I don’t know what it is but thing have been so busy in the last two weeks that I don’t remember a time I left school before 7pm (most days 8)… and I continue doing work at home until 10 or 11. I honestly don’t know why. I’m not getting any more work done that I have previously. I’m just grading and lesson planning. Maybe it’s that all my free time at school is now being taken up by meetings with students. (Note to self: do you really want to encourage students to seek out help? [1])

It’s a little bit crazy. Actually totally wackadoodle crazy. I mean, anytime that I don’t read my “back twitter feed” (the tweets that happen when I’m in school or working), it’s just wackadoodle crazy. And I’ve had a couple of those days where I thought “Can it be winter vacay already, please, Mr. Calendar, because I seriously need to lie down and sleep for hours.”

Unfortunately, I won’t have time to do that for a while. Because today right after school I am getting on a bus to go to Boston for the NCTM conference. I don’t return until Sunday evening. And what do I have waiting for me on Monday morning? Yes, the substitute is administering exams in 3 of my 4 classes. So I totally win the prize by having tons of stuff on my plate when I return.

AWESOME.

Followed quickly by the end of the quarter, and comment writing time.

Please, sir, I’d just like some sleep.

[1] In case it wasn’t obvious, sarcasm. Obviously.

Disclaimer: This post is snarky, a little exaggerated, and in no way is meant to be anything more than me just hamming our meeting up.

We like having people talk to you. So says my school. Which is why they bring in consultants. And honestly, although it may sound like kvetching, well, it is. But it also has a larger point.

We have consultants for curriculum mapping, for drug and alcohol training, and just yesterday, for creating an “anti-bias” curriculum. I want to talk about yesterday.

My school is amazing in many ways, and one of the ways it excels is with its diversity work. Our diversity coordinator (yes, we have a full time person with that title) has been pushing for us to move to the last frontier: take what we’ve already done so well at and start applying it to the curriculum.

I can definitely get behind that.

So after school we heard a consultant tell us how we can do that. And throughout her whole talk, I did what I try never to do with the speaker in the room. I rolled my eyes. A lot. I might have been having eye seizures. Yes, it was that bad. Maybe worse than the consultant who told us to “imagine we were on a plane… but the plane wasn’t built… and we were building it while it was flying…” In that instance, we were getting an analogy for, well, maybe how to write terrible analogies. Who really knows? All anyone remembers from that consultant is the bad analogy, not what it was for. But that was then. Back to my eye rolling speaker.

So this speaker comes to us, in my opinion pretty unprepared [1] and with bad powerpoint skills, repeats “that’s why they pay me the big bucks,” and spews off either commonsense as Great Knowledge Being Imparted or pure tripe.

I know you’re just salivating now for an example of pure tripe. And it’s juicy. Her math example. How to make math anti-bias. (And, I should preface, that in the beginning of her talk, she mentioned the questions we may be having, like how to make polynomials anti-bias, and then later when asked what her answer is, she responded “I don’t even know what a polynomial is.”) Here it is:

Passive curriculum: “There are 200 miles between point A and point B. Driving at 15 miles per hour, how long will it take to get from point A to point B?”

Multicultural curriculum: “Jose lives 20 miles from school. Driving at 25 miles per hour, how long will it take Jose to get to school?”

Anti-bias curriculum: “Jose needs to get from his home to the far side of the city. If he goes the most direct route, how long will it take him? But Jose can’t go in certain parts of the city because they are dangerous. So how long will it take him if he goes an alternative route.”

No, seriously. SERIOUSLY. SERIOUSLY! I can’t tell you how dead serious I am. It was the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever heard.

Later, when pressed on it, the consultant admitted the problem was bad and then changed it to some problem with numbers of people on a bus and the probability that someone black would get out somewhere… wait that sounds wrong… by then, my head was expelling smoke and I couldn’t really focus…. but it was something like that.

Individually I talked with her and turned the screw by really giving her the lowdown of what math in a high school is, and how statistics easily lends itself to these sorts of social justice questions, but much of what we do doesn’t. And that I don’t see why we would want it to. It felt somewhat vindicating to hear her concede and say that the math teachers couldn’t really make an anti-bias curriculum.

She was — in my opinion — playing a giant joke on us. Giving us a parody of what an anti-bias curriculum might look like. You know, to get us to rebel and talk amongst ourselves about what we really think one would look like. Right? RIGHT? Hey, if that’s the goal, it worked. I have had three conversations about anti-biased curriculum since, all initiated by the “do you believe that consultant yesterday?” If that wasn’t the super double secret plan, then I can’t believe the school just spent goodness knows how many dollars to waste my time.

I know this is a rant. And I need it to be a rant. Because even though I love my school, sometimes I wonder what they are thinking. Knowing nothing about an anti-bias curriculum, I could have given a better talk. After my second year of teaching. That’s what infuriates me.

I know a lot of people I talked to were upset with the speaker. I don’t blame the school for working on this initiative. I love that we’re a school that actively works on diversity issues. The only thing I ask from the administration is that next time we meet, they agree with us that the consultant wasn’t up to snuff. Just hearing that would make me feel the administration understands us teachers and is on our side and we are working together.

My larger point: consultants are soooo overrated.

Signing off,
Sam

[1] Example: One of the go-to examples of how to create an anti-biased curriculum was a lesson designed around “To Kill A Mockingbird.” And the speaker said she hadn’t read it in years, and had cagey phrases like, “if I remember correctly…” If this is your paragon example, shouldn’t you really have read the book and know it pretty well?

Today I decided to do my classic “tie with a polo shirt” look.

Oh yeah, there was a hat.

One of the great things about my school — torn between being progressive and traditional, nurturing the whole child but with the looming vista of college admissions at the end — is that this tension is actually generative. It has its moments of maddening frustration, but it also allows for some pretty great things to happen.

Like what I wear to school everyday.

Let me explain. In my first week of teaching, I wore kakhis and button down shirts. (Which, by the way, I look awful in.) I had been told from everywhichway that your dress matters. That you need to dress older, to gain authority. I think even that horrible “First Days of School” bible gives the prescription of dressing in a suit everyday for guys, or something crazy like that. So I tried it out. And I noticed that some of my colleagues dress more relaxed, so each week I very consciously started dressing down. Button down shirts to polos. Kakhis to jeans. Dress shoes to grey sneakers. Polos to t-shirts. Grey sneakers to colorful Adidas.

No one commented. I hadn’t broken any norms.

Then, afterwards, I started adding to the outfits. A hat here. A scarf there. 5 pins one day. A cardigan with binder clips the next.

Why am I bringing this up? A couple reasons.

1. I was stopped on the street two times today by strangers because they needed to tell me “I found Waldo!” (One had alcohol on his breath.) And a few colleagues said something similar, and one said something about “Papa Smurf.” But he said it to me last week too, because I’ve been wearing this hat almost daily. It’s pretty kickin’, right? Okay, so I just thought it was neat and wanted to share.

2. I definitely think dressing up for teachers new to a school is important. Each school has different norms and they have to be carefully navigated early on. But I really, honestly think that people need to rethink this whole “you have to dress up to have authority” trope. Majorly. I get if putting on a suit makes you feel older, and that feeling gives you confidence, fine. But the suit does not make the man. I know I have control in the classroom. I can stand with a certain look and bring my class to silence in 3 seconds. My kids don’t take advantage of me. We have a good time. But I have control of the classroom.

And it’s not because of what I’m wearing. Wow, yeah, if that was a meterstick of anything, I would be an EPIC FAIL.

3. Most importantly, because of today, I was thinking again of why I dress the way I do. I’m not fashionable, I know. But I love my fashion choices. And it all started when I was in high school. My clothing was how I expressed myself. Badly, but it was. And in college, well, let’s just put it this way: one of my friends snuck in my closet and took out some of my signature pieces and was ME for Halloween freshman year, and definitely didn’t need to explain his costume to tons of people. (More impressive: my parents are from India, and his parents are from Korea. In other words, we don’t look at all alike.) Clothes are about individuality. And one benefit of being able to dress the way I do is that I get to express myself to my kids, and they see that it’s okay to express themselves in quirky, unfashionable ways. I don’t know if any of them take that away, that it’s okay to be yourself, by looking at me. But today, when I was pondering, I thought it might be nice if one of ’em did.

You know, teachers as role models, and all that stuff.

If you really want me to return full circle to the idea that the school is “torn between being progressive and traditional,” it is this: it is only because of this tension in my school am I allowed to express myself in this way, and still garner the respect from my students and from my colleagues that I think I have. 

Sam

On October 21, 2007, I sent an email to the other accelerated 7th grade math teacher. The subject: “ack! disaster in 7-1!”

I had only been teaching for about a month and half. I hadn’t learned the “mountain vs. molehill” principle, which — when I figured it out — changed my life. I was filled with insecurities, even though I had started gaining my sea legs. But the event conveyed in this email below kept me up all night. I was freakin’ out.

Wanna read the email?
Thought so.

[Other 7-1 teacher],

A total disaster! So the test that I gave right after the fire drill? The students were making ALL sorts of careless errors and conceptual errors. I don’t know what it is — either it could be that it was Thursday last period, everyone was crazy after the fire drill, or students felt rushed. I told them they could finish the next day — and so I gave them an extra 12 minutes…

But once you see the grades, you’ll see why I’m freaking out:

[list of all students’ names and grades]

I don’t know if I messed up teaching it, or if they were just all flustered, or what. Even the best students were really mucking things up. The mistakes ranged from sign errors to not simplifying to conceptual errors. What I’m thinking of doing is having a “make-up test” for them this Thursday during lunch or after school (whichever they can make it to). Is that sort of thing allowed? If they took it during lunch, when would they get a chance to eat? Or do you think I should give them “test corrections” for extra points on the test?

As for if they are totally missing the boat or not, I don’t know how to fix that since we’re starting on new things! Maybe each day my Do Now will be stuff from the last chapter?

Best,
Sam

I sound reasonable in this email. But internally, I was an absolute mess. How could I be such a bad teacher? It was one of those “take stock of things” moments. And I was coming up short.

What brought this back was misscalcul8’s recent tweet:

And it all felt so familiar. What’s great is that she has a support network with all our twitter buddies! Not that anyone can really help too much — I mean, we’re so far away from the situation we’re taking stabs in the dark on how to deal with it — but I can only imagine that the commiseration and advice was soothing.

I can just say that I didn’t have that on October 21, 2007. I was convinced that I was simply terrible, and that no other teacher had ever had a class bomb. No, seriously, I was so terrified that I believed that. (What a moron I was.)

I know I’ve grown a lot since those first few terrifying months, where I felt I was on trial — with the students, with the school, and most importantly, with myself.

As that first year went on, and I was exposed to some serious trial by fire, I found I slowly started to thrive. I dealt with a few (not many) challenging parent situations, had a few discussions with students who were acting out, actually sort-of yelled at a student when nothing else was getting through, coped with excessive absences of some students due to mono, and dealt with cheaters. A lot.

But as the year progressed, I got comfortable in my teacher skin. I gained my teacher voice. I learned to just lay my expectations and not try to justify everything or argue with students about them [1]. I learned not to be defensive.

But the only thing that does that is time.

So for anyone out there who might be new, and hitting their first major so-called-hurdle, just know that

(a) it probably isn’t as huge a hurdle as you think it is

(b) we’ve all probably gone through it too

and

(c) the best remedy is time and perspective.

If your teaching trajectory is anything like mine, I had a few bumps my first year, and my second year was smooth as silk. There wasn’t one major bump. I might have encountered the same problems again, but this time I knew what I needed to do when dealing with them.

Example? Last year my Algebra 2 students all bombed a take home quiz on quadratic applications. I knew they were going to. I rushed, taught it badly, and knew I was doing a bad job for the three days we worked on it. I wasn’t surprised by their (very low) quiz grades. So what did I do? I just fessed up. I told ’em I frakked up, and I knew it, and I couldn’t hold my mistakes against them. Quiz was wiped. We moved on from there. Not a huge deal. The previous year I wouldn’t have been nearly as mature as that.

[1] I’m requiring my Algebra II students to use a binder this year, and I got some pushback. “But I don’t like binders! Can I use something else?” “No.” “Why?” “Because I said so. But if you need, I’ll hold your hand when we use the binder, promise.”

My first day was underwhelming.

I could list all the things I would do differently, and all the things that were out of my control that affected things, and go on and on and on. But I won’t. I just don’t feel like it.

Instead I’ll just say that the biggest letdown for today was my own too-high expectations. I remember the community that we built in each of my four classes last year. By the end of the year, it was a crazy joy to go to each of my classes. I seriously cared about every single one of my students more than I thought I could. [1]  That’s my last memory of teaching. I forgot that I don’t get that at the beginning of the year. The class clown hasn’t come out. Students don’t know how they’re allowed to act in class, what I expect of them. I still don’t know what they expect from me. I’m having a real hard time reading them. That stuff comes with time.

I totally forgot. I totally forgot that it takes time for a group of individuals to become a class.

Sam

[1] Ah, selective memory and the idealization and whitewashing that comes with time!

So I’m just going to throw it out there.

Sometimes blogging makes me feel like a fraud.

Here’s why. I’m not an amazing teacher. Most of my lesson plans aren’t exciting. I have lots of ideas but often no follow through to implement them. I plan almost 100% of my lessons the day before I teach them. I don’t use group work effectively. I rarely teach problem solving skills and don’t do honest investigation in anything other than my multivariable calculus class. I keep a teacher-centered classroom. My kids all have laptops and I never use them in class. I pretty much follow the same teaching pattern every day (warm up, homework questions, lecture, stop to practice, lecture, stop to practice). I’m afraid to give up control of the classroom to my kids.

Which are — frankly — all things I’m totally okay with, at this point. Some things I don’t want or care to change. Other things I wish I were farther along in my own personal development. And there are a number of things I know I do really well too. But there you are. That’s where I am at the moment. I’m pretty good, but I’m not amazing. (My own personal assessment, anyway.)

But here’s where feeling like a fraud comes in. Did you really think I led a teacher-centered class every day? Would you have expected me to describe myself as I did above? In other words, if you came to watch me teach, would you see what you expected?

I’m 100% certain (bets, anyone?) that the answer is no.

Two years ago, 328 posts ago, when I started blogging, I was blogging for me alone. But it struck me recently that in the past two years, I had inadvertently been constructing this online persona, post by post. Like: my online blog self is one person and my real life self another? Is it just me? Prolly.

But it’s bothering me that this online persona is so incomplete, possibly a idealized version of what kind of teacher I am in real life.

I honestly do write for me. This place has always been for me, but I know that as opposed to when I first started and I was my only reader, there are now like 5-10 people (oh! kind souls!) who read this blog in addition to me and my super awesome teacher sister. I don’t want to be a fraud to you as I continue to write here. So for you 5-10 people, in case I had somehow drawn myself into some sort of caricature teacher costume, let me just put it out there straight:

I’ve had two years in the classroom. I’m okay at what I do. I love what I strive to do.

I wanted to revise my teaching portfolio. I decided to think backwards and start from what the goals of my portfolio were and then see what I could do to achieve them:

• A site for me to “sell” myself, if I ever go on the job market.
• A site for me to archive the evolution of my teaching career. My blog acts as that, in a haphazard way. The portfolio sorts through the detritus and organizes it.
• A site for me to express my personality and teaching style.

What I came up falls short of the third piece, but I think it is successful on the two parts.

If you want to check it out, feel free: Sam Shah’s Teaching Portfolio

And just so you know, my Teaching Philosophy as is now is actually just filler. I mean, I believe all that, but I haven’t written a formal one yet.