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.