnosis. Because of this many women don’t get diagnosed until adulthood, if ever. Thankfully with the internet and social media more and more people are able to realize that they may be more than lazy and disorganized.

So, why do I think it is possible I have it? I get distracted easily, I fidget and sway a lot, I often have to remind myself not to interrupt people, I lose my keys constantly, I procrastinate until the last possible second but do extremely well under pressure, I get obsessed with something for weeks and then don’t touch it again for months, housework is extremely hard for me to complete without some other kind of stimulation like Netflix or music (and that doesn’t always work).

I’m not saying I have it, and I’m not even saying I will ever get tested to see if I have it. I might just be lazy and disorganized and looking for an excuse, either way, I’ve made it this far and honestly it is the least of my worries, but it is interesting. Right now I am kind of operating under the assumption that I might have it, so I do some things that help me get along. I “body double” which means I work with someone over video call when I have to work on schoolwork and just having someone else in the space keeps me on task, I sometimes try to trick my brain with rewards and to-do lists that use my current fixation as motivation to get through the tasks (doesn’t always work), I put notes up to remind me to do things that I forget about like taking out the garbage and I use Routinery (when I remember) to keep to a structured routine that has me actually functioning like an adult.

So, while I doubt I’ll ever to much to address it, realizing this I believe will make me more aware of students in my class, and hopefully I won’t be the reason a girl is struggling silently and unnoticed.

Blended, online and multi-access learning

I appreciated our lesson on modality. I think it is really important to be learning about the different forms of access for students because in all honesty, with anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and variants, I don’t think COVID is ever going to completely go away. As new teachers we need to be prepared for a world that may be multi-access.

We spoke a lot about the benefits and biases surrounding face to face, online and hybrid learning. While online learning has been quite frustrating at times, I do enjoy not having to take two busses to get to campus each morning and this is nothing compared to the many students who live much further.

In my high school, we also had students that lived on Gabriola Island, every morning they had to take the boat over and were often late which frustrated teachers. I wonder now if we had had better tech access at that time how many would have chosen online or hybrid learning. We were the tech hub for the district for learn at home, but that wasn’t integrated into mainstream learning as far as I know.

I do know that there are cases when it would not work. Particularly the community that I lived in last year, attendance was poor so one would think it could be helpful but internet access was non-existent for most households and I doubt everyone had the technology for it to work which is unfortunate because those inequalities really act as a barrier for education access in remote communities, and consequently, Indigenous communities.

Despite pros and cons, I think that increasing the options and giving students choice is always overall something positive that we should be striving for.

Habit Stacking

Habit stacking is something that I have been wanting to look into for a while. It was mentioned in a number of my self help books that I read over the beginning of the pandemic. Habit stacking is basically just building positive habits but you structure them in a way that doing one reminds you to do the others.

To look into habit stacking I read the book Habit Stacking by S.J. Scott. In the book Scott talks about how how habit stacking improved his life and made him use his time more efficiently and help him work towards bigger goals. He defines some guidelines for habit stacking.

  • Start small, shorter smaller habits are easier to keep up with
  • Habits should not take more than 5 minutes
  • Habits need to relate to a bigger goal
  • The trigger to start your habit stack needs to be something that will happen everyday, whether it is an alarm or the act of you entering the kitchen

He also defines the seven primary areas of you life that you should be focusing habit stacking in:

  1. Career
  2. Finance
  3. Health
  4. Leisure
  5. Organizing
  6. Relationship
  7. Spirituality.

And a one habit stack doesn’t have to be just for one of these areas. You can have a morning stack that has you make your bed (organization) make a smoothie (health) text someone that you love them (relationship) and sit down to meditate (spirituality/health).

A habit stack may also be the trigger for you to start a bigger habit like sitting down to write or going for a run.

Overall you are in control of how you set up your habit stacks, there is no habit stack for every person and you need to create a routine that works for you. Here is another site that goes into more detail.

So, I started creating morning and evening routines and for a while I did quite well, however, one skipped day turned into two and so on and so on. I found that if I create a good morning routine I also need to follow a good evening routine because otherwise I neglect my sleep hygiene and subsequently everything else. However, the app I found does make keeping track of habit stacks much easier. It is called Routinery and you can see an example of how to use it below. Overall I think that habit stacking can be positive and I think it works very well for certain people. It was helpful for me but not life changing.

What I know about my brain…

I sometimes feel I have the great misfortune to be the owner of my brain. Over the years I have spent a lot of time trying to first figure out if something was wrong with me, then what, then why, then if I can fix it, if I even want to fix it. I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was 14, first for low self esteem and self harm, later anxiety, depression, now OCD and I only now am beginning to feel like I am starting to understand. Youper is an app I’ve mentioned previously and it is something I’ve used off and on to track symptoms and understand the factors that impact my mood. When I first started the app I filled out a survey that analyzed factors of my personality. I take this with a grain of salt, but it is interesting.

Personally, I think this is pretty accurate. I’m very introverted despite not being shy, my emotions are always at the surface and I’m very disorganized.

In addition to this analysis over the years Youper has helped me gain insight into the factors that affect my mood. For instance, I’m calm when I stick to a routine that involves yoga, meditation, exercise and solitude.

However, I become quite overwhelmed in situations where I’m quite busy with work or school, if I have a bad routine and if I am sedentary. Unfortunately this has been the last few months for me. Kids also make me overwhelmed at times, however, this is partially linked to me OCD and intrusive thoughts so it is not always the case. Also, when I am practicing the self care that are listed above, kids are much more enjoyable to be around and become a more positive part of my day. Though I’d be lying if they weren’t too much sometimes, I think any educator can say that.

My frustration over the years is in that while I can see these connection, I rarely act in ways that support those positive moods which fuels depressive episodes, which feed the bad habits and the cycle continues. This year I have been on a journey to explore all the factors in my brain be they anxiety/ocd, depression, the possibility that I have ADHD. Through this I have explore CBT and ERP therapy and for this inquiry I’m going to write down what I have learned and look into more sources to gain a deeper understanding beyond my own experience.

Trevor McKenzie and Inquiry

I really like the idea of inquiry. I think that allowing so much choice and room for passion is an ideal setting for learning and I wish that I had been given those opportunities when I was in school. Attempting to do it now, after almost 20 years of schooling that was not inquiry based, extremely difficult. I don’t do well when there is little structure. I wish that I did because that is life most of the time.

Trevor is a really fascinating guy and creates so many great resources. I know that our Facebook group and other social media was abuzz after he spoke with us this week, and I really appreciate the time he took to explain to us all the different kinds of inquiry because really when I think about inquiry I sometimes get stuck on only seeing it as free inquiry, and settings like Summerhill where kids are basically free to do whatever they want and unfortunately that doesn’t really mesh well with our society and established schooling system. With the spectrum from the teacher selected to student selected and from structured inquiry to free inquiry there are so many ways to guide students into a freer style of learning and inquiry.

Personally, I gotta say I kind of feel like I got thrown in the deep end this semester with this class and the focus on inquiry as our products. And I know, that it is an attempt to give us freedom and time to explore technology in a way that is more relevant to our lives but when you have four classes that aren’t inquiry based and have many deadlines it is really easy to let a class with an inquiry structure end up on the backburner, at least for me.

All that being said, I do want to use inquiry in my classroom but I am going to be very mindful in the ways I use it. I think that in giving students choice, they also deserve the choice of a more structured learning style, external boundaries and goals are really helpful for some people but limiting to others. Really it boils down to knowing who your students are and what they are capable of.

One thing that I do really love about Trevor is how well he manages his social media, while I’m still not really active with Twitter, I followed him on Instagram and I think that his content is phenomenal. Now I guess we’ll have to see if he gets hip with the kids on Tik Tok as trends change.

Audio/Video Editing

So I didn’t actually do much on the pro-d day but I do have experience in audio and visual editing. All through highschool I really believed I could make it as a singer on YouTube and while now I don’t think I’ll be “making it big” any time soon I have definitely edited both videos to go up there and audio to go to SoundCloud. I’ve linked a video that I created for work last year which also displays my super amazing (sarcasm) ability to make gifs and edit those into videos. However, that video was also had a few things added by the media team at my work before publishing.

One thing I really enjoy doing is creating harmonies which obviously requires multiple tracks (and multiple takes). Here is a song I put up a few years ago, there is harmony as well as a separate guitar track that I had to splice together. The video was put together with iMovie with the audio file imported from Garageband. (You also now have my YouTube channel… so have fun with that.

The programs I most use now are iMovie and Garageband. I think they are relatively simple to use if you don’t need to do anything complicated and they come free with apple products which I have. I also just downloaded OBS and have added a video here showing me using it for the first time.

And as promised here is a tutorial for this program from How To Tech:

Inquiry and Passion – Jeff Hopkins

Education as if people mattered (TEDx Talk)

“education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a flame”

Jeff Hopkin’s TEDx talk spoke to me. I think that we are starting to move in the direction that he is suggesting. That inquiry and passion driven education model that he tries to use at PSII. Certainly this class is proof that at least some new teachers are learning these concepts. However, we have a long way to go.

I remember as a child learning content, specifically, I remember learning about railroads and the fur trade and finding it very boring. For years, social studies was my least favourite subject, all through high school. I went on to university and studied science and said good riddance to “social studies” because the way it had been taught to me was so dry. Then, slowly, I started getting involved with activism, social justice, eco-justice, decolonization, more and more of my classes were focused around social sciences and I found them more engaging than most science courses I was taking. My values had not changed, my previous experience had just not lit the flame.

The solution, as Jeff so clearly demonstrated in his searching for keys example, is difficult. Our systems are so set in place and while change is happening there are still many who like the old ways. The funding is supporting the old ways. Decades of resources support the old ways. In certain cases, retired teachers turned professors still have foot in the past. Do children need to learn math? Yes probably, do they need learn math the way we have been teaching for decades? Probably not seeing as so many children grow up hating math.

Inquiry is still tricky for me because I wasn’t taught in that way, given no boundaries, due dates, criteria etc. I flounder. I am glad we are getting some instruction on this subject because honestly, I wouldn’t have known where to start.

Learning Theories

So no, I have not been on top of much lately and I think I’ve expressed why that is in the few posts that I have managed to make. It’s frustrating but I’m trying to get back on top of things. Open-endedness is not a structure I do well with but unfortunately, I’m even worse at sticking to a self-set schedule. Anyway, week 3.

In week three we were looking at resource evaluation and a few learning theories, specifically, Multimedia learning theory, SAMR, and TPACK. We also started looking more deeply into inquiry, but I will delve into that in my next reflection post.

Resource Evaluation

Throughout my first degree, I was asked to evaluate the resources from which I took examples and quotes for various scientific papers and research projects. Therefore I think I have the strategies that I need to evaluate the sources that I am accessing in my own inquiry process. That being said, it is very easy to just go with what is easiest to access and unfortunately, that is how a lot of misinformation is spread these days, for example, many well-established less biased newspapers keep their resources behind a paywall whereas many far-right and extremist publications keep their articles open to anyone. This has contributed to the rise in polarization, especially to the far-right, we have seen and will continue to see not only in the US but globally.

Multimedia Learning Theory: How We Learn

It is ironic that the way I often present things does not overlap with the way I best process information. I find it very difficult to process large blocks of text yet here we are. However, I can’t say that I agree with every point made in Principles of Multimedia Learning.  Specifically, I think that if we limit ourselves to teaching what is necessary, things can be a lot less engaging. Personally, I’ve been brought back into lessons that I had disengaged from because the speaker said something unrelated that caught my interest. Though maybe I’m misunderstanding what they address in terms of cognitive load theory and extraneous load.

The coherence principle says not to use graphics, text and narration that doesn’t support learning goals and not use music. Personally, these things help me engage more but it is interesting to not that that may not be the case for many.

I do however agree with the signaling principle. It definitely helps me to have things bolded, highlighted or separated to signal their importance and have and advance organizer is helpful when reviewing and being able to keep track of the lesson.

I can understand the redundancy principle. I do agree that minimizing text is ideal however because it allows learners to focus on the presentation instead of trying to take notes (whether they need to or not). However, personally, I like to be able to switch between looking at a graphic and reading text to get the full picture. However, I believe that this is addressed in part by the spatial contiguity principle and the temporal contiguity principle (despite sounding like something from Star Trek) in that related text and visuals should be kept together in time and space. This was always something that bothered me when writing scientific papers because you would say “refer to figure 3” and the figure wouldn’t appear until three pages later. Makes it frustrating to process information.

As far as going on to manage intrinsic load and germane load I think I can summarize in a sentence of two. People typically learn better when their learning is personalized and human. We are a visual species and we evolved as a species that used oral language primarily for a long time. It makes sense that we want human voices explaining things at a personalized pace with pictures to bring them together. Some people, myself included, may say that people tend to speak too slowly in certain settings which makes the involvement of technology a plus as students are ideally free to adjust the speed of a recording, at least when working asynchronously.

I think that many of my concerns are addressed in the boundary conditions sections and talking about the individual differences principle. I think that much of this can boil down to the spectrum of neurodivergency and between those who are neurotypical and neurodivergent. Overall though I think a lot of what was presented is correct or at least adaptable to most learners.

SAMR

SAMR looks at how we are using technology in the classroom. SAMR stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. I definitely think that with the pandemic we have integrated technology into the classroom up to the modification level on a regular basis. Google docs is pretty standard in my experience and I would be surprised if a teacher wasn’t able to integrate it, but I doubt it is doing much more than substitution and maybe slight augmentation in some cases. There are so many cool technological tools out there but I will have to be more aware of how I use them in the future.

TPACK

From my understanding TPACK is just overlapping layers of understanding of strategies, pedagogy, your students and the tools available to you. It seems practical, useful and somewhat like common sense. We should be educated on the basics, firm in our ideas and framework and then add tech innovations. I did like that it emphasized that we should not get too swept up in something new and shiny only to forget the basics and the curriculum goals.

Thoughts on “Most Likely to Succeed”

“Most Likely to Succeed” had me spiralling between different emotions. When we were first introduced to High Tech High my initial reaction was “Well that’s the dream isn’t it?” I feel that most teachers would be ecstatic to be told that they can teach what they want and how they want. Quickly though, I began to have many of the same apprehensions that are voiced throughout the film.

I believe that yes, the premise of High Tech High is something that we should strive for and I do believe that it is the education that will create adults more prepared for the job market of the 21st century. However, as the students at the traditional high school, and parents, voiced, we aren’t there yet. So maybe we are at a transitionary place, which is an uncomfortable place to be.

I can so easily see myself in so many of the students that were featured. I was awkward and wanted to please people like Samantha. I had a tendency to be a perfectionist with too big ideas and a tendency to procrastinate like Bryan (still do). I was the girl stressing about her grades to get into university and preaching the gospel of the almighty importance of a letter grade. Though honestly Bryan impressed me the most, he failed to meet his deadline and at his age that would have completely crushed me to the point that I’d probably be having an anxiety attack. Now I’m not sure if his reaction is different because of his character or the values that have been enforced by the school, but I don’t know that I would have had the drive to stay for weeks after the exhibition to finish the project. I don’t know who I would be had I gone to High Tech High, but I have to believe that I would know what interests me and have a better sense of self and confidence.

I can also see myself in the math teacher trying to bring the new teaching style to the traditional public school. In my last job I would try to mix things up and introduce new projects or activities, but the kids were comfortable with what they knew, and as I was hired to give them stability, I tended to let them dictate the programming which ended up being repetitive. In a setting where my role was as a teacher and not as a youth worker, would I be able to stick to my guns and teach the way that I feel is best? Should a teacher not listen to what their students are saying? If a large portion of the class is saying “teach to the test” is teaching to the test not student focused and guided, even if you believe you know better?

Though my honest reaction? Thank god I’ll be teaching elementary or middle school in Canada and not high school in the United States because if I had to teach to the SATs, I’m not sure I would make it.

Introduction

I am Sophia Bullock.

That feels silly to write. I am a 24-year-old student who really still feels unprepared for any kind of career or stability or adulthood in general. My last job was working with at-risk Indigenous youth in Northern Québec with a non-profit called Youth Fusion which was an experience I did not expect and in all honestly wish I was still living. My goal for being in this program is to create a skillset and obtain a certification that allows me to have the option for stability but also gives me options outside of what is expected. I may teach in an average public school as a full-time teacher, I may teach French immersion, I may choose to TOC for a while and pursue other things or focus on my mental health, I may try to find a school like High Tech High or Summerhill (a democratic alternative school), or I may choose to move back to Kuujjuaraapik (my home last year) and find a position there, or elsewhere in a more remote community. I have a science (biology) background and when asked, my preferred age range to teach would be grade 4-7. I care deeply about preparing kids for an uncertain future and that mean teaching them hard truths, new skills and emotional and social literacy, things I struggle with myself.

Newer Posts