It's official: my host school is Agincourt Collegiate Institute. I am very happy about this as it is quite close to home (I think even closer than the school I used to attend and, later, volunteer at)...therefore even though I have to be there on practicum days earlier than I have to be at York on the days I have my own classes, I actually get to wake up later. I may wake up at the same time anyway in the interest of developing a more regular sleep schedule for myself, but then that means I will have more time to do other things before I leave the house on practicum days than on days when I have my own classes. It is a little lonely that I'm the only York TC (teacher candidate) in my program being placed there (not sure about TCs from other programs), but that's okay if the alternative is travelling farther :). Oh, Kef asked about my host teacher(s)...well, all I know at this point is that my contact person at ACI is Mr. Stuart Burns. I don't know if that means he is my host teacher or just the site coordinator or someone else entirely, but I will find that out on Tuesday. Remember that my teachable subjects are chemistry and physics (though any new science teacher in high school gets the junior grades, too, and the junior science courses are just general in nature rather than specialized by discipline).
I have been asked if I've done the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test to find my personality type out under that system. I haven't done the official MBTI test but I did read the book Type Talk--which is by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen and talks about the MBTI--at an early age (I think I read it in grade 8, and I re-read it later in grade 9 and then again when I was in college...though not all of it each time, I think). By doing the version of the test that is in that book and by reading over some of the personality profiles in it, I determined back then that I am an INFJ, although my J-ness was borderline at the time...still, I thought the INFJ profile sounded more like me than the INFP. My mom is an ESFJ and my dad is an ISTP. There is a whole portion of my grade 9 "Book of I" project where I found out both my mom and dad's types and compared them to my own and detailed how our typological differences created some interesting situations in our home. I was just a little fascinated by the MBTI back then :).
I mentioned that today we would be with all the B.Ed. students from all the B.Ed. sub-programs and all the satellite sites at which York runs its B.Ed. programs. Well, I was a little mistaken...the concurrent education students weren't there...but everyone else was. To give you an idea of what that was like, let me tell you the statistics today's first major speaker told us: approximately 5800 people applied to York's consecutive education programs. Of those, approximately 775 were given spots. I suppose those approximately 775 were the people I was with today. It didn't feel like that many but it was indeed a lot of people. We heard speeches from the dean of York's Faculty of Education, the associate dean, the president of the Ontario Teacher's Federation (OTF), and the president and vice-president of the Faculty of Education Students' Association (FESA). A student panel of recent York B.Ed. consecutive program graduates also gave us their advice and reflections. This was all pretty interesting...I only found one of the speeches boring not due to content but due to the way in which the speaker presented themselves (something to learn from!).
The most fun part of the morning, though, came when we had to present our cheers. See, each of the sites and/or programs attending had to come prepared with a cheer with which to represent themselves. The Barrie campus came with a cheer (or, rather, a string of cheers...some of us decided that they must have a former cheerleader in their ranks), the Glendon campus came with a cheer, the Urban Diversity group came with a cheer, the ECE program, our own MST program, the Fine Arts program, and so on. At the end of it all, FESA presented their cheer. Well, of all the programs attending, our cheer was pretty dismal...one of our membership pretty much summed it up and decided that we had come in third last (I would have said worse than that, frankly). We decided that we had managed to place in the top 7, anyway :-T. We had spent maybe 15 minutes on our cheer, though, if that, so we justified ourselves by saying that for the amount of time and effort that we'd put into it, we had come in first place, hahaha. Of course the Fine Arts TCs had an impressive cheer that included a uniform (black clothing and sunglasses), various actual or improvised musical instruments (the drums made from water cooler bottles were especially neat), and a beat you could actually groove too. Now, they didn't have a lot of words (they basically told us over and over that "you can't spell party without A-R-T!"), so it wasn't as impressive that way as some of the groups that made up whole new sets of lyrics to "Take Me out to the Ball Game" or, um, I think it was "Happy Together" originally [edit: I just remembered it was actually "Yellow Submarine" that the group I was thinking of modified], but the rest of the Fine Arts presentation was so good that it really didn't matter. Darn those trained-in-performance people ;).
The free food for today wasn't terribly impressive, though I still appreciate that it was provided. You know how I said "I hope they have lots of hamburgers"? Well, there were no hamburgers. You got a hot dog bun and your choice of either a veggie dog or, well, a meat dog. Macaroni and potato salads were also both available, as was a selection of pop. It took me about ten minutes to eat what I wanted to...and then my bun started falling apart and I started to be a little not-impressed. I understand that hot dogs are a good easy way to feed a large crop of people but they're just not my thing unless they're done one of a couple particular ways. Anyway, it was about 11:10 a.m. when I decided I was done with lunch, but our next "class"/orientation session wasn't until 12:30 p.m. What to do. Well, one of our classmates decided that it would be a good idea for some of us to hit the Blueberry Hill patio for the remainder of our waiting time and get to know each other some more over there (Blueberry Hill is one of the eating establishments on campus). I wasn't terribly impressed with the idea of having a few beers before class (I say that because even a little bit of alcohol makes me sleepy fairly quickly...I know not everyone is affected by it the same way, but let's just say I know I can't have any alcohol before class...and I don't like beer anyway!) but I figured I would be able to get myself something over there that I would like and would be able to further develop my relationships with these classmates at the same time. That did end up being pretty enjoyable despite the fact that I had to change my order twice because the items I tried to order (nachos and cheese at first, then grilled cheese) weren't available at the moment (I ended up with a salad, which was good enough, and I sneaked in the Pepsi I got at the BBQ). Some of my drinking classmates pointed out the irony of having a few beers before going to our next "class"/orientation session...which according to our orientation programme was going to be on professional misconduct. In fact, one of the situations we got told about in that session involved a TC from a previous year who ended up removed from the program because of alcohol being smelled on his breath repeatedly (besides making some inappropriate comments to students in the school and so on)! What was really shocking was he was still in the observation period at the time (as in the period when the TC observes how the host teacher--HT--runs the class, not when the HT observes the TC)...he never even made it to the point where he could show his stuff teaching-wise! Ouch.
The professional misconduct session was pretty sobering and even scary as we watched a video by the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario entitled "It Could Happen to You" detailing at least three separate cases where teachers were accused of having assaulted a child (one sexually, two physically) and how it affected them even though all three were in the end found not guilty of the charges brought against them (in two of the cases, the students eventually admitted they had lied; in the third, the staff member who had initiated the charges eventually recanted her story). It was quite eye-opening to see that even when you are totally in the clear and haven't done anything wrong at all, you can still suddenly find yourself receiving a call from your superintendant saying, "Don't go to school tomorrow. I can't tell you why. Don't talk to anyone from school either." That's your signal that some complaint has been brought against you...possibly by a student who's decided that because she is failing your class, she is going to accuse you falsely of sexual assault and make your life a living hell. I gotta say, I am glad I am female, since the ladies find themselves facing such allegations less frequently. We also found out that at the point where a formal investigation begins, your name is put in the Ontario College of Teachers (OCT)'s publication Professionally Speaking in a section at the back along with details of the case, and this information is also put on OCT's website in a particular section. OCT is the teaching profession's self-regulatory body in Ontario, and they do this publicizing of names/etc. in order to maintain public accountability. (It is because of such actions on OCT's part that the teaching profession is apparently more respected since OCT's formation in 1997 than it was before.) This section of Professionally Speaking is called "the blue pages." Unfortunately, if you are found innocent, there are no "gold pages" where you are publicly exonorated/etc. Even a false accusation does tons of damage to your career as a teacher, not to mention your public reputation outside of the school system (with parents/etc.). We spent a lot of time today on this topic, with some of my classmates bringing up instances (true or false) that they knew about, with our course directors somewhat reluctantly responding with stories they knew about relating to TCs (who weren't even teachers yet!), discussing how to keep boundaries with the younger kids who are still very touchy-feely-huggy without coming across as cold and mean, how to deal with schoolyard fist fights, and so on. There is a big paradox in that the unions and sensible people constantly advise us that a completely "hands-off" policy is the best way to go in order to avoid most accusations, yet the policies and so on do state that teachers, just like parents, are allowed to use "reasonable force" in order to deal with discipline situations and so on--and indeed those who work with special needs kids may well need to use physical restraint at times to protect the other kids in a class from a dangerous child. The problem is of course that there is no legal definition of "reasonable force" so anytime you do use physical force you are putting yourself at risk of accusations. But then, just by being alive and a teacher you are putting yourself at risk of false accusations...sigh. Hopefully I will not be "lucky" enough to experience that. Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries...
Well, that is the end of orientation. We get tomorrow off and Monday is Labour Day...4-day weekend, hooray! Tomorrow I am taking hubby to a dentist appointment and then we are going to have dinner with some of his relatives; otherwise, the weekend is free for me to catch up on sleep, catch up on some of the things that got neglected in the busyness of this week (such as laundry), relax a bit before school starts in earnest, and prepare myself for next week, when I will be in the class observing the start of ACI's classes Tuesday through Friday. Then my own classes start Sept. 11 and the real busyness will begin, yikes! I'll let you know how it all goes.
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