It Takes a Village Idiot

My tenure as a Pre-IB teacher ended today, not with a bang but a whimper.  The story I've been told (and I believe, for the most part) is that my "demotion" from pre-IB has to do with student and parent complaints about my teaching rather than my outburst in the faculty meeting a few weeks ago.  I can live with that.

My teaching philosophy tends to be "If you're willing to work at it, I can not only teach you a considerable amount of valuable mathematics, I can also show you some of the beauty of the subject along the way." It isn't "I consider it my responsibility to find a way to teach you the bare minimum of mathematics you must know to pass the state-mandated tests, whether or not you're willing to cooperate in that attempt."  That second philosophy is a great one to have -- possibly even the only appropriate one to have -- when teaching a standard course at a school such as the one at which I find myself.  The low-level kids who need to pass the state-mandated test to get their high school diploma are not now, nor ever will be, interested in the beauty of mathematics.  The ship upon which travels their capacity to absorb any but the most rudimentary mathematical concept has long since sailed.  They need a teacher who cares about them, individually, and wants to help by making the math they must learn as digestible as possible. It is a noble calling, and I admire the teachers who heed that call.  But it is a cold and barren field in which to toil for someone who loves mathematics as I do.

I was enormously excited when I learned I'd be teaching all honors courses, including an AP class and two Pre-IB classes.  Here, I believed -- particularly in the Pre-IB courses -- I could loose these students on the subject while acting as tour guide, pointing out surprising depths lurking just beneath the simplest concepts, taking short excursions onto strange and esoteric landscapes (Mandelbrot sets! Riemann manifolds! Mobius bands and Klein bottles!), mapping out tougher but more beautiful trails for the strongest of the group to explore on their own, and generally stoking the fire of their natural curiosity in the hope that mathematics would captivate them as it has me.

In the real world, my expectation that they would take responsibility for their learning -- seeking tutoring when they were confused about something, getting together with other Pre-IB students to help each other struggle through difficult concepts, and going back to the textbook to teach themselves the material they hadn't understood in class -- was met with the reality that their standard reaction to adversity is to find someone to blame, then complain about that person to everyone they can, in the hope (justified, as it turns out) that their complaints will eliminate their adversity by removing the person responsible for it from their path.

It shouldn't be surprising that students complain about the difficulty of their path.  It is, I believe, our job as educators to look for the greater good -- funnel the students who can't or won't make the required effort into other, less challenging courses; inform, as often as necessary, the students who remain (and their parents) that success in the program will require dedicated effort; insist that the resources the kids need (supplies, tutoring help, places for small student groups to meet) be made available; and most importantly, hold teachers, students, parents and administrators to a higher standard of education for these kids, which will necessitate a more difficult path.  In this way, we could be providing our best students (most of whom do not have the option to attend a magnet or private school) the opportunity to truly excel both in high school and beyond.  Why shouldn't our students go on to study engineering at MIT, or music at Indiana, or marine biology at UC San Diego, or economics at Carnegie Mellon?

Instead, parents, school administrators and, I am given to believe, the district honchos in charge of IB, don't want a tough program for elite students.  They want an elite (i.e., high prestige) program that affords its enrollees wonderful benefits without requiring any payment of dues. Unfortunately, I believe all of those constituencies will discover relatively quickly that this is one more arena in which the aphorism "No pain, no gain" is apropos.

It is the students who could have scaled mountains but were directed only to molehills who will suffer.

Weather Man

Many years ago, I had a fascinating conversation with Walt, a friend who worked in marketing for a cigarette company.  (This was back when working for a company providing legal, but politically incorrect, products was a matter of personal conscience, rather than an invitation to be the target of hate mail, death threats, physical harassment and occasionally even violence.)  He told me a story about the company's research department presenting an advertising research study and concluding Ad A was better than Ad B because of its higher recall scores, higher favorable ratings, etc. Walt stopped them, and said he wanted to see the scores of the "Marlboro Man" ads using the same methodology.  (Marlboro wasn't a brand owned by Walt's company, but it went from an also-ran in the category to a dominant number 1 when Philip Morris introduced the now iconic rugged cowboy image.) Turns out, Marlboro's ad scored lower than either A or B, which was what Walt expected.  He told the research people that, until they began basing their conclusions on the results of studies in which Marlboro was the clear winner, those conclusions could not possibly be considered reliable.

The point here is this: so far this year, I've given my kids 11 state-, district- or school-mandated tests (2 more scheduled next week) so that we have pre- and interim-assessments on our kids, in order to better guide our instruction so that they will perform better on the one that actually counts (sort of), at the end of the year.  But no one is able to determine whether the assessments actually measure anything of value, and even if they do, whether the results can be effectively used to improve the kids' test grades on the end of year assessment, and even if it does, whether that translates to improved quality of education.  Of course, on a macro level, only one thing is absolutely crystal clear:  whatever we've been doing hasn't been working.

Everyone, it seems, understands public education is in deep trouble.  From teachers in classrooms to principals in schools to Superintendents of county school systems to the President of the United States, each individual in that chain cares about, and is actively working on, improving education.  This has probably been true since 1647 (the year Massachusetts began requiring towns of at least 50 families to hire school teachers to educate their children), but has certainly been true for the past 30 years.  For the most part, these people are well-intentioned and reasonably bright.  Sure, there are snakes in the woodpile, but no more, and no more venomous, than the snakes in woodpiles elsewhere in America.  So why has American public education been declining rapidly, by all accounts, and reached a point where America's students are near the bottom of virtually every list of industrialized countries in terms of math and science skills, reading comprehension, and probably several other measures I haven't stumbled across in my quest to find data on the subject?

The issue cannot be money.  According to TIMSS (Trends in Mathematics and Science Study), the US is educating its students in mathematics on a par with the Russian Federation, Slovenia, Lithuania and the Czech Republic.  And while our spending on public education as a percent of GDP is a "middle of the pack" 5.85%, it is roughly equal to Slovenia's 6.02% and well ahead of Lithuania's 5.18%, the Czech Republic's 4.55% and Russia's 3.67%. Japan, which kills the US (and everyone else) on all these lists of best educated students, spends less than Russia on a GDP basis.

Here's one possibility.  I work in District A.  District A is one of (if not the) worst districts in the state, as measured by drop-out rates and state-mandated standardized test scores.  An adjoining district, cleverly named District B, is the best district in the state on these measures.  Now, admittedly, District B is much richer than District A, and that's always the rationale one hears when people discuss the stark difference between the districts.  But I'm not buying it.  Yes, I think parental involvement is hugely important, and without question, parents in poorer districts are less involved (mostly because they're running as fast as they can just to keep food on the table, or the kid is living with his older sister and her boyfriend, or a dozen other reasons that are money-driven, not concern-driven).  But I teach honors classes this year, and the parents are very involved, for the most part, but their kids are still not doing as well as anyone would like.

However, there's another phenomenon that is very different between the districts that I believe has been completely overlooked, but may be enormously important.  District A has 17 high schools, of which 3 are academic magnet programs.  Those 3 academic magnets are very successful - on a grading scale, they're all A's - whereas of the remaining 14 high schools, 9 are D's and F's, and the other 5 are C's.  District B has 6 high schools, none of which are academic magnets, but one of which is a "technical" high school, where kids who are not academically inclined go to learn the standard subjects, but also to be trained in culinary arts, automobile repair, HVAC maintenance, etc.  Essentially, it's a trade school. Of the 6 high schools in District B, 5 are A's and 1 is an F.  Even the F school - the trade school, of course - is comfortable with its place in the hierarchy.  They understand that their students will not perform well on the standardized tests, but they make an effort to prepare the kids to do well enough, and to give them skills they can use when they finish high school.  So about 85% of the kids in District B get a very solid high school education in a traditional academic setting, and the other 15% get a decent education and some skills.  Whereas in District A, about 15% of kids get a top quality high school education and 85% get at best a mediocre education and no particular skills.

The 5 "A" schools in District B have very high academic expectations - higher than I can even dream about in District A.  I think it's worth looking at the "technical" vs. "academic magnet" high school model to see if one of them is better for the overall educational level in the district.  My money's on "technical."

Turns out, sleep IS important.

I lost my cool on Wednesday, and yelled at the principal.  In a faculty meeting.  And used the f-bomb.  Truth is, it had virtually nothing to do with the subject we were, um, discussing, as I suppose these things usually don't... I was frustrated with my classes, hadn't slept more than about 3 hours a night since Sunday, and troubled by a number of other things that aren't going the way I want them to.  Nothing big, just a bunch of minor annoyances.

One of my minor annoyances is that I don't feel we (the teachers) get very much support from our administration.    For example, this happened a couple of weeks ago:

I had a student transfer into my class about 2 or 3 weeks into the quarter, a few days before the first test.  He had (he claims) a 93 in the class he left, but I knew he hadn't taken any tests, so his 93 was in homework and classwork, which counts for only 20% of the grade.  Skipping to the end of the story, he failed my class miserably, by virtue of not doing any work and not passing any of several tests and retests.  When I told him he was going to fail, he said his 93 should be averaged in, to give him a good grade.  I explained that it didn't count for much, because the tests were weighted at 80%.  So he went first to the counselor to complain.  He then told his father I wasn't counting his transfer grade, and his father called the counselor.  After I explained to the counselor what was going on, she (I assume) told him he was out of luck.  So he went to the principal.  Now, at this point, if I'm the principal, my response to the kid is to say "I'll look into it," then actually have somebody look into it and get back to the kid with the answer.  But my principal walks out of his office with the kid in tow, tracks me down (on my planning period), and confronts me about it.  I was taken aback, but explained that when he transfered into my class, he hadn't taken any assessments, so his grade was just classwork and homework.  The principal then starts probing... "What about pre-assessments?  What did he get on the pre-assessments?"  I responded that I had no idea, but that he hadn't passed any of my actual assessments.  He left me with, "Well, you need to count pre-assessments if they help."

I later looked up the actual grade he had in his previous class (I'd assumed he was telling the truth and gave him a 100 homework grade rather than deal with further complaints, and because it didn't matter - he still flunked).  Turns out, his grade in the previous class was (wait for it...) "0."  He'd done nothing.

So a few days later I ran into the principal and told him I was a little upset with him confronting me with the kid at his side, and he said "Hey, I'm here for the kids.  It's all about the kids." He then went on to claim that once he heard my side of the story, he immediately turned to the kid and sided with me, which isn't the way I recall it happening.

This was, as lack of support goes, pretty minor, but indicative of the larger issue -- it feels to me that if there is a choice between the student's word and the teacher's, they go with the student's.  Moreover, all issues seem to me have the same solution:

Kids aren't paying attention?  The teacher isn't engaging the students well enough.  The teacher needs to work harder.
Kids are talking or texting in class?  The teacher hasn't made the policies and procedures clear enough. The teacher needs to work harder.
Kids aren't doing the work?  The teacher hasn't made the content relevant enough. The teacher needs to work harder.
Kids don't understand the material?  The teacher hasn't unpacked the content and chunked the learning effectively enough. The teacher needs to work harder.
I believe it was once the case that if a kid flunked a class, it was an indication the kid wasn't working hard enough.  Now, it's the teacher who isn't working hard enough.  The principal visited my room during my planning period about a week ago, and questioned me about the 14 kids in the pre-IB program I'd flunked.

Which is why I had been getting about 3 hours of sleep a night, and was cranky when my students didn't even make an effort to do the classwork I'd given them.  Which is why I should have stayed in my room, as I seriously considered doing, when the faculty meeting started.

Within 10 minutes, the principal was talking about teachers giving out too many hall passes, so I piped up with a "But Mr. Teacher, it's an emergency."  He responded "You'll just have to wait."  I piped up again with "But it's an emergency."  This continued for several iterations (with both of us getting more upset) until finally we're yelling at each other, and he yells (something to the effect of) "I can't do your job for you.  You have to have control of your classroom," while stabbing his finger my direction.  To which I responded (loudly) "So I'm begging you for help, and you're saying 'Fuck you, you're on your own.'"

At that point, he kicked me out of the room.  It remains to be seen what the fallout from this will be.  He can't fire me, but he can make life miserable.

Turns out, math isn't important.

An editorial, written by a professor emeritus of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago is running in McClatchy-owned newspapers today, and states that math's importance to the daily lives of Americans is overrated.  In fact, he claims, the attempt to make math seem essential is a marketing ploy by colleges to create and sell mathematics education programs.

He asks exactly the question my students ask, namely "How much math do you really need in everyday life?" and goes on to say you should not only ask yourself that question, but "the next 10 people you meet, say, your plumber, your lawyer, your grocer, your mechanic, your physician or even a math teacher."

I'll leave the "math teacher" issue aside, and address physicians for a moment.  Consider the following scenario, a standard of every intro probability and statistics course:

You suspect you may have a brain cloud, for which there is only one cure - jumping into a live volcano.  If you do in fact have a brain cloud, you will survive the jump, become perfectly healthy and live happily ever after with someone who looks remarkably like Meg Ryan.  If you do not, you will die a gruesome death. However, if you have a brain cloud but do not leap into the volcano, you will die an equally gruesome death within days.  So it is imperative you make the right decision, which means you need to know, as surely as possible, whether you have the brain cloud or not.

Fortunately, brain clouds are very rare - affecting only 1 in 1,000,000 people worldwide.  Moreover, there is a test for tomhanksiplexy (the technical name for brain cloud) which is accurate 99.9% of the time.  There are no other symptoms or indications of any kind (up until the moment of gruesome death, of course).

You go to a physician and take the test.  He comes back from the lab, sadly shaking his head, and tells you that you have a 99.9% chance of having a brain cloud, and should go jump in a volcano immediately.  Your response is to...

a) jump in a volcano.

b) decry the state of mathematics education in America, and wonder how anyone could imagine it's unimportant.

If you chose (a), you're not alone, but you are, in all likelihood, gruesomely dead.  In fact, you're in a mathematical hell crowded not only with high school dropouts, but the vast majority of physicians as well.

Since the test is 99.9% accurate, if 999,999,000 healthy people take it, 999,999 will have false positive results. (one tenth of one percent of 999,999,000 is 999,999).  If 1,000 people who have brain clouds take the test, 999 will have correct positive results.  So if 1,000,000,000 random people take the test (and 1 of every 1,000,000 has a brain cloud), there will be 1,000,998 positive results, of which 999 will be correct.  That's approximately a 0.000998 chance of having a brain cloud, given you have a positive result.  Said another way, that means there's a 99.9002% chance you DO NOT have a brain cloud, even if you have a positive test, which is accurate 99.9% of the time.

Nobody expects "the average" person to get that problem right.  But people have a right to expect that their physician, when reporting on the results of their most recent battery of tests, will understand what those tests do or do not "prove."  Most physicians cannot do that, because math education in America doesn't do a good enough job equipping our future physicians and lawyers and plumbers and grocers with the math and cognition skills to think through a problem like that.

Okay, maybe doctors need math, but surely not lawyers, right?  Here's the same problem in a courtroom:  In a town with two taxi companies, a woman saw a man rob a liquor store and jump into a cab at 8:07 PM on Tuesday night.  The witness testifies that the robber got into a Yellow Cab, which has 10% of the cabs in town; the Ocher Cab company has the rest. You've checked her ability to recognize the difference between the two cabs, and concluded she's accurate 80% of the time.  Based on this information, and assuming the witness is telling the truth as she knows it, what are the odds that the perpetrator got into a Yellow Cab?

At this point, my students tell me that if they are confronted with situations like these, they'll just hire someone who's good at math to give them the answer (which, as it turns out, is 50/50).  The problem is, they're confronted with these questions every day without ever knowing it.  The paper tells us that the number of dropouts in Home County has doubled every year since the consolidation in 1990.  No one bats an eye.  Store A provides a coupon good for an additional 25% off on pants already on sale for 30% off, whereas Store B has the same pants on sale for 50% off.  People who buy at Store A think they've saved money.  A group in art class makes a scale model of a building using the same materials they'll use for the one 10 times as tall, note that the model weighs 3 pounds, then are befuddled when 4 of them together can't lift the final project.

In early Mesopotamia, unscrupulous individuals would offer parcels of land for trade that had the same perimeter as the land they wanted, but much smaller area.  A knowledge of geometry was vital if you wanted to avoid being swindled.  Anyone who plays poker without knowing how to calculate rudimentary odds is giving away his money to those of us who believe math IS important in everyday life.  Buying a house or renting an apartment, buying or leasing a car, investing in stocks or savings bonds, choosing a line at the supermarket and a thousand other daily chores are easier and more likely to lead to the outcome you want if you are comfortable with and know how to use some relatively simple mathematics.

We're not teaching kids the Pythagorean Theorem because we believe they'll be in a situation someday where they will need to know the straight line distance between Juan's house and Julie's, which is 4 blocks east and 9 blocks north of Juan's.  We're teaching them those things because in their job as District Sales Rep for BigCo., Inc., they'll be much better salespeople if they have been trained to examine problems analytically, and look for solutions using the tools they have in their arsenal.  High school isn't a trade school.  They may never again, after high school, ponder the morality of Jean Valjean or the empathy of Atticus Finch.  They'll certainly never be quizzed on them.  But they WILL be better equipped to make judgments about criminal punishment and racial inequities – things they will certainly face in the real world.  A similar reality exists for mathematics education, even if some math professors haven't figured it out.

The Law is an Ass

In researching the title phrase to ensure I remembered it correctly, I discovered things about it I didn't know.  In fact, nearly everything I discovered was stuff I didn't know, so rather than write about the things that put me in mind of the phrase, I'm going to write about the phrase I was put in mind of.

For example, I thought it had been uttered by a lawyer.  And I thought it was in reference to some bitter result having turned on the unintended consequences of an ill-considered law.  In fact, it's much more interesting than that.  It's from Oliver Twist, and is said in response to the statement "the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction." The person to whom this statement is directed is unmercifully browbeaten by his domineering wife, and rejoins "If the law supposes that... the law is an ass - an idiot.  If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor."

I find that verbal exchange absurdly amusing.  I'm not sure why, but there it is.

Time is the fire in which we burn

I find myself, on an almost daily basis, choosing to take the time I have available to prepare what is required in order to satisfy administrative edicts, rather than prepare a better, more interesting, more involving lesson for my students.

This pisses me off.

First, let me be clear -- it isn't that I'm attempting to determine how to spend the 7.33 hours a day for which I am paid; that time and more is spent (a) teaching - 4.5 hours, (b) in mandatory meetings - 0.6 hours, (c) standing at my door between classes and walking my students to and from the lunchroom (both mandatory) - 0.25 hours, (d) maintaining the classroom (e.g., posting the mandatory agenda board, erasing the white boards in preparation for the next class, straightening desks) - 0.5 hours, (e) recording attendance and grades - 0.25 hours, (f) typing the three mandatory lesson plans per day (note: this isn't "preparing the lesson"... it's "typing the lesson plan") - 0.5 hours, (g) grading papers - 0.75 hours (note: I spend considerably more than 45 minutes grading papers; this is just my "planning period" time).

The time I'm talking about having to allocate to administrative edicts is (all or part of) the extra 3 to 4 hours a day I spend on school work during the week, or the 6 to 10 hours I spend each Saturday and Sunday on the weekends I'm not traveling to see my children.  I'm paid a little over $20 an hour for the time delineated in the previous paragraph; I'm unpaid for the time described in this one.

Don't get me wrong -- this isn't a request for pity.  I chose to take this job, knowing what it paid, and I choose to work the extra hours, knowing they're unpaid.  But I'm sitting here on a Sunday morning with 8 items on my agenda, in order of my estimate of their value to the education of the students in my class:

(1) designing an interesting, challenging, interactive game for my students to play in small groups that involves going to different stations in the room and solving problems like the ones they did so poorly on when taking their recent test. (I have the general concept, but I need to flesh it out.)

(2) using the "Jeopardy" PowerPoint shell to create an in-class review activity for the current module.

(3) planning the next two weeks of classes for each section, so that the students have an idea of what they'll be doing between now and the end of the quarter, and they'll be able to plan how they will bring their grades up prior to the first report card.

(4) writing and printing "scholarship warnings" for all of my students who currently have a D or F in my class.  This is somewhere between 50 and 70 students, because the most of them were taken by surprise by their first high school math test.  I guess middle school tests were absurdly easy.

(5) grading 5 classes' tests and putting them in the grade system.

(6) printing progress reports for all students so they know what grade they have and what they need to do to improve it.  Note:  they could go online for this information, but we're required to print the reports anyway.

(7) creating a "standards-based bulletin board" that shows students (who never look at it) how the project displayed on the board is graded, and what a good project would look like.

(8) creating "student-generated" charts.  There doesn't seem to be any other requirement for these charts, other than being student-generated.  I may have three students in first block tomorrow write "This is a chart generated by a student" on chart paper and hang those up.  But probably not.

Of course, it's extremely unlikely I'll get to all 8 things.  If I just got to the first 3, I'd feel pretty good.  Unfortunately, those 3 items are the three that my administration places no value on.  The other 5 are all items that will be checked on by my administration, and for which I will receive a poor evaluation should they be missing or incomplete.

I'm already tired, and it's only 10 AM.

But if you play Scrabble, you already knew...

TEACHER anagrams to CHEATER. According to an article in yesterday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, one hundred nine employees in the Atlanta school system, including 40 principals or other administrators, have been flagged for possible sanctions due to the widespread cheating scandal based on the 2009 CRCT (Georgia's acronym for the state-mandated testing I regularly refer to).  Of note, "many" of the schools involved performed dramatically worse on the 2010 CRCT, with failure rates of 2 - 4 times that of 2009.  Of the 109 employees flagged in Atlanta, 78 are from 12 schools.  All 12 of those principals have been reassigned, pending final state review and a decision on their certification.


One final note on the specifics of this story: the investigators presumably wanted to find out if teachers cheated.  There are several ways to cheat, including erasing wrong answers and filling in correct ones after the student has turned in the exam.  Another is to give correct answers to students during the test, or provide other assistance during the actual exam.  So of course, you'd want to interview a lot of kids to see if this kind of thing happened.  How many kids were interviewed? 12.  Of 292 total interviews, 12 were with kids. Hmmm....

"The commission's report cited no evidence that either Hall (the Atlanta schools Superintendent), who created an aggressive accountability system tied to test scores, or other top officials orchestrated or condoned cheating."


I have two issues here... first, I am deeply troubled by the fact that nearly 70 teachers in one school district are highly likely to have cheated.  I don't know how many teachers there are in total in Atlanta's elementary and middle schools, but 70 has to be a non-trivial percentage of them.  And that's just the ones who cheated blatantly enough to get caught.  And of course it doesn't include the ones who would have cheated but didn't get the opportunity or didn't need to because the kids they proctored were good enough on their own.  I thought teachers were the ones who abhorred cheaters...


Second, I find it laughable to suggest, as the quote above does, that the Superintendent has no culpability in this affair.  I don't think she encouraged cheating; I think, if asked directly, she would have forcefully discouraged cheating.  But I also think she set up a game in which CRCT scores were the only measure of how well you played, and she set the stakes on the outcome at an incredibly high level.  You have to be a fool to imagine, in that environment, there won't be widespread cheating.  Maybe she simultaneously "created an aggressive accountability system" tied to abiding by the rules, but I tend to doubt it.  (By the way, if the Journal-Constitution hadn't run several articles about the statistical near-impossibility of the test gains from 2008 to 2009, there'd be no scandal. The demise of newspapers will have costs.)


Bottom line: she, like most administrators I've encountered so far, cared about higher test scores, not better education.  The reason for that is simple:  she gets compensated for higher test scores.  When will we learn that to get better teaching, we need to incentivize teachers to teach better, and administrators to create an environment that fosters it?  Instead, we incentivize everyone to have students who get better scores, just because scores are easier to measure.


Final rant (of this message):  The school grade, the most important factor in the principal's bonus compensation, is based in part on graduation rate.  Suppose a senior is failing your Biology class, a subject he needs to graduate.  You're called into the principal's office to discuss this student.  Which of the following is the most likely to occur:
a) the principal praises you for maintaining high standards and insisting students master the content the state says they must in order to graduate,
b) the principal encourages you to work harder with this student to enable him to master the content he needs to pass your course, and offers support to enable you to do that,
c) the principal informs you that the failure rate in your classes is unacceptably high, and that you are not only not eligible for a bonus based on teaching excellence, but your job is potentially in jeopardy if that rate doesn't come down.
d) option (c), plus the student is withdrawn from your class and put into an on-line Biology course he miraculously manages to pass within 2 weeks despite being unable to spell "biology," or speak in full sentences.

Hey Mister Can You Spare a Dime?

I've sent a request for donations to support my AP Statistics course to many of my more, um, salary-enhanced friends, and have been very pleasantly surprised at the positive response. In addition, my brilliant daughter one of my brilliant daughters recommended I request that recent graduates who no longer had a use for their graphic display calculators (GDCs) send them to me, who has an urgent need for them.

I've gotten $550 and 4 GDCs so far, and pledges for another $100 and 3 GDCs. I've given one of the executives where I used to work a proposal to have my class run an analysis for him; I've asked for about  $3,000 in equipment. For various reasons, I think it's extremely likely he'd agree to do the project.

There's a part of me that doesn't want to beg my friends for money, but there's a bigger part that really wants my kids to have a chance to do well on the AP exam. Without money for calculators, stats programs and teacher training, there's not much hope. Moreover, I've been really impressed with the generosity of many people. I know that this is the definition of charity, but there's really nothing in it for them to give this money to the school -- they're doing it because I asked. I'm humbled, and grateful.

8 More Miles

School starts for the students in 2 weeks, but the math, English and science teachers return early next week for a program called "Early Return" (who thinks of these names?), and the week after that is Pre-Planning. I've been going to my classroom just about every day the last couple of weeks to try to sort out what to do and how to do it.  I feel like I have a pretty good handle on it, but of course, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting.

Looks like my schedule will be:  Honors Algebra II, Honors Geometry, AP Statistics and the two IB courses, which are essentially just Honors Algebra II and Honors Geometry, but with a British accent.  "Presume your boot measures 1 metre by 50 centimetres by 30 centimetres.  If each brolly cost 40 quid and is packed in a cylindrical tube 35 centimetres long and 5 centimetres in diameter, what would it cost to fill the boot with brollies?"  (Of note, "diameter" is the British spelling of "diameter," despite the fact that "metre" is the British spelling of "meter," the unit of distance.  However, "meter" is the British spelling of "meter," the measuring device.)

The school grades for the state were released yesterday (a couple of months late) and our school grade has gone from a D to a ... well, we don't know yet.  High schools are graded this year based on several other factors, which for some reason the state couldn't have been calculating while waiting for the test results.  So the high school grades will not come out until November.  The rumor is that we went from a D, 7 points above an F to a D, 2 points below a C.  I don't think the actual answer has any impact on me whatsoever, with one exception -- if we are a D school, I get a (small but not insignificant relative to my salary) bonus if any of students pass the AP exam, plus another, much smaller, bonus for each kid who passes.  I'm pretty sure I don't get the bigger bonus if we're a C school.  Whatever.

If It's Summer, Shouldn't I Be Somewhere Else?

I signed up to "teach" the incoming pre-IB Summer Bridge program, which was developed to assist these kids in their transition to high school.  An amazing number showed up -- 36 of the total of 45 or so who are enrolled in the program -- and I enjoyed the week of talking about stuff I find interesting in mathematics to a group of kids who are clearly interested in learning, even if math isn't their favorite subject.  I mention this only because it explains why I was wandering around on campus last week...

So Mrs. D (who is teaching summer school because her youngest child needs braces) and I were coming back from lunch when we noticed that a bunch of textbooks had been delivered to the school, and were sitting outside the book room, in the open air hallway.  (Note:  The school is surrounded by an 8 ft chain link fence, with perhaps 6 gates which are locked (but easily scalable - a fact I know because I've been locked in twice) during the evening but open during the day.  The books were in an area that is not far from the gate in front of the student parking lot.)  Mrs. D wondered aloud if those were the new math texts, and I said we should go find out.  So we went over to the pile and found several boxes clearly labeled as Algebra II texts.  We also noticed that a box of history books was open, so we opened a box of math texts.  As we perused the book, the book lady walked through another hallway, and shouted to us from about 40 feet away, asking what we were doing.  When we told her, she began heatedly saying we're not supposed to "take" books, and that she often ends up short of books because several of them have "walked away."  We left, and that was, I believed, the end of it.

Mrs. D, however, was offended, feeling we had been accused of stealing.  So she wrote an email to the book lady apologizing for opening the books, while also trying to justify the action (the open history book box, weren't going to take them, etc.)  Apparently Book Lady emailed back, and basically reiterated her contention that we were a threat to walk off with "her" books.  Mrs. D wrote her back; the note was nice, and the thrust of it was just that she would never take a textbook without asking, and that wasn't what she was doing.  All very middle-schoolish, but hey, what else is there to do in the summer?

So that would probably have been the end of it, but apparently, Book Lady was irritated enough to send a note to the new Vice Principal, whom I shall forever more refer to as "Tempest" (as in "... in a Teapot").  My guess is that Book Lady sent the email to Ms. Tempest prior to the exchange of emails with Mrs. D, but don't really know.  Anyway, Ms. Tempest sends a very snotty note to Mrs. D and copies me (why wouldn't I be a co-addressee?) essentially reiterating the "we can't trust you" theme.  Mrs. D and Ms. Tempest exchange a couple of additional emails, with Ms. Tempest getting snottier by the moment.  To this point, I had stayed out of it, figuring I couldn't do any good.  But the Tempest notes to Mrs. D were incredibly annoying, particularly given that Mrs. D has been teaching at MHS longer than Ms. Tempest has been alive.

So I finally waded in, and sent her an email (copying the principal) noting that the "crime" she's berating us for was the desire to see the textbooks we'll be using in August -- something I'd think she'd want us to want to do -- and that if she or Book Lady are concerned about pilferage then they should probably try to find a way not to leave the books out in the unprotected hallway for 3 days.  In response, I got a note about how we'll get the books in plenty of time to prepare (not my point), that the Book Lady didn't have a choice about leaving the books outside (not my point, but now that you mention it, why not?) and that it is never appropriate for anyone to open mail that isn't addressed specifically to them.  Riiiiiiiight.  That's what we were doing -- snooping through the mail.  Then she talked about the need for professionalism, something she clearly implied I lacked, by virtue of being willing to open someone else's mail.  (She hammered this point about 3 times).  I have a tremendous desire to fire back a really scalding response.  I'm going to suppress it.  Not because she is, in some ways, my boss, or even because I'm afraid it will get me in trouble with someone I actually respect, but mainly because I'm pretty sure she's not bright enough to recognize a cogent argument if she hears one.

It could be a long year.

That said, I can't wait to get it started... I think the classes could be really good.

Building Bridges to Nowhere

I'm teaching a weeklong "summer bridge" program to incoming freshmen who expect to enroll in the IB curriculum, and will be teaching those same students when school starts in late August (which cometh, and right soon). Bad news: my attempt to show them the beauty of mathematics has led to a lot of blank stares. Good news: they seem like they're going to be pretty good students. And a few of them may even come to enjoy mathematics. It will be interesting to see what the rest of my students are like.

On a side note... To make a "gain" on the state-mandated end-of-year exam, a student must go up a level from the previous year, or gain a minimum number of points without going up a level, or (and this is the kicker) maintain their level if they were at or above grade level the previous year. Put another way, kids at or above grade level could actually LOSE points and still be counted as a gain, whereas kids below grade level had to make significant gains (even bigger ones on a percentage basis) to be counted as having made a "gain." Teachers are judged based on how many of their students make gains. Administrators and most teachers have no concept of the fact that a significant factor in what percentage of your kids make gains is what percentage of them start out below grade level.

Last year I had, by far, the most students who were below grade level of any of the math teachers. Unsurprisingly, I had one of the worst scores for students making gains. I'd make a ruckus about this among my administration, but two other things are also true: I've been given the courses I wanted to teach this year, so it's somewhat difficult to claim I've been wronged, and (perhaps more importantly), even when you factor out the bias due to a high percentage of below-level students, I still had miserable results. I have a number of ready-made excuses for that, but the fact is, I'm essentially unconcerned about last year's results (except that I feel bad for the students who didn't pass but would have with another teacher), and am focused on this year.

And this year, virtually every single one of my students is at or above grade level. Of course, this year, the state is also messing around with how the state-mandated testing will occur, so it's going to be somewhat hard to compare people's scores either to previous years or to other teachers if they aren't teaching the same course and the same class of students (i.e., freshmen or sophomores). I have enough other things to worry about this year without adding concern about their test scores on the state exam, but I'm expecting them to do very well. In part because they're much better students than I had last year. But also in large part because I expect to be significantly more adept at incorporating the skills they'll need for the test into the course.

Anyway, they seem like they're pretty bright, and more importantly, willing to work. Stay tuned.

Must Love Math

Yeah, I know I've used (almost) that same title before - consider this the American release of the British film of (almost) the same name. By the way... if "maths" seems like a goofy thing to say in a sentence like "I studied maths at university," consider what it's short for. (If you're currently cringing at my sentence-ending preposition, take this, you scurvy dog!) Also, I welcome any opportunity I might get to promote Diane Lane, however obliquely.

My friend L (who also teaches math at MHS) and I were recently relaxing poolside reading books when we spotted a fellow MHS teacher and mutual friend. We walked over to her, and she asked what we were reading. Upon hearing the title of the book L was reading, she engaged in a lively discussion of the book, the upcoming movie and other related items with L. She then turned to me and asked what I was reading. I showed her my book, entitled What is Mathematics, whereupon she sneered at me and turned back to continue her conversation with L. L gave our friend an apologetic shrug, as if to say "Yes, he's odd, but he's the best I could do."

Which brings me to the point of this post. I think math is sublimely beautiful. Not just fun, or interesting. Truly staggering, on the scale of the Grand Canyon.

[Warning: serious math content to follow.]

For example, I've been playing around with Pascal's Triangle, a neat little mathematical device that enables you to know the coefficient of any term of a binomial expansion (i.e., the expansion of (a + b)^n for any power of n). More relevantly, perhaps, but equivalently, you can use it like a chart or table to look up, say, the probability of tossing a coin 10 times and having it land heads-up exactly twice. Then there's something called the Sierpinski Triangle, which is a construct in fractal geometry that enables you to create a geometric shape with arbitrarily large perimeter and arbitrarily small area by cutting equilateral triangles out of the middle of larger equilateral triangles. It, and many other fractal constructions (particularly in higher dimensions) are beautiful in themselves, as abstract art. Anyway, it turns out that the two triangles, created in totally different ways for completely different reasons over 300 years apart and on first inspection having absolutely nothing to do with one another, are related in an incredibly surprising and fundamental way.

[It's safe to go back in the water, now. No more actual math content.]

I was trying to explain to another friend why I think it's important for math teachers to like mathematics, and am afraid I didn't do a particularly good job. It's actually a little depressing that it even made sense to have the conversation in the first place -- I mean, don't all math teachers like math? Unfortunately, no, not by a wide margin. Half of the staff at my high school never took a math class past calculus, and most of them didn't even take calculus. They were education majors, got certified to teach middle school math because that's where the jobs were, then moved to high school teaching Geometry and Algebra I because those qualify as middle school subjects, and eventually struggled through their high school certification by acing all the lower level questions and skipping all the trig and calculus questions on the test. They've given me enough blank stares when I talked about non-Euclidean geometry or interesting problems in differential equations that I've stopped mentioning them. I can't even talk about math around most of the math teachers; they aren't interested. (Mrs. CowCulus and Mrs. D are exceptions, but there are desperately few others.

English teachers love to read, right? Science teachers love science, don't they? As a country, we suck at math. Is it because even our math teachers hated the subject? And by the way, most of our math teachers think math is all about memorizing equations, trying to memorize when to use which equation, plugging in the numbers required to solve the equation, and solving it. Hell, NOBODY likes that. Well, maybe engineers do. But it sure isn't mathematics. If you told a mathematician he'd have to do that for the rest of his working life, he'd blow his brains out. Of course, as a school district, we suck even more at English, and I've already made the claim that English teachers love reading. So maybe my argument is flawed. But my complaint isn't - I'd like to be able to talk about mathematics without having people roll their eyes at me, and that doesn't seem to be possible even when I'm among (most) math teachers.

End of complaint

Generosity, or "Sometimes, you just have to ask."

As noted in an earlier post, I'll be teaching AP Statistics in the fall. I pushed for the assignment with both the Math Department head and the principal, and now I get to wonder if I should have been careful what I wished for. Still, I'm very excited about the opportunity. Only one person from MHS in the past 6 years has passed the AP Stats exam, and only a couple of others have even scored a 2. I believe I can do better, but of course, I have to prove that.

One thing I wanted to do immediately after I got the assignment was to go to a summer institute course for new teachers of AP Stats, to learn some techniques and methodologies that would benefit my students in their attempt to pass the exam. It cost $650, and was to be held at a local college here in My Town. So I asked the principal to send me, and he said the school didn't have the money. That ticked me off.

So I decided to ask my friends for donations in order that I could do things like attend the summer institute, purchase graphing calculators for the students who couldn't afford them, and buy other miscellaneous items I will need to help the students pass the exam.

So far, I have commitments for $650, and I have a meeting next week with a senior executive at the company where I used to work, to discuss having the class work on a project for him. That discussion will, of course, include conversation about a donation, either personally from him or from the company, or both. I expect to get a significant contribution stemming from that meeting. In addition, I mentioned my quest to my daughter, who replied that she had a perfectly good graphing calculator she would never use again, having already graduated from college (and law school). Moreover, she was sure most of her friends did, too. She posted her (my) request for graphing calculators on Facebook earlier today, and is already receiving responses.

So it looks like I'll be able to provide my students the tools they'll need to be successful. Now, it's up to them to learn the material. And, of course, me, to teach it.

Summer's Over? Already?

I'm sitting in my new classroom, supposedly preparing for the IB Summer Bridge program -- a weeklong introduction to MHS for the incoming pre-IB students. This is my first official workday related to the 2010 - 2011 year, so I guess the summer is over, although after today, I still have about 2 1/2 weeks completely free, and 3 other weeks in which the workload will be pretty light, before school officially begins. Still, though... it's mid-July, dammit.

In about March, I applied for 2010 - 2011 teaching positions in the county immediately to the south of this one; a county which is significantly wealthier. The principal with whom I interviewed noted that over 97% of students pass the Statewide Test on the first try, and about the same percentage or more go to college. It's a totally different world than the one I'm currently in. I got an offer from one school and an opportunity to interview at another, and turned them both down. I am sure I will have days I curse myself for having made that decision, but I'm also very excited about teaching the pre-IB courses, as well as the AP Stats course.

I need to come up with something interesting to say to 40 or so incoming freshmen, and I'm being paid to do it today, so with that...

This is what I do

So, the chairman of the math department told me today that the principal was raving about how great I am and how well my kids are going to do on the state-mandated exam. She told me this while also letting me know how my next year's teaching load is currently slated.

I'm teaching "pre-IB" Geometry and Algebra II. They're "pre-IB" because the IB program doesn't officially start in high school until the 11th grade, but they're courses that only IB students may enroll in, and are expected to be very rigorous, preparing the kids for their actual IB courses the following year. I'm very happy with that.

However, those are 9th grade courses, and the new rule is that all teachers of 9th or 10th graders must teach only 9th or 10th graders. So the rest of my schedule is Standard Geometry, Honors Geometry and Algebra I. Meaning I have 5 preps (i.e., different courses I have to prepare for, grade papers for, etc.). In truth, the Honors Geometry course and Standard Geometry are really essentially the same, so it's "only" 4 preps. For comparison, every other math teacher in the school has 2 preps, with the exception of Mrs. D, who has 3. Mrs. D has been teaching for 33 years.

Also, because I'm teaching IB, I'm being moved to a new academy (the school within a school that we receive grant money for). My current Assistant Principal is great with teachers and very strict with kids that are sent out of teachers' rooms for misbehaving. My new Assistant Principal is very strict with teachers and incredibly lenient with kids. The teachers who work for him universally want to be in another academy, because their discipline problems are uncontrollable.

Because I'm in the new academy, I will be moved to a new room, about 50 yards from the main office, out of the portables, which are a fairly long way off the main campus. So every administrator who ever visits the school goes first to the wing that I'll be in.

Because I'm in the new wing, my lunch schedule will go from being last lunch (served at the reasonable hour of 12:15) to first lunch, which begins at 10:45. AM. In the morning. You know, the time that normal people are rushing to McDonalds, hoping they haven't stopped serving Egg & Sausage Biscuits yet.

I have an undergraduate degree in Math, a masters in Math, and a masters in Business Administration. There's a new course for seniors this year that is called "Advanced Algebra with Business Applications." You'd think I might be qualified to teach that. Nope... I've got Algebra I, where we teach kids how to solve equations like 3x + 1 = 7. A new teacher, with a degree in Math Education, will be teaching Advanced Algebra with Business Applications.

All this because my principal believes 9th and 10th grades are the most important, because they're the ones who take the standardized tests the school gets graded on. So because he thinks I'm terrific, I have a terrible schedule in a terrible room with a terrible administrator. I'm thinking I should key his car or something; I'd probably be teaching AP Calculus next year.

This is where I work

Article on the local newspaper's website:

The City Sheriff's Office says a 10-month old girl has been accidentally shot at an apartment complex in [name redacted, but it's about 2 minutes from my school].

The shooting happened during a fight over a car in the parking lot of the [...] Apartments on [...] early Tuesday morning. Police say it started around 12:30 a.m. Tuesday. When police arrived, a woman was holding the baby girl who was bleeding from one leg.

The girl suffered a gunshot wound to the leg. The baby is at Local Hospital in serious but stable condition.

The City Sheriff's Office said police are interviewing witnesses and have several persons of interest in custody.

The local newspaper reports there were four homicides there last year.

[End of article]

Somehow, I don't think the surface area of a triangular prism is uppermost on my kids' minds.

Southern Living

I have a very good friend who is otherwise intelligent, charming, articulate and delightful in virtually every way, but she has (I believe) a hole in her vision that is incomprehensible to me.

As background, she is from New England, a fact she is inordinately proud of. She's also an enormous Red Sox fan, a statement that's probably redundant. She moved to the South 6 months ago because a friend from the same area who moved here a couple of years ago convinced her to give teaching and this city a try. I'm from the South, but have lived in many different regions of the country. When I lived in New Jersey, I was ridiculed for my accent, and assumed to be stupid because of how I said the words "five" and "nine". I can't recall my office phone number from a year ago, but I still remember my phone number in Morristown, NJ, 38 years ago: 539-9039. Lots of 5's and 9's.

Anyway, today she told me a story about her fear of taking the English portion of the general knowledge exam for teacher certification, and how her friend had assuaged her fear by noting that of course the vocabulary of Southerners is much smaller than that of educated people from the Northeast, and since the exam is geared for people from this (Southern) state, she (as a non-Southerner) had nothing to worry about. She thought this was a funny story that she'd share with me. I was apoplectic.

It occurred to me that there's an analogy one may use when deciding if a story like that is appropriate: Imagine you replace "Southerner" with "African-American," and "Northeasterner" with "white person" in the story above. "You have nothing to worry about, because black people have smaller vocabularies than whites." Would that be okay to say? Would anyone be offended? Would the black man with a good vocabulary to whom you're telling the story be offended? Should you be surprised if he is?

She then went on to say, "Well, you have to admit things are different here. Like, I would never have had to wait 2 days to get a call back from a Northeastern doctor, like I did with the one I went to here." Analogously, "I would never have to wait 2 days to get a call back from a white doctor, like I did with the black one I went to." It is a sentence I guarantee she would never utter, and one she'd be shocked to hear coming from anyone else.

So, to put some mathematics content into this post, I am reminded of "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott. Flatlanders are sentient polygonal shapes occupying two-dimensional space, and they have no notion that there might be a third dimension. They can't imagine where it could be, because their universe consists of a plane. (Think 'infinitely long and wide piece of infinitesimally thin paper', not 'flying machine with passengers and a pilot'.) One Flatlander (A. Square, by name), is visited by a 3-dimensional being, who shows Mr. Square the wonders of one-, two- and three-dimensional worlds. Square then notes that there are probably higher dimensions as well, going off in directions unimagined by 3-dimensional beings, just as the 3rd dimension was unimaginable to a 2-dimensional being. As I recall, the 3-dimensional being immediately dismisses this idea as ridiculous.

The point, and the reason my conversation with my friend reminded me of "Flatland", is that analogies are easy to see until they start bumping up against your own version of reality. It makes me wonder what version of "black people have smaller vocabularies than whites" I espouse without recognizing the inherent bigotry.

Must Love Maths

So I ended the last post with a comment that there must be some incredibly bad teaching going on out there. I was reminded yesterday of a story I heard about another teacher here at MHS (My High School).

First, some background. (Warning: Math content)

Students in Algebra II study the quadratic equation [f(x)= ax^2 + bx +c]. Given specific numbers for a, b and c, this equation can be graphed. The general shape of the graph is a parabola, with the width, the direction it opens (up or down) and exactly where it is on the coordinate plane determined by the coefficients a, b and c.

Mrs. CowCulus and another teacher both teach a course similar to Algebra II, and were discussing where they were in the curriculum. The other teacher (we'll call her Miss Informed) noted that she was well ahead of Mrs. CowCulus, prompting the following discussion:

Mrs. CowCulus: Gosh, you've gotten further than I have. How did you get through quadratic equations so fast?

Miss Informed: Well, I skipped over a lot of stuff. I only did the parabolas.

(If you're a math teacher, you're rolling on the floor laughing right now. If you're not, you're wondering why this is supposed to be funny.)

On the "good news" front

Gotta go to bed now, so I'm just going to bullet point this, and come back later to fill in detail (yeah, right...)

* continue to get rave reviews from the state inspectors

*got the required observation / evaluation from my Assistant Principal and she was effusive in her praise

* have spoken to Mr. Principal about teaching a dual enrollment course (which requires a master's degree in math to teach, and no other teacher has one), and he's been very encouraging

*MHS is attempting to become an IB school, and so for the next year or two, we'll be implementing an IB curriculum. I'm one of 4 math teachers tapped to be trained in, and teach IB math.

* got told by the department head that in her meeting with the principal, he called me and one other new teacher the best in the department, behind only Mrs. CowCulus and Mrs. D, her faithful sidekick.

I can merely reiterate something I told Mrs. D a couple of months ago -- if I'm good, there must be some incredibly bad teaching going on in other classrooms, because I'm only now beginning to feel barely adequate, and that's on my best days.

This is why I could never be a reporter

Daily, or even weekly, deadlines are hard for me. So now I have a daily deadline -- I have to have a lesson plan every single day, along with regular test/quiz-making and grading, etc. -- and in my certification course, a weekly deadline that requires about 2 hours of reading and another couple of hours of writing. I'm not sure how it's getting done, but so far I've stayed just ahead of the oncoming train, so hopefully I can keep it up for another 75 days.

My principal called me "Captain F" in the faculty meeting yesterday -- apparently I have the highest failure rate of anyone in the school (49% of my kids received F's in the second quarter). He called me and 30 other teachers into his office earlier in the week for individual meetings to discuss the high failure rate (it looks bad to his bosses if a lot of kids fail), and I just laughed. I told him what I was doing this quarter to try to help kids do the work they needed to do in order to pass, but that if they're skipping class, coming unprepared, not listening or taking notes, not doing the homework and failing the tests, I wasn't planning to pass them.

Every kid also expects to be able to do something called "grade recovery," which is apparently the following plan: a) blow off all course work, classes, homework and effort for at least 6 of the 9 weeks, b) either don't take or fail miserably all exams during the quarter, c) skip the first few classes of the next quarter, then d) receive a "grade recovery" packet consisting of work they'll have to complete in order to improve their grade from D or F to C. The packet is expected to be short and easy. In the first quarter, I denied all requests for grade recovery, because I told them that grade recovery was for people who tried but for various reasons weren't able to pass the first time, not for people who made no effort but still wanted a good grade. This quarter, I've offered grade recovery to all who want it, largely because half of my students failed, and that's not good either.

But my grade recovery packet consists of every assignment we completed in the quarter, including a project on volume and surface area of polyhedra, and even if they complete that, they still don't get a C unless they pass a make-up end-of-quarter exam. They looked at me as if I had three heads when I explained the process to them. I have one student who had showed up twice this year -- once on the first day of school and once in mid-October -- and SHE wanted grade recovery.

Go re-read some of my early posts regarding the incredible lack of math skills my students have. There are, in my opinion, two reasons for that. The first is that our urban, low-income schools' "standard" class includes about 10 students who would not have been in the same schools as the "standard" kids 15 years ago, much less in the same classes. Are there benefits to reducing the minimum IQ required for mainstreaming and also including kids with "special needs" in standard classrooms? Probably. Certainly for those kids there are some benefits, although there are also ome negatives. But for the education of the rest of the students, it's an enormous drain. The in-class behavior, work ethic and motivation of ESE (Exceptional Student Education*) kids is often terrible, and it's usually contagious. Their inability to grasp concepts quickly means we spend at least 3 times as long on topics as I believe is warranted, which bores my good students and enables my mediocre ones to screw around and still eventually "get it" (contributing to my discipline problem).

The second reason for the incredibly low skill levels is that everyone is under pressure to increase the percentage of kids who graduate, and no one is under pressure to ensure they actually learn anything (except just enough to get a passing grade on the state exam). Middle schools send kids to high school who cannot add two integers together correctly, and are incapable of multiplying one fraction times a whole number, much less two fractions. So high schools dumb down the curriculum and then give passing grades to many, many students who can't even do the dumbed down work. We are encouraged, to the point of having one-on-one meetings with the principal, to improve our pass rate -- and we are never, ever encouraged, graded on or measured in any way with respect to ensuring they understand the course content. So it shouldn't be surprising that we pass kids who don't know anything. I'm appalled at how little the C and D students in my classes know -- the F students had to have been actively attempting to avoid learning anything, or else they would have accidentally picked up enough knowledge to pass the course.

So, while I want very much to get my pass rate up, and I'm really not proud of flunking half of my kids, I'm also not terribly concerned about it, as long as I'm doing the things I'm supposed to with respect to safety nets and second chances. I am. So I laughed when Mr. Principal called me "Captain F." He actually laughed, too, so I think I survived with my "good first year teacher" reputation intact.

All for now.

*This is presumably the outlet for the very gifted as well, but I've yet to see or hear of a gifted student getting any resource allocation from the ESE department.