On Pi Day…
In my seventh grade class, I had to forge forward with the curriculum, but I came up with something great to punctuate the class work with. We have been working with areas of geometric shapes (specifically circles), radicals, and the pythagorean theorem. One day, a few days before Pi Day, I drew The Perfect Circle on the whiteboard. They were impressed. I was lucky — but I didn’t play it off as luck, but practice and skill. I rehearse, I told them.

That night, I sent them this video over email:

And again, they were impressed. So I decided that in honor of Pi Day, I would hold a freehand circle drawing contest. They came to class psyched. One said he had practiced drawing circles in the air so much that his arm hurt, and another used a whiteboard marker on a mirror. We forged forward, and as we worked, we punctuated the class with the competition (3 students at the board at a time; the winner of each round got to compete in the final championship round).

The winner of the contest got to create — with me — the bonus problem for the next test.

Dan Meyer asks the question:

Unless my experience as a classroom manager is several deviations below the mean, other people are struggling with this as I have struggled. New teachers are struggling with this. So why is classroom management the farthest topic from anyone’s blog?

Before reading the comments, to see what his other readers thought, I suspect that others will agree with me: talking about classroom management meaningfully often times requires speaking in specifics about individual students or incidents. For those teachers blogging under their own names, there’s the added thought: “what if…”

What if students come across the site (probability: likely)?

Don’t get me wrong. 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.) And for an issue like classroom management, it’s all about specifics. The individual student, a particular incident, a conversation or punishment. Without that, it’s all and all (just) another good teaching tale.

That’s not to say that conversations about techniques on how to keep a classroom running smoothly and effectively aren’t worth having. It means that talking about when a classroom isn’t run smoothly is harder.

That being said, I’m going to hopefully give Dan something to play with… I’ve typed up a list of notes I took before starting teaching this year, given to me by a veteran teacher: Advice to New Teachers on Classroom Management. I normally eschew prescriptive teaching talk (someone telling me this is the way to do things), but these tips are so useful that I ignored my initial gag reflex and I’m a better person for it. (I’ve noticed that I do a lot of these things naturally, which is a good sign for me, I think.)

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Sitting in my mailbox this afternoon was a big white envelope. Inside was my “First Year Faculty Class Observation.” The head of the upper school observed me in late October and this was the fruits of that labor.

Part I of the document was a brief description of the lesson or class.

Part II of the document were commendations and areas of strength.

Part III of the document were recommendations and areas of growth.

I won’t bore you with Part I. And honestly, Part III is interesting only to a certain degree. It does have some very helpful suggestions (e.g. have a good method to close up class to tie everything together) but most were things like “you had students use the calculator in class… how were you making sure they could use it at home without you there” (the implication is that I didn’t have a way to do this, but in fact, I post very explicit instructions for them online so they can refer to them).

So I’m posting Part II below. It doesn’t really scream “you’re wonderful,” but hey, I’ll take the good in whatever form I can get it.

Part II: Commendations/Areas of Strength

Throughout the class you maintained a positive tone that encouraged students to participate in the work you had laid out.

Your carefully planned PowerPoint reinforced different learning styles and helped the students remain focused as new material and tools were being introduced.

You comfortably moved around the room to monitor student progress as they began to work with the graphing calculator and you offered helpful feedback along the way.

You used simple hand gestures to tell a student to hold her question as you finished giving instructions to the whole class and then you returned to listen to the question once the class had begun to work independently.

You demonstrated your understanding of the material and supported your students in their own burgeoning understanding by reinforcing prior learning and connecting it to the new topic. For example, asking students to describe what they had already learned about [the] zero and then making the connection to [the] zero as a function, or drawing a graph and asking “what would be the zero of this function?” When [student name redacted] was unable to answer the question, you reminded her about what she already knew, so she could regain her confidence and telling her “don’t apologize” [for not remembering].

You have already taken time to meet with [the US Learning Specialist] in the learning skills deparment to review the educational testing and instructional needs of various students. Your interest in reviewing this important information is an excellent habit to develop in what I hope will be a long and successful teaching career.

With the start of the second quarter, I vow…

to be more creative, to start a project, to put more effort into making each lesson plan clear. Basically, to bring the enthusiasm back to the classroom that I had on the first day. I made a really great first day presentation where I made a pact with the kids: they put forth their full effort and they get me at my full effort.

I told my students its the start of a new quarter. We have a blank slate to work from. Thanksgiving break just happened. I think I will repeat the sentiment on Monday: a blank slate and a new vista of territory to cover. And I hopefully will repeat that sentiment to myself too!

With the start of the second quarter, I’m (by definition) over 1/4 done with the year. Champagne all around! Seriously, though, that opened my eyes. Everyone says first year teaching is really hard, a lot of work. It was, in the beginning, but I’ve learned where I can streamline. (I can’t imagine this is true in the sciences, history, or English… but math is incredibly easy to prepare for. Smartboard makes it time consuming, but it is still easy.) The hardest part so far is becoming emotionally uninvested. And even doing that, I think, helps me out. It isn’t that I don’t care about my students, but I need to have a hard edge to show my students I mean business. So it’s going well.

Also at the end of the quarter, I had to write comments on each of my students. This too went well. What struck me about the comment writing process is how easy it is to write comments for the students who aren’t doing so hot.

Today is the last day of “freedom” — but that is true only in words and not in spirit. I am going into campus today to meet the middle schoolers during their lunch (it’s their orientation day) and then have back to back to back meetings (literally three!) with teachers about the classes we’re “co-teaching” (a term I am using because I don’t know how else to express it succinctly… we each are teaching different sections of the same class). I also have a lot that needs to get printed out for the first day: worksheets, emergency lesson plans, rosters, etc. My list has about 20 things on it already!

Yesterday, the technical penultimate day of freedom, I worked with a new-teacher-friend for 4 or 5 hours straight at a coffeeshop (and 3 hours on my own). Lots of writing and revising. What’s insane is that I was hoping to get at least the 2nd day of school’s lesson planning done, but that was wishful thinking. I did get a lot of other important tasks done.

Some lessons I’ve learned from the last few days:

1. My initial posting with regards to veering away from the textbook is just not going to happen. At this point in time, at this stage in my career, it is just too much work for me to do to still get sleep, stay on target with the other teachers, and be happy. If it was just me, and I only had one class to prep, I think it would be manageable, but having to work in parallel to another teacher makes the task more difficult.

This is not to say that I will be teaching to the textbook. Hopefully I will act as a complement to the book. My sister, the teacher, gave me some advice I think I will heed even though I told her I wouldn’t:

[I]t is your first year of teaching and your kids will learn so much even if you aren’t reinventing new crazy lessons each day and in fact they will learn more if you are leading a balanced life and are not tooooo overworked (which you will be anyway) … you will have MANY years to refine and invent and hone your lessons and ideas. Don’t teach a bad lesson on purpose, but don’t assume all text-based ideas are bad. After all, some kids really thrive on lessons based around the text; it helps reinforce their learning process. Go for one cool lesson per week. Not per week per course. Just one lesson you feel really good about once a week in one of your courses.

I can do that.

2. I am going to be the king of “beg, borrow, and steal.” When it comes to great teaching ideas, why come up with them on your own? I’ve already hit upon the genius of dy/dan multiple times, but there’s lots out there. For example, yesterday I was wondering how to teach “why is it that you get a positive number when you multiply two negative numbers?” Seriously take a minute and think about that. It’s hard to get a good real-world example for it. And the technical explanation revolves around the consistency distributive property. But online, you just punch in your question, and you get teaching solutions. Some are not really good, in my opinion, but some could work!

Since this is going to be a blog about practice, I might end up posting some or all of my lesson plans online. Here’s a working draft of my first day smartboard presentation for my calculus class. I am pretty satisfied with it, so far, but there are things that could (and might) be improved.

First, many of the slides — especially those dealing with assessment — are text heavy. I hate text heavy slides. On the other hand, the thing that kept ringing in my ear when I was about to press the delete key was “be clear.” Students are desperate for clear and well-defined expectations. (At least I was.) How can you expect a student to know how to act, know what to do, unless you spell it out?

Second, the slides aren’t visual enough. Which comes right out of point one.

Third, I tried a number of background colors, and this one worked best. But the red text and royal blue text are arresting, and hence distracting. But I played around with other standard colors, and couldn’t get things better. If I have time, maybe I’ll finesse things until they look less jarring and more appealing.

Fourth, I haven’t written a conclusion yet.

Fifth, and most important, I don’t see a direct connection between my syllabus and this presentation. I don’t want to be reading the syllabus, but the “we are on a harrowing mathematical adventure together” aspect of the syllabus is totally absent in the presentation. Even the feeling of us embarking on an intellectual mystery cruise or taking a journey or anything. I will definitely change that this weekend.

Computer training today went better — although all my criticisms of the email/conferencing/messaging system remain, and perhaps have grown even stronger.

Most importantly, I learned about course conferences. These are required for every teacher in the school to create and use for each course they teach. And when I say “use,” for example, I mean that each day teachers are required to post that night’s homework by 3:30pm; if a teacher forgets, technically the students are officially absolved of the responsibility of doing it. (I don’t think it works that way unofficially.) So my school takes this technology really seriously.

I finally did get a sense of what a “conference” for a course is, and if you’re wondering, it’s basically a place to archive emails you’ve sent to a class with their homework assignments or additional information, and also a place for students to submit their homework electronically. That’s it. And there’s nothing special about it. So if a student needs to see what the assignment was on any given day, they open the course conference message whose subject reads “HOMEWORK: 2007 Aug 21.” Although there is a steep learning curve for managing these conferences, it seems like it won’t take much to get a grasp on it. And an added benefit is that if a student joins the class late — or if a teacher takes over a class mid-stream or wants to reference what a previous teacher emailed out — you have that information to give them. It’s institutional memory. And as a former historian, I know how important these sorts of archiving practices are. [1]

Still, when push comes to shove, I would much rather there be a requirement for a course webpage for each course instead of this list of emails that get stored. First, the page has the exact same content the conference does (you can even design it so there is a place to drop assignments electronically on it). Second, it is better than the conference because information is presented in a visually pleasing and visually organized way. You can put text, images, files, and links grouped by project/chapter/assignment rather than have them all in a list by date. (If you saw the way our software looks, you would see why I keep on harping on the visual. You might even cry. It is truly terrible.) Third, there are ways to make website creation a total piece of cake for teachers to create — where teachers can have as much control or as little control as they want. (At UCLA, as TAs, we had the ability to create our own course webpages, and although it wasn’t perfect, we had the ability to customize it and upload documents and files for students to download, display links, email the entire class or select sections, etc.)

With that being said, the more I think about it, the more the need for at least some sort of system that does what our system does becomes at least plausible, possibly even beneficial. The world is becoming more electronic, less paper based. Students need to learn to collaborate — and this appears to be a long-term goal of the technologists in my school. (They push teachers to come up with innovative uses of wikis and blogs.) It also teaches organizational skills and creates a complete online community, one that wouldn’t exist if we just emailed.

For now, I’m going to take this software with a grain of salt, learn it to the best of my ability, and see what I can do to make it useful for me, or if that doesn’t happen, figure out how to use it so it is at least the least of all evils.

On a much brighter note, and I mean much brighter note, I learned how to use smartboards today. And these, my friends, are amazing. I was inspired by dy/dan’s keynote presentations (example here) and I think that I could possibly design smartboard lessons to work similarly.

That’s all for today folks. Let’s see what wiki and blog dreams tomorrow brings us.

[1] I think that some of the information on the system only lasts 6 months, however, so if that includes the course conferences, then this benefit isn’t much a benefit.