Could This Ever Happen?

Dr. Joel Shatzky:

The only way the leaders of this country and enforcers of this policy are going to realize that they have to rethink their agenda is by teachers getting their attention. I believe that evidence of the strength of teacher opposition to testing instead of teaching is through a “Sick of Testing Sick Out”: a national “sick out” that would be determined by education activists and those among the three million teachers in this country who recognize that these destructive practices must stop. They must also offer, as they certainly should, alternatives to testing and a clear explanation as to why these programs have been bad for students.

This post (and you should read the whole thing) gave me feverish dreams of high school math teachers across New York calling in sick next June on regents testing day and refusing to administer their sad excuses for math exams: bad questions emphasizing the most pointless skills about way overly broad standards. Those of us who use them as a final exam grade can make up our own exam and give it on a different day.

I think it could work if it ever happened. The press coverage would be unreal, and we'd be so very ready with our "alternatives to testing and a clear explanation as to why these programs have been bad for students." I just wonder if it could ever happen. Never mind that most teachers I know tend to, well, behave, and listen to authority. (On the other hand, most of them also go all mama bear when asked to inflict damage on their kids.)

But I also wonder would it qualify as collective action taken outside the grievance procedures of our unions, which I take to be a big no-no for reasons I don't fully understand. Even though it's not action against our school administration, but against the destructive requirements of the state bureaucracy. Interested in your thoughts, especially if you have any insight about what's allowed/risky/smart in light of collectively-bargained contractual obligations.

With All Apologies*

The bell stopped ringing and the cacophony of sliding chairs died down. From nowhere I felt a bright, concentrated jolt of contentment. It was my student bracing a hand on the back of a chair as she slid her backpack fluidly to her shoulder, it was the precise flip and click of capping my whiteboard marker one-handed, it was the earthy, acrid odor of teenaged boy straight from gym, it was the squeal and giggle from the hallway piercing the chatter, it was the harsh lighting and painted cinder block wall and faded American flag perched in the corner and early afternoon pressing golden on the window. It happened in the duration of a deep breath: this is real and it is my life. The small details and annoyances shout louder than any triumph or tragedy. They tell me I belong.

*to Tana French, who is brilliant and dazzling, for this paragraph's vague but undeniable resemblance to a reverie by a police detective from In the Woods, chapter 4. Blame remix culture.

PS Though I enjoyed writing this I also think it is deeply crap that I am getting nostalgic for school only halfway through the summer.

PPS This is about the time I start contemplating piercings and odd hair colors. It's a dangerous time.

Who else is sensing a theme here?

Exhibit A :  I don't know the answers, but it turns out the experts in the field don't either. Not because they haven't tried, but because it's that complicated and messy.

Exhibit B : Just don’t make this about some magic set of rules that are going to make your classroom perfect. Guess what? That will never happen. Stop looking. Education is always going to be ugly.

Exhibit C : Let it be clear that there is nothing magical that I am doing. There is no algorithm. I don’t woo them in with some charm and they are all of a sudden amazing students.

Virtual Conference on Soft Skills: So Bad

Welcome to the Virtual Conference on Soft Skills. I'm honored to be taking part.

This is half an analogy that's been haunting me that needs some light and air, and half a probably not terribly helpful how-to.

I'll open with something I heard from Derrick Jensen. (Please, please forgive me for the Nazi reference. I know. Just bear with me for a minute. I see no way around it.)  

The smartest thing the Nazis did was to make cooperation in the Jews' rational best interest every step of the way. 

Do you want to get an ID card, or resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to move to a ghetto, or resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to get on a cattle car, or resist and possibly get killed? I'm not comfortable citing a direct quote because I'm remembering this from an appearance about six years ago, but he repeated (something like) this over and over, and at the time, it split me open. Read it over to yourself a few times for the full effect:

The Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had a higher rate of survival than the Jews who went along.

Which, let's not draw parallels with too bold a line between the Holocaust and modern schooling, but NB: Derrick was drawing parallels between the Holocaust and modern culture, and how multinationals are rewarded when they chew up laborers, animals, air water soil in their big machine, destroy them, spit them out, both with impunity and in collusion with governments... His point was that in the face of an utterly hopeless life-destroying planet-killing economy, those who fight back will be better off, even if it feels like we can't really fix anything.

It followed me into my classroom which turned out to be disorientingly (I know that's not a word) unlike the ones I attended. I teach in a school similar to where I went to high school; however, I don't teach the same kind of kids I was, or the same kind of classes I sat in. By the time I heard Derrick speak, I had earned back some of the self-actualization I lost by being the kind of student I was. But it had been a hard slog, and I hadn't yet forgiven the well-meaning, efficient schooling that turned me into a young adult who needed constant direction and a steady stream of praise. At least half of what I do professionally (experimenting with empowering grading practices, offering choices in how you're going to learn stuff, etc) grew out of seeds of rage planted in the soil of dissatisfaction I felt about my own schooling.

Now, let me disclaim a little bit - I'm not endorsing everything Derrick Jensen has ever written or uttered. He says lots of compelling things and lots of inflammatory things. But he comes to mind whenever I decide to shut the door and do things my own way. Also whenever I'm working with a particularly recalcitrant child.

I strongly suspect that my students who resist complying with school have a greater chance for fulfillment, doing good work, and even saving the world, than the ones who go along. Resistance isn't futile; it's a bellwether of potential.

Do you know how there are badass, renegade teachers who shout to the hills about how we're doing it all wrong? About how kids aren't really learning anything from school, not really? There are kids like that too. They are not often validated in that opinion. They just know this model isn't serving them. They don't write blog posts about it. They pursue other interests, healthy or not. In your class they can be annoying as a dentist's drill, or smooth as a confidence man, or quiet as a sniper. If you're anything like me, you love them a little more, and you want to strangle them a little more, than all the other children.

(Photo credit: C. McCarthy '12)

Okay so now I'm going to awkwardly transition into a quasi how-to section, wherein I try to explain how I have had some success keeping the badasses engaged and challenging the complacent game-of-school-players.

I don't pretend like everything they do is great. I tend to think Mr. Rogers did more harm than good for several generations of Americans. You know what? You're not awesome just because you're you. You become awesome when you decide to do something difficult, or create something beautiful, or act with kindness, and follow it through. These are things I've been known to say to high school students, who are capable of much more than people give them credit for:

"I think you can do better than that."
"You're not hurting my feelings. You're just wasting your time."
"Quit being such a jerk. I know that's not you."

Nobody's idea of teacher of the year material, right? I know. But really, if you're validating everything they do every minute, you are not helping. Sometimes I think we need less Mr. Rogers and more Tyler Durden.

The flip side of these admittedly negative statements is to make a huge, hooting, hollering deal out of the kinds of behaviors you want to encourage.

"Thank you for advancing our understanding by asking for that clarification."
High five!
"Way to take a risk by sharing that idea! How did that feel?"
Fist pound!
"Wow, you really stuck with it through your frustration. I'm glad your persistence paid off."
More high fives!
"I couldn't have explained that any better myself. Thank you for sharing your understanding."

On the other flip side (this coin has three sides, ok? It's a quantum coin) you have to give them something better than listen copy listen copy practice practice practice oh yeah do it all in silence for no good reason. If you're reading this, you probably already know that. And I'm no expert at giving them something better; I mostly flail around at it (see also: the rest of this blog.)

I'm not going to act like I save them all and Margaret Cho is going to play me in the movie (but just in case: she would be my first choice.) But I can tell you, many of them respond and thrive. And decorate my walls with unsolicited artwork:

So what's it all mean, and what does Derrick Jensen have to do with it? Look at your badass little punks as an opportunity instead of an inconvenience. Challenge them with difficult problems and challenge them to be a better version of themselves. They're not afraid of the power of your grading pen. They need a reason better than coercion. It's worth it. They are worth it. They are the hope for the future.

Union

This summer I am very purposefully avoiding thinking about work. A break seems crucial and necessary. I can't really explain why. I can't think about work. I don't want to think about work. My brain and body rebel at the notion of thinking about work. When people on Twitter start talking about the minutiae of their grading systems, I have to close the laptop and leave the room. This is the first time I've begun summer feeling like this. Maybe I will understand it better when I come out the other side.

One of the things I've been doing instead is attending Bikram yoga practice. The executive summary of Bikram is: very hot room, an hour and a half, same difficult 26 poses in the same order every time, lots of sweat. I've gone every day. I am shooting for thirty days in a row. My everything hurts.

But as you've probably guessed, despite my determination to think about other things for six weeks, aphorisms from Bikram apply without editing to a teaching practice. This is just me writing some of them down.

Everything matters. At yoga, which direction your fingers are pointing and where your eyes are focused matter. At school, where you stand, how long you pause, and the numbers you choose for every problem matter.

...but don't be too serious about it. Wink at yourself in the mirror.

Many teachers is better than one teacher. At yoga, I haven't had the same instructor twice. They lead you through the same poses, but the individuals are all different and equally awesome. This one told me to point my tailbone at the floor so that I really felt my spine lengthen, that one told me to press my chin into my chest. At school you can and should engage all the students in helping teach the course. This goes to deep, philosophical methods by which you approach instruction with collaborative problem solving, and the surface of how you structure practice activities.

Push yourself, try your best, and aim for perfection. At yoga, you can move a half inch deeper into the pose on the next breath. You can inhale another sip of air when your lungs are full up. At school, you can pick one student in each class you haven't talked to this week and ask them about their sport/hobby/pet.

...but be gentle and forgiving, and kinder to yourself than you think you deserve.

...and then let it go. Did you fall out of standing bow? Twice? It's over now. Let it go. One of the instructors says this and it's awesome: "Exhale...set you free." Did something go down at school you could have handled better? Acknowledge, learn, let it go.

If you are doing something mentally and physically demanding, don't forget to eat and drink enough water. Or you will feel like crap.  At school, sometimes I am feeling cranky in the late afternoon and realize I haven't had any water all day.  The consequences are a bit more extreme at Bikram: dizziness, nausea, feeling faint.

Finally, I took a picture of their poster, which might make a cute WCYDWT. What are they trying to maximize or promote with this pricing scheme? You'd probably want to hide that bottom part at first.

Absolute Value Both Rigorous and in Context

I know I said I was done for the year. SORRY. I am literally sitting around school twiddling my thumbs today. I am ripping this idea off from Dan, but trying to extend it to be appropriate for Algebra 2. Absolute value is one of the first lessons of the year, and in the past my students neither understand it conceptually nor remember an algorithm for solving equations and inequalities with anything like reliability. This feels more like an Algebra 1 lesson to me, but I think it will be necessary.

This is my version... peanut M&Ms were the cheapest/most voluminous things I could find. There are about 230 in a large bag, by the way. Yesterday I polled 50 faculty and staff. In the fall I am going to have to get my butt into overdrive within a day or two to collect at least as many data from students.

I have yet to nail down the details, but the flow will go something like this:

Preliminaries
Put up a picture like this.

Ask how far away the houses are from school. Get a few volunteers to describe the mental procedure they used to determine distance from school. Point out that everyone naturally used a difference and absolute value to express distance. And that further, if we can represent distance as absolute value with an equation, we will be able to use it to ask and answer more interesting and difficult problems than our intuition can handle alone. Graph by hand y = |x| by making a table of values. Note the characteristic V shape.

Questions to Answer
Bust out laptops and distribute excel file. As per Dan's original plan, kids will have some choices about what questions to explore and time to flail.

- Who won?
- Rank everybody.
- Top 10 Guessers.
- Any ties?
- Worst guesser?
- Which grade guessed best?
- Which job guessed best?
- Calculate percent error.
(Maybe some/all kids can present aspects of the results on posters we can display?)

Once that's all squared away, I want everyone to explore:
- On average, how good were the guesses?
- Create the scatterplot that displays the characteristic V shape.
- What is the equation of the connected graph of that plot and what do the variables represent?

(This popping up on my screen should not have been, but was, the best part of my day yesterday:)

Follow-on problems once equation is achieved. Solutions using both the graph and the equation.

- What guess corresponds to the average distance from the correct guess?
- What did the worst guesser guess? The best?
- In what range did the better-than-average guessers guess?
- In what range did the worse-than-average guessers guess?

New problems and generalization:
Write an equation/inequality that models the scenario. Make sure to define your variables.
- Today’s temperature is 10 degrees off from the usual temperature.
- Today’s temperature will be within 10 degrees of the usual temperature.
- Today’s temperature will be more than 10 degrees off from the usual temperature.
- If the usual temperature is 68, find values for the three forecasts above using algebra. Show all work at every step.
- Graph the scenario. Indicate the three different forecasts on the graph.

- Write a general expression for the distance between a changing value and a known value. Define your variables.

- Put this equation into words: |x – 10| = 3
- Solve it, showing all work at every step.
- Write down/discuss a procedure for solving any absolute value equation.

- Put this inequality into words: |x – 10| < 3
- Solve it, showing all work at every step.
- Put this inequality into words: |x – 10| > 3
- Solve it, showing all work at every step.
- Write down/discuss a procedure for solving any absolute value inequality.

Feel free to poke holes in this or let me know how you would implement it differently. Also I need to get them solving and graphing more complicated equations and inequalities like say 10 = 2 |3x - 4| + 7, so I'd love to hear if you see any natural ways to make that happen. I haven't been able to think of any yet.

Odds, Ends, Obligatory Summer Slowdown Heads-up, etc.

I expect posting to slow way down here over the summer. We have our last workday Friday and getting my grades done is going to take my last ounce of will to think about non-fun work-related things. I am in sad, pitiful need of a break and expect to come back rested and raring.

Here are a few things I want to get out of my brain for now:

My current working definition of mathematics at the level I teach it - Translating your intuition into a generalized form so that it can be used to solve harder problems than your intuition alone can handle.

Grading the Geometry Regents was not so bad. The kidlets did themselves proud. Disturbing trend wherein I am good at getting (very nearly) everybody to pass, yet an alarmingly low number above 85% mastery, continues. That needs lots more meditation. Had a nice chat with my new Principal about it though. (On my initiative. He was very supportive.)

Grading the Algebra 2 Trig Regents was wholly depressing. Depending on where NY puts the passing cut score I could have a small handful fail or like half my kids. And very few if any above 85. I don't know what to do with that mess of a class. Behold the epic frustration. Leaning heavily toward making tracks off the reservation and ignoring the test to the extent possible.

Also. I miss the kids.

Other news: If you are looking to nurture your inner stalker and want a glimpse inside what makes your favorite edu-blogger/twitterer tick, spend some time over here.

Other other news: My post for the Riley-initiated Virtual Conference is queued up and ready to fire on July 10. Featuring Nazis! Eco-terrorists! Badasses! Homemade artwork! Unless I revise it a whole bunch more. Which I probably will.

Happy summer, everybody.

Where Mah Physics Peeps At

I usually talk about vector forces by pushing desks around. You know like 2 people push in the same direction, 2 people push in opposite directions, then they push on adjacent sides and the desk moves diagonally. But then we just make up forces and do practice problems.

Would it work to get 3 bathroom scales to measure the two component forces and the resultant force at the same time? Is there an easier way to do it than trying to balance a scale against a corner of a desk?

I would ask the Physics teachers at my school but I'd have to walk all the way down two hallways and I am very, very lazy.

Subscribe to This Now, So You Can Feel Cool Later

and also because I love reading about how people who know how to teach decide to parent. LOVE. If I have a favorite reading genre, this would be it.

GL(s,r)

All I’m saying is that once we teach our students the core ideas about how to think about the world in a mathematical way (read “logically creative way” not “creatively logical way”), then and only then does it make sense to start adding things back in. The standards are the problem. But you have to teach them the standards. But the standards are making it harder to teach and harder to learn. But you have to teach them the standards. But teaching them the standards is, in most cases, tantamount to making sure they will not learn any real mathematics. But you have to teach them the standards. I give up. Teach the standards. The story sucks, but so do most movies.

 Also, go read this, if you haven't already. Just so you know what is up.

I Kind of Hate the Stupidly Ubiquitous Video Cameras

So in the last ten minutes of fifth period, awards had been given out, instructions about what to bring and not bring to the Regents exam had been given, and D plugged his ipod into my computer speakers to entertain us...fine, cute. He started dancing, so did another student, they were very talented, well-practiced, adorable, etc. So then D asks if I want to learn The Stanky Leg and I'm like "Sure! I hope I don't hurt myself! I am comically uncoordinated!" He starts trying to show me, and I start trying to imitate him, and I'm sure it was hilariously awful. But after like a minute, I look up and there are at least three cameras pointed at us. And I stopped. I couldn't make myself continue. I don't know how to feel about that. It would have been fun to continue, and I was fine embarrassing myself in front of these 20 people I've spent so much time with this year, but I wasn't fine embarrassing myself in front of the universe.