Back again!

It's been ages since I wrote here. No wonder I only have 2 followers. I will try to be more consistent for a while.

I was a bit depressed about all this teaching thing I've gotten myself into. The school where I was teaching last year had to close because there weren't enough students - but those 100 students we had really needed our school, because they just couldn't manage the impersonal environment of 40 kids in a classroom and thousands of kids in the school yard during break. My facilities were terrible, but I loved finding materials to be able to do science in a combined music room/girl's gym (shared with another teacher.) The occasional fingers finding keys on the piano was the worst disturbance. Not being able to lock doors and keep my materials there was an inconvenience. Watching kids enjoying science made it all worth while.

Then another summer went by where I was reading up on all my subjects, and picking up a new one, Earth Science, but no jobs. Finally a charter that had turned me down this summer, because I didn't have Earth Science, called me and needed me, because the young man they'd hired skipped out after 3 weeks. But they expected me to teach all 4 of my sciences with 5 preps for 7 classes, 4 of which were 8th and 9th graders, which I found more than I'd bargained for. I bought 5 cardtables and 20 chairs for the classroom, so they would be able to work in groups on a flat surface. When I arrived the classroom was equipped with desk-chairs all in rows. How can you learn science that way? I managed for 3 weeks - until we were to leave on an already planned trip to India and I knew they had a good sub ready for them - and quit.

I went into teaching because I know a lot and have lots of ideas and love it when students love it, too. I can put up with kids who can't sit still, or are a little disruptive, because I've figured out that putting them in small groups with good learning and discovery activities keeps them busy and learning. At the last school the kids destroyed things. (One threw an egg we were using for osmosis experiment at the periodic table and enjoyed watching it drip down. I was outside dosing out vinegar I didn't want to smell up the classroom, because there was no ventilation.) The school's response was detention or expulsion, so I was always missing 2-3 expelled kids in my classes, who then couldn't make up the activity learning we were doing in class, and got more disruptive. I can't help but believe that kids respond to the confrontational punishment with more disruption. They came to accept it, and didn't realize that I don't want confrontations, I want learning.

I've been taking more courses, and reading more books. I will try to write more about them here in the future. Happy holidays!

Summer Reading

I've had lots of time to read this summer (also to knit and to swim.) I thought someone might be interested in the great books I've found.I am a member of a number of email lists which have asked about summer reading ideas, and I jumped at the chance when I read about books that seemed useful.

For new teachers (like me!)

One of the best books I found about classroom management is K. Cushman's Fires in the Bathroom, which is advice by high school students for new well-meaning teachers, who don't always get it right.
 Learning Outside The Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution is a completely different book - written by 2 students with ADHD who finally figured out how to get their life together to graduate from college. It is a real eye-opener for teachers.
Along the same line is one of the books that is waiting for me: Fair Isn't Always Equal, which I am looking forward to reading.
I was taking a class this summer about teaching  students who are gifted and/or have a learning disability. One of the books I read for my paper was When Gifted Kids Don't Have All the Answers: How to Meet Their Social and Emotional Needs. It helped explain a lot about the problems low achieving but smart kids are having in school.
Since I just got myself a Kindle, I decided to read a couple of books on it. The Accidental Teacher by Eric Mandel tells his story of trying to teach English with no credential and little support. Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Your Students By Their Brains by LouAnne Johnson.
Unfortunately most of these books are by English teachers, which is often a different kind of teaching. (I guess English teachers like to write more than math teachers!) So I am very happy to have found Coach G's Teaching Tips, since he is a math teacher.

More books!

I've also been reading about chemistry, biology, physics and math, so I guess there will be at least one more summer reading blog coming up.

Engaging a classroom

One of the questions I get asked every time during a job interview is what my version of classroom management is. I hate that term, because it leaves the students out of the equation. I manage, you be managed.
As far as I can see, if the students are engaged in meaningful, sense-making learning experiences, a good classroom experience just happens.
I just got a new Teaching Tips from Coach G today, where he provides a couple of suggestions that I had learned previously, but they are worth repeating, since I'm not, unfortunately, practicing them yet. In a tip called Replacing Classroom Chaos with Control, he recommends using "data" to identify problems that have already arisen. This is data from a coach or peer who observes your classroom, or from a video.
Among the solutions are:

• Always have some easily understood, but somewhat time-consuming, activity on the board when students come in, so you have time for taking attendance and whatever has to be done in the beginning. Don't give students a chance to get going on something else, but give them the opportunity to be quiet with math for a few minutes in the beginning of class, to get focused on what will be happening during the hour.
• Although I want students to learn by doing, in cooperative learning groups, there is still a need for up-front, whole class teaching. I discovered during student teaching that it is extremely important to face the class as much as possible, keeping your eyes moving. That means using overheads, document cameras, or pre-prepared slides or activities on an Electronic White Board, so you don't have your back to the class while you're writing things.
• On the other hand, if things are pre-prepared, be sure to give students enough time to read and take notes from what is there. My student teaching master teacher would display on the white board, and then write on the overhead as he was talking about it - although that makes the students look two different places at once.

Other things that I have found helpful or have inspired me:

• Equity sticks or cards, one for each student, color-coded by class, so you can keep track of them. Students know that they will be called on. If you replace the cards at the back of the pack, then everyone knows they will be called on. On the other hand, they also figure they won't be called on again. So occasionally shuffle the cards, so students get called on more than once. Cards are great, but I found them clumsy to work with, so popsicle-sticks might be a better solution.
• I expect that group boxes of materials are common-place in elementary school, but I think they would be great in high school, too, so you don't have to take time handing out rulers, markers, scissors, etc. to groups. I've bought my boxes, but not having a class, I haven't gotten around to equipping them.
• My master teacher in preteaching discovered that we (at least I) kept looking for my markers, equity sticks or whatever, so she gave us all a simple canvas tool belt filled with supplies as a getting started gift. It has not been in use yet, but Coach G suggested the same thing. Don't waste time looking for stuff during class. Make sure that everything you will need is available - either in group boxes or your tool belt, or somewhere else front and center.
• Seat students in primarily in cooperative learning groups, but angle the groups so that everyone can see up front. I've observed classes with groups, where some kids had their backs to the board. Either they had to turn around to look at the board (strain on necks) or they just looked in front of them, and missed things. It might be possible to work out a way to quickly move the desks into "looking front" position, and then back to groups.
• As Coach G suggests, teach only long enough that you know that at least one person in each group "gets it." Then let the groups figure out themselves how to make sense of it all. And be sure to hold every member of the group responsible for understanding, so the group ensures that everyone gets it.
• Of course, while the students are learning in groups, you are working the classroom, trying to position yourself so that you still have an eye on everyone while you work with a group, asking questions, giving tips or leads, but not giving the answer! You have to be ready to move on quickly if need arises.
• Some teachers change the groups regularly, so the class gets to know each other - or to avoid conflicts arising in groups. It seems to me that Groups that function well together and learns well should be able to stay together. Disfunctional groups may need help to learn to work together. It takes time to learn to cooperate effectively.

And again, I look forward to the not impossible situation that I will have my own classroom soon to practice what I blog about!

Teaching at last!

I finally decided that I had to get into a classroom or go crazy, so I accepted the offer from Claremont Graduate School to become an unpaid student teacher instead. They were absolutely amazed that there are still about 6 of us with math credentials who did not land a job.

I am teaching at a good school with a great Master Teacher. I am observing and teaching one class of seniors who need to pass the California HS Exit Exam (CAHSEE) to be able to graduate, plus 3 honors Algebra II classes, which is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum. The teacher also has a class in AP Calculus BC, which I am technically qualified to teach, but I'm learning more just watching him teach!

Obviously the part you can't learn from a book is classroom management. This is much harder here than when I taught high school English and German in Denmark 15-20 years ago.) I don't know if Danish students have become like American students, or if the American students are just so much more immature than Danish students. I had reasonable success back then treating them as young adults; I just happened to know more than they did about certain things. We weren't even allowed to contact parents outside of parent consultation nights. Here it's expected. Admittedly, our students were on average 1-2 years older than in American high schools. Does that make that much difference?

One older teacher who is retiring this year told me that he thought the HS students now act like Middle School kids a generation ago (despite early onset of puberty.)  Is it because of parents who coddle kids? (I intimidated something like that in a teacher course and one parent immediately defended her parenting, saying that times were very different now.) I think the difference now is that we hear about every single incident that happens anywhere, so the world seems more dangerous. But I think it is more dangerous if the kids don't learn to stand on their own 2 feet, to take responsibility for their own actions (and learning!) and learn to think for themselves, rather than just think in opposition to adults.

At any rate, I have to learn to wait for 5 very long seconds to get the class quiet. I observed my Master Teacher doing it (after he had timed my "5-seconds" to 2!) 5 seconds is very long! But the kids get the message that you mean it. So I have to learn! I have also switched from writing on the white board (I keep saying "blackboard!") to using the overhead, because then I am facing the students. The Master Teacher uses "Equity Cards" to call on students, which I try to remember to do. I've got to learn their names - a total of about 115 students, not counting the Calculus class! In Denmark I never had more than 100. There is an electronic board in the classroom, which we can use to display PowerPoints, use the document camera, and a lot of fun things I hope I learn. But for the time being, it seems to be best to be facing the students! Once I learn Management, then I can try the fun stuff!

Movie classrooms

We've just watched two very different movies about classrooms.

The 1988 movie Stand and Deliver stars Edward James Olmos playing a (real) high school teacher who'd quit his computer job to teach at the largely Latino Garfield High School in Los Angeles. He manages to turn around math teaching at the high school so that many of his students pass AP Calculus. In the movie this happened in a year, in real life, it took several and was a struggle. In a 2002 article in Reason Stand and Deliver Revisited we can read about what happened when the teacher finally got tired of the odds against him, not because of the students, but because of school bureaucracy, envious colleagues and whatever else can cause a teacher to burn out.

The other is the excellent French movie Entre les murs (The Class in English,) which takes place in a middle school in a very similar location in a present day Paris suburb. Pretty much all the students are either first or second generation immigrants, from a wide variety of countries, mostly north African. Their teacher (the actual author of an autobiographic novel of the same name) does a remarkable job treating his students as people, allowing them to talk and ask questions in his attempts to bring them into mainstream French life, which they know (and he probably does too) is not very realistic. But toward the end we discover that he hasn't really been listening as much as we thought, and he makes a fatal error of judgement to save his skin. He has favorites in the class as well as at least one student, the target of his tragic error, whom he (and maybe the school staff as a whole) has failed. Manola Dargis wrote an excellent review of the movie Learning to Be the Future of France in the New York Times, from which the picture above was borrowed.

Both teachers are working against enormous odds and both ultimately fail because those odds are too high. The French teacher has much more support from his colleagues than the American one, but in the film (at least) the backup support of counselors, tutors and the like is sorely lacking and you are left wondering why they couldn't prevent the ensuing tragedy (of a lost future, not a life.)

I watched both films with a new-found interest in how teachers manage difficult classrooms, and was impressed with both teachers for treating the students much more as fellow human beings than in the stories I've been reading about American classrooms.

For example, I recently received some helpful guidelines about becoming a substitute teacher which were all about this thing called "Classroom Management." It told me to ensure silence and raising hands, to not turn my back on the class, move around to keep my eye on everything the little perps are doing, and pounce before they get me (my exaggeration.)

I didn't need to teach like that when I taught in Denmark. I hope I won't have to here either. I have collected some books to read about this topic, which I will review as I finish them.