Well, better than her English teacher, anyway.

Accepting failure

I just had an interesting conversation with some other members of my course team, in which I argued this case:

If we decide to move to new content, when we know that nearly 50% of our students haven't mastered the current content, then we are de facto acknowledging that this content wasn't particularly important, and we should not have taught it in the first place.

I hope to flesh out this argument in more depth, when I get a chance, but I wanted to get it down while I'm thinking of it.

Learning is more important than math

When I started at Juarez three months ago, I implemented a "check-in", an idea lifted from something described in one of my grad school classes-- it's simply a couple of minutes at the beginning of class, to greet one another and get things off our chests or get ideas out in the open.

Today, the first day after finals, my seniors clearly were distressed to hear that I wanted to help them learn some math today. Their expectations were that the few days after finals are blown off, without any work. As part of their protest, they suggested checking in (which they clearly intended to use as an opportunity to soak up some time, instead of "working"). The first student managed to soak up maybe an entire minute, talking about how he was looking forward to the weekend (this is, I think, a small price to pay for the opportunity to get to know my students better, and to get some buy-in from them). As is often the case, most students didn't have anything particular to say, and took a pass.

The fifth or sixth student almost took a pass, but then remembered that he's upset about his phone being confiscated as he came into school. That led us into a full class period wherein we discussed school safety, bullying, technology, advocacy, civil rights, student rights, the relationships between schools and prisons, and hegemony (yes, by that name). I even read a paragraph of Michael Apple (from the chapter "On Analyzing Hegemony" in Ideology and Curriculum) to my students. One student came up and recited part of a poem that she had previously written on the topic of how non-white children are systemically deprived of opportunity and tracked towards continued poverty.

That's the kind of classroom I want to keep having.

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...

Reflections

It's occurring to me that I ought to be using this space more often to record reflections, so here's a first start...

Yesterday, in a course team meeting, the most experienced veteran (who is, I think, actually quite good, knows his math stone cold, might or might not be adaptive-- I can't say yet-- and is clearly not afraid to try new things) noticed that I was recording minutes/notes of the team meeting. That set him off a little, not at me but at the administrative burden involved in the existence of the notes: all this fuss, he was concerned, eats into his time for planning today's lessons. Fair point, I thought. So, it occurred to me that part of why I think that the common planning/common assessments/group reflections around analysis of student work isn't an undue burden, in part because it's built into the fabric of how I plan and teach. And, if it were a burden, I probably wouldn't do it.

So, I extended that thought, to include the veteran, saying "If we're doing this common planning right, it doesn't have to be a whole new thing-- a lot of this should be about documenting what we do, and it doesn't have to mean changing everything. How do you normally assess your students?"
"I give a test every week."
"Okay, would you be willing to do that next week, and share that test with us, and the rest of us will use it too?"
"Yeah, that'd be fine."
"Great! So, let's do that next week, and we'll see if any of us have any concerns or problems with it-- if so, we can tweak it, but for now, let's all just give it a once-through, using your test."

That gave us room to talk about what content we're looking to teach next, and our veteran (who has, in my short time here, been pretty spotty about attending and participating in meetings) ran and got his materials, and we talked about what we'll teach next week and how we'll teach it. Today, he dropped into a meeting that most of the rest of our team was in, and said that he expects to have his test done by this Friday, so that we can build our lessons around what we'll be assessing.

That's exciting.


The college algebra course is starting to move in a direction that I'm more happy with, too: we're looking at wrapping up this really dry content (quadratic functions), and are starting to think about our next topic, which we've decided will be mathematical modeling (a HUGE favorite of mine), using as many projects as we can to have students gathering and analyzing data, and fitting it to linear, quadratic, sinusoidal, inverse-square and other functions. That's VERY exciting.


I also feel like I'm making some real pedagogical progress with my students-- eleven instructional days in, and I feel like I'm getting to know them well enough that some real teaching and learning can take place. Right now, it's all a bit tricky, because I believe that I'm still breaking down how they've been trained to approach mathematics, and there's a lot of very slow movement, and a lot of me pushing students to not just DO the math, but to UNDERSTAND it... but I think it's on the right track.

I'm not ready, yet, to attempt the "skill-less lesson", that is, an entire unit taught from a purely conceptual point of view, never teaching an algorithm or skill, but focusing on the conceptual and seeing if students will develop the skills themselves. I think I blogged about this idea before-- I'll check, and if not, then I'll add it in here soon.

The Saddle

Started teaching again last week. Very happy for it. That said, yesterday I needed a couple of reminders:

First, I needed to remind myself to be patient-- not only with my students, but more particularly with myself. I've been working with these students for five days now, and it's unreasonable to expect that they'll be ready to hit full throttle, yet. Go slow to go fast!

Second, I've been thinking about the tricky balancing act inherent in the relationships in my "late start to the year": it's important that I establish trusting relationships with my students as quickly as possible, but I want to balance that with the reputation that I earn for myself among my students (which should be that I'm a teacher who isn't just playing...)

Third, I needed to remember that, when my students are struggling, it does not make sense to try to narrow the world of their thinking, by providing questions that are increasingly focused on a singular topic or skill or mathematical technique. Rather, I want to expand the world of their thinking, so that they have in mind all of the ideas to which they might connect the current problem. (Teach concepts, more than skills!)


Finally, professional learning communities, for the win: We have a really great instructional coach, a guy who calls himself "Boo", and landed here some time recently after a long career in the State of Washington (home of the Math Wars, which for the record our side lost). Boo sat with me for an hour and a half yesterday after school, mostly helping me talk through this stuff. Being an exceptional teacher, he said little, and told me very little, but his questions (on math content, then on pedagogy, then on philosophy of education) were just what I needed to help me focus my thoughts and learn faster-- not only good for me, but a good reminder of the model.

He helped me to honor the fact that I want to be in the second quarter, because, well, it's the second quarter-- but my reality is that I'm in the second week, and there's nothing to do but to deal with that. He gave me permission (and a concrete suggestion) for how to balance my obligation to the other teachers in my course team, and my need to do right by my students. But the funniest exchange, I think, was when he marveled at my claim that I'm about 80-85% on my students' names-- and in response to his amazement, I pointed out, "So, if that's been my priority, then you can understand how little math instruction I've been doing!"


On an unrelated(?) note, I've been thinking a bit about the value of "Following the Rules." From the perspective of a liberatory educator, I may have just decided that I generally approve of Following the Rules, but only if the rules have got it right, because I do think that students will have a better life if they learn to advocate for themselves and to negotiation with people for what they want and need, instead of Learning to Follow the Rules.

Hanging

Had an interview this morning, at a school I'd quite like to work at. I'll find out by tomorrow, end of day. If they want me, they'll want me to start on Monday. That's pretty quick, and I'm sure it'll cause some friction with the team I'm leaving behind... but I'm game.