The Dogman

Last week was my birthday and I popped around to mum and dad's house for lunch. Over toasted cheese sandwiches dad and I caught up for a lovely chat. All of my children were at Kinder/School, and I quickly realised how unusual (and lovely) it was to sit down and spend some uninterrupted time chatting with dad!

As we worked on solving all the problems of the world, the conversation moved to one of our common interests, education. (Dad is a retired teacher and I obviously love a good teaching-chat!)

Dad told me a story about his Year 12 English exam. He remembered being asked to write a reflection on an Australian poem called ‘The Dogman’ by Robert Clark.

Dad told me how he did pretty well on this exam, but he remembered many of his friends saying they had found the poem really difficult to analyse.

Dad explained that it wasn’t because he was better, or had done more study than his friends (in fact he said this most likely wasn’t the case!). He attributed his success to the fact that his life experiences had allowed him to immediately make a connection with the poem theme.

My Pa (Dad's father) was an electrician. He ran his own business and dad would often work with Pa on weekends or holidays. Pa’s business was located in the Melbourne CBD, so many of his jobs were in shops or building sites around the city.

Dad described how in the city he would often hear the whistles of the Dogman as they directed the cranes on the building sites.

Pa had explained to him that the Dogman had a very important job: to communicate and direct crane drivers from the ground through a series of whistles and hand signals. It was like a special language. Two toots of the whistle meant left, three meant right etc. (don't quote me on those exact instructions). Google tells me that there is an official course that a Dogman is required to complete in order to gain their 'Licence to perform dogging (CPCCLDG3001A) qualification'. In this course they are taught all the necessary whistles and signals! 

Dad said he would listen and watch with fascination as the cranes maneuvered safely around, guided by the Dogman.

It turns out that this life experience came in very handy for dad in his Year 12 exam.

When most of dad's classmates read the Dogman poem, they logically thought the poem was about a man who owned a dog.

It was only that dad had experience of another 'Dogman' context and had heard the Dogman’s whistles, that allowed him to see the poem through a different lens, and recognise the nuances in the language and phrases used by Robert Clark.

This made me think of maths assessments (surprise, surprise!)

When we create a worded problem, we are often wanting to assess if students are able to apply their knowledge of maths in certain situations- to assess their 'problem solving' or 'reasoning'.

However, each student's reality is very different to ours, and this can seriously impact their understanding and comprehension of a scenario, before they even get to the maths! 

I remember recently watching students complete an online assessment.

One item started by asking:

"Cathy is buying 9 boxes of detergent for her hotel..."

Before the students even reached the maths, several were confused by the context. I would guess that not many 8 year-olds have experience buying detergent for a hotel!

This made me think about the increase in cognitive load as the students attempted to make sense of this problem.

Along the same lines, I remember asking my 4-year-old son to model a simple subtraction for a PD I was planning. I was going to share the video and unpack the thinking with the teachers.

The video didn't go quite as I planned (what do people say about working with children and animals?!)

You can watch the short clip here.

To summarise, I asked him:

"Ari has 5 cars and he takes away 3 and gives them to Bec- can you show me how you would work that out?"

Before we even got to the maths he was more concerned with:

Does Ari really give the cars away?

Is Ari real?

Why can't you use a 'real person'?

And my favourite line: 'Is this just a joke?' 😂

This interaction really made me think…

My son felt comfortable enough to ask me these questions (because I am his mum), but in a classroom scenario many of our students would likely internalise these thoughts. 

From our perspective, as the teacher, we might assume the student is struggling with the subtraction concept when they take a while to answer...

In actual fact their internal dialogue may be 'why would someone have 4 cars- I don't even have one?'

or 'why would you give cars away?'

I think it is important that we are constantly considering the cognitive space that unpacking contexts and scenarios may be taking up, particularly in assessments. It is important for us to be cognizant of the unintended difficulty of the contexts we, or online assessment platforms, use.

Are these contexts interfering with the reliability of the data we gather? Are we assessing their maths skills, or their life experiences and reading comprehension? 

So this week, I encourage you to think about the assessments and questions you are asking your students. Consider the internal dialogue your students may be running as they try to make sense of our adult- created scenarios...and if you are passing a construction site, keep an ear out for the Dogman's whistles!

Have a great week!

Ange🎲🎓

P.S. You can download the PDF version of this blog to print or share with colleagues here.