Success Story (where it should be posted)

In education, people like to talk a lot about how classrooms should be “student-centered.” Oddly enough, however, when it comes to the way we evaluate teachers, we typically think of our successes and failures in a teacher-centered vacuum, as if the students themselves had little or nothing to do with the process. My success and failure stories are basically a bold and resounding refutation of any such notion. It is the students who learn, and the students who, ultimately, bear the responsibility for their own education. As a teacher, I have a job to do. My job is to present an opportunity, to open the doors of education as wide as I know how. But it is the students who must walk through. I cannot carry them.

Not teaching a state-tested subject, I have no quantified results to point to and justify myself as a good teacher. The evidence of my success is subjective and entirely non-standardized. I have only the word of the next teacher down the line, the calculus, pre-calculus, and trigonometry teacher at my school, who once informally told me good things about my former students. I have nothing else to go on but my own instincts.

So I write about my own subjective feeling of success. As such, my other Algebra II class comes to mind, and not merely for the sake of symmetry. This past spring, 3rd block Algebra II was my failure story, but 1st block Algebra II was hands-down the best class I’ve ever taught, bar none. They wanted to learn. They were respectful. They listened. They tried. And they learned. And what do you know, the majority of them (i.e. all those who really tried) passed—a remarkable fact in itself! I loved them, and they loved me. I pushed them as I try to push all my students, and they respected me as a tough teacher.

But I cannot take credit. It was the students. By some accident of the school schedule, I got a lot of our best students lumped into that one class, and that’s the honest truth. One of my girls would literally cheer every time I gave homework or announced a test! Another girl, a ninth grader, got a perfect score on her state Biology I test—and neither of these were even my best student! One of the boys, English was his favorite subject. He said Algebra II was the hardest class he’d ever had, but he still tried, and he passed. I’m proud of all of them. The fact is, I had so many really good students in that class that they outnumbered the underachievers. The class tone was positive because of them, and I had to do so little to maintain it.

Last Christmas, my sister gave me a dozen white Beanie Baby teddy bears embroidered with the logo, “I [heart] Mississippi.” Apparently, they came from the surplus stock of some sort of Katrina fund raiser. Anyway, I used the Beanie Babies for a guessing game at the beginning of the year. A few of my students asked if they could have one, which I just answered with some vague deflection. At the end of the year, I decided to reward my best class by giving out these bears as rewards. I asked my students to come up with funny and not-so-funny award nominations to give each other (not unlike Teacher Corps summer school)—then I had fun choosing among them and making up my own titles. Then I gave the bears away to my most deserving students, and they really seemed to appreciate it.

My Student of the Year was an adorable 11th grader. Despite the respectable competition from her classmates, “Gretchen” always managed to get the highest score on all of my tests except one. Early in the semester, she won me over by asking me to attend her basketball games. No one had actually invited me to watch them play before. She would wave to me when she saw me in the stands, and so I kept coming to her games. At one point, she came to see me after school to apologize. She had not realized that I had to walk home after the games, and so she felt guilty for asking me to come! She was such a nice girl, one of my favorite students ever. She is really smart in math, but I worry for her because I noticed her writing is pretty poor. I worry that her poor grammar may hold he back a little bit when it comes to the ACT, college, etc. Then again, she will do fine in life, because she is quite bright and has a great attitude.

At the end of the year, some of my students in the class wrote “we love you, Mr. A” messages on the board. I wrote a message telling them they were my best class and I really enjoyed teaching them, which was the honest truth.

Suggested Blog: What is the impact that this experience has had on your life?

When I was in Peace Corps training in Namibia, we were visited once by a group of veteran volunteers who were about to conclude their service. One of the volunteers wore dreadlocks and tattoos, talked about how she was deciding whether or not to marry her village chief (who already had four wives!), etc. When one of my fellow trainees asked how the experience had changed them, all the other volunteers gave reasonable responses you don't necessarily tell funny stories about. This one girl, the one who was contemplating a polygamous marriage into a Himba village, where the women go bare-breasted, paint their skin with red ochre, and plait their hair with mud, she claimed quite adamantly the experience had not changed her at all! It was pretty funny.

Well, at the risk of sounding like that crazy Peace Corps girl, I feel like I am pretty much the same. (If anything, I probably looked even more like a "deranged hitchhiker" last summer!) My goals and plans have not really changed: I plan to continue teaching. I want to move to New York City when I finish MTC. And after a few more years teaching high school, I plan to apply for Ph.D. programs in mathematics, with the ultimate goal of teaching collegiately (or perhaps in a math and science academy). If anything, my plans have solidified.

Mostly, I feel one year older, and nothing really big has happened. I simply plodded forward on the course for which I first set out, to obtain my teaching certification and a free master's degree. Some students have benefited from my being here, and some have not. I am probably a better teacher than I was 12 months ago, but the difference does not seem as dramatic as I wish.

Mind you, I taught before in Peace Corps, so my experience is not necessarily typical. I have noticed in my classmates a rapid growing-up over the past 12 months. The glow of youthful optimism is dimmed slightly as one realizes one's own small insignificance against the big, hard world. You cannot solve every problem, and you cannot be and do everything you once dreamed. Many of your students will most likely fail, no matter what you do. But there is also a resilience that comes from sticking it out. Your ideals become tempered by the experience of reality, and in the end, you are stronger for it.

The biggest impact of Mississippi on me, personally, has been cultural and environmental. I once told someone, "You have to forgive Mississippi before you can love it." In all honesty, I have not been as open-minded toward Mississippi as I probably should. One of my goals for next year is, with guidebook in hand, to seek out more cultural, historical, and natural highlights of the state. Doing so will most likely mitigate one of my least favorite things about being here: I feel like my town and the state has so little to offer me socially, recreationally, and culturally.

I think it is one thing to know that a place like the Deep South, and especially the Mississippi Delta exists, but it is quite a bit something more to live and experience it. For instance, one of the hallmarks of the developing world is that things in general do not work like they should. The Mississippi Delta shares this characteristic to some extent. Even well-established legal principles, such as the separation of church and state or the desegregation of schools, do not necessarily apply like we expect.

I have not made out-of-school friends in Mississippi as I probably should. So another goal for next year is to get involved with something of interest that will get me interacting with people completely outside of school or Teacher Corps.

Suggested Blog: How to deal with difficult administrators...

My advice when it comes to administrators is pretty simple: Do NOT confront them. Do not let them know you think they are incompetent, lazy, sexist, unfair, etc. Show them nothing but respect. Bring them gifts, if it helps. Make them like you.

This goes for all administrators, but especially difficult ones. Why? Because you want them on your side. You want them to think you are a nice person and a decent, sincere teacher. Usually just staying out of their hair and seeming like you do your job is enough. Then just pretend as if they do not exist. If they are no good, you want them out of your business. Keep them thinking you are a good teacher, then have as little to do with them as possible.

Most incompetent authority is in constant fear of being found out for how incompetent it really is. For this reason, bad leaders are hypersensitive to anything even remotely resembling criticism or second-guessing. Therefore, if you have a better idea for something, speak privately and give them the opportunity to feel like it was theirs. Do not confront your administrators with their incompetence, especially in front of witnesses, or it will only go badly.

Of course, there will be difficult things that may happen to you because of inane decisions or policies of your administration. Please do not make things worse by complaining. Just roll with the punches. If you must, must say something (as in you cannot possibly teach the classes they ask you to), do so in the most respectful way you can possibly imagine. When the need arises, be firm without being difficult.

There is also the possibility that your administration refuses to back you up on discipline. Unfortunately, this is quite common. If it happens, bend the rules if you need to so that you can get your classroom under control. If your administration refuses to help you with discipline, you need to come up with last-resort consequences you can enforce on your own. Do what you gotta do. If that means kids standing outside, or whatever, so be it.

My advice is simple and obvious to some, but nevertheless, it always blows my mind how many young, new idealistic teachers get into personality clashes with their administrators. Perhaps the sudden change of environment is worth noting: College professors are generally confident individuals who can usually take criticism without bad feelings or petty reprisals; your new bosses, probably not so much.

A Love Letter (unreplied)

There is something to be said for airports, for their hustle and bustle and their clever anonymity, the shuffling about of such crowds of strangers in their massive loadings and unloadings, the vast rows of empty chairs and the crowded escalators, for the eavesdropping on random conversations and the people-watching, etc. Do you ever wonder, if you could just switch places with someone you see in an airport and go wherever they’re going—if you could somehow wind up in the arms of whoever’s waiting for them on the other side—what would that be like? The other day, after we said good-bye and you dropped me off at Sea-Tac on your way to yoga class, after I worked my way through security, past the girls’ water polo team and all the other strangers, I plugged into my iPod and paced up and down the “A” concourse. Outside the expansive windows, the comings and goings of the gigantic machines matched my restless mood. I boarded the underground automatic train to the “S” terminal, but it was the same over there. The view of Mt. Raineer was squeezed between two massive corrugated metal airline hangers, and I walked around in circles.

The other day, my friend Stephen led me on a pilgrimage up Mill Creek Rd., beyond the state line into Oregon, and on up Tiger Canyon Rd., where it winds spectacularly up into a relatively remote section of the Blue Mountains (less than an hour's drive from Walla Walla). He pointed out a white cross marking the spot where the grandson of a former professor, perhaps aflicted by a touch of teenage bravado, had driven too fast, too close to the edge of this gravel, cliff-hugging mountain road—and we commented on the Byzantine laws and liabilities which prevented the nearest ambulance (in Walla Walla) from responding to the accident, as it was based in a different state. Further up, we stopped to inhale the mountain panoramas from a wildflower-speckled meadow, and still further, we stopped upon a grassy bank beside a babbling brook to enjoy sandwiches, not far from the South Fork of the Walla Walla River.

The two of us hiked a ways downstream from there, and as we trudged over still-unmelted patches of snowpack, me falling through the little ice-melt tunnels down to my knees on one or two occasions, Stephen told me tales of his professed “soul mate,” Ted. Stephen and Ted were roommates in college, and to this day, Stephen tirelessly relates how peacefully he slept whenever he could hear Ted’s breathing, whereas he couldn’t seem to fall asleep at all if Ted was not there. Then Ted married a jealous wife, and (to make a long story short) Stephen barely saw Ted for the next 40 years.

Several weeks ago, I watched on TV a BASE jumper climb out the window of a Manhattan hotel and leap to the street below, landing calmly beside a yellow taxi cab. I became fascinated with this image and how similar it seems to suicide, as if the parachute itself is a mere inconsequential detail. Either way, I feel an almost kindred spirit with those who choose to leap from such great heights. A daring celebration of life in all its possibilities or a desperate act of self-annihilation, they seem like two sides of the same coin to me.

Tameka [not her real name] was one of my brightest students this year. Once, when I was gone for a conference, she was the only one out of all my Algebra II students who successfully decoded the cipher message I left for them to work out. But she also had a pretty annoying attitude most of the time, and it only got worse as the year dragged on. I think I was too indulgent of her disrespect at times, perhaps because I liked her fierce, independent spirit, but mostly just because I was so happy she was participating and doing her work when no one else would. She was so transparent, though. I think she acts all tough and in-your-face to impress her underachieving, ghetto friends—and perhaps she even lacks the social skills to present herself in any other way—but she really did want to learn.

Toward the end of the year, Tameka began telling me a story of how she was pregnant by another boy in the class. My guess is that Deonte and Tameka really did have sex at least once, but she was probably never actually pregnant. Anyway, she took to saying all kinds of provocative things, like how they were going to get married and take a honeymoon to the Bahamas, etc. For his part, Deonte was no dummy. He was lazy as hell in my class, be he always had such a pleasant, easygoing demeanor it was impossible for me not to like him anyway. He was mostly unflappable, but any idiot could see that Deonte was aloof at best to Tameka’s exaggerated demonstrations. She would brush up against him or touch his arm until he would finally rebuke her. “Don’t touch me,” he would say, and she would answer, “That’s not what I said when you put your…” The whole things was pretty hilarious—if it weren’t so sad.

Recently, Stephen had a dream about Ted. In the dream, the two of them went out for dinner, and at the end of the meal, Ted announced that he was splitting up with his wife and ventured to ask if Stephen like to share a house with him. Then, in the dream, Ted got up and kissed Stephen lightly on the cheek before leaving. The dream ended there, and Stephen awoke to the disappointment of realizing this breakthrough with Ted, what he wanted more than anything else for over 40 years, was only a dream.

This vacation has been really good for me. It was good to see you again, and a part of me wonders if I didn’t halfway on-purpose miss my flight that afternoon to make it possible. But whatever. As I pace circles around airport terminals, I sometimes feel an almost physical urge to run and stowaway somehow on one of those departing jets, as if to say: Take me with you, anywhere! Reshuffle the cards of my life one more time—or as many times as it takes! Someday, I hope the Tameka’s and the Deonte’s of this world find what they need and figure their stuff out. I wish I had some wisdom to offer them, but I don’t.

The Unapologetic Atheist

This summer, Richard Dawkins has been my recreational reading companion. A renowned atheist and science writer, Dawkins most recently wrote a book called The God Delusion—just the sort of book, in the words of an awesome old woman I met on an airplane, I don’t want to be waving around in Mississippi. Me, I have a more than casual interest in atheism and the separation of church and state. Last summer, as a non-believing outsider coming to teach in a Bible-thumping state, I wrote a passionate, very personal blog entry in support of religious tolerance. I remain a First Amendment fanatic, and by the way, I believe it is a travesty of the broad-minded principles enshrined in our Constitution that “In God We Trust” has become our official national motto, minted on our money and posted, by law, in Mississippi classrooms. (Don’t tell anyone, but I broke that law all year long! Consider it my small, symbolic act of civil disobedience. It wasn’t hard. If I were a little less thorough, I might never have found my copy, broken as it was.) Today, I pause to reflect once again upon religion, particularly in response to Richard Dawkins, balanced against my profession as a public school teacher in the community context where I teach.

My critique of The God Delusion is a that, by its strident tone, the book serves largely as sermon for the converted (so to speak). It fires me up, though! Many of the arguments Dawkins puts forth are familiar to me because, as a life-long (well, since the 6th grade) atheist, I thought of most of them myself. However, he does make a few points which I find intriguing. Particularly, he causes me to reassess the singular deference we give to religion. He calls it “underserved respect,” the fact that, as soon as anyone invokes the name of religion, no matter how preposterous the beliefs themselves might be, polite company must instantly bow to religious deference. What makes religion deserve such respect?

The fact that God cannot be proven not to exist is, after all, a baseless claim to legitimacy. As Bertrand Russell once pointed out, we also cannot prove that a small “celestial teapot” is not orbiting somewhere out there in the Solar System, but the idea itself is so unlikely as to be unworthy of our consideration, and furthermore, Dawkins goes on, just because we are uncertain about the existence or non-existence of something does not imply a 50-50 chance of its existence.

Furthermore, the claim often made that religion forms the basis of morality is equally without merit. Read any respected figure from history, even from as little as a few decades ago, and often their comments and language about politically sensitive topics seem to our modern ears vulgar, at best, often blatantly sexist, racist, etc. The point is, the moral consensus of society changes with the times, and in our present day is changing quite rapidly, far outpacing the churches themselves, let alone the sacred canons of religious texts, which have remained static. Religion is not the source of morality; it is actually irrelevant or if anything, generally resists the changing of the times, otherwise known as moral progress.

Yet, when it comes to religion, we are silenced. In any other realm of conversation, even politics to some extent, if we believe someone else mistaken in their beliefs, we feel not only justified, but often we even feel a duty to disabuse them of their mistaken notions. As if that were not enough, we have, at least in America, a clear popular bias against non-religiosity. Faith is in. Not only must we defer to religion in all aspects, public and private, but despite all that we know, despite the clear and overwhelming majority of elite scientists being atheists, it is taboo in most of this country to admit atheism as a personal belief. Arguably, due to the rise of the religious right as a significant political force, we have even become, in recent years and by small degrees, a more theocratic nation. Yet Dawkins believes there are more atheists in America than there are conservative Jews, despite our obviously wielding far less political power. Why are we so silent?

To my point: I do believe, almost militantly, in a strict separation between church and state. Government should never, by any means, promote or inhibit religion, even by implication. This means no prayer, no Ten Commandments, no mention of God whatsoever in public schools (or in Congress, or in the Supreme Court!), not because government is saying people should not pray or read the Bible, but simply that government should not touch upon religion in the slightest degree.

I also believe, however, that society, indeed the human race as a whole, would be better off casting aside the shackles of ignorance that are packaged in the name of religion. Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried,” and I believe there is a pithy truth to that. But part of the reason democracy is so lousy at times is due to its ultimate decision makers, its citizens, being so ignorant. How can a democracy not be impaired by the fact that so many of its citizens are (1) poorly educated to begin with, and (2) blatantly inculcated with false and irrational beliefs without even so much as a credible choice? We live in a society where ignorance and delusion still rule unchallenged.

And let’s be real. Religion is hardly harmless, is it? Look at Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Old Testament, all over the world and throughout history: Religion is the number one cause of us-vs-them-ism, the primary source of conflict between groups who are often otherwise indistinguishable. Nobody ever fought a war to say there is no god, but okay, suppose we forget for a moment about jihads and crusades. What about guilt? How many recovering gay Christians do I know? Fear of eternal damnation, ostracism, and spiritual bullying not your poison? What about the entirely sincere, justified (in the minds of the killers) murder of abortion doctors, or just as perniciously the outright hostility to certain promising avenues of medical research, namely the ban on stem cell research? Research! On cells? I mean, these are cells, people, not human beings! Don’t even get me started on so-called “creation science”! And finally, there’s my personal favorite, the environmental policy of Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior: “We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand”!

Mind you, not all religious people are nuts. Most believers are perfectly nice, well-intentioned, and at least outwardly sincere. Some are even quite tolerant. A blessed few may even go so far as to admit the subjectivity of their own beliefs, the inevitability that others of no less moral value will come to entirely different beliefs. Others may even look the Ultimate Question in the eye and choose to turn away, succumbing instead to the comforts of familiarity. But these individuals become more and more rare as we move down the list, and none of these descriptions in any way imply the correctness of faith itself.

Rather, faith, by definition, is the opposite of reason. One cannot, without some degree of inward insincerity or simple lack of intellectual fortitude, reconcile faith with reason, because faith is believing something without evidence, in spite of reason. Therefore, while faith usually seems harmless in the form of the individual church-goer, it is by its very nature opposed to the principles of science. Faith is the mind-killer.

(Dawkins, you devil! My long-dormant hostility toward religion has been rekindled.)

As a public school teacher in an enormously conservative religious community, my beliefs and principles are placed in delicate balance. Even my time in Africa did not prepare me for this, because there it was always someone else’s country, and besides, that was the Third World, anyway. (More to the point, there were no fundamentalists to speak of in Namibia.) But here, this is America! My America, too! We live under the same Constitution. Yet, here, we see that community standards are actually stronger than the Constitution itself, because in order for a practice to be stopped, someone with standing to bring suit must first cry fowl. Granted, the religion at my school is really not so egregious as it is in most of the Delta. Even so, I find myself seriously pondering whether or not to request, privately, that we stop opening required school staff meetings with prayer. Even I, steadfastly and courageously atheist as I am, hesitate to stick my neck out, even that far!

The even more delicate point is how I relate to students. How should I answer when a student innocently asks about my religion? To state my position without elaboration, when asked directly, is almost certainly within my legal rights. But is it right, right? I prudently decline to discuss the matter whatsoever, but doing so leaves me feeling dishonest and bullied by the majority. I am well aware of the conservative Christian hatred for atheism, and so for good reason, I am wary of putting my beliefs on display in the context of my adopted (for now) community. I am assumed, like everyone, to be Christian, and because of my position, I am all but precluded from stating my contrary, exceedingly unpopular opinion. The silence fills me with loathing.

Trickier still, to what extent should I exert editorial influence, as a teacher, over the religious expressions of my students? In one instance, during some free time after testing, I asked a student to erase a religious message he had written on the board. In another example, however, I tacitly approved a student who had written a religious message on a poster assignment, influenced admittedly by this student (one of my favorites) clearly seeking my approval. I have reflected on both of these cases and alternated between which (or both) I believe to be right. Yes, students have the right to hold and profess whatever beliefs they want. They are merely citizens, whereas I am an employee of the state. However, no teacher is under any obligation to provide students with a platform to promote their religious views in class, and arguably any editorial discretion allowing a student to do so in an academic, public school setting is an implied state endorsement. The First Amendment case law about religion is very confusing and often conflicting, but it seems to me both stances are within the foggy gray cloud of the probably legal. But what is right?

Failure Story (where it *should* be posted)

I failed to manage my 3rd block Algebra II class effectively this past spring. When I think back on it and try to identify why things went wrong, it is hard to accept full responsibility. It was just a bad group of students, I prefer to tell myself. After all, none of my other classes, whom I endeavored to treat the very same way and largely did, were ever so bad. Perhaps there is some small truth to these self-absolving thoughts, but in all honesty, I know I f***ed it up.

What was so bad about it? Well, the majority of students failed. All the seniors put their heads down and stopped trying. There were times toward the end of the term when the entire class, with their lack of participation and general bad attitudes, all but prevented me from teaching. There was constant teasing and put-downs-manship that lasted the whole term long. And, selfishly, I hated teaching that class.

Probably the first bad move I made was letting M-(girl) sleep and not do anything. She was hardly ever in class anyway, and her name was familiar to me from the in-school suspension and administrative detention announcements. Although her younger sister had done well in my class the previous term, M-(girl) came into my class with an unmistakable I don’t give a crap about you or this class scowl on her face, and so I reflexively did nothing when she put her head down the first day, and every day afterward. I stopped caring whether she was in class or not. No, I correct myself: I would actually prefer she not even be there. Mind you, I was under the delusion for some time that I was able to get away with this bad precedent—and M-(girl’s) spotty, at best, attendance certainly contributed to the perception—but eventually it did catch up to me. It made me reluctant to call anyone else out in class when they began to zone out and put their heads down, until finally, toward the very end, it became such an epidemic I had to do something or I would literally have no one left to teach!

Back when I taught in Namibia, the teachers at my school rotated, and the students stayed put. Some of the other teachers were so unconscientious about their duties that some the classes were unsupervised half the day, anyway. So I got pretty used to having no real control over the initial physical classroom environment. Here in Mississippi, with a classroom of my own, I tried to do it right, and of course that means a seating chart. Only I never really liked making a seating chart, and it seemed to me, when things are good, you don’t even need one, but when things are bad, it really doesn’t make that much difference, anyway. Well, at my school, we run a 4-by-4 block schedule, which means that every semester is a new, fresh start. So for the second term, I decided to experiment without a seating chart at all. Now, this is not to say that I would exert no authority over their arrangement whatsoever. I would make the students sit in the first three rows by three columns (I called it my “magic nine” square) if they left a lot of those chairs empty, and I would sometimes move one or two students to respond to specific problems. It happens all the time in college classes, and it’s largely true in high school, as well: Students decide where to sit on the first day of class and, unless forced to do so, barely move at all for the rest of the year! Did my lack of a seating chart contribute to bad classroom management? Perhaps. Certainly it was a risk, yet still I doubt whether it was a major factor.

What probably did contribute to the problem was my utter failure to contact parents adequately, if at all. I have a phobia about telephones, and I blogged several times about this problem throughout the year, yet I never managed to overcome my thinly-veiled procrastination and pick up the damn phone on a consistent basis. I caught some flak at the end of the year for my high failure rate because of this. I hated being told I had not done my job. As unfair as that accusation seemed, I had to admit there was a small sliver of truth to it. So hopefully that shame will motivate me to do better next year.

Finally, there was the Rivalry. T-(girl) was one of my brightest students, period. She always did her work, even while she pretended to hate the class. One time, while I was away for a conference or something, she was the only student who actually solved a cipher puzzle I had left behind for them to work on. But she was so ghetto, too. She always, always, always had to act the part like she was all tough and disrespectful and narrow-minded lazy to impress her ghetto friends. She was a walking contradiction: A great student—and a great big pain in the butt. I tried to convey to her that she could go anywhere, do anything she wanted in life, but she would need to loose the attitude to get anywhere nice. When I would talk to her about her behavior and attitude, it seemed like I was talking to a brick wall. Well, T-(girl) and her ghetto friends led the way in a class-wide rivalry against J-(boy). Now, J-(boy) was no little angel himself. He was a big-head little S.O.B. who was lazy and insolent toward me. His dad was something-something in the community, and his parents even admitted that they spoiled him. Anyway, J-(boy) would get into little put-down teasing games with almost everyone else in the class. It was all sort of under my nose, yet it was done with whispers and unfamiliar slang (e.g. “Star Crunch” after the Little Debbie treat, for a black person with acne) and behind my back. Even when I knew this was going on, it was difficult for pick out specific instances of the back-and-forth teasing, so I had a difficult time applying consequences for it. Then, of course there would always be an argument from J-(boy)—which the class would cheer—or T-(girl) and her friends if I did write a detention, which often led to an office referral, which would lead to ISS. It didn’t matter. At one point, I was asked to attend a conference with the principal, vice-principal, and J-(boy)’s parents. The parents had calmed down a little bit by the time I was brought in, but apparently they were steaming mad about their son’s grade (he had like 50% because he didn’t pay attention in class, didn’t do homework, and didn’t study) and the notion that he was getting picked on. Now, to be fair, he probably got in trouble more often than the rest of the class before this conference, probably because he was the only one on his side of the rivalry. Anyway, after the parent conference, my discipline bias probably swung a little bit the other way, and I am not really happy about that, either. It was such a difficult and persistent problem, and I’m not really sure what went wrong, and how I should have been able to stop it. It’s not like I didn’t do anything! I gave out several consequences (detentions or referrals) a week for this very pattern, yet it persisted throughout! I just don’t know.

What am I going to learn from this failure? (1) I will be more consistent about what I allow and do not allow (especially in terms of non-participation), so as not to set any unsustainable precedent within a class. (2) I will not try to treat every class the same. Some classes can handle more freedom, and some cannot. I am thinking about ways I can actually write different rule sets, according to the maturity of each class—because they are not the same. Perhaps I should have even implemented a seating chart for 3rd block halfway through the term, even if just to symbolize in my own mind how the classes were not the same. (3) I need to keep in better contact with the parents. It will only actually make a difference in some cases, but it needs to be done.

Required Blog for EDCI 602, Pt. 2

When a student is able to perform a given objective in class without any problems, gives a questionable effort on their homework, then fails the objective entirely on the subsequent test, did the teacher do something wrong? This happened to me in regard to solving absolute value equations and inequalities. In order for summer school, in its condensed format, to work, 100% effort on the part of students is absolutely essential. We just do not have time to keep doing things over and over again, as one might do at times during the course of a normal school year. Already, we are covering only about 70% of the state objectives over the course of this three-week summer course. Could I have presented the material in a better, more stickable way? Perhaps. But how? How do you explain absolute value equations—splitting each equation in two because the part inside the absolute value might be positive or it might be negative—with blue Play-Doh?

One goal which has been reasonably successful has been my efforts to get the students to add and subtract with negative numbers correctly. I taught them a pneumonic trick about like signs and difference signs which the Algebra I teacher at my school uses, and this has given the students a frame of reference if we have to stop and correct a mistake. They seem to be remembering the rule fairly well, even if they forget to apply correctly sometimes. Part of the reason this has happened is because it happens so often. Negative numbers occur all the time in algebra, so it there are plenty of opportunities to reinforce this baseline (pre-)objective. My co-teachers have followed my example to some extent, as I have heard them referring to the same rule once or twice.

The most striking example of how we have differentiated learning in our classroom has been to use our club activity time to offer extra tutoring to a student who is really far behind. This has met with limited success. I suspect this particular student has a learning disability, as she is extremely slow to answer any question related to class, no matter how basic. She needs far more help than we can offer her in summer school. We have spoken to her mother, who seems to hold delusions that this child is going to squeak through Algebra I this summer so she will not have to take two maths her (upcoming) senior year. She failed our first test, which was little more than basic operations and exponents; she is going to fail the state test without a prayer unless she gets a full-time, private tutor. That is the sad reality.

I believe my procedures have been effective at imparting information and keeping students involved and listening to abstract math procedures. They are often somewhat one-dimensional, lacking a certain amount of creativity and multi-learning style approaches that arguably would improve student retention. This is one of the major areas I would like to improve.

My Required Blog (Can You Tell?) for EDCI 602, Pt. 1

Basically, my co-teacher (for Algebra I) and I chose our objectives by first coming up with a list of topics (i.e. objectives, but less formally) we felt were most important to cover during the summer school session. Early on, we made our initial list of lesson topics mostly from our experience as Algebra II teachers over this past year, then we compared that list both to the state Algebra I frameworks, a sample exam, and the list of lessons taught for this course in last year’s summer school. We had to do quite a bit of paring down, since our summer school this year is only three weeks, whereas last year we had four weeks. Looking at all these resources, we were forced to make choices, because it is simply not possible to cover the entire exam / framework in just 14 school days of four periods each. We ultimately relied on our experience as teachers to decide how to make these prioritizing decisions, emphasizing areas we feel are within our greatest ability to make the greatest impact, topics such as graphing and general skill with word problems, etc. For instance, because of the ubiquity of student errors when dealing with fractions, negative signs, and so on, we felt it was worthwhile to start off with several lessons of review of these basic (pre-algebra) skills.

From our list of lesson topics, we then assigned each topic to a class period. We combined some topics in the interest of time, and we expanded other topics which, from experience, we thought may require more time investment. We worked this out until we had filled all our 56 times slots. Then on the day before summer school was to begin, we learned that several periods which we thought were going to be taken up by testing were, in fact, not, so we simply decided to put our four newfound spare periods at the end of our schedule, with the objectives to be determined as we feel the need arise.

Because of our rotating teaching schedule, our orders to adhere strictly to the “master” schedule for observation purposes, and the practical concern that teachers should know what and when they are teaching well beforehand, the entire summer school course is mostly planned out pretty rigidly at this point already. However, we have left at least one “review” session before each of our four unit tests, as well as the four “spare” periods (from the non-happening testing, mentioned above), which give us the opportunity to spend more time on problem areas that come up along the way.