This could be very cool...

As I approach the end of my first quarter (the school's second quarter) at a new place, I've been struggling a bit to find the real value in what I'm teaching. The school is moving, broadly speaking, in a pretty positive direction: course teams are meeting very regularly (typically twice a week), with a mission to examine student work in order to drive decisions about pacing/reteaching/etc. I'm also working with the administration to develop better interdisciplinary links between math and science, which I'm quite excited about-- in short, I like the direction that the school is moving.

But, within the math department, there's a lot of reproduction and not a lot of creativity, or student inquiry. The senior-level course I'm teaching (a "forced elective", required by our school, for which none of these students volunteered) recently attempted to engage in a modeling unit, with the idea that it would be driven by interactive student-inquiry projects in which students would gather data from real-world phenomena, and use these as the basis for developing mathematical equations. After six days and one hands-on project, the rest of the teachers in the team were concerned that students weren't engaged, and said "I'd rather go back to book-work." (A verbatim quote from one teacher). This morning, that team was deciding what topics to include on the final exam-- I've suggested that we shouldn't include a topic if we have evidence that students mostly didn't get it, unless we've seriously re-taught it. In response to this, another teacher said, "We taught it and retaught it, we did everything we could. I think we should test them on it." I'm interested to see if "we retaught it" means "they learned it"-- and if it doesn't, I hope that that can be the starting point for another important conversation...

So, suffice to say, I'm frustrated by the amount of useless math that I'm teaching, and it sort of was getting to me this week. Yesterday's grad class helped a bit-- lots of thinking about how to engage in the slow and gradual process of building a professional learning community, including a link sent by the prof just before class to Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk on changing education paradigms.

This morning, one student in my geometry class asked me about my religious views. I've already decided that it's important for me to share myself with my students, and to answer honest questions with honesty, though I generally try to do so with as little fuss as possible, and in a way that will allow me to steer us back to the work at hand. This one clearly drew a lot of people's interest, though, and soon there were all sorts of questions flying around, including whether or not we were allowed to talk about this in school; I also have already decided to deal with information and misconceptions like that-- so I took a moment to talk about how the Constitutional right to freedom of religion impacts how religion gets dealt with in schools, and what the real legal line is, and how that's different from the typical cultural line.

At one point, maybe 10 minutes into this discussion, I said, "Okay, can we get back to calculating area" (referring to the worksheet of basic problems I'd whipped up for them). Very shortly after that, I remembered my own philosophy (I don't teach math, I teach kids; it doesn't matter what content I teach, so long as my students develop their ability and desire to learn) as well as Sir Kenneth's comments about the artificiality of subject areas (which, of course, resonated with me). So, a little guiltily, I stopped fighting, publicly acknowledged that I was pleased that we were having an intelligent and thoughtful conversation, and said that I was happy to keep facilitating, so long as the discussion remained intelligent, thoughtful, and respectful of each other.

About 20 minutes after that, the 2012 end-of-the-world thing came up. What I said was, "The Mayans made a calendar, including calculations of what time the sun would rise and set, and the angle of the sun in the sky each day... they made those calculations for every day, for hundreds of years into their future..." my usual setup, really.

A minute after that, having let it percolate a bit, one student asked, "How do they make all those calculations?" A few minutes later, after talking about it a bit, I said, "Okay, here's your assignment, if you choose to accept it: Bring in bits and pieces of information that you research about that sort of calendar-- they Mayans did it, the druids did it with Stonehenge, the Egyptians made the same sort of calendars, so did the Greeks. They're all still there, and the information isn't hard to find online. If you guys do some basic research and show an interest, I'll make a unit out of it, and that'll be our geometry class."

The girl who started the whole day off with her question about my religious views said, "That sounds like a lot of work." "Yeah," I said, "it will be-- but I promise it'll be no harder than what I'd ask you to do if we stick to the textbook." A pause. "That's probably true," she said.

So, I'm hopeful that this could turn into my first REAL, ACTUAL student-generated inquiry project. And, if so, I wanted to capture that it would not have been possible for me to discover what this class wanted to study, had we not spent most of a class period just chatting about diverse topics, from religion to Nostradamus to palm-reading...