Blogging/Twittering

The blog that will never be

Oh there are times when I want to share things with you, my (very) few loyal readers. Through my yearlong courtship with the independent school system, I’ve come to absolutely love what it has to offer, but there are also individual moments of supreme surrealism. Where you are confronted with something — be it an email, a conversation, a policy — that makes you do a double take and go “whaaa?”

Today I had just one such moment, that made me take up a variation of the old man’s trope: “When I was in public high school, it would have been unthinkable for…”

And I have this blog, and I desperately want to share these moments with you, because… well, they’re really, really funny. Actually they’re usually a mixture of being comical and somewhat upsetting simultaneously. Because they reveal a world so different, full of people so different, that you sometimes wonder if you’ve wandered onto the wrong set, and you’re waiting for someone to say “cut. WHAT THE HECK IS THAT GUY DOING HERE?”

But unfortunately, a post on this blog beginning with “Even if you tried, with the help of a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters, you wouldn’t be able to predict what just happened today…” can never be. I vowed to myself to never write about specific students or specific situations — no matter how much the emotional side of me wants to. The reasonings are many and sound (I followed this story closely), and I’ve outlined them briefly before:

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.)

It’s not fair to those you want to write about, because when push comes to shove, you don’t want them doing the same to you. I hate ratemyteacher.com. It’s the most malicious form of this.

But I’m sad about my self-imposed policy, especially with school ramping up, just days away. Because I love to vent. (I think venting is cathartic and healthy and absolutely necessary in teaching.) Because I love reading good teaching tales. (Some of my most favorite blogs are all about spinning good student yarns.) Because I think we can learn a lot about other schools, other teachers, and how to deal with our own situations, by hearing these stories.

And because yet another absurdity happened today.

On this blog, the farthest I’ll go on this is to make generalities about the performance of my classes as a whole, and consequently, I’ll be forced to take my own teaching tales to the local watering hole.

So yes, this post is a proxy of the one that I can’t write, but so desperately want to. In other words, I’m just giving myself a little reminder to stay true to the original purpose of this blog — a personal archive of my professional growth as a teacher, a form of communication with other teachers, and a place to reflect upon teaching practice.

Some Places To Visit On The Interweb

I’m a blog junkie. I now read blogs daily, and I want to point out my favorite posts. Partly as an archive for myself, partly to share with others some great things out there that I’ve been struck by.

So without further ado, here I go:

  1. On Nailing/Blowing Assessment (dy/dan)
  2. End-o-Year Calculus Projects (Math Teacher Mambo)
  3. The Function Machine Game (Let’s Play Math)
  4. Teaching the Long Tail (Math Stories)
  5. Math Teacher Bingo (3 Standard Deviations To The Left)
  6. Competing the Square (Coffee and Graph Paper)
  7. Math & Art / Big Numbers (The Exponential Curve)
  8. Teflon Teacher and How Much Do They Change (Certain Uncertainty)
  9. We Know You’re Blogging (On The Tenure Track)
  10. Exceedingly Lame Final Question and Counterexamples (The Number Warrior)
  11. Quitting Teaching College (An Educator’s Blog)
  12. Classroom Management vs. Discipline (Catching Sparrows)
  13. A Motivational Experiment: Reflections on a Mohawk (I Want To Teach Forever)
  14. Help Wanted: Active Summer Learning With Technology (Dangerously Irrelevant)
Lucky 14. With that, I’m out.

My Blogroll

I’ve been meaning to put a blogroll up for a while. But the problem is that my blogroll is constantly evolving, and I wanted something that updates as I update.

Well, my RSS reader netvibes — which I’ll tout as currently the Best. Thing. Ever. — allows you to see all the blogs I read, updated. So click on the netvibes icon on the right and check out some of the amazing blogs out there. Without further ado: my blogroll.

And the blogosphere keeps marching on…

When I was away in Paris for Spring Break, people didn’t stop blogging. I spent a good number of hours catching up, while I’m sick and not in the mood to do anything really active. (When am I ever really in the mood to do active things, though?) So I logged into netvibes and buckled down… carnivals… posts… links…
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There’s a lot of good stuff out there. Here’s some that I want to highlight:

  1. A primer on the zeta function: you know this person knows how to break something down and present it in a clear way. It builds up, from smaller simple examples to build intuition, to a grand finish.
  2. An analysis of whitespace — physical, and metaphorical: “I like to talk. I really wish I could just and listen to myself, because the information that I spew out is just awesome stuff. My students might disagree, though. If I reduce the amount of noise that I make, my students will be more likely to hear the important things I tell them. As a side note, I find that the misbehaviors in my class seem to happen when I am talking or the students are otherwise disengaged. So the less I talk and the more I work, the better! “
  3. A funny (but insightful) take on parent teacher conferences, which I had to pass along to a number of my teacher friends. To whet your appetite: “I also feel I must apologize. I am sorry that I sent your child to the nurse the other day when he complained of a toothache. I don’t know where my head was. Thank you for the quick analysis of my motives via email that afternoon. Had you not pointed it out, I would have never picked up on my underlying desire to lessen the number of students in my class by sending them to the nurse for innocuous ailments. I got your message loud and clear though. Your use of 18 point font, bold print, all caps text really aids in the reading process. From now on, I will not send him to the nurse for toothaches.”
  4. I struggle with homework, and it’s nice to know others do too. Good ideas for other forms of assessment are in the comments after the post. Huzzah!
  5. A small, silly, cutsie way to get students engaged when dealing with coordinate points.
  6. Carl Sagan on Flatland (from Science After Sunclipse)… Amazing expository. Good teaching. I was hooked and I know all this.

Yahoo! for teachers

Update: Bill Fitzgerald and Dan Meyer are now on a similar quest.

Yahoo has started a new web 2.0 site for helping teachers create, manage, and share “projects.” I’ve dreamed of a site where teachers collaborate (as well as beg, borrow, and steal) online in a massive community. Yeah, bloggers read and comment, but that’s not what I dream of. I want a huge archive and discussions on projects.

This could be that, if we’re speaking with all the idealism and naivety of a ten year old. But for a site like this to work, people have to use it. Without having played with it, my initial spidey sense is telling me that instead of the website being adaptable to us, instead we’re going to have to adapt to it. Constrained by what the website constitutes a “project,” teachers are likely to think this site isn’t as natural as it could be. Instead of technology adapting to our needs, we might reconfigure our needs to adapt to this technology. And I’d like to have some… not promise… but strong indicator that it’s worth it before heading off into the technological blue.

It’s unclear to me how useful this is going to be (if at all), but I’m going to keep an open mind. One thing I’ve often noted is how hard it is to find smartboard presentations online. I create mine from scratch, but I also imagine that others would find them useful, as I would find looking at (and stealing parts of) their presentation of the same material useful. I secretly have a hope that one day I will be the facilitator to this giant city wide project which will get teachers who actually make lessons (smartboard, handwritten, typed, group projects, etc.) to upload them to some site to share.

In any case, the website is still in beta form: http://beta.teachers.yahoo.com/

I signed up for an invite forever ago, and just got invited to join today, but maybe anyone can get one now that they’ve opened it up for testing.

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.