We have been lucky to enjoy my in-law’s cottage at Hillside
Beach on Lake Winnipeg for twenty years. They’ve been enjoying it for even
longer, but times, they are a-changin’. If you’re not a Manitoban, then maybe
you don’t know this, but Lake Winnipeg is one of Canada’s largest fresh water
lakes after the Greats! It also has some unique properties such as being
shallow and sandy, and having a very large watershed area. This watershed
brings in all kinds of contaminants and over time, the algae population in the
lake has had massive growth. All of this means that our beach becomes un-swimmable
– and sometimes so thick with green, stinky algae – not even safe to paddle a
kayak in. The diminishing health of our beach has made cottage-going somewhat
less appealing, which made us daydream of a cleaner lake. We even talked from
time to time, about moving home to our rural roots near beautiful Riding
Mountain National Park, where the aptly named Clear Lake is nestled. However,
we enjoy the amenities of the city and the opportunities a larger centre affords
our kids: French Immersion School, for example. With the kernel of these
ideals, we browsed Canadian cities.
During university professors drilled this process into me: read the curriculum, plan the unit, plan the assessment, reflect on your teaching. It was a cycle repeated in every Curriculum and Instruction class. My friends and I could site curriculum outcomes and whip together an impressive series of lessons in a flash. Through 16 years of experience, I have learned that this is certainly NOT all there is to it. Unit planning remains one of my favourite tasks in teaching. It is the dreaming phase. It is that time before instruction, that time before you may have met your students, that time when all is fresh, exciting and possible! But do you know what it also is? It is the time for focus, restraint and actually…leaving things just a little un-planned. Let me explain. What so many of my university professors failed to teach me as an undergrad is that teacher reflection should be about two things: 1) what are the students learning and to what degree are they learning it?, and 2
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