Monthly Archives: February 2009

First Place: Ben Wildeboer

Second Place: Frieder Knauss*

Third Place: Simon Job

Dan Meyer’s Favorites: Frieder Knuass & Sam Shah (that’s me!)

To determined First, Second, and Third place, Dan had each entrant send in their favorite top 3 annual reports, in order. So Dan was using some form of preferential voting — which could have led to disaster. How, you ask? Well, it’s a bit of an interesting paradox.

Say we have 3 people ranking 3 candidates (A, B, and C).

PERSON 1: A B C (in that order)
PERSON 2: B C A (in that order)
PERSON 3: C A B (in that order)

Who wins? The great Englightenment thinker Condorcet noted this paradox.
*Mr. K’s (Frieder Knauss) annual report was my #1 favorite. If you want to read why, click on the “Second Place” link above. My blurb is posted there. Part of my interpretation wasn’t correct, as Mr. K points out on his blog.

It’s about time for hiring season to begin for independent schools. It’s truly begun this weekend, interviews and all. Good luck for those looking for jobs!

I have old two posts that I thought I’d highlight that might help you out.

1. My musings on being on a hiring committee
2. My musings on being on the job market

I hope they help any of you looking for a new job or considering looking for a new job. If you have any questions about my experience teaching in an independent (read: private) high school, feel free to ask. I have a lot of really great things to say about it, but there are a number of trade offs too. I’d be happy to give whatever counsel I can.

Earlier in the year, I was talking with a student who clearly wanted to do better  academically but realized his laziness  and penchant for procrastination was preventing him from achieving change. (This is a very self-aware kid.) But making big, vague imperatives to himself — like “I will get an A in math”, or “I will always do my homework” — weren’t working. At that point, I told him he should try to work on the small stuff. Don’t make big pronouncements, but take small baby steps that would help him in the long run. I said: “Hey, don’t say I will do something for the quarter… say that for the next week, I will sit at the desk in my room and work on homework for three hours, only taking at most one 10 minute break. I can try this out this week”

This idea of short-term baby steps had never occurred to him.  When we finished that conversation, he was so excited about this idea that he left saying he wanted to his mom got in on it and for her to hold him accountable for monitoring his short-term goals.

Recently I was talking with this student, one quarter after our previous conversation. I didn’t bring up all the things we talked about. I let him guide the conversation. And what came out was amazing. So amazing, in fact, that I interrupted him twice to say that I wish I had a tape recorder so I could get everything he was saying down.

He said that the biggest change that has led to his success last quarter was doing homework. Not just hastily writing down answers to get it done, but spending time to really understand it. He said that was the biggest factor that caused his turnaround. He also said that by doing the homework, studying for exams wasn’t hard anymore. Because it wasn’t all cramming, but simply review. He already knew the material from the homework. (Gasp!) He wasn’t learning it again for the first time. Studying for tests became so much easier this quarter. Lastly, he said that even if a class is totally dull beyond belief, boring as all heck, he has started paying attention instead of zoning out. Why? Because for some reason, he noticed that when he did pay attention, he knew the material and could much more easily recall the information.

Can you imagine how I felt after this conversation? I wanted to grab every word he said, bottle them up, and make every one of my students this year take a long, refreshing swig. It was so powerful coming out of his mouth. I say these things to students, and it’s all hogwash. A friend says this unsolicited to a friend, it’s inspirational.

All I can say is that I hope he is proud enough of the strides he’s made academically to share his wisdom with others. They’ll believe him.

I am calling on the collective powers of the online teacher community to see if anyone can help me out. I know it’s a long shot that anyone will respond. But hey, you might know the answer for your school, or you might not know the answer and be intrigued enough to find out the answer.

(1) What are the disciplinary infractions that get reported to colleges by your school?

(2) Does it matter when in high school the offense was committed?

(3) In your school, who makes the decision whether something gets reported to colleges or not?

The reason I’m curious is that I’m on the Student Faculty Judiciary Committee (SFJC) at my school, which is composed of 8 elected students and 3 faculty members, which hears all cases involving student misconduct. (Yeah, yeah, I know… fancy… we didn’t have anything like this in my public high school… but I think student-centered disciplinary committees are common in the private school universe…)

We’re now about to have a discussion with the administration about our current set of disciplinary responses, about infractions getting reported to colleges, about what sorts of offenses warrant the college counselors reporting them, and if it matters what grade the student is in.

If a 9th grader cheats once, should that get reported to a college? What about a 12th grader? What about if a 9th grader cheated 3 times? What if a 12th grader cheated, after being sent before the disciplinary committee for cutting 3 classes the week before?  What if a student cheated in 9th grade, and then again in 12th grade?

It gets really sticky, especially with something as high stakes as college admissions, and a clear policy — or at least general guidelines — needs to be drawn up so that there aren’t gross inequities in what happens to one student and what happens to another.

So anyway, any idea of what the policy is in your school? Or if you don’t know the answer, muse a bit in the comments with your thoughts about how you would deal with this in your ideal school: what kinds of things you would say HAD to be reported, and where you would draw the line between something being reported and something not being reported.

PS. If you care, the Common Application has students fill out the following:

I’ve accidentally came across a few videos on youtube of students getting their College Board AP Scores letter and opening it live on video camera.

I know I’ve posted a bit about this, but it’s so interesting how little I remember about the emotional heights that high school brought. And that time when you know those scores are on their way, those anxious, expectant moments after you see the College Board envelope and before you open it, the rush of emotion when you see the scores inside –

wow.

It’s hard to capture it in words. But watching these videos, I got a rush of those feelings back. Words don’t do it justice, but seeing these kids’ facial expressions, their inability to comprehend, the tone of their voice changing… it’s drama at it’s purest because its a lot of emotion boiled down to a few seconds.

I wonder if people do this for SAT scores too?

I am in love. Absolutely in love…

…

with Winplot (download it here - don’t be deceived by the ugly page). I discovered it on my hunt for a great program to make visuals for my Multivariable Calculus class. But now I’ve started using it when preparing lessons and graphs for all my classes.

The bad news: it has a pretty high learning curve. Some things are intuitive, many things aren’t. You have to, for example, type: y=root(3,x) to graph the cube root of x. But once you get the hang of it, it’s easy, breezy, beautiful.

The good news: what can’t it do?

I decided that either this weekend or next I’m going to spend 60 minutes going through
this comprehensive guide and learn all the features of this program in one go. Since the start of the year, I’ve been learning it piecemeal. I need to graph an inequality, I figure it out by looking around on the program. I need to get gridlines on my graph, I putz around until I figure it out. And in fact I thought I had a pretty good grasp on things without ever reading any documentation. However, it turns out that this program is way, way, way more powerful than I thought — because I only found out today that I can create pictures of volumes of revolution with the short click of a button! And so much more, apparently, after looking at the guide. So in my excited state, I felt compelled to write this post.
I know you’re dying for some screenshots, so I’m going to post screenshots cribbed from the guide linked to above here:

A few more pictures after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry →

Read below for a challenge!

Tasks accomplished today:

1. Sent info to all high school students regarding the upcoming AMC competition.
2. Organized my advising conferences on Thursday and sent all my advisees this info.
3. Learned that I have to re-organize my advising conferences because of an administrative snafu.
4. Had someone proofread comments written for students who got a C- or below this quarter, and edited them, and gave the appropriate people copies.
5. Scanned and emailed a letter of recommendation for a student.
6. Planned tomorrow’s Multivariable Calculus class.
7. Did homework that I assigned the Multivariable Calculus class tonight.
8. Wrote an Algebra II exam and sent it to the other Algebra II teacher.
9. Put some copies of the Algebra II exam in the Learning Center for students who need to take it in a “distraction free setting”
10. Met with a number of students who had questions about math.
11. Met with administrator and student about a sensitive matter.
12. Talked with administrator about a sensitive matter.
13. Uploaded PDF of Smartboard for students to access in Algebra II, Calculus, and Multivariable Calculus.
14. Sent students homework in Algebra II, Calculus, and Multivariable Calculus.
15. Photocopied my Multivariable Calculus Quarter 2 students exams for my own personal records.
16. Emailed a lot of students about math — and setting up meeting times for individual help for tomorrow.
17. Met with administrator who observed my class last Thursday for him to debrief me.
18. Tried (and failed) to find out if my advisees were supposed to get their metro cards soon.
19. Reminded department head about upcoming Mu Alpha Theta induction.
20. Dealt with late homework.
21. Created a sign out sheet for students who are going to use the restroom in my classes.
22. Printed out my new seating chart for my Algebra II and Calculus classes.
23. Assisted the AP calculus teacher with a sticky math problem.
24. Read an email from a teacher friend at another school who wants to shadow a Biology teacher at my school next week; tried to set that up.

I was thinking today, with all my tasks large and small, about what I spend my time doing. Being a teacher is so much more than just planning classes and writing and grading exams. Such little time, proportionally, goes to those things. I know most teachers wish that we had more time to devote to lesson planning! At all points during the day, I am juggling a number of various responsibilities, small and large.

Challenge: Make a list of the things you did today. I’m curious what tasks, large and small, consume your attention. I think it’ll speak volumes about teaching in general, about your school culture and your teaching style in specific.