No Wonder
No wonder some kids hate math.

Recently I witnessed what would be considered a typical math lesson and I'll admit right here that I've taught many like it. Here's how it goes:

1. Hand out worksheet;
2. Worksheet questions are meant to review concepts taught in previous lesson;
3. Students plough through worksheet;
4. Teacher stands up front and either presents answers to worksheet or solicits answers from students;
5. Further homework is assigned.

Goal of the students:
- to better understand the concepts?
No.

- to examine the big ideas surrounding the concepts?
No.

- to consider how the concepts apply to real life situations?
No.

- to get the worksheet out of the way so can then get the homework out of the way so that can then spend evening doing something more interesting and meaningful?
Yes.

What a shame, yet it goes on all the time. No wonder some kids hate math.

Teachers teaching math the same way they were taught all in the name of making sure the curriculum is "covered," and I include myself in this group. So what can be done to break the cycle?

Spring Rambling
Spring has sprung
The grass has riz
I wonder where the flowers is
- one of my dad's favourite poems

Last Friday our team went on a field trip and I chose to sit in the back of the bus instead of in the front with the other teachers. Why? Because my student teacher is taken on 80% of my teaching load (i.e. all the time with my core classes) and I was missing my students. And it was good to sit there and watch them poke each other, whisper together, play cards or Korean clapping games or looking-out-the-window games. My homeroom class is quite a diverse group, not quite a cohesive whole even now, yet each student has made at least one new friend this year and has somebody to belong to.

And I realised that this was actually true of me too, this being my second year at this school. It takes time to get to know people (I read somewhere recently that it takes 3 years to make a real friend. Now how researchers determined that particular number is a good question), especially if you don't get into the staff room that often. But one of the up sides of having a student teacher is being able to lunch in the staff room regularly and to arrange meetings with like-minded colleagues during other periods in order to talk about math/numeracy and share ideas and goals. What a luxury, and I'm trying to make the most of it while it lasts.

So, to sum up this ramble, I feel as though the grass has riz and the flowers will be along shortly.

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.