Recently — when making my daily pilgrimage to my favorite teacher blog dy/dan — I was directed to a presentation on presenting created by Scott Elias. I was blown away. [1] It’s not that it “said ” anything that I hadn’t read before (especially since getting sucked into dy/dan’s obsession with good design), but it reinspired me to do what I strove to do at the beginning of the year:

Pay attention to presentation, because presentation, content, and understanding are so damn intertwined its not even funny.

I used to think that math was the exception for all the design advice that abounds about PowerPoint/SmartBoard. (If you don’t know what SmartBoard is, play the video in this post.) How do you teach someone to do math by using very little text — text that usually explains some complicated math concept, problem, or formula?

Recently I’ve come to believe that one has to be more careful, but that it truly is possible to actually teach (not just gloss over) mathematics with the same advice that those design folk give to those lecturing about History or Literature.This year I’ve made a few presentations I’m proud of, but they don’t have that “wow factor” that I’m going for. I’ve realized that it’s for a few reasons:

1. My SmartBoard presentations serve a dual purpose, both acting as the driving motor to my lesson and to provide a resource for students at home to download and look at if they are confused. So I tend to write everything down, using entirely too much text. I do this because I think students will need it at home. I also do it because it is a crutch for me. I know exactly where I’m going and what I have to say if I have it on the screen.

2. I don’t use any pictures — save for the occasional graph.

3. I don’t have a way to indicate to students “take notes on this!” and “don’t take notes on this!”

4. I don’t emphasize the “big” points well.

But I’m working on addressing of these. And I think I have made some pretty good slides for Monday. We’ll see…

[1] I liked the presentation so much that I sent it to this one particular email list (“course conference”) at my school for other teachers to check out if they wanted, and one of the computer teachers wrote Scott Elias the following (and copied me on the email):

Good Morning Scott,I am fortunate to work with a teacher named Sam Shah, who shared your blog post on presenting.

With more than 20 years of being a classroom student and 10 as an educator, this presentation is one of the top three most engaging I have ever seen, and the most useful in my teaching career so far.

I am attaching your pdf here to share with the Middle School Skills Team, Upper School Director and Technology Director.

Thanks so much.

I hope that a dialogue is sparked about how to make presentations and use SmartBoard effectively in the classroom. I find it crazy that we all have this tool and yet it appears to me that no one uses it to be anything more than a whiteboard with capability to save.

Blah. Once you get behind in one class, it throws off the entire next class. On Monday I got behind — because I spent so much time going over homework — and that meant I only had 15 minutes to present new material. Which meant the students had trouble on homework. Which mean that on Tuesday I spent so much time going over homework — and that meant I only had 15 minutes to present new material.

A vicious cycle.

That’s happened in both my Algebra II classes and I’m going to put an end to it today. I’m going to spend a lot of time before we go over the homework taking a “mulligan” (a do-over) and re-presenting the material. And then hopefully their “ah haaah!” moment will happen and they’ll say “oh I get it now!” and be able to see how to do the problems they had difficulty with on the previous night’s homework. Well, they’re 10th graders, so hard-to-read, and the actual “oh I get it now!” verbal exclamation won’t actually happen.

This problem is actually forcing me to reconsider the content of presentation. Normally I try to ease into a formula or definition — and spend more time talking about it conceptually — and less doing problems. Not that my board is all theory and no practice — but perhaps it is too much theory and less practice. I don’t want them leaving my classroom thinking the equation for a circle (x-h)^2+(y-k)^2=r^2 is a circle “just because.” I want them to understand that:

1. the circle equation is an EQUATION, just like any other one they’ve been working with. So for a line y=mx+b, all (x,y) that lie on the line are solutions. Similarly, for the circle, all (x,y) that satisfy the equation lie on the circle. It’s pretty amazing. [It’s clear to me that some of them didn’t get this… they just see a lot of letters and symbols and squares and have no idea what they’re looking at…]

2. without knowing anything, they can easily plot a few points and get an intuitive sense it’s a circle. If the x-coordinate is h, they can find the two y-coordinates easily. And if the y-coordinate is k, they can find the two x-coordinates easily. And they at least show something that COULD be a circle.

3. they should know — but not have to rederive — that this formula for a circle comes from the pythagorean theorem. It is just a new way to look at what they already know.

But I spent all this time showing these things, and then we have little time to do simple problems like:

1. If the center of a circle is at (2,3) and the radius is 7, what is the equation of the circle (simple application of formula)
2. If the center of a circle is at (1,4) and a point on the circle is (-2,5), what is the equation of the circle (slight leap in understanding needed… have to get find the radius first…)

And so when they see those on the homework, they can usually only do a problem like #1 and #2 poses more difficulty. And importantly, something like

3. If you have the points (2,3) and (1,-7) lying at the endpoints of a diameter, what is the equation for the circle?

is super hard, because there’s a few concepts that have to be brought together (have to find the center first… then get the radius…)

It’s tricky stuff, but all this time on the conceptual level leaves them in the lurch in problems like that.

The other teacher I think does things more problem-based — where he spends the majority of the class presentation time working on problems from the book/homework, so they can do the homework. I have to find out how to plan a proper lesson plan that can do both of these things.

It’s less than two weeks before teacher training and orientation, and my nervousness is increasing tenfold with each day that passes. To combat the onset of anxiety attacks, I went to a local coffeeshop yesterday afternoon and started pouring through my textbooks. For hours.

And the unfortunate truth dawned on me — only reinforced when burning the midnight oil catching up on my favorite teacher blog dy/dan — is that I only learned how to teach to the book. I saw the lesson plans emerge in my head for each section of the textbook I was reading, and they were all regurgitating the text. My lesson planning as a student teacher consisted of doing all the problems at the end of each section beforehand to know what classes of problems my students needed to learn how to solve, and then coming up with lesson plans filled with variations on the examples given in the texts.

It provides the structure and consistency that I desire in a classroom, but it also, it hit, completely limits me as a teacher and as a creative person.

I sighed a lot last night, because I knew I used my textbooks as a crutch: to provide the skeletal backbone for each lesson plan. And even though that worked fine as a student teacher, it’s time to step up to the plate and take a more active role.

Giving up the central place that the textbook has for me as a teacher will be hard because:

1. I myself was always taught to the book. So it’s unclear in my mind’s eye exactly how an alternatively designed class might go.

2. I am teaching classes that other teachers have sections of. Which means that no matter how much creativity I can muster, my students still have to learn the same content as my fellow teachers’ sections. So I have to teach the same content — my students have to learn the textbook and engage with it’s problems — without falling into the lazy trap of teaching the book. [1]

3. I have three preps (three different classes to prepare for), and at the moment, the at-home-lesson-planning work already seems daunting enough even if I structured my lesson plans around the book. [2]

4. Backing away from the book means needing to be conscious of re-evaluating what exactly I’m teaching them, and what I want to teach them, and what they need to know. Relying on the textbooks makes those questions moot.

Nevertheless, at the very least, it seems to me at the moment one thing that needs to be done is to design clear, relevant, at-least-somewhat-investigatory problems which we spend class time on each week. At the same time, I have to be wary of doing something radical just for the sake of doing something different. My focus has to be on student understanding, and the question that needs to keep buzzing in my head as I go through this process is: why am I making this particular choice?

I think it’s time to question assumptions.

[1] This is no excuse, however, to reverting back to old ways. I signed up to teach at a private school so I would have more autonomy than in a public school. Batter up.

[2] Again, not meant to be an excuse or a rationalization, just a hard reality I know I will have to countenance, day after day.