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.

On Aging

I don't often think myself old... even when my daughter was getting married, or both older daughters graduating from college / grad school in the same month, but occasionally it hits me in the face, like the other day.

I meet weekly with a small group of teachers who have many of the same students I have, to talk about issues we may be having with those students, and whether any of us have found good methods of dealing with those issues. The leader of this group is a history teacher who I've come to respect for her good insights and wise perspective. She mentioned her birthday was coming up. Someone asked which one. She answered she'd be 25. "My god," I realized. "I have a daughter older than you."

Makin' Copies.

New rule, starting Jan 4: we've hired someone to make the copies for us - we're no longer allowed to make our own - and we have to submit the request 48 hours in advance. And we're limited to 1,000 copies per month. Of course, given that I have yet to have a worksheet ready for one of my courses more than about 6 hours in advance of the course, I'm unlikely to need the 1,000 copies.

I'm pretty sure this rule will go away very quickly, given that virtually every teacher in the school is going to go nuts the first time they need a worksheet or an article or whatever copied for their class the next day. That said, it's going to be a right regular pain in the class between now and then.

The 1,000 copies per month thing sounds like kind of a lot, but keep in mind -- I don't have textbooks. So if I want to assign homework, particularly on something like polyhedra (which no one can draw freehand), I have to produce a worksheet. That's 80 copies each day I assign homework. If I give a quiz or test, it's another 160 copies over 2 days. Which means I can give 12 homework / quiz / test pages per month, or about 1 per week, since I only meet with the same kids every other day. God forbid I should give a 2 page test or homework assignment.

Interesting Stuff

I gotta get to bed, so this is going to be short, but with any luck, I'll come back and edit it after the state visit on Wednesday.

I prepared extensively for a geometry lesson, with multiple handouts and lots of thought put into how to step the kids through a multi-step process that was going to be important for them to be able to get through.

First period is a disaster. (It starts with a kid who won't surrender her phone, forcing me to call security to escort her to the administrator's office). Virtually no one is paying attention, and the ones who are, are grousing about not understanding, my going too fast, etc. I can't get anyone in the room to focus on the work and get through the step-by-step process.

Second period... same process, same preamble regarding the work, etc. It goes incredibly well, the group all gets it, and we whip through several examples and extra problems with time to spare.

Third period was in between, but generally positive.

Why? The 1st period class has a personality, driven by a few students but contributed to by many. And that personality is not good for their education or my sanity. More than half the students are flunking, and one reason I prepared the lesson I did today was to give them a chance for an easy, good grade based on attempting the classwork. All it actually did was further separate the ones who are flunking (none of whom even attempted to complete the work) from the ones who are not (virtually all of whom completed the work).