My students love to ask me about marijuana, whether I think it should be legalized, whether I’ve used it before, whether I like it, etc. I usually try to deflect their questions. For example, here’s a conversation from today.

Students: “Mister, do you like MJ?” (laughing)

Me: “Oh, you mean Michael Jackson? Oh yeah, I love his music. He was so talented.”

Students: “No, no we mean marijuana. Do you like smoking pot?”

Me: (while walking away) “Oh yeah, Michael Jackson is great. Especially that video ‘Thriller’.”

Tee hee.

But seriously, pot usage seems rampant at our school. One kid asked to go to the bathroom today. He came back with a distinct odor.

I started off this week feeling very anxious about starting school. I ended the week on a much better note. I saw some students motivated to learn and some learning happening, which encouraged me. I feel like I’m developing deeper rapport with students and gaining their respect. Also, once I get back into the daily rhythm of teaching I think I’ll feel even better.

The students are my university are exceptionally bright and talented. To a certain extent, my potential impact on their lives is probably lower than here at this high school. As long as us professors don’t screw up too badly, these university students are smart enough that they are going to learn and go on to make something wonderful of their lives regardless of what we do for them. At this high school, many students are making important decisions that could significantly affect the rest of their lives. High school teachers have the potential to make a tremendous difference in the life of each of their students.

I’m still cautious about my hopes for students, however. People have asked me whether I have seen the movies like “Stand and Deliver.” Their implicit question is whether I see myself as a miracle maker like in those movies. That’d be too much pressure. I would just like to make it through this year having learned important things and helped some students learn math.

One of the things that I notice about my students is that they often lack number sense, by which I mean an intuition for numbers and arithmetic operations.

For example, an Algebra 1 student came by after school today to ask for some help. (That in itself was great and made me happy.) At one point, this student was struggling with how to find the solution to “-8+y=2”. We tried lots of different approaches: using the blank-out method where you replace y with a box, using the number line, etc. The student was throwing out guesses, but she wasn’t guessing wildly even though her guesses were way off–she really was trying to guess the correct answer. Here’s what I mean.

The picture above shows all of the guesses that she made. She would give a guess for “y” then I would write out what happens when we add her guess to -8 so we could see if it equaled 2 or not. I purposely wrote all of the guesses in numerical order, not in the order that she guessed. That allowed her to clearly see all the guesses she had made and I was hoping the visual pattern of the numbers would help her see the answer. Two things surprised me: (1) that it took her so many guesses before she got the right answer, and (2) the guesses that she produced were seemingly random: she would guess “y=5” then “y=-8” then “y=-2″ then y=0”. However she didn’t seem to be guessing wildly because she was trying quite hard to get it right and it was clear to her that I wasn’t going to just give her the answer (which is what students are trying to coax out of you when they are guessing wildly).

Certainly we could have just jumped to the algebraic method of adding “+8” to both sides of the equation to solve for y, but it seemed a much more valuable thing to help her develop more number sense, in particular, the intuition that negative numbers are less than positive numbers and that adding a lesser number means you’ll get a lesser answer.

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Today was a good day overall. Went for a walk outside with Geometry class (because they were starting to get ornery) and I happened to see some nice shadows cast on the ground by some trees so I snapped some photos and when we got back to class I pointed out the nice similar triangles in the photo (foreshadowing of what we will do in class next week).

Most of my Algebra 1 students are beginning to show mastery of some key skills and concepts. I feel like we are making slow, steady progress.

Two new students got added to my classes today. One in Geometry, one in Algebra 1. Part of me starts to feel inconvenienced by having to get these students up to speed, but then I just imagine what it must feel like for them.

One of the two students told me she hates math and is only back at school because a judge ordered her to go back to school.

In other news, it seems that students are becoming more used to my seat arrangement system. I have an Excel spreadsheet that randomly generates seating charts and we use that to shuffle seats every three weeks. I explain that not everyone is going to be happy with the seating arrangement but that we do this because I think it’s important for students to learn how to work well with each other. The level of complaining that I get from students seems to be decreasing. Today we only had about one minute of complaining from my Algebra 1 class. I’m learning to be content with micro bits of progress.

One of my students told me yesterday that she thinks she is in the wrong class. She’s a ninth grader, says she passed Algebra 1 but she’s in my Algebra 1 class now. I’m sad that she managed to slip through the cracks until this point. I vaguely remember her telling me that she already passed Algebra 1 and I told her to speak to the school counselor, but that was months ago and I forgot to follow up on that comment.

I’ve arranged an appointment between this student and the school counselor tomorrow morning. If she is able to switch to Geometry, I will require her to stay after school for extra help until she catches up with the class. Will post an update later on what happens.

UPDATE: Either the student was genuinely confused or she was lying. The counselor looked up her grades and she failed Algebra 1 last year in 8th grade. <sigh>

Today was the first day back to school after the winter break. I was anxious about going back to school over the last week and it got to the point where my digestive system was off and I was experiencing weird back pain. Anxiety before the first day of school is pretty normal for me, but usually it doesn’t bother me so much because I know that I’ll get so happy to see my students that I’ll forget I’m back at work. Perhaps the anxiety this past week was due to the absence of this mitigating effect. But still, after walking on campus today it was nice to see some of my high school students; others… I can only pray for a bigger heart.

But I didn’t let that anxiety show. Teaching is part performance anyway. Since students have been away from school for three weeks, I started each period by reviewing some classroom rules and those myths about mathematics.

Today, I was again reminded by how students’ motivation is strongly linked to their beliefs about whether they will be successful at the task set before them. Since the tasks today were relatively simple tasks to help students review what they’ve learned, all of my students got to work with no complaints.

I saw another instance of this principle while helping a student with Algebra 1 after school. This student is not one of my students and was in a heightened emotional state today. Her worked involved graphing linear equations. She had learned an algorithm for graphing lines, but it was not clear that she really understood what she was doing. For example, to graph the line y=5x-2, she knew that she had to “start at -2” then “go up 5 and over 1” but she didn’t know whether the y-intercept of -2 meant to start at (0,-2) or (-2,0). I’ve worked with this student enough to know that it is better to let her try, give lots of encouragement and choose judiciously when to gently offer corrections. She was motivated to graph lines, perhaps because she knew the algorithm enough to be successful at the task. Once I started to probe more about whether (0,-2) or (-2,0) fit the equation, she lost the motivation to work. With this student, I’ve learned that it will take time for her to develop enough confidence to move out of her comfort zone.

Today was the last day of school for 2009, woo hoo!!!

Many students were absent from school today and I didn’t expect a lot of learning to happen today, but I was really happy about an interaction with one of my Algebra 1 students. I’ve been a bit confused by this student because his English skills seem extremely poor (can’t form even simple complete sentences in English) but yet he tells me that he understands what we do in class. He finally turned in homework for the first time on Wednesday and I realized that he is not doing his homework because he doesn’t understand the directions and problem statements. (DUH!)

We sat down today and with the help of Google Translate I was able to communicate with him and start a glossary of important mathematical words such as “expression” (the mathematical kind) or “order of operations.” He eagerly started working on homework problems that he had left blank. He also agreed to come after school starting in January for tutoring. Progress! Yay!

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This blog will probably be quiet for the next few weeks as I go into hibernation. To encourage you all to come back in January, I leave you with a little cliffhanger…  Rumor has it that some teachers are going to be let go at our school at the end of this semester (end January). Our counselor talked to me about some possible changes to my course load. (I guess that means I’m not one of the teachers that will be let go?) I may pick up an entirely new Algebra 2 class. I’m really praying that I don’t have four preps. Stay tuned for the exciting resolution next time on “Adventures in Teaching…”

Happy holidays, everyone!

Today, the superintendent of our district made an announcement that the district will now try harder to weed out ineffective new teachers before they become somewhat permanent (after two years).

As much as I want students to receive high quality instruction, I don’t agree with this new policy.

First of all, we’ve got to find a way to measure teacher quality comprehensively before we start trying to define who is a good teacher and who is bad. There are many ways for teachers to be good, many ways for them to be bad. For example, imagine you’ve got two teachers. Teacher A is extremely dedicated, talented, and knows her content material but refuses to “teach to the test” so her students don’t do as well as her colleague, Teacher B, who isn’t as creative, smart, or talented but instead gives students near exact replicas of test questions before the district’s assessment? If teachers are evaluated based on their students’ performance on a standardized assessment, doesn’t that seem unfair?

Second point: we’ve got to find more effective ways to help teachers develop before we think about getting rid of them. Putting aside this economic downturn, all the reports I’ve read point to a continuing shortage of qualified teachers in California over the next decade.

Final point: TEACHING IS SO INCREDIBLY HARD!!! I have been teaching at the university level for over 10 years and had jobs related to teaching math for 28 years and so far this one year of teaching high school has been so incredibly difficult. I feel so inadequate all the time. A veteran teacher told me that the second year is easier than the first, but it’s not until the fifth year or so that one really starts to feel good about his/her teaching. How can we expect new teachers to be effective in their first two years of service?

The district’s new policy will focus on new teachers that get a “Needs Improvement” on one or more criteria on their evaluations. The way things have been going for me this year, I would definitely be one of those teachers that gets a “Needs Improvement.”

1. It’s hard for students to focus during the last week of school. I rewarded one of my classes with a pizza party for working so hard on a test. The students were playing their music during the party and it made my smile to hear them getting excited over music from the 80s.

2. One of my students has been behaving badly in class and I wrote a note to her basketball coach to ask for his advice on how to reach her. The note set off a chain of unexpected events. First, the student was suspended from the team. She was angry at me today, but I think we had a good chat and got over that. Then, the coach came to my class today and used up the last 15 minutes to lecture the entire class. He was trying to be helpful, but it definitely was not the way I was intending to end class for 2009. He even started giving them a mini lesson on how to calculate percent!! (?!)

3. Grades had to be turned in today. I didn’t have any problems with the computer system for grade entry this time. Woo hoo!

4. Magic erasers are amazing! I was able to remove some tagging (sharpie on painted metal door) with one. AMAZING! And all the scuff marks on walls–GONE IN A FLASH! Seriously, I can’t begin to tell you how much I love magic erasers. I need to figure out how to get them to underwrite this blog.

A bit cruel to give a test during the last week of school in December, but our 15-week grading period is this week so it made sense to have another test on which to base this grade.

All of those thoughts about “teaching to the test” came back again. Even though our math department collectively wrote the assessments, they still included questions on material that I haven’t yet discussed in my class. I just told my students to skip those questions. But even on the material they should have known, students didn’t do very well again. I have to keep telling myself that it’s a process and that everyone is moving forward, even if the progress is very small.

Three more days.