Teach For America teacher blogs are on Teach For Us

Open Letter to Secretary Duncan on High-Stakes Testing

Ms. Math — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 22:43:13 +0100

This letter written by a number of education experts is a great description about the problems inherent in high stakes testing. I'm surprised that they did not mention that statisticians think that the tests are not reliable indicators of teacher ability because there is too many other variables that are out of control of the teacher and also affect test scores. I bet Gary Rubinstein would like this letter.

On Emotions, Constructivism and Teaching Mathematics Meaningfully

Ms. Math — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 22:41:08 +0100

I spend most of my time building mental models of student thinking, and constructing logical arguments, yet I know that the forces that kept me teaching and pushed me from the profession were largely beyond logical description. Due to the unexpected death of a young friend and a subsequent reconsideration of myself, I’ve realized that logic only explains half of my life and by focusing on it almost exclusively I’ve missed some major insights into who I am and why I struggle in particular aspects of my life. Given the difficulty of implementing reform instruction in mathematics classrooms and the dismal teacher retention rates, studying emotion as an explanatory construct for the state of affairs seems reasonable. (There, I go again, juxtaposing emotion and reason.) Here is the story of constructivism and my emotions. I entered math education because I realized through tutoring that students didn’t understand why math was true and as a result spent agonizing amounts of time memorizing things they didn’t understand. I read a few articles on conceptual learning of mathematics, entered Teach for America, and began teaching Algebra and Pre-Calculus to students who were years behind in mathematics. I brought with me strong mathematical connections and deep understandings of secondary curriculum but very little understanding of student thinking. The best I knew how to do was to ask and explain why a mathematical statement was true and to try to get my students to “discover” what I wanted them to learn. Discovery often took the form of guessing at a pattern, and in hindsight probably didn’t promote the meanings I intended. The emotions, which were largely expressed in tears and anger and exhaustion, were a result of the conflict between what TFA told me I could achieve with my students and the reality of what happened when I tried to teach math meaningfully without the support of anyone with knowledge of student thinking. I was instructed to teach algebraic concepts for which my students had no foundation and told that I was lowering my expectation and promoting the achievement gap when I suggested that students who didn’t understand fractions and multiplication would not be able to make sense of algebraic reasoning. I had no research to back me up, just a sense that was I was attempting to teach couldn’t possibly make sense and that the best I could hope for was that kids would be inspired to memorize. I remember telling my program director that I didn’t think that the district Algebra test was a reasonable goal for my students. She made me feel guilty for giving up on them before the semester began and I made the ill-conceived district test my goal. All of my students failed. Later I found out that 93% of the district failed. I cried while hearing the click of wrong answers as I ran the responses through the scantron machine. Students who have failed at math for their entire life are resistant to trying. It opens them up to more failure. It’s easier to dismiss and insult a teacher than to open yourself up in a class that can’t make sense, because you didn’t learn the math that would allow it to make sense. As I tried to teach “why” my students interpreted my instruction as confusing and they revolted. I felt strongly that my role was to inspire and help them, not to constrain and restrict them. My all-boys freshman Algebra class fell apart at the seams. The first lesson that wasn’t an abject failure involved teaching them how to multiply fractions by rote at the suggestion of a mentor teacher. She asked “what can you teach that they will understand and do well on a test.” After a day of multiplying fractions (which probably had little meaning for them) on a worksheet the class aced a quiz that only required multiplying fractions out of context. This was the most emotionally satisfying day of my first semester with them because they listened, they tried, and progress was made. As a constructivist educator, I see that I contributed to the construction of the sense that math was moving senseless symbols around and contributed nothing to developing productive meanings for fractions. But it saved the week and kept me teaching. In my PreCalculus class I instigated “practice tests” which mimicked the real test almost exactly and probably allowed students to earn high grades without a strong understanding of what they were doing. The 80% class averages, earned by mimicry, made life seem more bearable. I had some success to share with my mentors who I assumed thought I should never have been admitted to this elite program. Most of the time I worked with my mentors I cried about the boys who were sexually harassing me in my classroom. As a young, insecure woman, most of my instructional decisions revolved around a sense of self-preservation. I gave worksheets that everyone could do so that they wouldn’t insult me. I knew they were not learning what they were supposed to but I couldn’t do endless battle. A primary consideration in lesson planning was making sure I was always facing the class. If I let my guard down for a second and wrote something on the board something would get thrown at me. I didn’t put questions on the test that required more than memorization because of the cries of “you never taught us this” were too much to bear. Critical thinking was all in the extra credit for the kids who cared and sustained me. I was faced with a group of boys who I hated because they harassed me yet I felt guilty because TFA told me I was supposed to care about their future. I didn’t, and I did all at once and it ate me up all year. Lest I appear to exaggerate, let me share the day I went to the doctor because I’d stopped menstruating, and he told me that I might be infertile. When life calmed down I realized stress was probably the cause of my health problems that year. I'd lost my voice for days, became overweight for the first time in my life, only felt okay when I wrote my bike for 70 miles and all I could feel was hunger, and prayed to get mono so I could leave school for a month. I remember the moment my first year teaching where I realized I used to be happy but couldn't remember what that felt like anymore. There were moments in my first two years that were more than this suffering. Some of my brighter students, who typically rebelled at boring worksheets, loved it when I spoke of the beauty of math. I remember tossing in the Goldbach conjecture into a lesson on prime numbers. One student spent all period trying to write numbers as differences of primes while the rest of the class worked on basic arithmetic skills. I saw students blossom and grow and go on to major in math, study physics at MIT, and tell me I’d changed their mind about education. In the midst of the coping by subverting my inclination to teach math meaningfully, I still explained why enough to reach a few students. For better or worse, I don’t think I knew how ineffective many of my “why does this work” explanations were and kept giving them over and over and over. I get the sense that some of my kids learned because they kept studying math successfully in college. Maybe it wasn’t me-who knows. But, I still keep the nice notes they wrote to me in a scrapbook. I did care about the kids I worked with in TFA. I cared about the school and the teacher and starting making impacts and seeing successes. But the feeling I got when I imagined the emotional energy it took me to deal with the meanness directed towards me was enough to make me move on to a fancy private school with minor behavioral issues. Again, emotions were a primary reason, that I changed my math instruction. I entered the school with the idea that I must teach these above average students the meaning and beauty of mathematics. They were going to fancy colleges and needed to solve hard problems and understand what they were doing. The first weeks of school I realized how much they knew about math! I dreamed of all I could do with them. I was using Hughes-Hallet’s Calculus and assigned them problems that didn’t look like examples. Half the class revolted. They insisted that I assigned work I hadn’t taught them. They told the principal that everything they had learned about Calculus they learned from friends and Kahn Academy and that I wasn’t teaching them anything. I thought that these bright students could clearly comprehend the delta epsilon definition of a limit because I had in Calculus 2. I saw them as younger versions of me. Yet again, no one with a background in student thinking was there to point out to me the obvious. Most of my students had completely different conceptions of rate of change and function as I did and didn’t understand my instruction in the way I intended. At this fancy wonderful school that promotes critical thinking many of them had memorized their way up to Calculus. They had impressed me the first week with loads of memorized procedures and formulas and I'd attributed my own understandings of those concepts to them because we used the same words at the same time. I needed to know that my students didn't have big ideas behind many of the words I used in my explanations so they couldn't figure out what I was saying. There were a few brilliant, notable exceptions who told me that my instruction was wonderful. I remember one student saying “I love how you teach because you explain the idea and then I can solve all the problems myself.” As I didn’t see my students thinking as different than my own, I attributed their complaints to laziness. A logical conclusion given how disinterested in work my former students often were. My students were offended I thought they were not working hard enough and attributed their confusion in switching from a traditional to a conceptual textbook to me and my teaching. After all, I was young and new to their school. The knew the school, the administration, and the climate much better than me. They told the principal these things, and although he was a former math teacher he didn’t believe that math should be meaningful either. I was once shocked when he said “I never figured out why you need the quadratic formula or what the point of quadratics are. To me it is just a song.” I was annoyed when I was trying to teach the definition of the derivative and he came in to observe and impressed the students by using the power rule to compute in his head what they had spent lines doing. Many probably thought I was an idiot for teaching them the hard method when the power rule was so simple. To them, I should be teaching them to find answers quickly. That was what math was. And some saw exactly why the definition was more important and continued to back me up and provide me the joy I needed to believe in myself. The observations and meetings turned into a formal letter-they were observing me twice a week to see if they wanted to keep me at the school. The principal did not attribute my difficulties to my lack of awareness of student thinking but to my personality. He told me “teaching is an art, and some people just don’t have it.” He told me “the kids don’t respect you.” He asked me to watch sporting events and make friends with my students to solve the problems he saw. Yes, relationships are critically important. To learn math meaningfully, I needed my kids to trust me enough to risk failure and express confusion. Yet, as a woman, who was still unaware of how fundamentally insecure I was, I just believed him that I was bad with people while maintaining the sense that my mathematical knowledge was much stronger than his. I decided I didn’t like talking to students very much. That I hated noise. Sometimes my notions were contradicted by some of the amazing, meaningful and fun lessons I created with those wonderful, curious students(not the girl who didn't understand rates who tried to get me fired-the others). I started to understand my students as I watched them try to estimate the area of baked goods using Calculus. I started to realize that my meaning for function and derivatives were not theirs as their knowledge broke down in application of math to the real world projects I'd devised with their help. I realized that some of my students could solve and pose problems more complicated than I’d ever dared to suggest. For some, what I was saying made sense. My guess is that these students were the reason I wasn’t fired. One told me after scoring a 5 on his AP test and an 800 on his math SAT 2 that I was the reason he’d been able to do that and that I’d made it all clear. (I’m sure it was not just me, but the emotional boost I took from that allowed me to read and process the weekly emails about how bad at teaching I was.) Getting those emails about how bad my class was from the principal was brutal. They tended to point out that I'd added two numbers wrong or that a kid who'd stayed up late the night before working on an essay was sleeping and I didn't do anything about it. When the principal asked me what I needed I told him "positive reinforcement." I didn't get it except for once after the year was done when he congratulated me on how well my students had done on the AP calculus test. I cried under my desk. I wrote angry responses to my criticisms and sent them to my mom. I relied on the love of my friends and tried to fix my boyfriend's life to distract me from my own failure at work. I started changing my instruction. I started giving examples that looked precisely like the questions on the homework and telling the students which example corresponded to which problem. I made the tests easier and eliminated problems that I knew required thinking that only some of the students had. I got rid of epsilon–delta descriptions of limits(based on further reading, that was a cognitively sound decision!). I tried really hard to get my students to like me instead of getting them to think critically. I ignored topics that I sensed would be hard. I dumped extra time into writing challenge problems for the students who wanted to do hard math-they kept eating them up. They did amazing projects. The second year at the school I realized I had to build student confidence before asking them to grapple with hard ideas and didn't sacrifice the quality of my instruction as I had the year before. Although most of this was subconscious I imagine that I was forming enough of a sense of student thinking that I could predict what would be easy and hard without fully being able to explain this why in terms of constructs I found in math education research in graduate school. I don’t know if all of these modifications to reduce the demand of my class really worked to improve the problems my principal saw in the class culture. At that point, I really still thought that the problem was that I just wasn’t likable as a person and I didn’t see the huge rift in mathematical thinking between me and my students. None of that made sense until I worked with Pat Thompson in graduate school and learned about student thinking in his Calculus class. I reconsidered the problems my students found challenging and what that might have said about their thinking. From this standpoint, I developed the theory that different conceptions of math, rates, functions and fractions led to many of the difficulties that were written up as a problem with my "likability as a person." My students did try to do the novel problems I assigned them but they didn't have the meanings I did and therefore didn't know what to do with them. This frustration got directed at me. Emotions were part of the reason I was working with Pat. The most memorable moment of my graduate school search process was a conversation with Pat Thompson. He commented that I’d had realized more about student thinking while teaching than most of the teacher’s he worked with. I said “I had some particularly difficult circumstances and had to reflect daily on my instruction to decide if it was really as bad as my principal told me it was.” He said “I’m impressed you didn’t just believe the principal.” And then he turned serious, sat me down, and said “This is important. No matter which school you choose, I think that you need to be in a PhD program where people can help you grow and support you.” He somehow realized how horrible things were, without me saying anything. I wasn’t about to tell my future advisers that I was under consideration for being fired for a year. (In the end they saw me improve and kept me.) What if they thought I was actually a bad math teacher? Although choosing a PhD program involved a lot of rational thought on research goals, money, geography, ranking and more, the moment where Pat cared about me, seemed to read my mind and understand my pain for a second, stands out to me as a decisive experience. It’s the only I’m most likely to explain when asked why I chose ASU. So take this as an existence proof that emotions do matter- especially to a young, insecure female math teacher. I had the knowledge and passion to teach math meaningfully. Once I was orientated to build models of student thinking and given some assistance I was able to do it productively. I had creativity and passion and love for math and lesson planning. I cared deeply about my students. Some of them even thought I was funny and wrote wonderful notes about how I was their favorite teacher. My teaching career could have been so much more, yet the tears, depression, self doubt turned my classroom into a place where thinking wasn’t valued as much as I thought mattered. Boosting content knowledge is important. Providing curricular support is important. But for some teachers, a giant piece of the puzzle in teaching math meaningfully is how they feel about themselves and what they know about how their students learn. I know I'm not alone-I've mentored many teachers from my role in TFA and realized that teaching math meaningfully is an exhausting, stressful experience for many and that despite their best intentions they are up against an institutional and emotional mountain that few have the energy to climb. -This is an edited version of something I posted last year. Given the recent shout out to TeachforUs in the New York Times, I wanted to put up one of my posts that resonated with a number of teachers here.

My New Year's Resolution-Discovering Joy in Learning

fans361 — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 01:43:36 +0100

As readers of my blog know, I have been thinking a lot of happiness recently. With the excuse of wanting to spend at least part of a Barnes and Noble gift card on myself (What does it say that my initial instincts are to spend it all on my students?), I bought Eric Weiner's book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World. I bought the book since I wanted to strike a balance between reading about happiness and fascinating travel literature for my beach reading in Costa Rica (yes, I am a spoiled teacher vacationing with my family on the beach). The book details his journey around the world searching for happiness in a variety of locations. I spent much of this afternoon at the pool reading the section of Weiner's book on Iceland. While Iceland is a small, wealthy, and ethnically homogenous nation, it faces some real barriers to happiness. During this time of the year, Icelanders can go over a month without seeing the sun. I am sure that Iceland is a lovely place to visit during the summer time, but the winters seem absolutely brutal. However, many Icelanders thrive during this period of darkness as it allows for studying and creativity. The Icelandic language, which is notoriously difficult to pronounce for foreigners, has been used to create poetry and music. As Weiner discovers, much of this poetry and music is garbage. It stinks. But that's ok in Iceland since failure is part of the culture. Iceland has historically been a difficult place to live and as a result, Icelanders are bound to fail at something. Rather than treating failure as a mark of shame, Icelanders do not become sad or necessary more motivated as many Americans become after experiencing failure. They simply accept it as part of life, and move onto to their project, which may be a success or it could be another failure. (I am honestly not doing justice to Weiner's book, and I highly recommend reading it.) Failure is an accepted part of Icelandic culture, which is one of the things that makes Iceland one of the happiest places on Earth. This fall, my classroom experienced a lot of failings starting with myself. I lost sight of the big picture of educating my students by getting tied down with behavior management issues that I underestimated coming into the classroom. By overlooking these issues, I set up the conditions that allowed too many of my students to fail assignments or even whole parts of my class. It's one thing to fail on a creative project, but it's different to not learn how to read for comprehension or complete basic multiplication facts. These fundamental skills allow us to make creative failures further down the line. I responded to these failures in a variety of ways over the past few months. Sometimes, I became even more motivated to succeed and worked longer and harder to ensure that my students would have a chance at success. Other times, I would simply ignore the students who were failing and focus on teaching my objectives to the students who were actively trying to grasp it. Finally, there were other times where I simply wanted to give up. I didn't respond to failure like an Icelander since I lost sight of a "greater joy". What do I mean by a "greater joy"? For me, this "greater joy" is the happiness caused by learning and discovering. From a young age, most of my academic motivation was intrinsic. While my parents surely encouraged much of this motivation, it was mostly me pushing myself to do better in school. It wasn't due to peer competition, but I wanted (and still want) to learn and experience as much as I can since that's what makes me happy. Whether it's reading a new book, trying a new food, or learning a new fact about how the world works, I am still motivated by the happiness that I find in learning about our world. Not all of this information makes me optimistic about the world, but for the most part, more knowledge has made me happier. My New Year's Resolution is to instill this same sense of intrinsic motivation, curiosity and academic inquiry in my students. Rather than finishing an assignment so they can listen to their favorite song in class, I want my students to reach a point where they complete their work, because they experience joy in learning. Without much effort, some of my students have already reached this goal. Their desire to learn more and expand their knowledge is truly inspiring, and it keeps me going each and every day. However, I know that through the right inspiration, I can get all of my students to this level in at least one subject by the end of the school year. I know that not all of my students are going to be motivated to learn everything about every subject, but if I can make my students passionate about their favorite subject to encourage further investigation both inside and outside the classroom, I will have hopefully set my students on a path to future success and ideally happiness. North Las Vegas is not and will never be Iceland. (I have become so used to the Las Vegas winters that I am not sure I could survive an Icelandic winter with my current, thin blood.) However, if my students in North Las Vegas can learn how to respond to failure like the Icelanders, then I know that they will be setting themselves up for future success and happiness well beyond the end of the school year. Now it's my New Year's Resolution to work smartly towards this goal for my students both this school year and for next school year.

Finding Happiness while and hopefully in Teaching

fans361 — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 20:11:35 +0100

It's no secret that most first-year teachers (especially TFA Corps Members) are not happy during much of their first year teaching. Facing an incredibly challenging job without all of the skills to succeed is difficult for anyone no matter how much support you have. I am not making this statement to indict anyone, but rather it's a fact (for me at least). It's the reason why I avoid many of the parties of 2012 CMs throw since it's simply too depressing to be around people who are always complaining even if you are one of them. Starting at Institute, I would seek out adventures on my own to make sure that I was of sane mind when I was lesson planning and instructing the classroom. I would take trips to random sights in LA in addition to catching baseball games in LA, Anaheim, and San Diego. Sometimes I would take these trips by myself and sometimes I would do them with others (sometimes TFA people but more than often than not, friends from elsewhere). However, the main point of these trips was always to clear up my mind from whatever disappointments I was facing in the classroom. I was always trying to escape something, which is a horrifying thought for a job that I wanted to get. Overall, I liked my life outside of my job, but I hated my job. Moving to Las Vegas, the same has proven to be true for better or worse. I love my weekends where I can explore new restaurants, new hiking trails, or simply catch up on sleep. Obviously, most people enjoy their weekends more than their workdays. However, like many people (especially my peer group), I want to work at a job that both challenges me and is fulfilling. That is what I thought would lead me to happiness in my life after college. I thought this job would provide the perfect balance of challenge and fulfillment, and maybe one day it will. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a control freak. Outside of the classroom and being single, I can control a vast majority of the variables in my life. I actively control my activities down to the smallest details. I know what I want, and most of the time I can get it. In the classroom, there are so many more variables outside of my control that it's often over-whelming. I can keep improving, but that doesn't mean that I will be able to control the other variables in the room and the whole school. Last month I was talking to a second-year CM who admitted how happy he was with teaching. I gave him one of those weird stares, and he said that for most of his first-year he simply didn't enjoy teaching. However, after seeing the progress of his classroom and their test results, by the end of his first year, he started to really enjoy teaching. Hopefully the same thing can happen to me, but I am simply pessimistic at this point since I feel like there are so many forces working against me in the classroom. Teaching (or really behavior management) feels like a giant game of "Whack-a-Mole". Whenever I solve one issue or my students finally master a skill, a new issue and new objective arises that seems beyond the grasp of both myself and my students. It's depressing since I want my students to succeed so badly that it's not funny, but too often that success remains elusive. I know that if I dedicated significantly more effort (time really isn't the issue) towards becoming a better educator, I would be more happy in the classroom. However that would consume much of the happiness in my life that I experience outside of teaching. Is it worth giving up that happiness temporarily for longer-term happiness in the workplace? I think it is, so I have been cutting back a bit on the things I do outside of work for fun. But now I have just found that I am simply more tired and hardly any better in the classroom. I know that I will get better with time and experience, but I am impatient person. I want results now so that I can feel as though I am spending my limited time on Earth in the best way possible. On dark days, I have started job applications for other positions, but I never get more than five minutes into them. That may be due to exhaustion, but more likely it's due to the fact that while I am impatient, I am not even close to wanting to give up yet. I am not going to throw in the white towel unless someone else throws it in for me. I still believe that I can be a successful teacher with my students achieving as much as possible. I know that I can get to a place of relative happiness as a teacher. Now it's my quest, especially after Winter Break, to actually get there. Hopefully, break will provide me with a large enough re-boot that I will really start to see results in my classroom in the following weeks.

Making the Comeback

fans361 — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 00:23:48 +0100

One of my favorite parts of my job is showing my students that I am human who cares about them rather than just being a mean teacher re-directing their behavior and leading a boring classroom. I have a few ways of completing this task. One way is that I allow any students who want to stay after school with me to work on their homework, play on the computers, or just chat with me. Even though these activities force me to spend more time at school, they are among the most enjoyable time of the day for me. A number of my colleagues have given crazy looks for wanting to stay longer than necessary at school, but they have to remember that my family isn't waiting for me at my condo. My kids are a very large part of my life here, and they are almost family. The other main way I connect with my students outside the classroom is by attending their extra-curricular activities. I have been to nearly a dozen football and basketball games already, and I know that number will grow. At the games, I am able to connect with families and others in the community along with watching the game. This past Friday evening I stopped at a student's basketball game that was particularly inspiring to me since I thought it was a good metaphor for my first year as a teacher. Here it goes: When I arrived at the game, I was alarmed to see "my team" (yes, I am going to use first-person narrative to describe this game) only with 6 players where the other team had 11. It was clear that it was going to be an uphill fight from the start. To start the game in this league, each player on each team gets to shoot a free throw that counts towards the final score. The other team went 11 for 11 at the line where our team only went 3 for 6. Therefore, we were down by 8 before the tip off. As a first-year teacher with students well below the national average, I felt the same way entering the classroom as though I was way behind. The first quarter went fairly well, but not good enough. Our team had plenty of shots (I don't have the exact number but we had to outshoot them by a margin of 4 to 1), but most of them were off-target. They weren't using the backboard to bank in their shots. I did the same thing at first in teaching. I kept trying, but my efforts weren't aimed in the right places. I didn't use my support network at school and through TFA enough. As a result, we were losing the game by 5 at the end of the first quarter just like I was still behind at the end of my first academic quarter. The Second Quarter didn't provide much news as the margin stayed at 5 points by "half-time". While I am not at the end of the Second Quarter yet, I feel like I am at "half-time" now as we are half-way to the CRTs (Nevada state tests) in April. It's a pretty scary feeling being down at the half. Back in the basketball game, the start of the 3rd Quarter didn't bring much good news either. The back and forth game continued to the point where we were still down by 5 with 3 minutes left in the 4th Quarter. Hopefully, my classroom will see more improvements in my Third and Fourth Quarter where we will have a good chance at "winning" our game by increasing student achievement with more time to spare before the final deadline. But in basketball, there is always time for the late comeback. In the 3 minutes of the fourth quarter, we went on a 6-0 run to take a one-point lead. Naively, I believed the end of the fourth quarter was the end of the game just like some of my students may see the CRTs as the end of the year, but that's not the case. In the fifth and final quarter, our team ran away with the game to win by 9 points. The comeback was quite impressive, and it was inspiring to me. After the game, I asked my student how she was able to lead the comeback (her defense and speed changed the momentum of the game by creating a dozen turnovers). She simply replied, "I'm good like that." After a quick laugh, I replied by saying that I know you are good like that in the classroom as well (she is a strong student) and that you can help lead a comeback there as well. As my Class President, I hope to equip her with the necessary skills to help us out in leading a real comeback in the classroom. Hopefully, it will start tomorrow (in some ways it has already started), but in any case it's necessary, because unlike a basketball game, we can't afford to lose these opportunities for my students. Success is the only option here as my students simply cannot afford failure at any cost. But success here is going to require a team effort, and now I am strengthening my team to ensure that my students, families, fellow staff members, administration, and TFA are all on-board to ensure this comeback. Unlike my student's basketball team, I have no shortage of team members ready to come off the bench to help lead our team to victory. Now it's my job to put everything into place to ensure this victory. That's the real challenge.

Breaking up with my bicycle and finding myself

Ms. Math — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 16:08:49 +0100

I know that there is no mathematical proof that everything happens for a reason, but if I strive to make meaning, I can reimagine the low moments of my life as gifts that took a long time to unwrap and comprehend. Three and a half years ago one cleat of a junior track racer came unclipped as he stood up to sprint in front of me. His spine and my carbon wheel broke in the next moment. I flipped over my handlebars, throwing my bike through the air and breaking my helmet as I landed. People asked me if I was okay as I walked away from the crash. I responded, “I don’t know yet. It will take time to understand what happened to my body.” At the time, I meant that I needed my endorphins to fade so I could feel pain again. I had no premonition that I’d still feel this day in my body three years later. I had no idea that slowly taking away the sport that defined me would help me find my voice and leave me in a better place. My bicycle wasn’t taken away from me all at once. Two days after the accident I was riding again, apparently unscathed. I wasn’t. Although I could ride, whenever I pushed myself the right side of my body felt as if it was tearing itself apart instead of becoming stronger. Training didn’t make me faster anymore. It just made half of me hurt. I couldn’t ride away from my problems by taking myself to a place where all I felt was exhaustion, hunger and endorphins. I still defined myself by my success on the bike, and came up short when I compared myself to teammates who were going pro and setting records. I didn’t look injured; I thought my failure must have been an issue of not having the personal strength to work towards a goal. After three years of yoga, expensive bike fits, physical therapy and doctors, I gave up on my troubled relationship with my bike on the side of the road halfway through a ride. On mile 45 of a ride I watched my friends pedal away and didn’t even try to keep up because I knew the strain would leave half of me hurting. What struck me was not that I was slow, but that I couldn’t even attempt to do my best without making myself worse. I recalled my first long bike ride six years earlier. With no preparation or spandex, I borrowed my father’s ill-fitting bike to see how far I could go. After 45 miles it started raining, and I raced home exhausted and high on endorphins. The realization that after 30,000 miles on the bike, I was worse than the day I started, was what I needed to give up my failing relationship. I told my friends to come back and get me with the car when they finished, and I sat in a park and cried as if I’d lost a lover. When Mara Abbott broke up with her bicycle after riding high on world-wide success and then falling apart emotionally and physically, the time away allowed her to finally decide that a career in cycling was worth it even though she wasn’t sure how she would achieve her goals of saving the world. She cut straight to painful truth and shared how she starved her body until she couldn’t race because she couldn’t tell the truth in words about her commitment to bike racing. Giving it up allowed her to embrace her true love for the bike. My four months away from the bike, coupled with the reflective frenzy triggered by my friend’s death, allowed me to realize that I defined myself as a cyclist because it was too painful to define myself as a teacher. My first year my classes were out of control and my second year the administration thought I was insubordinate. At my new school, I was told teaching was an art form that I had no innate skill in, and that they were considering not renewing my contract at the end of my third year. In my life of straight A’s, good health, and success in extracurricular activities, I’d never had to love myself, just as I was, in that moment. There was always a new honor, or perfect score to allow me to define myself by how I measured up against others. When I attended Teach for America events and heard about all the success that was possible for every teacher who worked relentlessly and maintained a sense of possibility, and thought about my own classroom, I wondered if something was wrong with me. I thought “Do I just not care enough about these students to work hard?” even as I described myself as a “crumpled, shriveled, heap” on my blog as a result of the effort I put into teaching. As I failed at living up to my TFA-defined teaching dreams, cycling was where I could still define myself by comparing myself to others. Hard work and suffering led to quick success. If I could ride 100 miles in a day I wasn’t worthless. And beyond my need to see some success in life, there was something innately beautiful about being on the bike in Red Rocks. I truly hope Mara achieves her dream of loving herself, finding her voice, and tearing it up on the mountains around the world. Being fast isn’t my dream any more. I’ve worked hard to stop asking myself “Why don’t I care about beating everyone and getting faster on the bike? What is wrong with me?” I've filled the space left in my life with dozens of books, dreaming seriously about writing my teaching memoir, and exploring the canyons of Arizona. I found the beauty of yoga and practice loving myself and the moment. Cycling pulled me through a bad time and is an amazing sport to many, but like many relationships started in a time of desperation, it ended up not being healthy for me. Bikes are amazing-the misery I brought into the relationship was not. After many years, I’m thankful that the junior’s pedal unclipped so that I would not be so caught up in a chasing a sport that no longer served me that I would ride away from finding myself.

Hope! My six-year old neice loves thinking critically about numbers.

Ms. Math — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 03:44:58 +0100

Confirmation of my math education dreams came in an unexpected place last weekend. I sat cross legged in the doorway of my niece's dance studio, thinking that she had grown up so much since my last visit home. Six years old, and dressed in pink leggings and leotard, she tried to coordinate her legs while somersaulting in time to "Who Let the Dogs Out." She finished her dance lesson and we walked hand in hand(always looking both ways) to eat lunch with the rest of the family. I gave her a purple sparkly necklace which she adored and decided was going to be added to her special box that was reserved for her favorite possessions. We began to attempt to replicate a flamingo on the kiddie place-mat when she noticed the legs of the flamingo looked like the letter four. Four! My math educator brain returned from the vacation it had been taking to the land of necklaces, dance rehersal and sparkling jewelery, and I asked her about what she was doing in math class. P-nut(my nieces nickname) launched into an animated demonstration of adding and subtracting integers. I can't remember a time when I felt interested in adding and subtracting integers-now these are essential skills in my quest to model the world with higher mathematics. However, p-nut was quite excited about adding the new numbers I gave her over and over again. She was also happy to talk about five groups of four cookies and draw related pictures. I noticed that if I asked her to add 43 + 12 she would count on from 43. While marking with her fingers as she went using a method that helped her keep track of how far she'd counted that I didn't quite understand she said 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54. Hoping to lead her to a new way of thinking about adding I asked wrote down in pink colored pencil 40 + 3 = 43 and asked her if this was true. The question was interesting to her but non-trivial as we had to discuss the equals sign which she had seen before but wasn't quite sure of. Next I asked her if 43 +12 could be written as 40 + 3 +10 + 2 and again she pondered it, wasn't sure and eventually agreed that they were the same. At first these two addition problems looked quite different and it required some real thinking to sort out what was happening, in addition to confirmation counting. Then we discussed the commutative property in kid-friendly language. 40 + 10 + 3 + 2 is how I thought about adding this all, and I think she finally agreed my way made sense, but resorted to counting on her fingers on the next problem. We kept talking about the meaning of each digit, breaking the numbers a part, and after awhile of this discussion she turned to me and said "I see now. 40 + 30 is seventy because 4 plus 3 is ten! And 40 plus 40 is 80 because 4 + 4 is 8." She seemed just as excited about figuring this out as she had been about dance class. She wouldn't have to count on her fingers as much once she has internalized this new knowledge. I hadn't been trying to teach her that concept consciously, though I had been emphasizing the meaning of the ten's place and continued to do so. I said "Yes! Four tens plus four tens is 80 tens. We call 8 tens eighty." I was so excited that she'd figured out a new and important idea as we discussed adding strategies together. P-nut's excitement reminded me of times I'd solved a graduate problem successfully and I realized that no matter how easy a problem is on a relative scale, if it is a doable challenge for the solver, it can be fun. I used to think that teaching elementary school math would be boring because the math is so simple for me, but as I started listening to the reasoning of my niece, I realized how many ways there are to think about adding. Next she started asking some amazing questions. "I'm thinking of two numbers that add up to 22. How many numbers combinations can I have?" Or "I have 29 and subtract a number to get 23. What is that number?" I thought to myself that she was developing the beginnings of algebraic thought that would later help her understand unknowns in equations. There were so many possibilities for exploration in the questions she posed to me-I couldn't believe my niece was coming up with questions worthy of being in an elementary math book. It was amazing that the child who asked these questions was still unsure about such fundamental mathematical ideas. It was as if her capacity to ask and understand more difficult questions was not at all impaired by the newness of addition and place value. After seeing so many college students who are afraid of math and try to cope with their fears by memorizing everything, it was wonderful to see that the natural state of a child is to be curious about how numbers fit together. Perhaps the school system will damper this enthusiasm later, but for a moment in p-nut's life she was just as interested in talking about addition strategies, unknowns, representing multiplication visually, and the commutative property as she was in drawing a flamingo or playing with the toys at the restaurant. Moments like these help me know that I'm on the right path when I suggest that mathematics education can be more than memorizing and that there can be critical thinking at all levels.

Thanksgiving

fans361 — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 18:09:01 +0100

Like most teachers, I wanted to impart many (but not all) of the values of Thanksgiving onto my students. As a result, this past week's writing prompt (to help them prepare for the 5th grade writing exam) focused on what they are thankful for. I wanted to share both my model essay that I shared with my students and a few more things that I am thankful for on this Thanksgiving. First, here is my five-paragraph essay for my students: As the cold air from the north finally starts to blow in, I know that we are reaching Thanksgiving. Like many of you, I am getting ready to eat a delicious meal with turkey, stuffing, and all sorts of other dishes with friends and family and watch some football. At this great time of the year, I would like to pause and give thanks for being healthy, new opportunities, and for you, my students. I am incredibly fortunate to have stayed healthy for the past year. Even though I often have a cough or other minor issues, I have mostly stayed healthy over the past year. Without this good health, there is no way that I could have lived a successful life. Unfortunately, I see sick people all around me, and I hope they can have their health improved so that they can live a good life as well. Without being healthy, nothing else in my life would be possible. This year has been filled with new opportunities for me. This summer, I decided to move to Las Vegas to become your teacher. Moving here has given me great new opportunities from working at this excellent school to hiking all around Southern Nevada to eating delicious food. Each day I discover something new whether it is a new trail to hike or a new place to eat. There is so much to discover here in Las Vegas that I am never bored. Finally and most importantly, I am thankful for you. Each and every one of you has brought something new into my life. Through teaching you, I have learned more about your lives, my life, and the future of our country. You are the future of our country! While I may not be pleased with every one of your actions, I have faith that our future will be better than our past, because of your commitment to your education. If you stay committed to learning, then you will have boundless opportunities ahead of you along with one very proud teacher. I know that I going to spend the next week being quite thankful and content with my good health, my opportunities, and you. Whenever I am feeling down, I look back on what I have, and I realize just how blessed I actually am. Even when life is tough, I always remember to appreciate what I have, and I hope that you do the same this Thanksgiving. Moving away from this note/model for my students, I feel like I need to add a few more thanks in here. First, I must thank my school administration for not giving up on me already. Honestly, my performance as a teacher has been pretty awful for my first three months. While my students are growing academically, this behavior has not been acceptable, and I haven't done enough to change that. I would like to thank them for giving me the opportunity to teach (along with Teach for America, of course) and not firing me on the spot. Hopefully, I continue to improve enough that I will be able to return to 100 Academy next year. Next, I want to thank anyone who has listened to me vent at any point since I started teaching. From readers of this blog to various calls to friends both around the corner and around the world, I have released more stress, tension, and anxiety than I have ever had before in my life. Thanks for reminding me of the context that I am a 22-year old first-year teacher working in a difficult environment. Often, I get so caught up in the details of the job (mostly my failings) that I lose sight of the big picture. While I am still nowhere near as good of a teacher as I need to be, I would like to thank anyone who has given me real encouragement to keep moving forward in this process. Even though it may be difficult, I can't quit on my kids, and your words help remind me of that. Overall, I have much to be thankful for today. I writing to you from my parents' house in Ohio where I am incredibly fortunate to go home to for the first-time after five very difficult months. It's amazing to have a home-cooked Thanksgiving meal with my immediate family. However, this reunion is only temporary. On Saturday afternoon, I will be flying back out to the desert ready to tackle the next challenge. While I will still make plenty of mistakes, I am thankful that I have a learned so much this year so that I will be a better teacher in the days, weeks, months, and years moving forward.

Is it My Classroom or Our Classroom?

fans361 — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:47:29 +0100

One of the biggest internal struggles I have been having as a teacher is related to the sense of ownership in the classroom along with the sense of leadership and responsibility for my students. My school makes it very clear that each classroom is the teacher's classroom and the students should feel as though they belong to the class, but not much more. On one level, I understand the importance of setting up the authority structure of the classroom. Honestly, I haven't done a good enough job at establishing my presence and authority in the classroom. Too many students still misbehave, and I have not done enough to correct their misbehavior. Also, as a young white male teacher teaching in a mostly black school, I came off as too soft at first, and it has killed my reputation as a teacher. I try to improve that reputation each and everyday, but it's almost impossible to undo a first impression. However, I want my students to have some permanent responsibility for maintaining the classroom. While it may be my classroom, all of us learn there together each and everyday. It is really our collective classroom, and I want them to show pride in the classroom. Responsibility means more than just completing your class job. To me it is the idea that students are showing this pride in wanting to improve our class. As a result on Tuesday, we held an election in class. Instead of holding a mock election to simulate the Presidential election or the Nevada Senate race, I decided that we were going to have class elections for a President, Vice President, Treasurer, and Secretary. My kids were incredibly invested in the elections. Initially 20 of my 21 students decided to run for an office, but we ended losing a few candidates due to absences and students scared of making speeches. However, we still had 7 students run for Class President and competitive races for all of the offices. In the end, four girls who are all friends with each other swept the elections. This sweep has led to some awkward tensions in the class as some students (mostly boys and one girl who lost) feel as though they are not represented. These students want to have a recall election in one month, but I am going to allow that. My students need to learn two things from this election. First is that their choices have consequences. Just like the country voted to re-elect President Obama for 4 more years and not 4 more months, the Student Council will be elected for the rest of the year. They need time to develop their ideas, programs, and leadership skills. Second, the student council needs to learn how to best advocate for the entire class and not just for themselves. On Friday, they learned a tough lesson in this regard. The student council was not pleased with the current seating chart, so I allowed them a one-day chance to remake the chart. However, they angered the rest of the class when they all decided to sit on the same side of the room. They did not make the best decision for the class. Therefore, I told them they had to survey everyone in the class to figure out the best possible seating chart for the entire class. Our joint seating chart is now starting on Tuesday, and hopefully it works because both myself as the teacher and the students are invested in it. If you give my students an inch, they will take a mile. (They now know what this idiom means as we have been going over idioms and customary units of measure in the past week.) I have learned what comes under my purview, and the students are slowly learning what comes under theirs. Overall, I know that with time we will find a plan that will work so that the classroom can truly function as our classroom where everyone feels ownership over what they should control. This goal will enable all of my students to succeed and reach their goals for this school year and hopefully beyond.

Minority voters, my students, and the belief that people voted for Obama because they are lazy ...

Ms. Math — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 23:19:01 +0100

The comments made about minority voters and women by people who are disappointed that Romney lost are likely to further distance these groups from the Republican Party. They make me think about my students who are, to me, the faces of minority voters. I believe that my students, despite their critics, do want to grow up and have a good job and earn money by working hard. Some of them already graduated from college! First, here are some comments that demonstrate the inability of some prominent Republicans to understand other perspectives: "But what was Romney's recipe? Romney's recipe was the old standby: American route to success, hard work. That gets sneered at. I'm sorry. In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins?" Rush Limbaugh continues discussing the ways in which the Republican party has reached out to minority voters. He asks "Why doesn't the Republican Party get credit for Condoleezza Rice?" He doesn't understand why people don't think Republicans care about minorities because fundamentally he doesn't see what minorities do in these comments. This point is well made here. Rush continues by discussing how the Republican party should reach out to women. "If we're not getting the female vote, do we become pro-choice? Do we start passing out birth control pills? Is that what we have to do?" I didn't vote for Obama because I wanted free birth control pills. I voted for him because I had evidence to believe that he was less likely to say things like "there are 47% [of American's] who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims." I voted for Obama because he is not in a party full of people who appear to look up to Bill O'Reilly. O'Reilly said, "Obama wins because it's not a traditional America anymore. The white establishment is the minority. People want things." The juxtaposition of "white establishment" and people who want things is too big to overlook. I've heard people claim, on facebook and in the gym, that black people voted for Obama because he was black. Many comments implied that black people were racist or too ignorant to form judgements apart from matching their skin tone with the presidents. Perhaps some black people were not interested in voting for a party that thinks they are children who just want things and enjoy depending on the government. I'm sure that black people, like those of any skin-color, had many reasons for voting, some good and some bad. However, I can understand that some would vote for a man who was more likely to understand their experience in the United States and skin color has something to do with this. Others believe Romney lost because he couldn't convey empathy to people in tough situations.. Obama has written about his experiences as a black American. Although he admitted to not experiencing some of the worst inequities in this country, he had the experience of being treated differently because of his skin color. For example, white men have handed Obama keys to their car assuming he was a valet at a nice restaurant. I know that some Republicans mock people like me for thinking that small details indicate racism, but I truly believe that there are too many inequities in this country to assume that racism is a thing of the past. To me, it is racist to promote the concept that black or Latino people prefer welfare to working hard without a good hard look at some of the reasons that it has traditionally been easier for white men to support their families in this country. I think of my students who wanted to have a good job and wanted to go to college and were given teachers who did not know how to help them get there. I don't see my kids as people who were looking for handouts or free rides, but I did see some of them give up when they were faced with a school system they didn't know how to succeed in. How many F's do you get before you stop trying on tests? And since 93% of my district and my entire class earned an F on the district Algebra test, it is certain that there were hard working kids who did what the teacher asked them and still didn't understand math well enough to pass. Would you give up if you were failing math and knew that 50% of your school couldn't graduate because they couldn't pass the math proficiency test. Would you assume that your friends were all stupid and lazy or believe that there were no teachers at the school who had the skills to prepare the majority of students to pass the test? I just don't see the evidence that my kids wanted to be lazy failures-as soon as I gave them something interesting that made sense to them they sat right down to work. I think that a lot of the laziness was a defense mechanism so that they didn't have to fail on another assignment. I still don't know how to take these observations and be a good teacher-I know giving out free passes to individuals because I see that the system is unfair isn't going to work. I know I have to hold them to high standards while reflecting on the issues in the system that work against them. That is a tricky balancing act that I have yet to master. How do I get students to do advanced work when I know from a math education research perspective that they need prerequisite skills first? How do I spend a lot of time on those prerequisite skills when I know we'll be held accountable to higher standards? How do I reconcile the conflicts within myself? I know that the system is making it harder for these students to learn, but to accept this in my own classroom as a fact and absolve myself of responsibility means that nothing will change. If I give easier work or more chances because that is what I think they can handle given their prior knowledge, I'm setting them up for failure. I DO understand why Romeny doesn't want people to feel like victims of a system. Feeling like a victim is license to give up and ask for help. But, my kids WERE victims of a system. I saw it every day. I honestly have no answers here even though I wish I could believe in the warm and fuzzy TFA success stories. I do believe that teachers can make a huge difference in Elementary school, but I have my doubts about high school math. I can't believe that the stories of turnaround elementary classrooms apply to high school math because it makes me at fault for my kids failure even though I gave teaching so much energy I ended up miserable. In fact, I ended up believing that I could not change things no matter what I did at my school. I helped individual students, but systemic change was beyond me. I was so mad at the system that seemed impossible to overcome and my own failure as a teacher that I just wanted to stay home with mono. I have always had dreams and worked hard and never considered depending on the government to be an interesting or fulfilling goal. However, when I was in a school where more than wrong was right, I wanted to give up right along side my students. And a lot of days I rode my bike instead of grading or lesson planning because the school-wide problems I had to overcome were just too huge. And even though I persevered, got my classrooms under more control and taught a little bit of math, in the end I did retreat to my white world. I did not want to keep failing as a teacher because I was placed in a system that was broken. The daily, personal, failure was too much to bear and I had an escape route back into the world where hard work meant success often enough that I could bet my behavior on it. It is not that the concept didn't apply in my TFA school. When I worked hard things definitely improved in my classroom. However, when I moved to my private school I worked half as hard and had twice the success. The system, not just me, determined so much of my student outcomes. I had to believe I was not a victim of the system so that I would keep trying, but realize that I was a victim of the system so I wouldn't loath myself for my failures and become depressed. How are young students supposed to reflect enough to see what they have power over and what they don't and keep believing in themselves despite repeated failures? Perhaps the Serenity Prayer in addition to the flag salute? I think that some Republican's hear liberals complaining about the unfairness of our system in a different way that we intended. When I point out that large groups of children receive poor educations because of the neighborhoods their parents can afford to live in, I think that conservatives are hearing me say "minorities are not responsible for their own lives because the system if not fair." It is clear to me that my hard working students who took responsibility for their lives did better, but even as that happened the system STILL wasn't fair. It is obvious that hard work is important, but we can't blame people for 100% of their troubles when they were given no fair shot at college and a good job. I just don't buy it that 100% of my students at my private school worked hard enough to go to college because of their own individual work-ethics and talent and that at my other school only 50% graduated because the rest were so lazy and didn't care. I guess what irks me the most about some of the election aftermath comments is the sense that the Republicans think that the current system is fair and that differences in outcomes are due to differences in personal work ethic. They believe that the people who vote for Obama are "takers not makers" and that therefore the majority of minorities are takers. To them, if black people have a proportionally higher number of people on welfare it is because they are that much lazier. I want Republican's to consider the system that we created and perpetrated in this country. I want them to think about cities 30 years ago where the city government gave 99% of contracting jobs to white's even though 30% of the city contractors were black. I want them to consider how much harder it is to get to college if you don't actually do much but sit around and fill out badly written drill worksheets in school and listen to teachers try to control behavior. I want them to see a connection between a lack of jobs for African American's in the past and their children going to at-risk schools in the future. I can understand why minorities don't vote Republican-it as if some major leaders of the party are missing some huge piece of reality. Their belief in hard work and personal responsibility requires them to make up reasons for the unequal outcomes in our country that don't imply that unequal outcomes were due to systemic inequalities. If the abysmal college graduation rate of minorities is due to the system, then they have to look harder at their personal responsibility philosophy and look for other pieces in the picture. Republican beliefs about personal responsibility absolve them of responsibilities to the kids who went through a broken educational system and ended up without a good job. To close, I'm certain that I have said something offensive to someone here, but I would welcome discussion on race in America and how to cope with inequity in a way that allows everyone to move forward and escape the system. I think that everyone who teaches for America is dealing with these issues in their classrooms and schools.