let x = x : an extended throat-clearing Oct 10 '04    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Health Aids Mabis Rediscan Infared Thermometer From $45 Lumex Suction Cups (Set of 2) 9295A From $7 The Bottom Line (Personal nonsense. I realized I'd never finish any real reviews if I didn't write this first. Doesn't mean you gotta _read_ the damn thing. Cheers!) Epinions is a product-review site. There is no reason why I should feel a need to tell you where I’ve been these past three months, nor should you care. But I’ve had the habit of sneaking personal experiences into my movie and music and book reviews, simply because they color the artworks’ meanings for me. If this habit’s had any charm, it’s probably because I am, by nature or habit or preference, a happy person, confident in my experiences. Lately I’ve not been happy or confident, so my abortive attempts at review-writing have been miserable and painful. So here, instead, I shall write in detail about my last couple of months, and get’em over with. If you don’t care, cool: don’t read it. But some of you, bless your dear sweet nosey souls, have made it clear that you do. Hi! Two things, in sequence, have troubled my recent life: (1) Getting a math-teaching job. (2) Losing that math-teaching job. ********* Several of you have told me that I’m cut out to be a wonderful teacher. Thanks for your support, and hey: you may even be right. At least two of my fellow teachers agree, and they’ve written me lovely, gushing letters of reference. By the end, I think many of my students thought I was good, too. But I underestimated how hard it is to go from an inner-city Boston student-teaching job in Social Studies, to a southern small-town full-time job teaching Math. The fact that I’m really good at math is vaguely handy, sure, but I started my job having never observed a math class in my adult life. Even if I could remember being a math student – when I was not exactly taking close notes about the structure of the teachers’ lesson designs or the organization of the rooms – I’d been in small accelerated classes, not the least bit useful now. So when I spent the last week of July and first week of August prepping my classroom, I was full of ideas remembered from all the discussion classes I’d led, and the writing assignments and real-world problem-solving exercises I’d given. I was full of ideas taken from Frederic Jones’s book Positive Classroom Discipline and Harry Wong’s the First Day of School, ideas that – if used by someone who has a clue – are indeed excellent, well worth each book’s status as a bestseller among new teachers. I had the daily “pacing guides” for Algebra I and for Algebra 1-B (the courses I’d be teaching), telling me in detail what subjects I would be covering each day. The students came into my classroom on Monday, August 6th, and for the next two weeks, everything that happened would come as a complete surprise to me. ********* --- Some of it was the sort of self-discovery common to almost any teacher in charge, for the first time, of his class’s layout. For example, the way I’d inherited Room 403, the teacher’s desk was at the back of the room. This was new to me, but I could see how it let the students sit nearer to the front, with a less cluttered view, so I decided to leave it that way. For someone who did _not_ have Attention Deficit Disorder, it might have been a fine plan. I, however, spent much of the first week of classes walking with a confused look from the front of the room to the back or vice versa, trying to remember where I’d put down my textbook (or my lesson plan, or hall passes, or chalk, or pen) _this_ time. All the teaching guides agree that the first week is where the teacher proves his absolute authority, his self-confidence, and his ability to create a safe and reliable order. He will be better at this if he doesn’t keep interrupting himself mid-sentence to look for the prop he’d been using 30 seconds earlier. (Monday August 13th before school, I moved the desk to the front of the room, dramatically reducing the space in which I could have misplaced anything. It helped. Only in my fourth week, however, did I have the brainstorm of buying/making a strapped-on pouch with a pen, small notebook, and stopwatch attached to the pouch, and therefore to me, using cord. It worked great; and amazingly, the kids hardly mocked me for it at all.) --- Some of the initial problem had to do with the switch from Social Studies to Math. For example: how can I give out expensive calculators (which I was expected to do), with resale values around $100, and actually get them all back? I borrowed answers from other teachers, but two calculators were stolen after I started assigning them to individuals by name, and in both cases, I know that the students to whom those calculators were assigned had nothing to do with their loss. (Brilliant solution I later saw at a different school: not only assign the calculators, but lay them all out side-by-side in numbered spaces on a big table, and train the students to return them there. The teacher can then see, at a glance, if any are missing.) --- Many of the problems came from just not knowing the school culture. For example: I couldn’t give detention, because the only school buses left almost immediately after school. I _could_ send kids to the office in quantity, which was new; and in fact office visits had teeth they don’t usually have, because they could lead to in-school suspensions. What I wish I’d known (had I been smart enough to ask) was that the kids expected office-visit punishment, and when for two weeks I barely used it, they took it as proof that I didn’t care how they behaved. On advice from fellow teachers, I started week three with a bunch of office-referral forms all filled out, every space except Student Name and Time. I sent three students from my first class to the office, and word spread; it wasn’t until my last class that I needed to send anyone else. These and later office visits helped: the kids suddenly saw I was crazy, and didn't want to cross me so much anymore. But then the office referral forms were made three times as complicated to fill out, and I became – dangerously – a little less willing to use them. Another school-culture problem: lots of the ideas from Wong’s the First Days of School would look new and ridiculous to the students – even though the book itself was spoken of with deep respect by every teacher I mentioned it to. If I’d come in with years of experience using the Procedures I’d drawn up before the kids came, I’m sure I could have imposed them anyway; it’s hard for me to put an aura of certainty, however, behind ideas in a book that I’ve just, y’know, thought might be cool. Still, if I’d spent the first week drilling the students in classroom procedures, as both Jones and Wong recommend, I could probably have made them work. However, at least one aspect of the school’s culture is, I think, objectively harmful … and to be fair to the school, it’s one largely imposed by the self-important idiots at the North Carolina legislature, who are not much different from the self-important idiots in most of the other states’ legislatures. The Pacing Guide, you see, does not allow a week at the beginning to work on class procedures: it allows one day. And the Pacing Guide, I would soon learn, was the #1 thing on the minds of both the principal and of my superivisor from the county. With every meeting, the connection between my lessons and the Pacing Guide was the first thing I’d be asked about, and every deviation – there would be many, it turned out – meant I got a reprimand. Because in the school’s view, a student’s purpose of taking an Algebra I or Algebra 1-B course is very simple: to pass the state-designed End Of Course test (EOC), which helps determine the school’s funding. The Pacing Guide rations space for each of the hundreds of mini-lessons covered by the EOC. Deviation, even to teach procedures that might speed up later classes, was not welcome. Obediently, I spent one day teaching procedures, or rather, one day having students explain to me why the procedures were dumb. By the time I had control of my classes (week four), I’d left many of those procedures behind. ********* All this said, the single largest problem I faced in my math teaching job is this: the math teaching in North Carolina is terrible. This does _not_ mean that my fellow teachers were or are terrible. I like and admire most of them quite a bit, and watching their classes was a key to my improvement. Rather, I think math was ruined for my students long before they got to me, and that we, the high school teachers, have been reduced to functionaries in a lousy system. I first started to believe this from the evidence of my senses. Of all the shocks I faced those first two weeks, the largest was this: that my students had total amnesia about their prior math courses. I’m not kidding. Algebra 1-B, which I taught for two 90-minute periods a day, is the second half of a course, the first half of which is Ontogeny 8-Q. Er, I mean Algebra 1-A. The Pacing Guide says that days two through seven of an Algebra 1-B course are to be spent “reviewing” one Chapter per day from Algebra 1-A. Each Chapter includes five to nine Sections, most of which include two separate skills, each broken into several subskills. Neither the Pacing Guide nor any of my fellow teachers could ever really answer for me _how_ one is supposed to review all these lessons in a single period… but of course, since it’s all old material, it shouldn’t be hard to improvise. Right? Sure. Under heavy criticism, I took nineteen days, not six, doing “review”, and only some of the delay was due to my early incompetence. For it turned out that, with the single exception of Scientific Notation, the students treated _all_ of the Sections in each review Chapter as brand new material. Worse yet, most of the students (including many of the bright ones) were inclined to multiply 8 by 3 and get 12, or add 7 plus 4 and get 12 again. Negative numbers messed almost everyone up completely, and percents were so vague that my students were honestly surprised that “ 100%” means “all”. Word problems? Forget it. How was I supposed to teach new material when the Check Skills You’ll Need problems – provided by an excellent textbook at the start of each new lesson, to refresh each student’s memory of the basics – left the students dazed and stumped? My supervisors didn’t know; they just knew I wasn’t following the Pacing Guide. I came in thinking I’d give problems in which math could answer real-life, or at least semi-real, questions. For example, a lot of my students were NASCAR fans, living half an hour or so from a professional speedway. I designed a 4-word-problem assignment one day, using real data from the local speedway’s last race, in which each question built on the previous one to answer, in the end, sorta-interesting-ish questions. (By question three, for example, one would calculate that if the 10th-place driver had been able to simply take one fewer pit stop while maintaining the same speed, the 20 seconds he’d have saved, in a 400-mile race, would have moved him into 4th place.) The first question was supposed to be the easy warm-up: since the race is named for its 400-mile length, and the track is 1.017 miles long, how many laps is the race? It’s a simple division question. Neither of my 1-B classes, working in pairs (and genuinely working), could answer it in under half an hour. The last three questions were possible only with extremely broad hints from me, followed (for most students) by direct instruction, and still most of them didn’t get it. In giving tests, I used – and I still think this is an excellent idea, as did most of the parents I talked to – a PreTest, Test, PostTest system. I gave the PreTest to the students three class days before the test: I’d drawn it up as a set of questions that strongly resembled the questions that would be on the test. I also included an answer key. The PreTest was optional, but for extra credit the student could hand in a finished PreTest and show all her work, with the advantage of knowing what answers the work ought to reach. Thus, while many of the problems were difficult (word problems, multi-step problems, or both), the PreTest was a chance for each student to get everything right, in her own time, and polish her skills. The Test, then, would be familiar-ish problems, and students could use their notes while taking it. The PostTest, available for any student unhappy with her Test grade, would again consist of similar questions, and any student had a week to take it after school; if she scored better, her new grade would replace the old. The principle was simple: I don’t care when anyone learns the skill, I just want them to learn it. Also, if a student got a wrong answer on a problem, but her steps were more correct than not, I gave half-credit for the problem. Never did any student get an A on even one of my tests… not, at least, without me curving the scores. For weeks, I assumed this was my fault. Here are some things I later learned about math teaching in North Carolina public schools: (1) The other Algebra 1-B teacher, a seven-year veteran, had also invented a system of PreTests. If a problem on the PreTest gave the majority of her students trouble, she then removed it from the Test. (2) The Algebra 1-A teacher across the hall ran a very tight ship and is, I think, an excellent teacher. I was starting to borrow some ideas from him when I was asked to leave. However, he used no word problems, and not once did I see him hint that math might be used to find answers to real questions. (3) I recently saw an even better algebra teacher in another school at which I was interviewing, and her insights on how to use group learning will stay with me, I hope, forever; she also decorated her room wonderfully, and made learning fun. She, too, gave no sign of ever connecting math to real questions. (4) I am the only math teacher I have ever seen demonstrate _why_ a formula works: the only one compelled, before showing the x’s and y’s, to walk the students step-by-step through the solutions for which the formula turns out to be a handy shorthand. Because of this, mind you, I confused the hell out of some of my students, more so before they got used to it. Eventually, though, I started to see results: I’d see students walk through, on paper, that long-form logic to solve problems when the formula had escaped them. By not relying on rote memory, these particular students had (for a problem or three) turned themselves into junior mathematicians, rediscovering basic truths anew. But they’d never done this before. (5) Far more damning than anything I’ve seen, however, was a little investigative article last week in the Greensboro newspaper. The reporter was curious about how many problems a student needs to get right, in order to pass the EOC tests. It turns out that this info is not public, and in fact the North Carolina Education Department does not wish it to be public. Eventually, however, the reporter got a confession: on math tests, for example, a student needs to get 33% of the questions right. The questions are multiple-choice format, A-B-C-D: a student should get 25% right by chance. Yet a sizeable minority of students still fail. ********* This, then, is why I was too miserable to write while teaching. I hated the paperwork. I hated the huge amount of grading to be done, in a system where every fresh class period (even aside from the horrible “reviews”) meant two-to-four new skills to be taught. I hated seeing 22 students answer a question asking them to Graph, yet exactly one of the answers being a graph. I hated how, the time I experimented with multiple-choice format for 29 questions out of 37, I got tests back still answering “A”, “C”, “D”, “B”, “A” from question #30 on. I hated being asked about the Pacing Guide. I hated how my supervisor would see attempts to bring real-life questions into my lesson plans, and repeat her mantra “Teach from the book. Everything you need is in the textbook”. Then I hated the students asking “When will we ever use this stuff?”, and not having a good answer anymore. I hated waking up at 5:30 in the morning. I hated being sleepy (or asleep) at 11:00 at night, when my mind normally starts getting creative. I hated struggling with ways to credit a decent number of students with passing my course. Still, I hated being asked to resign a lot worse. During those first two weeks, when everything caught me unprepared, I noticed three students being pulled out of my classes. All three students were pests, frankly, so while I was unhappy about it, it was less frightening than twenty other things going on; I didn’t protest, I didn’t ask why. It turned out that their parents had asked them to be moved to other classes, and that the principal had agreed. I should have made a fuss. Most parents I talked to, throughout, were supportive of me and happy to help me teach their kids. But four parents – all of bright students, used to good grades – later started lobbying to have their own students removed from my classes. In two cases, my explaining style simply did not work at all for the student, although I have respect for the one who kept trying to do his homework anyway, and no respect for the one who stopped turning any work at all, argued loudly with me, cussed repeatedly in class, and convinced his dad that his trips to the office were all my fault. The other two cases were students taking algebra for a second time, having already passed it, but in the class of a narcoleptic teacher who would teach for 15 minutes then fall asleep. Their parents wanted their students to really _learn_ this time around, and were unhappy when they brought home multi-step word problems that (I didn’t yet know) were far beyond anything they’d been asked to do before, and that threatened to harm their grades. Those last two parents were teachers themselves, and all four had been handed a powerful argument: if you could let those other three students leave Mr. Block’s class, why can’t you let mine leave too? They kept calling the principal, day after day. He couldn’t really make my classes any smaller, but there was one handy way for him to get them to shut up. None of my fellow teachers – not even the head of the math department – knew I’d been asked to resign until it was all over. It was secret, and swift, and I see I’ve gone and deflected a lot of blame here. I was a solid teacher by the end, humbled but reliable, using the textbook and discipline and good humor and my own explaining style to create a space in which students who wanted to learn could learn: nothing special, but likeable and fine. I did fail, though. I should have prepared better. I should have asked more questions during prep week. I should have learned from my errors _before_ I made them: then the students would’ve learned more, faster, with less frustration. Then I would still be, y’know, employed. Employed is good. I’ll be subbing quite soon. At public schools here in Guilford County, and also at Guilford Montessori School, where students learn math at their own pace using physical objects, toys, models, and puzzles. I enjoy subbing, and I’ve really liked being in the Montessori School, a cozy and attractive place where the teachers never raise their voices and the students never make them. I like doing useful stuff, and getting paid for it. That feels good. Epinions, we all know, is a weak parody of being useful and paid. But now that it won't be my only income, I think I’m happy enough to join it again.

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