Day: March 2, 2008

Recollections of theorems past

Yesterday I watched “King of Kong,” and a while ago I fell in love with “Spellbound.” Both of those movies are documentaries about strange subcultures of people — where the norms and values of these subjects are so foreign to the viewer that it’s a bit of an anthropological expedition.

While watching “King of Kong” I decided that a movie needs to be made about a mathcamp somewhere.

Some backstory: I went to mathcamp. Twice. And I was a counselor there once.

Those summers (especially those during high school) were transformative. I was one of those kids who were freakishly [1] good at math, astounded by the elegant beauty of it all, and I just got it. And I was always hunting for more. I would pick up second hand math books and study them, did the AMC (then AHSME) competitions, and did the write-in USAMTS competition. I was on my first high school’s math team (my second high school didn’t have one). And still, that wasn’t enough. I wanted to go to a place to study math for 5 weeks.

Seriously.

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Why? I’ll tell you why I have to remain silent…

Dan Meyer asks the question:

Unless my experience as a classroom manager is several deviations below the mean, other people are struggling with this as I have struggled. New teachers are struggling with this. So why is classroom management the farthest topic from anyone’s blog?

Before reading the comments, to see what his other readers thought, I suspect that others will agree with me: talking about classroom management meaningfully often times requires speaking in specifics about individual students or incidents. For those teachers blogging under their own names, there’s the added thought: “what if…”

What if students come across the site (probability: likely)?

Don’t get me wrong. I think a lot of value can be had by sharing these stories, getting advice from others, and just commiserating about the difficult moments that come up in the day-to-day. But doing so publicly makes it harder, because specifics have to be pitched out the window. (I don’t want a student coming across my blog, knowing a post is about him or her, and feeling uncomfortable.) And for an issue like classroom management, it’s all about specifics. The individual student, a particular incident, a conversation or punishment. Without that, it’s all and all (just) another good teaching tale.

That’s not to say that conversations about techniques on how to keep a classroom running smoothly and effectively aren’t worth having. It means that talking about when a classroom isn’t run smoothly is harder.

That being said, I’m going to hopefully give Dan something to play with… I’ve typed up a list of notes I took before starting teaching this year, given to me by a veteran teacher: Advice to New Teachers on Classroom Management. I normally eschew prescriptive teaching talk (someone telling me this is the way to do things), but these tips are so useful that I ignored my initial gag reflex and I’m a better person for it. (I’ve noticed that I do a lot of these things naturally, which is a good sign for me, I think.)

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My First Post

I’ve been blogging about my first year of teaching at my school in Brooklyn. But until now, the blog has been under wraps, private, an archive of the good, the bad, and the ugly. As I’ve been getting more and more into reading math teacher blogs, I’ve been getting more and more antsy to contribute to the conversations they’re having.

And so with no further ado, I here start my own public blog, and here is my first post.

“Wait! Wait, Mr. Shah! This blog has a ton of posts before this one.”

(Ah, ever the astute reader.) Yes, I’ve imported about half of my private blog here. The other half will have to remain private.