Sometimes Teaching is about Unteaching.
How to Speak Music
A Juilliard professor teaches me to play the piano like a child.
By Eric Liu, Slate magazine

As a Teacher, Who Do You Stand For?
Let me start by quoting Bill Ivey, from the Middleweb listserv:
"In many years past, to avoid or at least mitigate the onset of the winter blahs, we have started a thread designed to help us look to the positives at a time when our challenges are threatening to overwhelm some of us. The tone of some of our current discussions suggests it might be time for such a thread. So I'll have a go... with a variant on an end-of-the-year activity suggested on [the Middleweb] list..."

This inspired me to write the posting below, which was followed by many far more eloquent ones by other Middleweb members. Anyways, here's my go:


I stand for Tom.

Tom was probably the biggest bully in grade 7. He ended up in my advisory class in grade 8 and, honestly, didn't have a much better year. He behaved atrociously in the math class that one of my friends taught, and I can remember far too many meetings where we teachers worried about his influence on some of our meeker students. I only had him for drama class and it took a full two months before he'd willingly participate. But once I saw him playing a little old lady in an improv skit I could suddenly see there was a light gleaming deep in him somewhere.

In grade 9 he started growing up. He began dating one of the kindest girls in his grade and he softened. He was even willing to wear the wildly coloured shorts he'd sewn in home ec. class around the school (not that anyone would have dared laugh at him!). Once he hit high school, he initially struggled but he figured it out.

Tonight, while I was at the store deciding on what kind of cookies I needed to get me through a session of marking math tests, I met up with Tom for the first time in about 5 years and we chatted a bit. He made it through high school, and is now in college and working part-time at the grocery store. He's become a fine young man.

So tomorrow, when I go into my classroom and despair over how one student has lost her writing journal yet again, or how another is breeding fruitflies in his locker, I'm going to take comfort in the fact that, despite those rough middle school years, Tom turned out okay. And if he can do it, so will they.

Enjoying Teaching
I'm still plugging away on my thesis, where I'm looking at group flow experiences in the classroom. This quote is from an interview with Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, the researcher who first developed the concept of "flow," by Samuel P. Whalen:

"Try to enjoy your teaching as much as possible and work as hard and as ruthlessly as possible to free yourseves from all the bureaucractic and other impediments that prevent you from enjoying teaching. Because if you enjoy your teaching, it is going to help the children tremendously. Enjoying teaching has two components. First, enjoying the subject matter and pushing the subject matter for its own sake. The other component is to enjoy interacting with children and seeing them learn."

The Paradox of Misdirection as Direction
From another column in the on-line magazine Slate:
How I Learned to Pitch: A Seattle Mariners Coach Teaches Me to Throw a Change-up, and Much More

"Like any good teacher, Bryan is a master of misdirection: working on a fastball to improve a change-up, using dry work without a ball to sharpen performance with a ball, and talking about how to keep a quiet head when, in fact, we were talking about how to keep a quiet mind."

A long time ago, when I taught swimming, I was very conscious of using misdirection, especially when I was working with children and adults who were afraid of the water and I wanted to help them get their minds off where they were. Now that I'm in a classroom of 32 kids, I wonder if I use it as much. Would it still work with so many individuals?

The Importance of Listening
The following quote is from an interesting article on Slate's website about an aspect of teaching that isn't often discussed: How well do you "read" your students, and then, how do you act on this?

"We often have the notion in our culture that the Great Teacher is a Great Communicator: the enthralling evangelist, the mesmerizing orator. Of course, being able to communicate powerfully is vital to effective teaching. But it is still secondary. What separates good from great, across professions and domains, is the ability to receive before you transmit."
"The People Whisperers. What a Hollywood acting coach taught me about teaching."

One thing's for sure - if you don't listen, chances are you won't hear.

To Infinity and Beyond
It's early November, report cards are drawing nigh, and like many other teachers I'm feeling quite squashed lately (witness the fact I haven't written a blog entry for months). There was a thread about overwhelming workloads on the Middleweb listserv recently and a posting by Chris Toy, who is a principal somewhere in the north-eastern US, helped me put things in perspective. Here's a quote:

"When things get nuts I try to remember that the amount of work is infinite while time and resources are finite. What's half of infinity? Infinity! So it really doesn't matter how much work you do, you'll never get it all done. Odd as that sounds, it reminds me that worrying about 'getting caught up' is pretty much a waste of energy. I think it helps me to focus on what I can actually get done with less stress. Make your priorities and do what you can."

So yesterday I took the day off - I felt justified in doing so seeing as I had been sick for a couple of days last week and was still feeling pretty tired - but early this morning I sat down, made a list of things to do, made another list of the time I have available to do these things, and then I set some priorities.

As I result, I got some work done on my thesis, something I haven't touched in about a month. Not a lot of work mind you, but enough to lift some guilt off my shoulders. What a good feeling.

Here's to a more manageable November.

A New Beginning
Even though it isn't, tomorrow feels like it will be the first day of school for me, and it's all because of how we ran our first week.

For the second year in a row, our grade 8 numbers are high. Then, the week before school, at least 10 more students registered throwing us into a dilemma - do we pull a teacher from the gr. 6/7's to give us an extra class of 8's in order to lower the number of students per class? While lower numbers are preferable, it would have meant reorganizing most of the class lists in the school.

What we ended up doing was not putting the grade 8's into their homerooms until late Friday afternoon. Instead, our fearless team leaders Anne and Frank, organized a number of activities for all of our 220+ grade 8's, including the French immersion class, to rotate though while placed in groups according to alphabetical order.

I admit I was skeptical at first - I like to get my own class as soon as possible - but it really worked out well. By the end of the week, I had pretty much talked to every grade 8 student and made some good connections with some of them. This should help greatly with addressing hallway behaviour issues.

And it was good for the kids too. They met lots of new people, got an idea of what all the grade 8 teachers are like, made a few more friends, and generally had fun. Plus, the piece de resistence, they got to tie-dye a t-shirt of their very own. Now how cool is that?

It turns out enough kids moved away during the summer to pretty much balance the number of new ones. So we will remain as six English program classes, and one French immersion class, with the English program numbers at 32-33 kids per class which is high but the same as last year.

And tomorrow, we begin...

The Unblinking Eye
Although this is the first summer in a few years that I haven't been teaching summer school or taking courses myself, it feels like I've been in the classroom a lot these past two months. That's because I've been working on my master's thesis and watching videotapes of one of my math classes last spring over and over and over again.

I swear, I will never take an article in an academic educational journal lightly again. Just one 30 minute tape has taken me at least 15 hours to transcribe (not in one sitting of course), and I'm still finding things to correct or add. Add to that a second 30 minute tape, and another 10 minute one (actually longer but the kids stopped talking after a certain point) and, I tell you, my fingers are sore from hitting the "rewind" and "play" buttons so many times. (There are three other tapes I've hidden deep in my filing cabinet - please please let my advisor say that I have enough data and don't need to transcribe anymore...)

The hardest thing about watching the videos at first was simply seeing myself - although it has inspired me to try to spend more time on my hair :) That passed pretty quickly though since I'm rarely on screen. The next hardest part was watching or listening to certain students. When you're caught up in teaching, you definitely don't notice everything that's going on. The video camera though, its one eye never blinks.

One student, who was a solid B in math all year, seems very lost, never quite sure what his/her group mates are doing although he/she is very quick to yell out "oh, I get it!" when the rest of the group does, although a split-second later. I wish I had been able to pick up on that during the school year, and wonder if he/she achieved good marks simply by memorizing algorithms or if he/she just needed quiet time at home to work through concepts at his/her own pace.

Another student, C+ or low B in math, proves him/herself to be very capable at solving problems, although easily distracted by socializing with friends in another group across the room, even while fully conscious of the running camera! Again, I hadn't realized that he/she had been socializing (and sneaking candy!) quite so much and now that I think back, that explains a few things. Like all those wrappers for one ...

Perhaps, what the camera really showed me is how difficult it is to find math problems that truly work at a variety of levels. Many of the problems I chose worked for most of the kids, but I can hear in the background the voices of the kids who have given up before they've even finished reading the question. And even though I purposely grouped them with friends willing to help and talk ideas through with them, in a couple cases that wasn't enough. I need to think of more ways to scaffold these kinds of activities so that these kinds of kids are at least willing to try.

It's Summer and the Living is Guilt-ridden
This is such a weird time of year, all focused on the words "There are only x number of days left until classes begin..."

a) so I'd better get as much reading and planning as possible completed now because later I won't have time;

or

b) so I'd better get as much drafted on my thesis as possible because later I won't have time;

or

c) so I'd better take full advantage of being able to relax because later I won't have time.


Which option wins depends on the day, but there's always a big side-order of guilt to go with it, that I can count on :S

For the past day or so I've been choosing option b), trying to get some framework for the grade 8 English class I agreed to teach in place of Social Studies or Science. It's been seven years since I taught anything English related, and the Atwell and Rief I read at the time is pretty darn hazy, so I've been very thankful to be able to access Juli Kendall's journals on the Middleweb page. Between that, the reading/writing listserv, my colleagues Marna and Carleen, and my own limited experience with writing and editing, I think it should all be okay.

But all that got me thinking again about how my Math program is structured and reminded me how, back in June, I was thinking that one of my goals for this coming year would be to integrate more problem solving and more writing.

Which means I really need to revamp how I'm assessing and grading so that it's more meaningful, which reminds me that another goal is to do just that (and I've ordered a book by Robert Marzano that will be my main resource).

Then that leads me to other thoughts, other possible goals... and then I look over and see a pile of articles on collaborative mathematics and on flow and think: Oh right, shouldn't I be working on that thesis right about now?

So yes, I'll have an extra helping of guilt please.

Beauty of the Algorithm
"The theory of computation is replete with deep theorems. Among the most beautiful are those showing that, in most cases by far, there exists no shorter means to predict what an algorithm will do than to simply execute it, observing the succession of actions and states as they unfold. The algorithm itself is its own shortest description. It is, in the jargon of the field, incompressible."
- Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe

Perhaps that's why it's so tempting for math teachers to teach using examples and non-examples of algorithms. Particularly when time is such a pressing factor.

But if you take a constructivist view of how people learn, individuals may in fact need a longer description, an exploration, in order to appreciate what the concept actually is that the algorithm enacts.

(Note to myself - I'm wondering if this might be a way of dealing with the chaos that is the emergence of group understanding)