I've been on a bit of a Steely Dan kick as of late. I bought A Decade of Steely Dan on CD a few years ago and it's slowly been growing on me. I didn't really care for them when I was younger, but I kind-of knew that, as a snooty musician type, I was supposed to like them. And as I age, I'm understand that supposition a little better.

The Midnight Special has been posting some great videos to their YouTube channel as of late. Steely Dan's performance of "My Old School" is spectacular there.

I'd just like to say that I despise the ways online algorithms try to "give me what I want" by showing me news based on my most recent searches. It feels infantilizing to have a computer suggest that I read or view things that I may have searched for one time, or for a brief period. Just because I searched for something doesn't mean I want unsolicited news about it.

In addition, and perhaps related, I'm so tired of professional sports league contract talk. I've felt exhausted by the endless talk of contract talk over the last few years; the Pride stuff, mentioned a few posts ago, pushed my patience over the top. It's deeply unenjoyable to hear more about contracts than about people playing the game. I feel like I'm being pushed to ignore the major professional leagues altogether, because most of the talk will just be about contracts. It's off-putting.

To combine both of these points, I wish I'd never followed sports on Google because it inundates me with contract talk, amongst other things. So annoying.

​That's all.

I haven't mentioned it here yet but I'm in a play again: The Mousetrap, directed by Caroll Lefebvre for the Sidekick Players Club in Tsawassen, Delta, BC..

Here's the article from the  Delta Optimist, presumedly written and submitted by Carroll.

[UPDATE June 14, 2023: I knew it on the day I wrote this, but I very much admit this post is scattershot. I'll try to improve upon these ideas another time.]

For the entirety of my teaching career, I’ve learned that people learn best when we are actively involved in learning. Active lessons, where students can move around and interact with items and ideas in a variety of ways, almost always take pedagogical priority over speaker-slideshow-driven activities. I’ve been regularly trained to remember that students can absorb only so much information, that not all students learn in the same way at the same time, and that the memorize-what-the-teacher-said model just doesn’t work for most people.

This goes for all forms of pedagogy, as far as I can figure out. Whether you run a classroom, a workshop, or a seminar, effective instructors need to put some variety and activity in their instruction. In the sensory processing workshop I’m sitting in right now as I start this entry, the slideshow I’m looking at says, “Research shows that physical activity helps activate the brain, improves thought processing, boosts attention, and can enhance overall learning.” This concept fits everything I’ve learned about teaching over the last decade-and-a-half. Active learning works.

I’ve taken dozens of workshops in the last decade, and I’ve certainly attended them more regularly over the last two years as I’ve worked as an Integration Support Teacher in School District #36 (Surrey). The IST position is new to me and it’s not what I’ve been trained to do; I have a steep learning curve to work effectively in the role. With this role, I am required to take at least two workshops/inservices every month, and I take a few more each month on my own accord. I’m not quite qualified to do special education work, but I want to do a good job in this special ed related position, so I take workshops when available. I’ve had to learn about perception and learning strategies, about visual schedules and sensory overload, about self-regulation and self-management, and plenty of other concepts. In addition, I’ve had to learn to work with numerous experts I’d never had to consider before, such as Occupational Therapists, Speech Language Pathologists, Applied Behaviour Analysis workers, Behaviour Consultants, Behaviour Analysts, and plenty of other experts unique to each student. This IST position has introduced many concepts about learning that I’d never had to consider before, or at least I could ignore them and get by.

Almost every workshop I’ve attended extols the value of active learning for students. However, adult inservice workshops never follow the active learning model. The instructor sits at the front of the room and talks; behind them, there are slides that are chronically packed with information. Even as instructors discuss the issues with active learning, or sensory perception, or the ways we learn, inevitably each workshop follows the classic information-dump-from-an-expert sort of model.

There’s a straightforward, obvious reason for using the speaker-slideshow method: efficiency. A speaker and a slideshow seemingly pack loads of information into an auditory and visual model, so for practical purposes, if the purpose is to “get information out there,” it’s easiest to just get someone to talk to you while they click through Powerpoint slides, even if that person is a complete stranger. In the end, the instructor feels like they accomplished a lot because they said a lot and the slideshow backed up what they said. They feel like the information has been conveyed. 

If the medium is the message, the “speaker with slideshow” medium’s ubiquity creates a message that speakers and slideshows are the prime means of information transfer. The message is, this is the medium that the experts use; it must be effective.

But recently, I’ve found myself more agitated during presentations. The message, as it were, is getting in the way. I find it harder and harder to sit through them, to take in information, to keep myself from distracting myself. I’ve attended workshops that I zone out in, where I just want to pack up and leave, because the presentation feels like a big pile of irony. I’m so tired of sitting through sessions that don’t practice what they preach.

Part of this might stem from some undiagnosed ADHD on my part, or perhaps some sort of sensory issue of my own; I’ve had enough people suggest that I may be autistic or that I think in a “unique way” that I would be remiss to imagine that I don’t have something going on in my own head. I’ve always doodled; I’ve always fidgeted; it took a long time for me to figure out how inferences work; it takes me longer to learn new concepts than it appears for my peers. Perhaps I have too much trouble blocking-out all the information of a room and focusing on the matter at hand. Perhaps I’m not made for speaker-slideshows, despite my relative success in school, university, and workshops.

But as far as I can tell, the active strategies we use with autistic students, or with students with ADHD, for example, are strategies that are effective for almost all students. And that includes us adult professionals. Just because we’re adults at a workshop doesn’t mean we learn well though the speaker-slideshow model.

And I feel like we, as educators, aren’t going to take the next steps with students if we don’t take the time to create active learning situations with our own peers. I think this is particularly true in the case of in-person workshops post-pandemic. We grew accustomed to people talking through screens, reading slideshows on Zoom and Teams. I’d say it was a miserable time for taking in information. But now that we’re out of the pandemic, meeting in person again, we need to exercise our abilities to move and interact with one another at workshops.

In essence, we need to re-streamline our instruction. And slideshows should always be considered the most cumbersome, clumsy means to instruct anything. We are adults and we learn in the same ways as those kids do. It’s about time we acted that way.

I just listened to a Wisecrack-produced video titled "Is Therapy Speak... Gaslighting Us?" I like it.

This video highlights similar things to what I was trying to talk about in one of my more recent blog posts, "Trending trauma." The video describes the ways therapy-speak has entered the everyday discourse of the secular populace. 

I like how the video says, "Mental Health has become the great smokescreen for the ills of neoliberalism." I often feel this when I hear about people trying to treat anxiety with many different types of therapy, when living in this society is so inherently difficult and stressful that we would all require some sort of therapy or another at all times. 

I was thinking about the invasion of therapeutic language into our everyday discourse while I watched an episode of Ted Lasso last night. It was the Amsterdam episode, where numerous characters make steps forward in their characterization and development. For most of these characters, they had conversations that sounded like therapy: their dialogue sounded more like a counselling session than a conversation. It was a great episode, admittedly, but it hung on an understanding that talking-about-our-problems-in-a-counselling-sort-of-way is an inherently good thing to do.

Seven or eight years ago, I went through a series of self-help books. I've probably written about this before, but here I'll just say that I was going through a lot and I wanted to be able to figure out what was going on. I read three or four of these books, likely starting with Marshall Rosenburg's Nonviolent Communication, and moving on from there. These books gave me a new vocabulary for communicating my feelings; they also empowered me to allow myself to have needs and desires, things that I'd suppressed for most of my life before that point.

However, by self-help book five or six, I started so see the pattern. Each of these books seemed to be essentially saying the same things, and they were all speaking the same language: needs, desires, trauma, self, advocate, believe, etc.. In a way, all the self-help books were the same book.

With all this self-help lingo in my brain, when I tried to use the language I was learning in situations where I thought it might help, that language always backfired. It took me a while to realize that the language was clear, but it also had a place: therapeutic settings. Therapy and self-help language wasn't meant to be used in a fight, or even between two people trying to sort out their problems. It was intended to be used in within the walls of the therapy office. Over the last five years or so, I've tried to stay away from using language that, well I don't think really fits in everyday speak.

Which has made it strange to watch things like that Amsterdam episode of Ted Lasso, an episode that relies heavily on "Concept Creep," I guess, where all these characters can talk like therapists to one another, and, well, it kinda' gets somewhere?

But it's not realistic. I'm not convinced that making therapeutic language our everyday language... works. At least for me, when I rely on therapeutic language, my ideas overall get confused, and my solutions feel more empty. Therapy-talk mashes my feelings into a discourse that inherently complicates concepts and ideas. It leads from trying to talk about feelings into a place of preambles and hedges. 

When discussing the inner self, I think it's always best to streamline language into simple chunks. Where a preamble or redefinition might be needed, it's best to simplify and rephrase. I try to make things as comprehensible in the moment. That's it. I don't succeed in this often, but I feel like I'm happier when it works.