Tuesday's Gone

Train roll on, on down the line,
Won't you please take me far away?

-- Opening lines of "Tuesday's Gone," by Lynyrd Skynyrd

So the situation is this: at least 20% of my students are ESE (i.e., special needs) or ESOL (non-native English speakers). Statistically speaking, 50% of my students won't graduate, and a lot of them already know who they are, because they're juniors or seniors, re-taking Algebra II and / or Geometry. They believe they can't do this work, because they've tried before and failed (or not tried and failed...), and they'd rather be anywhere on earth but the math class.

I gave a very, very basic Algebra I skills assessment today, and the median score was 7 out of 20. Meaning that, if I were teaching Algebra I and grading the way it's presumably supposed to be graded, roughly 70% of my class would fail. Not just fail Algebra I. But fail the early, basic elements of Algebra I. Algebra I. Unfortunately, I'm teaching Algebra II and Geometry, which means they not only have already passed Algebra I, they NEED Algebra I as the foundation on which to build the stuff I'm presumably trying to teach them. It's absolutely no wonder why I'm having difficulty holding their attention -- the moment I put an equation on the board with a variable in it, they're lost.

OK, that's a reality I need to deal with. I can deal with the skills issue. I can drill, I can do mini/focus lessons on Algebra I skills, I can hold after-school help sessions (not that anyone showed up when I offered today)... whatever. But I can't do that stuff if the people who are bored or uninterested or completely lost are disrupting the rest of the class.

I decided today that the main thing I need to do is to look at every new day as a new opportunity to get it right.