Is the most effective means toward understanding other people really to probe your own experiences and personal history? Do instructors and trainers trying to promote intercultural understanding generally assume this to be the case? This seems to have been the approach both of the instructor who taught a Multicultural Ed class I took toward the teaching credential, and of the facilitator who did an anti-bias training at my school earlier this year. Then, a few days ago, a group of my students hanging out to do some math before a test were complaining about an episode suggesting, I think, the same preconception.
These students had also attended a diversity training, and the facilitator had - if I understood the students correctly - wanted to help the learners understand that saying "that's so gay" would be hurtful and inappropriate. He had tried to relate it to their experience by asking them how they would feel if he'd expressed general disapproval by saying "that's so nigger."
All other objections aside - I am puzzled by the idea that invoking a hypothetically analogous reaction would be the teaching strategy chosen. As far as I can see, no such parallels are needed to make the point. You only need to know that gay persons are, as a matter of fact, troubled by such uses of the term. And to know that, you only need to ask them, and then to listen.
The mistake may be, I think, one of believing too much in introspection as a source of knowledge of others, of directing a search inwards where directing attention outward is what is necessary. There is also the possible mistake of assuming that invoking strong, painful emotions promotes sympathy toward others. Why would either assumption be true?
What, indeed, is the rationale for starting off education classes or staff developments with activities of the kind "Think of a time you were involved in a bullying incident, and talk to your partner about it for one minute"? Of course, it is an empirical question whether reliving difficult past experiences might place one in a better position to empathize with others. If there are data to suggest that such reminiscing does promote insight, openness and understanding I would like to know. I am wondering, though, whether this apparently widespread notion is not rather a piece of pop psychology that sounds more plausible than it is. As it is, I am inclined to believe that rummaging in learners' personal histories distracts more than it contributes to the project of intercultural understanding.
Apart from epistemological objections about remembered personal experience as a source of insight about others' experiences, there is the question whether dwelling on painful past experiences actually promotes the desired kinds of attitudes and behaviors toward others. My hunch is that the opposite might be the case. Seeking out internal states of distress may well place us in a position where we are less able to be empathetic and responsive to others. In order to become more capable of listening and hearing what others are saying, to be capable of getting into our students' heads, to even want to go there, to be touched by their concerns and to work to address their needs, we must - I think - be in a position of emotional strength ourselves. States of insecurity or resentment are highly self-centered, and not conducive to orientation outward. Feeling what victims are feeling may be antithetical to being more reasonable and kind toward them. While on the one hand having had difficult experiences can increase our ability to understand what others are going through, sympathetic understanding might, paradoxically, require some sort of privileged position of emotional distance from those experiences.
Arguably, training activities involving the telling about sad things in the past have as their purpose to remember those experiences, not to actually become, again, victim of bullying or ostracism. However, it is curiously difficult to access past mental states without re-entering them. Remembering what being depressed is like from a vantage point of emotional health is virtually impossible - and to the extent that the pain can be reconstructed, it is just that - re-constructed, accessed by actually reverting to that mental state. Recalling the experience of being bullied can hardly be done with any degree of vividness without actually experiencing, again, the anxiety and shame of that experience. And in such a position one probably is not capable of much good. So, even if the past experiences did provide some real insight into the plight of others, it might well be at the expense of empathy and goodwill.
While I am writing many of these statements in fairly definite forms, as if they were assertions of belief or truth, that is largely because inserting indicators of their hypothetical character everywhere makes for awkward prose. This whole issue of learning when the learning outcomes have to do with attitudinal and emotional shifts rather than with grasping a concept is opaque to me. I feel fairly comfortable with breaking down processes of purely cognitive change, as when arranging the components of a math concept into a sequence for instruction - but constructing learning experiences to shape affect is different. Is it even reasonable to use the same term, 'learning,' for both processes? Interestingly, the word "understanding" is used both to describe knowledge about another person, and to describe connectedness and commonality of purpose with another person, although the two are hardly the same thing.
Whether these think-of-a-time activities really do much good or not, I do know that I would much rather attend hours of direct instruction about who my students are, how they experience their schooling, what their parents are concerned about, what rhetorical styles and actions are valued in their communities - things that I could not have figured out by mere introspection. And the little group of students kibitzing about their training experience over the math papers agreed: to find out whether saying "that's so gay" was acceptable, one should just ask gay people how they felt about it, and then listen.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
Nice try
So I submitted this bare-minimum response to the present-your-year-in-numbers challenge, and then discovered this morning that the images were not even there. Gah. Feeling really smart now:) But since there's no way of slinking out through the back door of the internet and pretending the old version never was there... here it is all over again.
Or so I hope.
On the positive side, I finally figured out how to make a very basic little podcast, just a few minutes ago, and I'm going to go ahead and be quite pleased about that anyway.
___________________________________________________________
Dy/Dan challenges his readers to present their year in numbers, and to devise ways of presenting this numerical information in interesting and meaningful ways. Now I don't know how it can be that I am admitting this in public, what with being a math teacher and all, but until today I have used Excel pretty much as I would use a table in Word - for typing in numbers and storing them, no more. The task of finding out how to get the program to do anything at all with the numbers was big enough to crowd out any more creative considerations, and the results are, well, commensurate with the time left over for such thought. Given my lack of skills, this Annual Report challenge was obviously an awfully necessary and useful thing for me to take on - and this post is for my benefit, not yours :)
Apart from the technical issues of presenting the numbers, finding numbers that could say anything interesting about 2007 was not easy. I don't mean that numbers could not in principle tell the story very powerfully - just that given constraints of time, imagination and access, that was not going to happen. For example, a table of corresponding values of dates when the local newspaper posted about my school, hits on the newspaper's website, and my adrenaline levels, could well have yielded something interesting, but such data were not forthcoming. A comparison of numbers indicative of the socio-economic status of the students of my previous school with that of my current students would be sadly interesting too, and with more time and dedication I could presumably have found such numbers. But - not this time. The report was, then, dictated more by what numbers were readily available than by what might have been the most telling, as is often the case, of course.
So, here goes. There are four slides.
Yeah, I am aware that the type is too small to read. And of the fact that illegible print is no hallmark of good design. Maybe someone will be nice and tell me how to go about fixing that.
As for the data, those were from my Amazon records. Books that were bought in book stores (I have a bad habit of wandering into Half Price Books and leaving with an armful of books that I don't need or have time to read) were not counted. It's a particularly clear case of the numbers telling what numbers I have, no more. Next,
This was more interesting. It looks like September was too busy for any kind of writing. February and April are writing lows, and they coincided with two major assignments in my Ed classes.
Nothing to add. I was considering doing this kind of comparison of numbers for my old and new school for each slide, but ended up dropping the idea before it was developed. (K did an amazingly neat job of such a comparison, by the way.)
That's it. I learned a lot. And I'm thinking about what data I'd like to have for next year. And about what kind of data collected from students' learning that the students might enjoy having displayed with these neat tools. Anyway, time to sleep - tomorrow's busy.
Or so I hope.
On the positive side, I finally figured out how to make a very basic little podcast, just a few minutes ago, and I'm going to go ahead and be quite pleased about that anyway.
___________________________________________________________
Dy/Dan challenges his readers to present their year in numbers, and to devise ways of presenting this numerical information in interesting and meaningful ways. Now I don't know how it can be that I am admitting this in public, what with being a math teacher and all, but until today I have used Excel pretty much as I would use a table in Word - for typing in numbers and storing them, no more. The task of finding out how to get the program to do anything at all with the numbers was big enough to crowd out any more creative considerations, and the results are, well, commensurate with the time left over for such thought. Given my lack of skills, this Annual Report challenge was obviously an awfully necessary and useful thing for me to take on - and this post is for my benefit, not yours :)
Apart from the technical issues of presenting the numbers, finding numbers that could say anything interesting about 2007 was not easy. I don't mean that numbers could not in principle tell the story very powerfully - just that given constraints of time, imagination and access, that was not going to happen. For example, a table of corresponding values of dates when the local newspaper posted about my school, hits on the newspaper's website, and my adrenaline levels, could well have yielded something interesting, but such data were not forthcoming. A comparison of numbers indicative of the socio-economic status of the students of my previous school with that of my current students would be sadly interesting too, and with more time and dedication I could presumably have found such numbers. But - not this time. The report was, then, dictated more by what numbers were readily available than by what might have been the most telling, as is often the case, of course.
So, here goes. There are four slides.
Yeah, I am aware that the type is too small to read. And of the fact that illegible print is no hallmark of good design. Maybe someone will be nice and tell me how to go about fixing that.As for the data, those were from my Amazon records. Books that were bought in book stores (I have a bad habit of wandering into Half Price Books and leaving with an armful of books that I don't need or have time to read) were not counted. It's a particularly clear case of the numbers telling what numbers I have, no more. Next,
This was more interesting. It looks like September was too busy for any kind of writing. February and April are writing lows, and they coincided with two major assignments in my Ed classes.
Nothing to add. I was considering doing this kind of comparison of numbers for my old and new school for each slide, but ended up dropping the idea before it was developed. (K did an amazingly neat job of such a comparison, by the way.)
That's it. I learned a lot. And I'm thinking about what data I'd like to have for next year. And about what kind of data collected from students' learning that the students might enjoy having displayed with these neat tools. Anyway, time to sleep - tomorrow's busy.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
The Annual Report
Dy/Dan challenges his readers to present their year in numbers, and to devise ways of presenting this numerical information in interesting and meaningful ways. Now I don't know how it can be that I am admitting this in public, what with being a math teacher and all, but until today I have used Excel pretty much as I would use a table in Word - for typing in numbers and storing them, no more. The task of finding out how to get the program to do anything at all with the numbers was big enough to crowd out any more creative considerations, and the results are, well, commensurate with the time left over for such thought. Given my lack of skills, this Annual Report challenge was obviously an awfully necessary and useful thing for me to take on - and this post is for my benefit, not yours :)
Apart from the technical issues of presenting the numbers, finding numbers that could say anything interesting about 2007 was not easy. I don't mean that numbers could not in principle tell the story very powerfully - just that given constraints of time, imagination and access, that was not going to happen. For example, a table of corresponding values of dates when the local newspaper posted about my school, hits on the newspaper's website, and my adrenaline levels, could well have yielded something interesting, but such data were not forthcoming. A comparison of numbers indicative of the socio-economic status of the students of my previous school with that of my current students would be sadly interesting too, and with more time and dedication I could presumably have found such numbers. But - not this time. The report was, then, dictated more by what numbers were readily available than by what might have been the most telling, as is often the case, of course.
So, here goes. There are four slides.
Yeah, I am aware that the type is too small to read. And of the fact that illegible print is no hallmark of good design. Maybe someone will be nice and tell me how to go about fixing that.
As for the data, those were from my Amazon records. Books that were bought in book stores (I have a bad habit of wandering into Half Price Books and leaving with an armful of books that I don't need or have time to read) were not counted. It's a particularly clear case of the numbers telling what numbers I have, no more. Next,
This was more interesting. It looks like September was too busy for any kind of writing. February and April are writing lows, and they coincided with two major assignments in my Ed classes.
Nothing to add. I was considering doing this kind of comparison of numbers for my old and new school for each slide, but ended up dropping the idea before it was developed. (K did an amazingly neat job of such a comparison, by the way.)
That's it. I learned a lot. And I'm thinking about what data I'd like to have for next year. And about what kind of data collected from students' learning that the students might enjoy having displayed with these neat tools. Anyway, time to sleep - tomorrow's busy.
Apart from the technical issues of presenting the numbers, finding numbers that could say anything interesting about 2007 was not easy. I don't mean that numbers could not in principle tell the story very powerfully - just that given constraints of time, imagination and access, that was not going to happen. For example, a table of corresponding values of dates when the local newspaper posted about my school, hits on the newspaper's website, and my adrenaline levels, could well have yielded something interesting, but such data were not forthcoming. A comparison of numbers indicative of the socio-economic status of the students of my previous school with that of my current students would be sadly interesting too, and with more time and dedication I could presumably have found such numbers. But - not this time. The report was, then, dictated more by what numbers were readily available than by what might have been the most telling, as is often the case, of course.
So, here goes. There are four slides.
Yeah, I am aware that the type is too small to read. And of the fact that illegible print is no hallmark of good design. Maybe someone will be nice and tell me how to go about fixing that.As for the data, those were from my Amazon records. Books that were bought in book stores (I have a bad habit of wandering into Half Price Books and leaving with an armful of books that I don't need or have time to read) were not counted. It's a particularly clear case of the numbers telling what numbers I have, no more. Next,
This was more interesting. It looks like September was too busy for any kind of writing. February and April are writing lows, and they coincided with two major assignments in my Ed classes.Nothing to add. I was considering doing this kind of comparison of numbers for my old and new school for each slide, but ended up dropping the idea before it was developed. (K did an amazingly neat job of such a comparison, by the way.)That's it. I learned a lot. And I'm thinking about what data I'd like to have for next year. And about what kind of data collected from students' learning that the students might enjoy having displayed with these neat tools. Anyway, time to sleep - tomorrow's busy.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Blogger identity issues
A semester ago I decided to discontinue this blog and leave behind its writings from a difficult year, with the mistakes I made as well as the awful things that happened to my students - but every now and again there are topics that seem to fit better here than at Coffee and Graph Paper, and I think I'll pick up the 7 random things meme from e to start this blog up again.
Instead of seven entirely "random or weird" facts about myself, here are seven ideas or beliefs that I have held at some point but do not hold anymore. Weird they are, "random" - I don't know. I turned 30 this year, and at some age I have thought that
Also, thinking about the amount of effort, and reading, and discussion, and embarrassment it took to transition from these assumptions to my current ones, it seems a little sad that children are born knowing nothing, that every person needs to start from scratch anyway.
At least we aren't born with ingrained misconceptions of the kind listed above. That's something.
The magnitude of the shift of my ideas invites the question what a list of my current notions will look like in the light of another fifteen years. It's one of the thoughts that makes public writing uncomfortable and underlies an urge to delete entries, discontinue blogs, and definitely keep everything anonymous. Yet, public articulation of one's ideas and trying out arguments against others' is precisely what is needed in order not to get too comfortable with possibly poorly justified beliefs.
This seems a rather random (eh) response to a "7 things meme." I'm preoccupied with this just now because we're having a "diversity training" in January, and I'm dreading it. I hope we won't be asked to dig around in our childhood to unearth our identity there. I have to believe that it is possible to do better than that.
That's one reason why I am a teacher.
*At least there was something to the impatience with Lamarckian explanations. There's that.
Instead of seven entirely "random or weird" facts about myself, here are seven ideas or beliefs that I have held at some point but do not hold anymore. Weird they are, "random" - I don't know. I turned 30 this year, and at some age I have thought that
- women are best suited for staying at home and minding kids, and that seeking a career outside the home is an expression of selfishness
- Nelson Mandela was a terrorist
- the theory of evolution is about the accumulation of advantageous traits from one generation to the next, and that this theory is ridiculous and makes no sense*
- "whites" and "blacks" are probably better off living in separate areas and developing their different cultures without mutual interference
- homosexuality is a sort of curse probably rightfully earned by those smitten with it
- the European Union just might have something to do with the rise of the Antichrist
Also, thinking about the amount of effort, and reading, and discussion, and embarrassment it took to transition from these assumptions to my current ones, it seems a little sad that children are born knowing nothing, that every person needs to start from scratch anyway.
At least we aren't born with ingrained misconceptions of the kind listed above. That's something.
The magnitude of the shift of my ideas invites the question what a list of my current notions will look like in the light of another fifteen years. It's one of the thoughts that makes public writing uncomfortable and underlies an urge to delete entries, discontinue blogs, and definitely keep everything anonymous. Yet, public articulation of one's ideas and trying out arguments against others' is precisely what is needed in order not to get too comfortable with possibly poorly justified beliefs.
This seems a rather random (eh) response to a "7 things meme." I'm preoccupied with this just now because we're having a "diversity training" in January, and I'm dreading it. I hope we won't be asked to dig around in our childhood to unearth our identity there. I have to believe that it is possible to do better than that.
That's one reason why I am a teacher.
*At least there was something to the impatience with Lamarckian explanations. There's that.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
An optimistic reading of these career crises
When frustration with the prospects for growth as a teacher are expressed as eloquently and forcefully as they have been at Teaching in the 408 and at Dy/Dan recently, it's hard to read these statements as mere public airings of private distress at a mismatch between job description and character traits. I still have Snow and Fillmore's remarkably upbeat closing to What every teacher should know about language echoing in my head after reading the article for an ed class recently, and perhaps for that reason reading TMAO's and Dan's complaints about incentives and structures missing in public education in a similar way - as a draft list of suggestions for changes. Back to Snow and Fillmore: in conclusion to a lengthy article about why teachers need to know a lot about educational linguistics, and after insisting that there are no less than six courses in this field that should be included in the preparation of every American teacher (yeah, right), the authors remark that
This proposal may strike some readers as utopian. We acknowledge that we have formulated it without thinking about the structures and constraints of traditional teacher education programs. Nonetheless, we are energized by the current political situation surrounding debates about bilingual education and the rather frantic search for better methods of teaching reading... (emphasis added)If educational linguistics increasingly does become part of regular teacher training, that would presumably be in part because of this article. If measures are taken to encourage teachers to continue to develop and learn and grow throughout their career, that would presumably be in part a result of writings such as those of TMAO and Dan. It may not be possible to distinguish between a meeting of lost campers stuck on a ledge and an encounter between wanderers who are scouting out new trails and better ways for others to follow, except in retrospect - but it's more fun to read the discussion as a case of the latter. At any rate, for however long it lasts, these blogs challenge my sense of possibility and clarify the meaning of high standards on a regular basis, and that is much appreciated.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
A different kind of place
My new school is a world apart from last year's school. Of course, teaching will probably always involve more work than one can actually quite complete, always absorb all available time and attention. And we always have a share of students who arrive well below grade level and need catching up or have problems. Still - this is just so different!
The administrators are not only law-abiding and sane (which would have been quite enough this year), but also reasonable, professional, competent, kind and thoughtful. Decisions made make sense in educational terms. Teachers are treated with respect. Students are spoken about with compassion and hope. When I see my principal, VP or math department head in the halls my first impulse is, weirdly, to run over and hug them (which, of course, I never do). Such strange reactions may seem less odd given how everyone in the building used to react to the voice or presence of my principal of last year: students would scamper off, disappearing around corners, hiding out in bathrooms or classrooms. Teachers would tighten up, set up blank faces and walk away as rapidly as would seem safe for avoiding attention... When I meet my current VP in the halls in the evenings or during weekends she'll tell me to go home and make sure I don't work too hard. Last year's principal would barge into classrooms and reprimand teachers in front of all the students for not having completed impossible tasks. My current school has as a stated goal of the year to improve in the area of helping struggling students to succeed. Last year's principal told the teachers explicitly that the lower-track students were there "to pay the bills" and advised us not to spend too much energy on them. And so forth. I love my new administration.
Student behavior is also incomparably different. I can identify with Ben Chun's amazed reaction to the fact that his students arrived in class equipped with pencils and paper, and that they would without further ado proceed to use these items to produce writing when asked to do so. That really boggles your mind after you've spent so much energy through a whole year on failing to get students to do this. Other strange behaviors include a homework completion rate of above 90%, an ability to stay more or less on task for 85 minutes straight, and the fact that they will actually allow you several sentences worth of time to explain the rationale for a policy they have objections to - and then accept the policy as a result of the explanation. That feeling you have when you brace yourself to lift something heavy, and then end up recoiling and practically losing your balance because it isn't? I've had that so many times this semester.
Not that things are perfect. I still have occasional classes going off track, and the Friday freshman group from 1:30-3:00 is a challenge. But overall classes are going well, and it's not because I have magically become a better teacher over the summer. That is, I am teaching better, but not due to any dramatic improvements in personality or capacity or wisdom over the break. Rather, the students arrive with fewer issues, fewer inner distractions and distress, less reason to be angry. And if they do have a bad day, we have two counselors - both wonderful people - that they can speak with. A student who appears troubled can get a pass from a teacher to visit a counselor, and the kid generally arrives back in class much more collected and calm 15 minutes later. At my previous school kids could have had a shooting in the family over the weekend and there would be no help for them at school. Small wonder their minds were not on their math classes.
Another strange thing: There are two music teachers and one arts teacher here. So in the teacher lunch room you can actually hear discussions about arts pedagogy and music instruction. That's new and different and wonderful, too.
My new Math Department is fantastic. The tiny PreAlgebra group is taught by a Religion teacher that I haven't talked much with yet. The two other full-time Math teachers - wow. They both have actual degrees in math, and have taught for more than 7 years apiece. They're naturally excited about math in all forms, love upper division math and can do great things with graphing calculators. They also are very interested in and knowledgable about pedagogy and learning theory. And they're deeply committed to helping struggling students through their courses, putting in at least 5 hours of tutoring per week (I'm sure one of them may do close to 10 hours many weeks). I recently observed these two women run into each other in the staff room after 4 pm on a Thursday and start talking about one student who had failed Geometry last year but was doing so much better this year. Then they got completely absorbed in a discussion about just why students tended to display a particular misconception when doing a certain kind of Calculus problem. I don't teach Calculus and just listened, enjoying the idea that I get to work with people like this.
Anecdotal comparisons between this school and last year's school could continue, and the contrast is interesting in a way. But as the positive shock is wearing off, thinking about math instruction is taking the place of reacting to the constant ringing of the moral alarm system (Beep! Beep! This is wrong! This can't be happening! Beep! That's lying! That's unfair! That will positively hurt the students! But...! Beep! How can anyone possibly be getting away with this?! Beep!) Without this noise, the topics I want to discuss are different. In accordance with this shift in attention and focus, I'm planning to pretty much abandon this blog for Coffee and Graph Paper. To those of you who have been reading until now - and to Dan in particular - thanks for listening :) Your kind interest was encouraging.
The administrators are not only law-abiding and sane (which would have been quite enough this year), but also reasonable, professional, competent, kind and thoughtful. Decisions made make sense in educational terms. Teachers are treated with respect. Students are spoken about with compassion and hope. When I see my principal, VP or math department head in the halls my first impulse is, weirdly, to run over and hug them (which, of course, I never do). Such strange reactions may seem less odd given how everyone in the building used to react to the voice or presence of my principal of last year: students would scamper off, disappearing around corners, hiding out in bathrooms or classrooms. Teachers would tighten up, set up blank faces and walk away as rapidly as would seem safe for avoiding attention... When I meet my current VP in the halls in the evenings or during weekends she'll tell me to go home and make sure I don't work too hard. Last year's principal would barge into classrooms and reprimand teachers in front of all the students for not having completed impossible tasks. My current school has as a stated goal of the year to improve in the area of helping struggling students to succeed. Last year's principal told the teachers explicitly that the lower-track students were there "to pay the bills" and advised us not to spend too much energy on them. And so forth. I love my new administration.
Student behavior is also incomparably different. I can identify with Ben Chun's amazed reaction to the fact that his students arrived in class equipped with pencils and paper, and that they would without further ado proceed to use these items to produce writing when asked to do so. That really boggles your mind after you've spent so much energy through a whole year on failing to get students to do this. Other strange behaviors include a homework completion rate of above 90%, an ability to stay more or less on task for 85 minutes straight, and the fact that they will actually allow you several sentences worth of time to explain the rationale for a policy they have objections to - and then accept the policy as a result of the explanation. That feeling you have when you brace yourself to lift something heavy, and then end up recoiling and practically losing your balance because it isn't? I've had that so many times this semester.
Not that things are perfect. I still have occasional classes going off track, and the Friday freshman group from 1:30-3:00 is a challenge. But overall classes are going well, and it's not because I have magically become a better teacher over the summer. That is, I am teaching better, but not due to any dramatic improvements in personality or capacity or wisdom over the break. Rather, the students arrive with fewer issues, fewer inner distractions and distress, less reason to be angry. And if they do have a bad day, we have two counselors - both wonderful people - that they can speak with. A student who appears troubled can get a pass from a teacher to visit a counselor, and the kid generally arrives back in class much more collected and calm 15 minutes later. At my previous school kids could have had a shooting in the family over the weekend and there would be no help for them at school. Small wonder their minds were not on their math classes.
Another strange thing: There are two music teachers and one arts teacher here. So in the teacher lunch room you can actually hear discussions about arts pedagogy and music instruction. That's new and different and wonderful, too.
My new Math Department is fantastic. The tiny PreAlgebra group is taught by a Religion teacher that I haven't talked much with yet. The two other full-time Math teachers - wow. They both have actual degrees in math, and have taught for more than 7 years apiece. They're naturally excited about math in all forms, love upper division math and can do great things with graphing calculators. They also are very interested in and knowledgable about pedagogy and learning theory. And they're deeply committed to helping struggling students through their courses, putting in at least 5 hours of tutoring per week (I'm sure one of them may do close to 10 hours many weeks). I recently observed these two women run into each other in the staff room after 4 pm on a Thursday and start talking about one student who had failed Geometry last year but was doing so much better this year. Then they got completely absorbed in a discussion about just why students tended to display a particular misconception when doing a certain kind of Calculus problem. I don't teach Calculus and just listened, enjoying the idea that I get to work with people like this.
Anecdotal comparisons between this school and last year's school could continue, and the contrast is interesting in a way. But as the positive shock is wearing off, thinking about math instruction is taking the place of reacting to the constant ringing of the moral alarm system (Beep! Beep! This is wrong! This can't be happening! Beep! That's lying! That's unfair! That will positively hurt the students! But...! Beep! How can anyone possibly be getting away with this?! Beep!) Without this noise, the topics I want to discuss are different. In accordance with this shift in attention and focus, I'm planning to pretty much abandon this blog for Coffee and Graph Paper. To those of you who have been reading until now - and to Dan in particular - thanks for listening :) Your kind interest was encouraging.
Classroom Decorations
A large number of my classroom decorations this year were simply snagged from other blogs. Neil Winton and Paul Williams kindly gave permission to use their photos for classroom posters, and here's what that ended up looking like (through the MacBook camera lens, so the image quality is what it is).
I'm teaching at a Catholic school this year, and Neil's beautiful images fit underneath a crucifix stuck to my back classroom wall that I felt a little awkward about. The series of photos, with the reflections of cathedral windows in the child's eyes in the last slide, did nicely - and I've no idea what else could have gone up there. The white background to the photos also fits well with the brown and black of the surroundings, making the white function more like an actual color rather than as blank space, if that makes any sense. In the morning, sunlight enters from a window just to the right of this wall.
Finding a background for Paul's images was tricky. I thought black would be the only good choice, except for the fact that this classroom has blackboard (yes - real, old-style black blackboard with chalk!) on three walls, so that there is already a lot of black in there. The arts teacher recommended this mint green, however, and that worked. Still think I'll change this wall somehow when I get time, which won't be any time soon, but for now this is what it looks like.
The third wall has a fast and dirty version of Dan Greene's idea. One student studying the poster thought "get rich" should be included as a separate item, without any qualifying additions, so that is chalked in to the right.
The text on green and yellow paper are the objectives for Algebra, with the pink arrow indicating where we are now. The row runs along the whole wall. The purpose was mainly to put some color up there to contrast with the ubiquitous brown and black. I do like the historical feel to the classroom deriving from the dark wood, tan walls, brown floor, and old-style blackboards and windows with irregular glass - but it is a little drab for a high school room.
I guess it would be good to have more actual math on the walls. But one of the humanities teachers who wandered in expressed that this was the most "human" math classroom she'd seen (whatever that means), and I'm happy enough with it for now.
Anyway, great thanks to all these bloggers who contributed ideas for decorating a blank classroom in just a few days!
Update: Would be nice if Blogger's preview looked just a little like the published version!
I'm teaching at a Catholic school this year, and Neil's beautiful images fit underneath a crucifix stuck to my back classroom wall that I felt a little awkward about. The series of photos, with the reflections of cathedral windows in the child's eyes in the last slide, did nicely - and I've no idea what else could have gone up there. The white background to the photos also fits well with the brown and black of the surroundings, making the white function more like an actual color rather than as blank space, if that makes any sense. In the morning, sunlight enters from a window just to the right of this wall.
Finding a background for Paul's images was tricky. I thought black would be the only good choice, except for the fact that this classroom has blackboard (yes - real, old-style black blackboard with chalk!) on three walls, so that there is already a lot of black in there. The arts teacher recommended this mint green, however, and that worked. Still think I'll change this wall somehow when I get time, which won't be any time soon, but for now this is what it looks like.
The third wall has a fast and dirty version of Dan Greene's idea. One student studying the poster thought "get rich" should be included as a separate item, without any qualifying additions, so that is chalked in to the right.
The text on green and yellow paper are the objectives for Algebra, with the pink arrow indicating where we are now. The row runs along the whole wall. The purpose was mainly to put some color up there to contrast with the ubiquitous brown and black. I do like the historical feel to the classroom deriving from the dark wood, tan walls, brown floor, and old-style blackboards and windows with irregular glass - but it is a little drab for a high school room.
I guess it would be good to have more actual math on the walls. But one of the humanities teachers who wandered in expressed that this was the most "human" math classroom she'd seen (whatever that means), and I'm happy enough with it for now.
Anyway, great thanks to all these bloggers who contributed ideas for decorating a blank classroom in just a few days!
Update: Would be nice if Blogger's preview looked just a little like the published version!
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