“A good curriculum is the best classroom management” February 7, 2011

I have worked for a lot of people, but the most inspiring boss I have ever had was a principal who was strict, forgiving of human flaws, hard-working and who lived by the motto “A good curriculum is the best classroom management”.

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I’ve never been a disciplinarian and never will be.  I value learning too much to stifle a kid’s personality in favor of keeping my classroom quiet.  Learning is loud, it’s fun, it’s rich, it’s not a library.  If learning was supposed to be done in complete sterility we’d all be able to teach ourselves in the quiet of our own homes.  Learning is the push and pull between student and student, student and curriculum, and student and teacher.  It should be a fun process.  Do you normally do things that are not fun?  The best classroom management is a good curriculum.

 

The article by Pamela Kripke “And You’re Out!” in the Huffington Post is very much in line with what I encountered during my years of teaching.  Kids would get kicked out of their classes for doing something against the teacher’s status quo and end up in my classroom.  I was constantly torn between letting them stay and being part of the “united front” against the student.  I never wanted to be a part of that front and never really was.  In my mind the right thing to do was keeping the kid happy and wanting to come back to school the next day.  With the dropout rate as high as it is and high school degree jobs steadily dropping, it was my job to keep learning fun and school an enjoyable place to go.  And that’s what I did.

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Negative Numbers. OH NO! October 6, 2010

In our BPS high school, there’s a big focus on the “broken window theory”, made famous recently in The Tipping Point.  One broken window we’ve identified in the school as far as discipline goes is hats and ipods.  So, there’s been a big push to get rid of them.

 

I’d like to mention to you a “broken window” that has somehow gotten lost in the mess of school closings, going charter, union fighting, pension plans, longer days, MCAS scores.  As a high school math teacher, the biggest broken window I face – in fact, it’s a gaping hole not even bothered to be temporarily covered with plastic- is… negative numbers.

 

What do I mean by negative numbers?  I’ve done my research as they’re the topic of my Harvard thesis.  Students using the TERC Investigations curriculum in Boston elementary schools do not do problems like “-22 + 5″.  One TERC representative told me they “leave that topic to middle school”.  So, I looked at the middle school Connected mathematics Project 2 (CMP2) curriculum, and negative integer problems, like “-22 + 7″ are taught for 20 days total in the 7th grade.  20 days.  From then on, students are assumed to know how positives and negatives interact and to be able to evaluate “-22 + 5″.

 

Then students get to me, their 11th grade Algebra 2 teacher, and they can’t solve for y in “y + 22x = 5x – 7″ because they don’t know what “5 – 22″ is.  The kids think -22 + 5 = -27.  Why?  Maybe the rules of multiplication get mixed in.  I don’t know.  Or maybe it’s because these problems were taught to them for a total of 20 days four years earlier and were never touched n again except in the context of other problems.  Understanding why and how kids think is beyond the scope of my thesis and my means for data collection.  What I can tell you is that because my students don’t know what “5 – 22″ is, they can’t solve y + 22x = 5x – 7 for y.  Because they can’t solve the equation for y, they can’t graph the equation.  I assume you know where I’m going with this.

 

Please, as someone on the front lines of math education in Boston, I’m telling you that the biggest difficulty our students have in math is adding and subtracting positive and negative integers.  It seems ridiculous and that there are bigger fish to fry, some of which I have listed, but if you want more competency in math, please, heighten the focus on negative numbers.  It will lead to better test scores, more understanding, but most of all, to students who feel good about themselves when they’re not still making silly 7th grade mistakes in high school.

One More to Graduate. Make that 50.000001% June 7, 2010

With a graduation rate in the US hovering at 50%, getting every kid to graduate from high school should be our #1 prority.  Alex wasn’t a student of mine but he took precalculus in my classroom during my off period. Because our school is a small school, classrooms are shared. One day, Alex asked to use my computer to work on his credit recovery for the Algebra 2 class he had failed the year before. I let him use it, and sat with him as he worked on the problems. I taught Algebra 2 that year so it seemed only natural I help him.  Alex needed to get through just this one course to graduate high school. 

 

Before I knew it, I was helping Alex every day during my off period, and when the school year began to wear down, Alex began staying in my room all day working to get through the program. The program was difficult; much of the material isn’t covered in the Boston Algebra 2 curriculum. It started to become clear that Alex was exceptionally smart, but the program involved a lot of difficult work that would give even m top Algebra 2 students difficulty.

 

On Thursday June 3, 2010, Alex and I stayed at school until 10:30 PM when the custodian politely asked us when we’d be leaving. The credit recovery program deadline was at midnight and we weren’t going to be done. We were on section 10.5 and had to get to 11.11, and it was clear there wasn’t’ enough time. Alex was devastated. I was devastated. After all that time, we were defeated. Worst of all, there were errors in the program that had wrong answers as correct answers and not achieving a 75% or better on each mini quiz (there were approximately 20 in each section) meant we couldn’t move on to the next subsection.

 

The next day was field day. As I was waiting in my classroom for our bus to come, the director of credit recovery came to tell me he’d give Alex another day because he had gotten so far in the program. He had been given another chance! WE had been given another chance! Hard work does pay off! I called the phone number I found in the office fir Alex and told him to come in immediately to continue working.

 

Because I wasn’t allowed to stay behind from the field day trip, I asked another teacher to work with Alex. Alex began working again at 9AM. When I returned from field day at 1:30, Alex had gotten through just one more subsection. I was so exhausted from staying so late the night before, from field day, and just from a week of work in general, that the thought of staying late on a Friday almost brought me to tears. Still, we had to take the chance. I had to be there for Alex. He was so close to graduating that I couldn’t give up. We worked from 1:30PM to 5PM and got to section 11.5 when we ran into the advanced probability questions. Probability has never been strength of mine. I can do problems that involve using formulas, but these problems were less “marbles in a bag” or even “out of 10 people, you need to choose a president, vp, and secretary” and more “If Monty Hall opens one of the doors with a goat…” We were on section 11.5, we needed to get to 11.11, and we were stuck. I was stuck. I felt like a failure. We had been given another chance and it seemed we were defeated again. Alex wasn’t going to graduate because I couldn’t grasp that the Monty Hall probability is 2/3.

 

I couldn’t imagine what Alex’s weekend looked like. If I felt defeated, he must have felt devastated. If I felt frustrated, he must have felt destroyed. To get that close and have it count for nothing.

 

Then came Monday June 7, 2010, two day before graduating seniors were scheduled to sign out of high school forever. I was concentrating on final exam review for my juniors when the credit recovery director came back in. He has overridden the last half of chapter 11 so that Alex could take the final exam. I immediately called the phone number I had for Alex and left a message for him to come in. I had assumed Alex wasn’t in school, but he was. Maybe Alex had ore hope that I did. About 3 hours after seeing the director of credit recovery, Alex was at my door. He took the final exam. He was graduating. I called his mom to let her know, as I promised I would. I had never heard a parent so excited. It was then that it was reaffirmed in my mind and heart that hard work, as painful as it often is, always pays off. Thanks Alex.

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UPDATE:  Alex was shot and killed on September 3, 2011 on his way to a barber shop in Boston.  

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YouTube… BLOCKED. Learning Today… BLOCKED! June 6, 2010

 

Sure, there are a lot of videos on YouTube that we don’t want kids watching at school.  But there are a countless videos on the site that can teach in 3 minutes what it would take a teacher a week to teach.  Our kids are visual learners, learning through video is most effective.  

 

For teachers like me who use their LCD projectors extensively to reach our visual learners, having access to YouTube in school would be extremely helpful.  This year, I could have shown videos on solving systems of equations, finding the equations of circles, solving triangles with the trigonometric ratios, and this says nothing of how much I used YouTube myself to get through my graduate Java and Calculus classes! 

 

But because someone made the executive decision that all of YouTube should be banned from everyone within the walls of BPS, I have to hope that TeacherTube- the ungroomed toenail of YouTube- has a video on the topic I am looking for, and moreover, has their search feature organized in way that a search for “algebra” doesn’t bring up “Mrs. Valentine’s Kindergarten field trip to the Museum of Science”.  TeacherTube is not YouTube, it never will be, and it’s a real shame that teachers in BPS cannot log into YouTube to access its wide range of useful educational videos. 

 

In any case, I have posted videos on TeacherTube at the ridiculously long address: http://www.teachertube.com/members/viewProfile.php?user=Shanadonohue

 

They can be watched in school, even if they take 5 minutes to load.  There’s also one other option that[sometimes] allows you to convert YouTube videos to video files to save onto your computer and then show in class.  I stress, though, that it SOMETIMES works:  http://www.forinside.com/  In fact, it’s not even working now.  Blah!  Maybe this one works: http://www.zamzar.com/url/

 

UNBLOCK YouTube!!!  Please!!