My Harvard Math for Teaching Thesis: Complete! And ready to share… March 20, 2011

After many many years of jumping through many many hoops, I am finally graduating with my MA in Mathematics for Teaching in May.  My thesis, Negative Number Misconceptions in High School: An Intervention Using the ZeroSum Ruler is right now at the printers being printed and bound.  I don’t know about you, but that instantaneous feeling of relief after taking a final exam or passing in a final paper stopped hitting me sometime in college.  So now, I’m just feeling a bit burnt out.  OK, completely burnt out.  But I’m sure it will hit me soon since it kind of needs to; I need to now get in a post-Bach program to get my Initial teaching license.  I like to do things backwards.

-

-

So here it is for download!  For all to read!  Or maybe to just glance.  In my study, the ZeroSum ruler proved effective in reducing eleventh grade error on integer addition and subtraction problems (especially with negative integers).  If I wasn’t so burnt out, I’d want to test it with younger kids.  Imagine how our world would be if my eleventh graders actually mastered integers when they learned them in, and only in, 7th grade.  But that’s in my thesis.]

 

Public school? Supersize my class! January 25, 2011

There are two upsides of a larger class: more diversity among students and the drive to succeed (and/or not act out in front of peers).  I found that when I was teaching if too many students were out on a day, the kids who were in school felt it should be a “free day”.  Kids weren’t there to bounce ideas off each other or to push each other. 

-

So does class size matter?  It definitely does.  Even when I had less students in class and the ones who were there were less motivated to do work, I was better able to connect to the students who were there.  There were less kids to reach.  And isn’t that what good teaching is half about?

-

Read the article The Class Size Debate on Huffington Post.

-

Small Schools, SUPERSIZED Classrooms: Thanks a bunch, Bill Gates September 3, 2010

School for Boston Public School teachers starts on Tuesday.  The kids come back Wednesday.  Three chairs at a table, eight tables, I have 24 seats in my classroom.  The class size limit in Boston is 31 per class.  -

–

37 students + 24 seats = success.  Solve for HOW.

-  

So that I could get an idea of who I’ll be seeing on a daily basis and when, since I had many of the students I’ll have this year two years ago when they were 9th graders, I went onto mybps.com to download my class lists.  This will be the first year that all students get electives after four years of none (Thanks again, Bill Gates.  My students thank you too for the opportunity to go to a small school where they get to know each other so well that they fight like siblings and miss out on things like art, music, and… computer classes.  But to have computer classes would mean we’d need computers, so thanks for dropping the ball on that one, too.  “Good looks” as my kids would say, only I say it to you sarcastically, you mad scientist, you!)

 

side: What’s the difference between a real scientist and a computer scientist?  Real scientists can admit when they’re wrong and try, try, try again until they get it right.   You can’t Ctrl/Alt/Delete this one, Bill.

 

Anyway, so I downloaded my class lists and I see the following:

 

Math elective, period 3:            37 students

Algebra 2, period 4:                33 students

Algebra 2, period 5:                25 students

Algebra 2, period 6:                24 students

 

By my schedule, you can see I’m a math teacher.  As hard as calculus was, I got through it.  I even got through a java programming class that sucked 15 pounds out of my body.  But I just can’t seem to do the following problem:

 

37 students + 24 seats = success.  Solve for HOW.

 

I appreciate any and all suggestions on how to pull this one off.  These are the kinds of things people forget about us teachers.  We “get summers off”, we “only work 6 hours a day”, we “have tons of vacations”, we are “failing our kids”.  But no one ever comments on how we’re sometimes set up to fail before we even begin. 

 

I’m scared for Wednesday, not because I don’t think I can teach 37 kids at a time but because I don’t know how to choose who gets a seat and who sits on the floor.