Randolph Decker
last update Friday, November 13, 2009
I don’t really wake up until I’ve had coffee. I don’t attempt much of anything until I have my first sip.
Sitting in front of my 30” Cinema Display connected to my Mac Pro, I start exploring, reading, watching, creating, responding, sending.... until I hear Oh Canada blasting downtown.
Then I head off to work. My home is in the West End in Vancouver, I take the bus to the Burrard Station and then the the Skytrain to New Westminster. If I’m lucky the total trip time is 50 minutes. I work on my MacBook Pro while I am in transit.
My History
I was born on January 13th, 1955 uneventfully at St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital, St. John’s Newfoundland. I’m told all parties were pleased.
Our family moved quite a few times during the 50s and 60s. We lived in Kapuskasing, Ontario, Nakina, Ontario, Red Rocks, Newfoundland and Gander, Newfoundland. We settled back in St. John’s in 1967. I graduated from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts. I left Newfoundland and landed in Vancouver BC in 1977 and discovered it was my home.
I returned to Newfoundland in 1986 to study and graduated from Memorial University of Newfoundland with a Bachelor of Education in 1987. Then, after two years of teaching in Manitoba ending in 1989, I returned to BC with stops in Ottawa, Toronto and San Francisco. I found an ideal teaching position at School District No. 40 in September 1990.
I was excited to start teaching at Pearson Adult Leaning Centre because I had freedom to teach as I had hoped to teach. The centre had already embraced the idea of teaching to mastery rather than teaching to a schedule. They used software to manage learning outcomes. I was thrilled. I had been disheartened with my previous teaching experiences. Too many students were advanced without mastering the expected outcomes. But now I had an opportunity to develop lessons and assessments that really mattered. I could assess students and place them where they needed to be.
The software we used was called Pathfinder. It was developed by Lu Hamacek a teacher working in an inner city school in Chicago. She had a class full of students who were all over the map in terms of learning readiness. She wanted to be able to let learners work at their level and experience success. She wanted the resources they used to be relevant to their experience.
