If you’ve ever wondered about how lesbians do things, you’re in for a real treat: Today's post is about the lesbian lifestyle.

I've written about "the gay lifestyle" in the past, but this particular post is about a very specific aspect of lesbianism, namely, the struggles that two more masculine women face when managing stereotypically "female" situations.

In the past, when I reveal that my spouse is also a woman, I have more than once been asked "who's the man?"

I kid you not, this is not a one time question, and as I do not always know the questioners well enough to presume an "intimate" nature to their line of questioning, I can only assume they are asking more superficially, i.e. who takes on the classically "male" chores around the house.

When faced with important domestic tasks, it seems the answer is, "we're BOTH the man"!

This was clearly illustrated to me this past weekend, when I had to help my partner with an emergency hemming situation.

Now before you ask what could possibly constitute such an emergency, allow me to explain.

You see, my partner recently got hired as a first officer with a regional airline. As such, she was issued a standard uniform, and given a budget to customize said uniform to specs.

For example, pant leg length.

This next part is not so much about the lesbian lifestyle, but it is germane to the story, so bear with me while I set the context.

On Thursday, my partner took all three issued pairs of pants to be altered last week. On account of the long weekend, they were to be ready for pick up on Tuesday. Not a problem, since she was still awaiting her actual flight schedule, and assumed she was not working for the foreseeable future.

But on Friday, my partner got word that she was to report for duty first thing Monday morning for a two-day pairing with an overnight in Windsor! In other words, she needed an actual pair of uniform pants, with legs hemmed, before Tuesday.

And thus ensueth the "emergency hemming situation" referenced above.

My partner dashed over to the dry cleaner and demanded one pair of pants back immediately. ESL barriers (both hers and theirs) not withstanding, she soon returned with one slightly crumpled and of course still unhemmed pair of pants.

Now if we were in a nice, traditional (read "straight") relationship, the woman could simply hem the pants, and the man -- who does not know how to hem pants, but can fly airplanes -- could wear them to his pilot job, and all would be well with the world.

Alas, because we are lesbians, neither of us knows how to hem pants. So we would have been really screwed (and not in a good way), except that as everyone knows, all lesbians are good problem solvers and very creative.

My partner, determined not to report for her first official day of work in pinned up pants, began to google.

She soon came across that magical tool called "hem tape". Hem tape is a lovely little iron-on solution for those (like men and lesbians) who don't know how to sew. You simply cut the tape to the length you need, fold up the material you want to hem, and iron that sucker on high to bond the two parts together. Bingo, you got yourself a sweet little hem!

As soon as she mentioned it to me, I remembered I had used the stuff years ago (when I was married to a man but still did not know how to sew, because I was not a real woman even then, I was a lesbian, I just didn't know it yet) to "hem" a curtain.

Off we went to Walmart of all places (never again!!) and picked up a roll of the glorious substance.

And then it was off to "hem" the girl's pants.

Since the job still required the use of an iron (a borderline "female" task), it was going to be a two-lesbian job for sure.

And what a job it was! In my eagerness to help, I had forgotten the little detail about how a pants leg is actually a round loop, and a hell of a lot more complicated to hem (even with tape) than a straight edge curtain. Despite measuring with a ruler and trying our best not to iron out the pre-existing crease in the pants, we botched the job pretty good, and had to start over a few times.

Also we did it naked, but not because we are lesbians, but because it was super hot this weekend, and we don't have air conditioning in our apartment.

Despite a two-hour struggle to hem (with tape) one pair of pants, we managed to get the job done, and you can only tell if you look really close that one leg is slightly longer than the other.  Overall, though, she still looks pretty kick ass in her uniform, and went off to do two full days of flying and didn't crash the plane.

Despite being a lesbian!

I had rather a surreal experience last night.

I've been working on my night rating, you see, and between kids and work schedules and official nightfall (Note to self: Night rating in summer?  Bad idea!!), I've got to fly whenever I can. This weekend, I had two child-free evenings in a row when my partner -- who also happens to be my flight instructor -- was available, too, and so I jumped on them. 

​Coincidentally, it's also Canada Day weekend, which means that as soon as the sun goes down, the fireworks start!

Nevertheless, I am determined to get this darned night rating done.  More specifically, I have to build some solo time, and -- as the winds were calm and pretty much right down the runway -- off we went to the airport, so that Tats could send me solo ("and do more than two circuits this time!", she scolded).

Lucky for me, the ATC in the tower at CYTZ on Sunday night was an experienced controller; I recognized his voice, and wisely indicated that I was going up for solo circuits when I radioed to request taxi clearance to the active.

It's an odd relationship, the one between pilot and controller.  Other than a call sign (my aircraft's and his "ground" or "tower"), we don't know one another's names.

And yet, he is my everything!

As a student pilot especially, one often thinks the controller is God-like, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent when flying in controlled airspace.  (Being in the unique position of having a partner who spent a few years with Nav Canada, I have seen behind the proverbial curtain, so I know that's not entirely so in real life.  Nevertheless, it felt comforting to hear a confident, familiar voice in my headphones as I prepared to do my first full solo night flight without a dual beforehand.)

The nameless controller took good care of me last night.  Although I was primarily alone in the circuit, there was lots of traffic in the zone, as everyone within a 50 mile radius and access to an aircraft seemed to want to come to Toronto for a "city tour" and to watch the fireworks at precisely 9:45 - 10:30, which was when I was flying circuits!

While I struggled to achieve and maintain appropriate altitude and heading for different legs of the circuit without being distracted by fireworks to the east and west of the field (and at one point in the centre of the field, when fireworks apparently formed part of "Electric Island", currently  underway at Hanlan's point!!), the controller managed the surrounding traffic with a remarkably calm grace.  As much as possible, he exuded an air of accommodating professionalism when able, and was firm but kind when the sky over the city became saturated with as many small aircraft as could be safely accommodated, and he had to turn other hopefuls away.  And on top of it all, he cleared me to touch and go before I called him on base for almost every circuit I flew!

As someone keenly interested in the human/social science part of aviation, I struggled to focus on the practicalities of my circuits while my mind wandered to marveling at this guy's ability to juggle it all, and my eyes wandered towards at the fireworks on either side of me.

I also tried to surreptitiously snap a photo of the beautiful light show using my iphone, which is actually a huge no-no when you are flying solo.  I didn't really focus on the photography, and so the few pics I got ended up just looking like a colourful blobby mess of lights!

After the usual overshoot on the first circuit (I always come in too high initially when flying a 172 solo; it does not drop out of the sky as easily as a 152!!), I managed to pull off a few "elegant" and some "safe but average" landings before I got tired and lazy and the plane began to increasingly veer off the centre line on the roll. 

After a particularly bumpy landing and some tongue-tied radio work, I decided to call it a night, and requested a full stop.

It wasn't a perfect flight from a piloting perspective, but thanks largely to the calm, confident voice on the other end of the radio, it was a reasonably good one, and it certainly built my confidence to fly alone amidst the chaos and beauty of all those lights!

One of my former students connected with me on LinkedIn recently.

And not just any former student, this was a kid from the very beginning of my teaching career! Back in the day when I had more enthusiasm than experience, more passion than pedagogical knowledge.

I remember this kid. I have often seen his face in my mind over the years, because he was one of those creative souls for whom school seemed just a little too basic. Teachers, I suspect, didn’t really appreciate the true value of this guy’s innovative mind. He wasn’t a troublemaker, in the teachery sense of the word, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar that he was rarely if ever intellectually challenged as much as he could or should have been in elementary school.

Naython (not his real name) darkened my door his grade 6 year at the K-8 school where I started my career. It was my second year in the classroom, and I really cared about the kids, but I was a new teacher, and still had lots and lots and lots to learn!

Likely bored to tears by by my basic, beginning teacher lessons, the kid would sit quietly while I droned on, and glue little bits of pencil and eraser to the legs of his desk. Quite creative, actually, if you overlook the fact that he was vandalizing board property.

Yep, The kid was quirky all right. I remember his deadpan query, when I was delivering the slightly over-the-top instructions for EQAO’s written component (it was the first year of the provincial testing, and there were extensive instructions about what students could and could not write for the fiction part of the assessment, and what our responsibilities were as educators, if we had concerns about the violent, bloody/glory, or otherwise troublesome nature of anything a student had written). Pokerfaced and in his usual monotone, Naython wondered aloud, “what should we write about, Ms. Teschow? Rainbows and puppy dogs?”

Indeed!

Speaking of rainbows, judging by the young man’s LinkedIn profile (he still looks very much like he did in Grade Six, btw!), I would venture a guess that he might be of my tribe, so to speak. Both his volunteer endeavors and his paid work over the past decade would suggest that he is either part of the LGBTQ family, or a very strong ally.

Assuming the former, I am struck with a nagging sense of guilt.

I did not come out of the closet – – to myself or my students – – until the final few years of my teaching career. And as such, I missed many opportunities to model for the students in my classes what a “normal“ queer adult could look and sound like. And if I’m right in my assessment of my new LinkedIn contact’s sexual identity, then he was one of the statistically 2 to 3 kids in my class that year who did not get to see and hear that it was OK to be gay (or bi, lesbian, trans, 2-spirit, etc.)

Lucky for Naython, he seems to be doing quite well for himself despite having had me as a teacher during his (and my?) formative years.

And now that my days in a classroom are over, and I play a more subtle role in helping to shape education policy at the provincial level rather than more directly influencing students, I must resort to guiding and mentoring other educators to be good allies, or, if they themselves identify on the LGBTQ+ spectrum, to be confident in who they are and embrace this part of their identity for and with their students.

The Naythons of the world might well depend on it!

Come enjoy "a night at the Aqueerium!", suggested a large digital sign festooned with rainbow fish and the branding of a local aquarium.  I was accosted by this colourful bit of corporate Pride at the subway, on my way to work this morning.

While I must confess both the visual feast of the advertisement and its playful pun caught my attention, something seemed a bit... well, queer.

I had been to said aquarium (in months other than June), and the business did not strike me as particularly LGBTQ-friendly.  I don't remember being impressed with a representative presence of gay, lesbian or trans folks who work at or patronize the place.  And did they have gender-inclusive washrooms?  I don't recall, actually (which probably means they didn't).

So it struck me as a bit odd (or queer, if you will) that this same establishment was now promoting itself as a fun place for the gays to hang out. In fact, it made me think of any number of allegedly LGBTQ-friendly businesses that seem to crawl out of the woodwork around Pride month. 

It's June, y'all, and suddenly everyone is all supportive of the homos!

Don't get me wrong... in a world that for so long overwhelmingly slung derogatory comments in the general direction of anyone who did not dance to the beat of the heteronormative drummer, and that certainly never celebrated anything queer, there is something quite comforting about seeing the colours of my tribe's flag represented in the mainstream.

But the truth is, it just all feels a little, well, insincere.

A gay colleague was complaining to me recently about how it frustrated him that so many of the younger fags just think Pride month is a party.  They forget, he lamented, the sacrifices that bought them the freedom to  frolic freely down the street amongst friends and allies all weekend long. 

They forget that the first pride marches were riots, political protests designed to raise awareness amongst a mainstream that could no longer afford to ignore a critical mass, and to demand from that mainstream the same basic human rights that they enjoyed.

Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, Operation Soap, Harvey Milk,  The Continental, Brent Hawkes... many straight people and even LGBTQ youth today have never heard of these historical events, places and figures. 

And those who have have only a superficial understanding of their significance in our tribe's history.

So what I want to know is, where was TD  Bank or Telus, who proclaim #lovewins and claim to be #foreverproud, when Rev Brent Hawkes was on Day 17 of his 25-day hunger strike in 1981, protesting police brutality and demanding an inquest into the bathhouse raids? (Or where were they, for that matter, 25 years later, when this same Canadian hero wore a bullet-proof vest to perform the first same sex wedding ceremonies in the world?!)

While it's true, as this CBC Archives clip from the late 1970s suggests, that LGBTQ rights have come a long way, let us not forget that it was within this decade that a mayor for our city refused to acknowledge the globally lauded efforts of the city and LGBTQ allies in particular for organizing World Pride, an event that drew millions to Toronto and resulted in undisputed economic gain for this city.  (And moreoever, this after he was already accused of making several previous homophobic remarks, and caught on film making misogynistic comments.)   

Nationally, we're faring no better:  It was only this past year that our Prime Minister finally acknowledged and apologized for decades of discrimination against LGBTQ Canadians; meanwhile, conservative leaders in our country continue to proudly promote homophobic policies.

Gay men find themselves at greater risk for violent crime, simply because they are gay, and it's no secret that LGBTQ youth are five times as likely to be homeless as those who identify as cis-gender and/or straight. 

Women, POCs and members of the Indigenous community who also happen to identify as LGBTQ are hit with a double whammy.

Where, pray tell, are all the proud businesses when it comes time to take action and create practical solutions to these very real problems that face our community?  Where are they when it's time to take a stand and speak up for what's right, even when it's not popular or sexy?

As someone who's been around long enough to know better, I'll enjoy the rainbow of my Pride celebrations this year, but I won't forget the cost at which they've come. 

​Nor will I climb unassumingly into bed with any business who slaps a rainbow onto their June advertising without the faintest idea of what their previous decades-long silence has meant to us.

One challenge for me has always been scheduling: When my kids are with us, I like to be a full-time mom, and we spend a lot of time doing family stuff, which does not include flying at night (which, at this time of year, would keep us all out well past bedtime). And when my kids are not with us, my partner is either working late, or I am, or the weather is poor for flying, or there is invariably some other conflict.

So, when we found ourselves with a childless, work-free two days of clear skies last weekend, we thought we’d hit the jackpot! (Flying not being a hobby for paupers, as it turned out, it was the flight school owner, from whom we rented a 172 several times over the weekend, who had hit the jackpot in this particular situation, ha!)

As a refresher, we went up on Saturday morning, and flew a few circuits on runway 26 at CYTZ. Then, after succumbing to a short nap and running a few errands for the rest of the day, we returned to the airport at dusk for some twilight circuits that turned into night flying.

Flying the same plane twice in one day approved a good strategy. My use of right rudder improved, as did my ability to set up for approach. My landings became reasonably smooth, (a skill supported largely by relatively calm winds pretty much right down the runway!!)

My girlfriend/instructor and decided we should fly again on Sunday evening, and if I was still demonstrating these reasonably smooth and independent circuits, she would send me solo. I felt marginally less anxious now about this idea than I had before the two-flights-in-one-day adventure, which I took to be a good sign.

So, the next day, after spending a beautiful sunny day on the island that we had overflown less than 24 hours before, we had a quick supper at home and drove back downtown for yet another evening flight.

Those of you who follow my blog know that in addition to being a certified teacher and mother of monozygotic twins, I am also a licensed pilot.

I’ve always said that I “just” have a PPL (private license, as opposed to a CPL, or commercial license, the latter being the first step towards career flying), and that while I do love it, it’s just a hobby for me, that my first love is teaching.

But after volunteering at the “Girls Can Fly” event in Waterloo this weekend, it got me thinking about how girls especially choose career paths, or perhaps more accurately, how they are steered down particular paths and away from others.

The event, like an increasing number of similarly targeted events held at various airports across the country in recent years, is designed to expose girls aged 8-18 to aviation-related careers, especially piloting.  Female and female-friendly volunteers from various airlines and other aviation organizations staff booths with information targeted at engaging girls in flying as a career.

For those lucky enough to register in advance for a limited number of free flights, 20 minutes behind the yoke of a Cessna or at the controls of a helicopter is also part of the day.

To those in the industry, it’s no secret that women form roughly 6% of the commercial airline pilot population; Porter airlines sits at a relatively impressive 12% currently, still abysmal, but twice the industry average, thanks to Bob Deluce’s vision of gender parity (and increasingly, systemic approaches to making it happen!)

With a massive shortage of pilots predicted for years already, engaging girls and young women is seen by many airlines as a critical opportunity to increase the pool and avoid a looming crisis.  If more girls choose flying as a career path, they feel, perhaps it may provide an eventual solution to an already-underway pilot shortage.

I will say that even as a grown woman, there is something tremendously exciting about watching a Dash8 land, the door open, and a large group of female pilots in full uniform alight.  Even as they hovered around their booth later on in the hangar, chatting with the various girls and families that visited the Porter booth, I felt positively giddy!

I reflected on my own fascination with the cockpit, which started as far back as I can remember, when the pilots on pre-9-11 flights would invite all the children up for a visit to the cockpit if they wanted to see… and, lucky me, on my way to Florida as a toddler and Europe later on with my mom or Omi, I got to go and visit the flight deck many times.  I was mesmerized!

But despite being raised by a strong and independent mother, I was still victim to the many subtle yet clear messages from the society in which I grew up.  Flying was for men: When boys visited the cockpit, they were often asked if they wanted to be a pilot one day, whereas my interest in aviation was never encouraged.  No, for me, a girl, it was clearly just a fun visit to the flight deck to alleviate the boredom of a transatlantic flight.  Furthermore, all the pilots I ever saw on those flights were tall, white and male -- and as a 10-year-old girl, I only fit one of those privileged categories.

Besides, teaching was my first love… or was it?

I had always wanted to be a teacher (and I think I was a mighty fine one for the many years I spent in the field before moving to the Ministry of Education to become a paper pusher).  But in retrospect, I can’t help but wonder how things might have played out if I had seen fewer female teachers in my 15 years of schooling and more female pilots. Would flying have stood more of a chance as a contender?

As with so many other things, the people around me just made the decisions about what -- as a girl -- I “should” like and be good at, and when I didn’t always fit the stereotype (I choose skateboarding over roller skating and drums over flute or clarinet), it was me that was the problem, not their gendered expectations.  

Or at least, that’s what it felt like.

From my spot behind the CAP booth, I watched as girls confidently engaged with the young women who were working in the field that they themselves dreamed of.  Excitedly, they chattered with “real pilots” who looked and sounded just like them.  The expressions on their faces said it all!

I love teaching, and I have no regrets about becoming a teacher.  But I love flying airplanes, too. And watching these girls just a generation and half younger than me, my mind pondered the possibilities: Had I had the chance to fly in a Cessna with a female pilot when I was 8, and had I been able to talk to a hangar-full of smiling, confident women pilots when I was 10, would my current “hobby” have started far sooner than age 40?  And maybe, just maybe, might it even have become my profession?

It’s at turns a troubling and a deliciously exciting mental exercise to imagine myself having chosen a different career path: Afterall, as it turns out, girls CAN fly!

In my beloved partner, a highly articulate intellectual with a flair for putting things off in the most creative manner, I am able to observe and reflect on the nature of procrastination.

Recently hired as a First Officer by a local airline, my darling has been thrown into an intense period of necessary mental and logistical preparations. In the forefront is the need to review and familiarize herself with hundreds of pages of Standard Operation Procedures (or "SOPs", as these necessary but somewhat dry bits of information are referred to by people in the industry).

I knew we were in trouble when, ten days prior to the start of ground school, I observed my beloved voraciously reading not the SOPs, but rather, various online bulletin boards dealing with which airline is best to work for, how to study said SOPs and what supplementary resources on Amazon are helpful when starting a new ground school class. 

Tats is very effective, you see, at convincing herself and those around her that in order to study well, she must first take the time necessary to prepare for the preparation of preparing her notes for review. I was almost convinced myself the first few times I saw her engage in this sort of behaviour. 

Seven years of co-habitation with this creature has taught me to be a better bullshit detector.

Things culminated in a new level of crazy this weekend when -- in an attempt to escape her thick cloud of impending new job anxiety -- I retreated under a blanket on the couch, noise-canceling headphones applied to my head, and Mozart's clarinet concerto flowing melodiously into my ears.  Halfway through the first movement, I heard a sort of crunching sound emanating from somewhere outside the concerto.

So much for noise canceling!

I attempted to ignore the distraction and focus on the clarinet... alas, by the time we were a short way into the Adagio, I tore off my not-so-noise-canceling headphones to see what the infernal racket was coming from my beloved's desk nearby.

The answer unveiled a new stage of procrastination: Tats had printed out all three million pages of her new airline's SOPs on our ancient and slowly dying printer, supplementing the barely-legible pale ink with quite possibly the tiniest font size she could find ("cute, little SOPS are comforting", she explained when I raised my eyebrows quizzically), and was rhythmically cutting the pages into quarters to make little booklets to study in chunks.

Apparently unperturbed that -- a week before ground school -- she was still physically manipulating the SOPs rather than committing them to memory, her greatest concern at this point was how she could effectively and attractively bind her mini SOP booklet.

​I decided to make some tea.  It seemed the only possible way forward.

Several hours later, those of you who fly commercially will be relieved to know that this airline's newest pilot is now an eighth of the way through her cute little SOP booklet, and is taking only periodic breaks to consult aviation forums regarding working conditions for the competitor, and is even looking up some actual aviation terms and definitions.

Blue skies ahead!

While I pressed the various buttons on the machine, the near-lurker kept remarking incredulously about how everything was closed today.  

"Even you can't get a bottle of wine!", he exclaimed, clearly perplexed.

I mumbled something about the obvious; it was, after all, Easter Sunday, so naturally everything was going to be closed.

"Even the banks are all closed!"

"Well, yes..." I said again, done with my own banking now, and slightly annoyed at this person's sheer stupidity.  "It's Easter Sunday.  Everything is closed.  It's Easter!"

"Everything?" came the fellow's response, in a dubious tone, as though he simply could not believe that a bottle of wine was not to be gotten this day. "Banks, too?"

Next he wanted to know if I could help him use the bank machine; he'd hitherto always done his banking in person. 

After ascertaining that he knew his PIN, I obliged.  He wanted to withdraw $100; we managed to extract $20, his balance being exactly $33.47.  He marveled at how easy it was (the machine even knew his name!), thanked me for my assistance, and we parted ways.

As I walked the dog along the lake and back to our home, I pondered what had just transpired.  I considered that -- incredible as it was to me that someone could not know that of course everything would be closed on Easter Sunday -- perhaps it was just as inconceivable to someone that a day could exist when every shop was closed, even the basics (hehe) like liquor stores and banks!

As my girlfriend reminded me, when I later recounted the tale, she herself had been in Canada many years, and not until she met me did she truly have an understanding of and remember that there were significant days in our religious and cultural calendars that indeed businesses shut down completely.  While some of us prepare for weeks on end for these days of celebration and remembrance, others just happen to focus on other priorities in their daily, weekly and annual cycles.  Different priorities, perhaps, but, equally important, and certainly no less valuable by sole virtue of their difference.

When we make assumptions about other people's understanding of the world and hurry to judge interpretations that differ from our own, we expose our bias, and worse, our ignorance, that the world is not one way to all people.  And in so doing, we miss all the bits and pieces the world and its diverse people have to offer.

I am appalled at the mediocrity of my writing.  Once inspired, and at times even funny, my blog posts have become average at best, mundane in actuality.

Even the quagmire of mediocrity through which they wade is a sham, the tired if apt phrase stolen from other writers, me being too uninspired to craft my own unique insult with which to describe my miserable work of late!

Why, tho?

It used to be the case, when I was swamped with students and the endless marking, lesson planning and social problem solving that accompanied them, that I felt constantly inspired.  Exhausted, yet excited about my work, I was frequently eager and somehow found the time and energy to share my various classroom experiments. 

The world before and after school also seemed more blog-worthy, somehow, and the words found themselves more readily in my mind, and worked their way more effortlessly onto the keyboard where they danced together to form ideas reasonably worth crafting so that others, too, could be inspired while reading.

Whereas I used to easily spin out a blog post several times a week, I am hard pressed now to find the time or inclination to write and post something more than once a month at best.

Is it because I am no longer a classroom teacher, then, that I feel a loss of material worth writing about?  How so?  The world has not changed so much as my place in it... surely even if I feel my contributions are less directly valuable than they once were, there is still inspiration to be found in the world outside of work...?

Or has the world changed, and is that the cause of my inertia? 

One thing I have noticed is the sheer abundance that colleagues and strangers produce: Before the age of twitter, instagram and facebook, before snapchat was ubiquitous, before in order for something to count, it had to have three hashtags and at least 250 likes, before followers were virtual and strangers were "friends", back at the dawn of the internet, when I was one of the few teachers in this country who had a blog, and by the very virtue of its existence, I was considered tech savvy (ha, ha, ha!) and my colleagues and students thought I was famous (tee hee), it was easy to get motivated to write.  Without competition, I felt the urge to get out there and self-publish!  Teachers needed me!  My dashboard showed they were searching critically important key words on my blog, and I had so much more to tell them about those themes and ideas!

But now, now there are a hundred thousand plus people who can say it better, with greater clarity, and with more awesome photos than I can. 

It seems as though every educator has a blog, a TPT acct and a social media following that rivals the Kardashians.  What can I say that hasn't already been said, and with greater eloquence and more recency?  And not just about teaching -- so what if I went to Cuba and spent two days off-resort with my kids?  A gazillion other travelers have beat me to it, and described it with breathtaking verbal imagery and panache. My recently-begun Salsa class is also nothing to blog about -- unless people are interested in a blog post about two left feet.  (And even that has been done and overdone.) So what if I periodically fly airplanes? #girlswhofly has 12 656 posts on IG. Even #queerparenting has over 1000, and I can tell by the pics that those parents are better looking, healthier, cooler and happier, and that their kids are all way more well-adjusted than ours!!!

It feels like I have nothing to offer the world, and that everyone out there on the internetz has me beat in every category.

My kids are becoming teenagers, but I'm the one suffering the adolescent existential crisis!

The superfluous content with which the world seems virtually stuffed, and the speed with which the it produces said content, is overwhelming.  To be honest, the pace at which I feel called to keep moving makes me question my ability to discern quality and authenticity in any form of content -- mine or others!  And I find myself not only lacking the inspiration to write, but often also the mental and emotional energy to participate at all.

If I stop to think about it, I have to wonder whether my writing, once a hallmark of my skill and imagination, has been replaced with other forms of creativity. Perhaps my ability to orchestrate six people's summer plans harmoniously across two or three households, or to coordinate a group of educators and policy makers by leading from behind is less public and glamorous than a well written blog post once a week but equally impressive and important.

But I sure would like a way to continue to develop these new skills while simultaneously growing as a writer. 

Perhaps a mindfulness exercise I will endeavor to undertake will be to notice small things worth writing about, and then to capture them in a few words.  Longer than a tweet, but shorter than the diatribes I used to write. A focused lens, an appetizer rather than a meal, a verbal salad.

Stay tuned.

I find myself with a renewed interest in rubrics.

Some years ago, when I was still married to the idea of a rubric (having been introduced to the concept as a first-year teacher years earlier by a particularly enthusiastic instructional coach), I was rocked into reality while attending a literacy workshop where a "Ministry Person" joked about the "over-rubrification of Ontario". 

Initially shocked that there might be another way when it came to assessment for learning, I eventually became a convert to the idea of Learning Goals and Success Criteria, and have been working on mastery of using these with descriptive feedback to improve student learning ever since.

Lately, however, I find myself wondering about how an amalgamation of the two might better support both student learning and teacher workload.

"Learning" Goal as Step One

Essential for both a quality rubric and the development of effective success criteria is the defining of an initial goal.  What is it that one wants the students to learn, in accordance with one or more overall curriculum expectations, and taking into consideration the student interests and affinities in a particular class?

As a classroom educator, I might express such a goal as, "We are learning to..." followed by some overarching description of the intended learning from the curriculum.

As an Education Officer with the Ministry of Education, I find myself pulling out these skills when considering the ideal candidate for a writing project. As my colleagues and I recently pondered while preparing a memo and call for writers, what, specifically, were we looking for in a group of writers? From this overarching vision, a set of criteria emerged, as they do when we consider how best to describe a curriculum-grounded learning goal.

From Success Criteria to Rubric

Assuming one has developed a clear learning goal, the set of criteria  that is developed (or ideally, co-developed with students) to describe said goal are used to provide descriptive feedback to students as they work though the learning.  This same set of criteria, once firmed up (criteria may evolve during the formative part of the learning) will also be used by the teacher to evaluate student learning for reporting purposes later on, in the summative phase of the assessment and instruction cycle.

Since we currently still have a leveled (or graded) report card system, it is crucial that success criteria be further developed into gradients of achievement, then.  That is, one must clarify (for oneself and the students) what different degrees of performance of each criteria look, sound and feel like. 

This is helpful both for the students and their families as they consider their development along the way, and for classroom educators, who ultimately have to make a judgement based on the evidence of student learning, and then assign that collection of evidence a mark on the report card.

In order to practice our own skill with this, and to develop an example to use in an online workshop , a colleague and I recently used the rubric maker tool on the VLE to co-develop a rubric to assess and evaluate participation in our online workshop.

We thought about what each of our success criterion might look like at each level, and then used this to flesh out a continuum of achievement, thereby creating in essence a rubric.

So, for example, we agreed that one criterion that would be essential in demonstrating our learning goal (active participation in an online learning session)  would be the contribution to collaborative online spaces such as google docs, a Padlet we planned to share, and so on.

A participant who was just beginning to develop these skills might access the spaces (which we could assess for example by noting their presence in a shared Google doc), but might not yet contribute any posts. Another participant, one who was progressing well towards our goal of active online participation in the learning, might contribute many relevant ideas, whereas a participant who was participating to a higher degree would not only contribute relevant posts, but would also build onto the ideas of others, perhaps by contributing a relevant link, or a photo of someone else's ideas or questions in action.

By taking the time to flesh out each criterion, we built a rubric that could ultimately be used to grade participant's attainment of the learning goal, were we to use this sort of evaluative tool in an online AQ course, for example.

Descriptive Feedback: A Formative Rubric

Although Growing Success (2010) tells us in no uncertain terms that feedback is an essential component in supporting student learning, we also know that feedback itself is not enough.  John Hattie’s research tells us that in some cases feedback might even be detrimental. Or, as Stiggins says, “It’s the quality of the feedback rather than its existence or absence that determines its power.”

So it’s important to have an understanding of descriptive feedback as a tool for supporting learning. Positioning feedback within the assessment process, and basing it on the criteria one develops (or co-develops with students) to describe an already-established and public, curriculum-based learning goal ensures that we are using feedback effectively to support student learning.

So how, then, can a rubric leverage the power of descriptive feedback?

The use of descriptive feedback can go hand in hand with a rubric being used for formative assessment, that is, in the middle of the learning rather than at the end. 

For example, a student currently demonstrating "level 2" in terms of online contributions in the isolated row of the sample rubric above should not be left (as my own poor students were 20 years ago when I was first messing around with rubrics!!) to puzzle out their own feedback from some random circles or check marks on a page.  Rather, the feedback that accompanies such a statement could be something like this:

​Once again singing the praises of the rubric maker on the VLE (why didn't I know about this thing when I was in a classroom??!!), this can all be pre-populated for a class in a rubric, and can still be customized for individual students where appropriate.  Better yet, photos (of exemplars) can be included, AND feedback can be audio-recorded if some students are more inclined to listen than read!

A little short term pain in terms of time commitment for the teacher in setting up the rubric for long term gain (being able to use it effectively when assessing and evaluating later on).

Feedback AND Marks?

We know from Dylan William's research that just throwing a mark on a page (even it's virtual!) doesn't move student learning forward, and yet we are still currently (in Ontario at least) stuck with a reporting system that requires grades.  My best advice, then, is to slim it down to four levels, quite possibly removing even the numbers, and replacing these with descriptors like "getting started", "almost there", "progressing well" and "progressing very well", or something to this effect.

How to interpolate the data gathered on a rubric like this and use it to inform final evaluation, or assessment OF learning, is a topic for another blog post. For now, suffice it to say that this method is one way to balance the desire to support student learning with the need to prepare for "marks" or "grades" later on.

Don't Wait Until the End!

When using a rubric for formative purposes, i.e. to provide feedback along the way, timing is key.  Don't wait until the end of a learning cycle to provide students with feedback.  It's too little, too late then.  (Just this week I saw evidence of this in my own household, where I found a small rubric in the garbage in my kids' room.  Clearly, one of them had received this "feedback" on a final assignment; the location of the rubric indicated its value!)