Thanksgiving Blessing

This thanksgiving I feel blessed to be surrounded by a team who strives to create capable students.  Students who not only feel like they can do the math in geometry class, but who also feel as if they can handle girl drama, family tragedies, or no food for dinner.  Resilient students who rise above their circumstances and learn to navigate this unpredictable world. Students who understand how to learn despite all the noise of life around them.

Recently, out of anger, a student put another student in a headlock during class.  This came on the heals of the student teasing the other and taking it too far.  A common playfulness between two boys went awry when one student just snapped.  Upon talking to the student who placed the headlock, he shares that he had a terrible night.  You see, he has no record of any sort of aggression.  He doesn't get sent out of class for being defiant and gets good grades.  The night before, however, his father was arrested.  He witnessed the whole ordeal.  I could have simply yelled at this student and sent him off with his consequence, but I have found that simply asking questions creates a much better learning opportunity.  This is true for any person.  We can either jump to conclusions, reprimand and redirect without ever learning why or we can ask questions and get to the heart of what is going on.

So many students have cried in my office.  It has honestly shocked me.  When one on one, these hard, disengaged students reveal their true colors.  They are hurting.  They are lost.  They feel forgotten.  They feel misheard.  They feel beaten down by stereotypes and discrimination.  They feel in over their head.  I seriously wonder whether I know what I am doing and how I got into this position.  Where did I learn to console a student who finally confided that he is simply sad and too depressed to go to class?  Where did I learn how to talk to the girl known as a bully to remind her that she is better than that, that I believe in her?  Where did I learn how to listen intently and how to seek help as a student talks about harming themselves?  These are not things I was taught formally in school and I fear daily that I might mess it up.  But when we know better, we do better.

This weekend a student passed away abruptly from a medical condition.  When anyone passes away people often revert back to their last interaction with that person.  What were my last words?  How did the student feel leaving my office? Did they feel belittled, hopeless, and angry, or did they feel capable, reflective, heard and optimistic?  I hope it was the latter.  I know in my heart that the team I work with always strives to ensure the latter.  I am blessed with a team that seeks to understand and educate versus harm and belittle.  A team that doesn't want to show their power and dominance over students, but seeks instead to help the students know better and do better.

9th graders

I really like my 9th grade class.  They are full of energy and truly are nice students.  But man are they busy.  They just love to talk and get up out of their seat. They keep me on my toes to make a stellar lesson that keeps them engaged.  There is no 'work time' if it doesn't involve some sort of reason to stay engaged in the work.  A review lesson on a Thursday, a block day, where classes are 90 minutes, started out as a carousel.  In a carousel, students typically rotate in teams around the room solving problems.  The goal is to review tough problems as a team before a test and get a chance moving while doing so.  This lesson could easily take 55 minutes, equivalent to a regular day's schedule, but I knew keeping them engaged in this work for 55 minutes is a large stretch.  Additionally, they need to do these problems and I needed to harness the intelligence of the top students to support the low students in better understanding the concepts we were reviewing.  But there was no way just having them do the problems standing and rotating would be enough of a motivator to stay on task...until the magical popsicle sticks.

I don't know where I learned this strategy, but I'd be wise to never forget it's power.  Each team started out with a yellow, three point stick.  The instructions were simple.  Work together on the problems for 30 minutes.  When you finish a problem, check your answer and ask for another problem.  While the teams worked, I would swap out their sticks to move them up or down based on how well they were working as a team.  As a team their goal was to get up to a five point, blue stick. I must never forget the power of the sticks...

And, yes, this is a short post.  I created it weeks ago.  Life gets busy when you are passing on the classes you're teaching and starting a new role.  I'm going to miss teaching these 9th graders.  More on that later.

Week 1

First of all, it was a LONG short first week with the kiddos.  We were on a special schedule that put us at only 4 minutes of passing time for our three days with students.  I have prep last hour, and let me tell you, not having a moment to breath from 7:50a.m. to roughly 1:30pm each day was rough.  Not to mention the only time I sat down was for a thirty minute lunch.  Whew!  It was a doozie.  With a pep fest on day one that highlighted academic clubs (outstanding work KHS Student Government!) and chromebooks being distributed to each and every student on day two, the week felt a bit too out of my control.  But it reminds me of the advice from my mentor teacher, Sharon, who encouraged me during my first year of teaching to never for get the f-word... flexibility.  Flexibilty was key this week because I had no power to change the circumstances.  I needed to just go with the flow.  Regardless, here is how I spent my first week with students and how the MathTwitterBlogoshpere shaped this week.

Day 1

First of all, freshman are so adorable (and quiet) on day one.  I mean, seriously!  They were so attentive, curious, and just downright cute.  I need to remember this when they don't appear so cute in the future!  I've got one section of Intermediate Algebra and I'm glad I do.  In the past,  taught a support class at this level for many years and it will be nice to be their primary teacher for a change.

I also teach three sections of Algebra 2, 11th graders.  This is a course entirely new to me.  I've taught the two courses before and the Honors course that comes after, but never Algebra 2.   My PLC had come up with "about you" questions to get students sharing who they are on day one.  This proved to be a great success.  The best two questions were "What did you have for dinner and who did you eat with?" and "What is one thing I should know about you?".  The insights into these students backgrounds from these questions was perfect.  I loved being able to get a glimpse into their lives so early in the year.

In all of my classes, the students completed the "Broken Circles" team builder from the book Designing Groupwork: Strategies for the Heterogenous Classroom. Dane on his Math Happens Blog describes it very well.  A colleague and I participated in this team builder last May at MCTM's Spring Conference and were excited to try it out with students.  I will admit, I appreciate the moral of the activity, but it was just too easy.  The students were done with the circles so darn fast!  This was true for all my classes and a few of my colleagues as well.  Before I feel comfortable capitalizing on the moral of the activity, I believe I need to have the students complete a more challenging 'broken circles' activity. More pieces, maybe squares instead of circles, but definitely something that takes more than a minute or two.  I still was able to get them to make conclusions like "We needed to pay attention to what other people needed" and I was able to determine who my talkers were because they were the first to pipe up with "I hated not talking!" but I feel there was more that could have been accomplished from the activity.

Ironically, the night before school started, while half asleep, I realized I didn't prepare any "rules" for my classes.  I am quite a planner, but I am also quite easy going, so I couldn't believe I hadn't thought through setting up "norms" for the class! Ironically, while falling asleep it came to me: Be Kind, Be Present, Be Appropriate.  These 3 Principles seemed very fitting for a high school math class.  Student: Can I go to the bathroom? Me: Is now the appropriate time?  Student: fiddling with phone scrolling through twitter while team is working at the boards. Me: Are you being present right now?  I didn't call them rules, just principles and introduced them with examples similar to the examples stated above.  I'm no longer that teacher who decides to rip a phone away from a kid because the rule is no phone.  We have to find a way to teach students appropriate use of all tools so they are truly prepared.  Being present is also a common, day-to-day challenge for many adults.  I promised my students that if we can be present in class and learn what we need, we won't have the obligatory homework.  And being kind is sort of like a Duh!  We don't have to love everyone we meet, but we need to be kind.

What a great 1st day!! #EaglePride Go directly to your advisor in the morning tomorrow for your chrome book! 💙💛💻

— JFKEagles (@JFKEagles) September 1, 2015

DAY 2

This day felt really out of my hands.  Each period was assigned a 10-15 minute Chromebook lesson, a bootcamp for day one going 1 to 1 at the High School.  Chopping into a 55 minute class with a 10-15 minute video/activity made it difficult to get much done in class.  

MTBoS to the rescue!  

While I had what I thought were adequately long lessons planned, I didn't have nearly enough to fill the time.  So I tapped into a resource I have been dying to use from the MTBoS.  I had students play "Which One Doesn't Belong?" If you haven't seen this resource, it is definitely worth your while.  The beauty lies in the simplicity of the question.  The challenge is in creating a situation where all four choices have a chance at being the outcast of the group.  We did the Shape #2 from the website and it was truly eye opening to see students all navigate to the pentagon corner.  

Shape 2 from wodb.ca

 I was flabbergasted by how they were all searching for that right answer.  (I even attempted a photo of my fifth our all standing in a single corner, but darn blurry iPhone made a photo not worth sharing) In turn I asked, "Why might someone go to the corner of the shape in the top right?"  "Or the bottom left?" They had great arguments for going to these corners, but they weren't comfortable being the person to chose that corner.  It was fascinating.  After doing a few from the shapes page, students became more comfortable choosing out of the ordinary corners and creating arguments for doing so.  I look forward to continuing this activity with all my classes throughout the year to not only build their ability to 'construct viable arguments' but to reinforce math concepts we will be learning.  

Day 3

Finally, a bit of normalcy.  In Algebra 2 students were tasked with a very team-worthy task of stacking functions so that when you input a given number into the first function, you then use the output as the input for the next function, repeating the process until all four functions have been used and you end up with a given output.  This created the ideal situation to put the team whiteboards to good use.  VNPS here I come! Each team had images of four function machines created by the CPM (College Preparatory Mathematics) curriculum.  Teams set off to complete the function machines after giving each team member a role and some general expectations for working at the boards.  Very quickly some teams fell into some old habits: working solo on their notebooks, disengaging from their teams, or taking over on the whiteboard and not explaining to their team what they were doing.  Thankfully, my first two sections are a bit smaller and I was able to get to these teams to remind them of the expectations and support them in doing the math.  The fun part was that this struggle wasn't true of every team.  Some teams fell into a groove with all team members finding some way to support and engage in the work and boy was that fun to watch.  I can't wait to do more with the whiteboards, but I know I need to ensure the problems are truly team-worthy and warrant the interaction of all members.  Additionally, the more opportunities I can give them to build their communication skills, the better, so I hope to incorporate some strategies from Powerful Problem Solving in the near future.

Next week

First I need to dig into the Probability and Statistics Course!  I am excited to have freedom in this class, but it comes with a lot of pressure I put on myself to do great things.  So, while I need to and want to dig in, it's important I do so realistically!
Additionally I need to find a way to build some challenge into the Intermediate Algebra course.  Units 1 and 2 are mostly review.  There's this weird balancing act of giving students a low enough entry point, but also not making it seem as though they've already done all of this.  I'm not quite sure what that will look like, but I know I've got to find a way to challenge them without scaring them off!