Reality Bites

It's incredibly hard. And I'm totally exhausted and overwhelmed. I feel as if I'm trying to lay down track in front of a freight train, currently barreling down the track I've already laid. It's about 100 yards behind me, traveling at about 80 miles an hour. Judgment day is coming, and right soon.

I got a classroom visit today from my Assistant Principal, and she didn't say much of anything in the 20 minutes she sat and observed. She then left and went to Ms. CowCulus's room. As noted earlier, Ms. CowCulus is the head of the math department, and is, I am confident, a kindergarten teacher reincarnated as a high school math teacher. She's very good -- she was MHS's teacher of the year recently, but her room is awash in posters and sayings and cutouts and word walls and decorative borders and cute wall hangings that have pockets for the calculators the students use and... and... and... So the AP (that's Assistant Principal to you -- public schools apparently acronym-ize absolutely everything, then change all the acronyms roughly every 4 years, just to keep everyone confused. Remember ESL (English as a Second Language)? Now it's ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Language) and occasionally ELL (English Language Learners). Anyway, the AP says to Ms. CowCulus... "Maybe you could help out Mr. Math Guy. His room needs a little help." For what it's worth, Ms. CowCulus later told me the AP didn't come down too hard on me, but I'm pretty sure the AP was trying to avoid piling on -- I'm already a haggard, twitchy wreck.

The stuff we have to do to meet state requirements, in the way of lesson plans, standards-based learning / testing, etc., is a nightmare, if you don't have a base from which to build, which of course I don't. I really can't do justice to all the paperwork and planning that I'm obligated to do. But the coldest slap in the face has been the amazing lack of math skills among my Algebra II and Geometry students. Algebra I, I could kind of understand, but these kids have presumably all passed Algebra I. The Algebra II kids have also passed Geometry (except for one young lady who is a senior and failed Geometry, and now has the great good fortune to have me for both Geometry and Algebra II. She told me on the first day that she hates math and she is terrible at it, and that nothing I say is going to convince her otherwise. Perhaps if she actually paid attention in class she might get more out of it, though...

Meanwhile, I had a kid yesterday look at me with a completely innocent, totally bewildered look when I asked her to finish solving the equation -2 + 7. It was as if I had asked her to add e raised to the i-th power and pi raised to the square root of 5. I spent an hour today going over the equation of a line. Example: "Okay, class, y=mx+b is the slope-intercept form: m is the slope, and b is the y-intercept. Now, suppose I tell you that the slope of the line is 3, and the y-intercept is 4. What is the equation of the line?" Blank stares. "Okay, well, in this equation, y=mx+b, m is the slope. So if the slope is 3, we get y=_x + b. What goes in the blank?" And so on. I am okay with going slowly through things, and explaining them in a number of different ways so that perhaps one will click. But while I'm explaining how to find the slope from two points ('rise over run') for the 7th time in the 6th different way, what are the kids who got it the first time doing? Aren't I doing the ones who already get this stuff a disservice by holding them back from learning more?

Anyway, it's an adventure. Each day, the first period is a real struggle, and I find my way a little bit better throughout the day. Still, I wonder if anyone will actually learn any geometry this year.