Month: June 2008

Technology: Either you’re for it or against it

So the new teacher program I referenced in my last post is in full swing, and I was not wrong about it being chalk full of stuff to do. I’m ambivalent about the usefulness of this program. I think I’ll probably get some good things to take away, but I’m not sure if the cost-benefit analysis works out in my favor. (We have “classes” until 5, and then projects and homework to keep us busy until 10 or 11pm. Remember that I only had ONE day of vacation since school ended before I had to come here.)

There was something that disturbed me about the program’s take on technology yesterday. And I now see why people like dy/dan are cautious about the school 2.0 crowd. When introducing technology, two mentor teachers took on the persona of 30 year old fogey veterans, who were “not okay with this passing fad of technology.” And we were supposed to try to convince them to come over to embrace technology.

Us: “Word processers are great! They allow you to spell check things, write faster, and edit and create multiple drafts quickly.”

Them: “Word processers are a crutch. Students don’t know how to spell anymore, and when they revise, they just change a few things instead of truly revising.”

What disturbed me was that everyone seemed to buy into this dichotemy. Instead of taking seriously the pitfalls of technology, the variety of teaching styles, and the fact that many veteran teachers with a lot of experience can teach amazingly without technology (with just a piece of chalk and a blackboard behind them), it was all an us versus them thing. The mentors were caricaturing the veteran teachers, making them look like they were wrong for not embracing technology. [1]

The focus on embracing technology wasn’t seen through the lens of student learning, and that’s the rub.

Give me a 30 year old beloved teacher without a Smartboard who has honed his (or her) craft anyday. I wouldn’t say no. [2] And how many of us have had those kinds of teachers, and loved them, and learned a lot from them?

[1] I finally read Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” in this program, and I was disconcerted. But everyone I talked to seems to buy into it wholesale. I wonder if the teacher mentors do too? Do people actually buy into this? How serious is Prensky? Not that all of it doesn’t sound plausible, but if you’re going to be arguing for a wholesale revolution in how children ought to be taught, I need a hell of a lot more evidence than the evidence provided. To me it sounds like the plausible argument “there’s so much violence in America because there is so much violence in movies.” Plausible, but I’m not buying it without evidence.

[2] Not that I think a teacher — veteran or not — can go through life oblivious about the technological world around them. But certainly we can’t and shouldn’t force anyone to embrace it.

The Students Are Watching || A Review

Although school is over for my students, it isn’t over for me. I am doing what I have come to affectionately term “New Teacher Boot Camp.” Its official title is “Collegiate School Teaching Institute” and is a two week program (weekends included!) which focuses on skills for new teachers, as well as getting new teachers acclimated with aspects of teaching particular to independent schools (such as comment writing, for example).

Before attending the boot camp, each of the participants was asked to read and review Theodore R. Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer’s book The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract. My review — surely still with typos and needing a good proofreading — is below the fold, for anyone who is interested. The one thing I didn’t put in the review, but which I couldn’t help but notice as I was reading this book, was how well my school conforms to the Sizers’ view of a good school. The thoughtful and reflective community (we often — sometimes to my chagrin because we do it too much or badly — talk about the core values of the school and how we can enact them), the attention to making each student feel like they are part of the community and respected, the emphasis on community norms and collective decision making (such as having a student-faculty judiciary committee or inviting students to be on hiring committees), the knowledge that each student has an individual learning style (the learning specialists are central to the running of the school and not a peripheral department; we write narrative comments on each student twice a year), and so on and so forth. No one would claim that it is a perfect school. But at least in terms of how the Sizer’s see things, I think they wouldn’t bite their thumbs at us.

Again, review after the jump. My opinion of the book below is very likely (read: almost certainly) going to change after I get to discuss this with the other participants in the program.

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Graduation!

Graduation was on Thursday — as you can see from the picture of me wearing my hood above. My merry band of seniors graduated, and that’s the end of them. Yeah, one of them might stop to write an email here and again, or pop by the school when they’re back in town, but let’s face it. They’re gone. And am I okay with that?

Surprisingly, yes. I honestly don’t know why, but I am. Not that I won’t miss them — they might be the standard by which I judge all future calculus classes — but I honestly think I’m okay with the “they come into your life, they go out of your life” revolving door aspect of teaching.

Picturesque and poignant defined the ceremony. It was held outside, with our 1851 Hogwartian brick building acting as our backdrop, light streaming through leaves as the sun slowly started setting, with a gentle breeze punctuating the warmth and a few butterflies fluttering around. Students sang, surprisingly mature speeches had us laughing, and then like the end of a really good chapter in my life, it was over.

While the seniors graduated, I also thought about all the colleagues who I’ve come to respect and truly like who are leaving; they also are graduating. And from that, my mind moved on… Graduation was the first time I was able to take a moment away from the hustle and bustle of the End Of Year Things To Do, and I finally really realized I too had graduated. I finished my first year teaching, and I loved it.

Congratulations, me!

Electoral Math and Computer Science Rocks!

I wish I taught a computer science course so I could introduce this problem.

How many unique ways are there to acquire at least 270 electoral votes without any excess?

For example, one combination would be to win California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin. That would be equal to 272 electoral votes (not coincidentally, these are the John Kerry states plus Ohio).

Note that there are no excess electoral votes in this combination: if you remove one of the states with three electoral votes, the number falls to 269, which is below the 270-EV cut-off. So winning all of these states plus North Dakota would not qualify, since the candidate has superfluous electoral votes. On the other hand, replacing Vermont with North Dakota would make for a unique combination.

Not only is an awesome math/computer science problem, but I have to say that I totally love the response that it generated in the comments. (Plus, Isabel Lugo’s solution is just so damn sleek.) Minus a minor spat in the comments, this is totally one heck of a sick blog post.

Best. Comic. Ever. (For real this time.)

So previously I touted this as being the best comic ever. (Click link to see.) However xkcd has outdone itself with this one.

Although the funding structures have altered this in recent decades (where anybody knows where once physics was on top after WWII, now biology is on top), I still admit this overarching bias in my thinking. Math reigns supreme, lording over all other sciences, which are mere derivative structures, polluted more and more as you descend down each rung on the ladder of knowledge. Ka-chow!

Seventh Grade Reactions To My Teaching

This year was my first year teaching, period. But it was also my first year teaching seventh grade, which I was not trained to do, nor did I anticipate liking. Junior high was a mess for me. I didn’t do terribly well, and I had almost no friends, and I’ve honestly blocked it out of my memory. I can’t remember my teacher’s names or anything that I did. I took the job in spite of this class — because I liked the school that much. And in fact, I ended up loving teaching my seventh graders. They are so sweet and awesome! But still, not knowing what I was doing with this age level, I had to improvise how I acted with them.

Oh Thursday last week, while I was at my college reunion, I had them write comments for me (flipping things around… in my school, teachers write narrative comments on each of their students twice a year… I thought I’d give them a chance to reverse that). The feedback was very positive overall (huzzah!).

A quick and dirty analysis of things that srtuck me below [things in quotation marks are direct quotations]:

  • A common refrain was “your teaching style is great, but different.” A few said that something to the effect that “it took me a while to get used to you and your teaching style [but then I loved it]” I actually am surprised by this, because I didn’t think I taught differently than any other middle school teachers! I wonder what makes me different.
  • A couple of the students thought I could “explain subjects a little more” and that one student “didn’t understand what you were explaining in class till the day before the test.” Yikes! But to mitigate, many others said the class was at the right level for them.
  • A number commented on how they loved how I ended each class wishing them a “Marvelous Monday, Wonderful Wednesday, Terrific Thursday, or Fabulous Friday” and a few wished me a “Super Summer.” (And one wished me a “Stupendous Summer.”) Interestingly, I didn’t know they really paid attention to this quirk of mine, that I picked up from my dad when I was younger, but it stuck with them!
  • Many students (even the ones who got really good grades) found the course pretty challenging and fast paced. And this actually made me happy, because that was explicitly the goal. In seventh grade, I’ve noticed, they can pick things up really quickly! When their minds are this moldable, it’s great to get a lot in there. We did some extraordinarily hard stuff (find the volume of an equilateral tetrahedron knowing only the side length) which messed with their minds. And the best part is: they got the hard stuff. Not barely got it or grasped onto it, but they *got* it.
  • In concert with the last point, the students seem pretty conscious that I hold them to a high standard: “I also learned that you had very high expectations of us that were achievable but we were not of expecting them.”
  • Almost universally, the students commented on my  “enthusiastic attitude” and energy level. Which I think translates into one student saying that I’ve taught her to “have so much more confidence in my math because you know I could do it and I did.”
  • A few said that the other teacher held review sessions, and I should have done that, instead of sending my kids to her sessions, because she taught things slightly differently. I buy that. And a few wanted more personal one-on-one help. The difficulty with that is that I teach in the upper school, so it’s hard to have a solid presence in the middle school. But to deal with that, I always sat in the lunchroom on Wednesdays to answer questions. And I always met with students when they emailed me for help. The students who commented that I didn’t provide personal help never asked for it! They never came to my lunch table on Wednesdays either. Maybe it’s my fault, and that in the middle school, I should be the one asking them if they need help? But maybe not.
And that’s the rundown of my feedback from my seventh grade class.

Final Exam Grading Marathon is Over!

I went to my college reunion this weekend [1].

Hanging over my head was returning to school to grade my final exams. Out of my four classes, I only had to give finals to two classes (my seventh grade class and my senior class both don’t get finals). But I dread grading. It’s horrible. And even though it went quickly, it was pure torture.

The funny part is, the actual physical act of grading wasn’t hard. It’s easy to see where students went wrong. And I had such a tight rubric, I knew just how many points to give for each problem before I started grading.

The hard part was seeing what I got my kids (on the whole) to retain throughout the year. And the answer: not too much. Oh yeah, they picked up a few things here or there, but when it came down to it, it was not nearly as much as I thought. I had a few As, but for the most part, the kids were getting Bs and Cs.

Which doesn’t sound so terrible. But the exam was designed to be extraordinarily easy, focusing on basic skills, so easy in fact, that I went into my grading frenzy expecting a spate of As and Bs, with only an occasional C.

How fleeting it is the stuff we teach them! I’m going to think over the summer about redesigning the cours putting an emphasis on retention. This will probably include pop quizzes and spiraling and assigning review homework each night in addition to homework on the new topics. I love dy/dan’s method of assessment, and maybe I’ll come up with a slightly modified procedure for my classes, but one thing his method doesn’t do is account for retention. Once a student passes a topic, he or she is done with it. Chances are that by the end of the year, it has been forgotten.

Perhaps what I’ll do is make a list basic skill topics that all students must master, and allow re-testing on those a la dy/dan. And then give tests and quizzes on more difficult topics which ask for synthesis and application. And then weigh the two types of knowledge in some fair way — like 50/50 or 60/40.

But let’s celebrate! My grading is over, I’ve calculated final grades, I’ve entered them in The System, and now I’m ready to close up shop! Just finishing up this week and I’m done.

UPDATE: Coffee & Graph Paper just posted about his experience doing just what I was talking about. Read Part I and Part II here.

[1]  It was a bit of an alterna-reunion because I didn’t *do* any of the reunion activities. I just met up with my crew and we hung out. Of course I got to see a bunch of other people I knew, but honestly, awkward conversations that get repeated ad infinitum aren’t my cup o’ tea. I got to see the new physics building, which blew my mind. (I would have been a physics major if I had that building to work in!) I got to go to a house party which got shut down. I got to go to a birthday party of a fraternity brother which turned out to be a surprise wedding that not even the bridge and groom’s parents knew about. It was all good times.