The Battle for Busing

“Children who attend diverse schools score better on tests, they’re more likely to graduate, to avoid crime, they’re more likely to go to college, graduate from college… There is growing evidence that white, middle-class children, and children from all ethnic and racial backgrounds also benefit–academically and socially from going to integrated schools.”

“The stuff you …

“The stuff you learn in school tends to be very thin. You don’t understand it very well and you forget it almost immediately – it doesn’t affect the way you think about the world.”
-John Black, TC’s Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Telecommunications and Education

read!

Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air. How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. The American psychologist, 52(6), 613–629.

 

Find it.  Read it.

“I was always d…

“I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity. I thought I was unintelligent. And it’s true that I was, and I still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully. Even when I was the first to answer the teacher’s questions, I knew it was because they happened to be questions to which I already knew the answer. But if a new question arose, usually students who weren’t as good as I was answered before me and towards the end of the 11th grade I secretly thought of myself as stupid and I worried about this for a long time. I never talked about this to anyone but I always felt convinced that my imposture would someday be revealed. The whole world and myself would see that what looked like intelligence was really just an illusion. Now that never happened. Apparently no one ever noticed it, and I’m still just as slow. At the end of the eleventh grade I took the measure of the situation and came to the conclusion that rapidity doesn’t have a precise relationship to intelligence. What is important is to deeply understand things and their relations to each other. This is where intelligence lies. The fact of being quick or slow isn’t really relevant. Naturally, it’s helpful to be quick, like it is to have a good memory. But it’s neither necessary nor sufficient for intellectual success.”

-Lauren Schwarz, French mathematician, winner of the field medal in math

I read this as part of a MOOC I’m taking through Stanford.  It really resonated, and I think would be important for students to ponder.

My Students > Your Students

I got in a pretty bad car wreck 2 weeks ago, and had to miss an entire week of school.  When I got back, one of the other teachers said students were asking if I would skype them and teach them from home.

best.  question.  ever.

This shows me how far we’ve come as a school.  Sub days used to be a celebration, because they weren’t forced to do their work.  In fact, this is what I walked in on when the sub didn’t show up one day last year:

 

Weve turned a corner, and the students clearly WANT to learn!!  I couldn’t have been more proud.  Then they gave me this:

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“There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much quail shot that you can’t move, and the kind that just gives you a little prod behind and you jump to the skies.”
― Robert Frost

Word Wall

One of my favorite assignments to grade is the “word wall word.” It is an English language-learner strategy, to have the students write the word, definition, draw a picture that represents their word, and use the word in a sentence. The visual representations are always creative, and often give me insights into the misconceptions my students have about the words. And occasionally, they just make me laugh.

The word in this case was “domain,” (as opposed to “range.”)

 

Philosophies

I Couldn’t Ask For More

I don’t have any children of my own, but I cannot imagine being more proud of any individuals than I am of my students right now.  My smile is at least a fourth of an inch wider because of a student in particular, we’ll call Edgar.  Edgar and I got off to a rough start.  He informed me at the beginning of the year that he was going to be a mechanic and drop out of high school as soon as he turned 16, so he did not need math.  Since my dad was a mechanic, I went home and asked about that theory.  I returned loaded with scenarios in which he would need basic algebra as a mechanic, but I’m sure I didn’t convince him.

Pretty early in the year I noticed someone was tagging my room with a sharpie.  They tagged my electrical outlets, bulletin boards, door frame, walls, walls, walls, desks, and even windowsill.  Although I teach math, I was relatively certain by the handwriting and the time blocks in which it happened that the artist was Edgar.  As a first year teacher, I’ve learned quite a few tough lessons in this one stretch. One of those is:  don’t accuse students of something unless you’ve seen it in action.

I was really afraid I had ruined this relationship for good, and he’d never listen to or learn from me again.  I know that he is in a gang, and that fact with the handwriting resemblance seemed to me to be reasonable suspicion.  I had not considered that asking Edgar if he wrote on my walls was such an unforgiveable injustice.  For about a month he barely spoke to me.  I will not make that mistake again.  The tagging did stop, though.*

As the school year progressed, I called his mom numerous times to inform her that Edgar was on the verge of failing or that he wasn’t doing much work.  He almost failed my first semester until I called and had her bring him for a parent conference with principals present.  I gave him a packet of makeup work, and she made sure that he completed it.  He squeaked by with a 59.52.

During Christmas break I called Edgar’s mom to insist that he attend intersession for Algebra 1 help.  She brought him, but he went to English instead of math.  When I found him in the hallway and reminded him to come to math, he nodded then ran out the side doors at lunch.

This semester, something finally fell into place.  Maybe I got better at classroom management.  Maybe Edgar realized I just wanted him to succeed.  Maybe he matured a little.  I’m not sure what changed, but I’m really thankful I hadn’t done irreparable harm to that all-important teacher-student relationship.

I called his mom again a few weeks ago, and somehow managed to communicate in my sadly lacking español that Edgar needed to stay after school if he wanted to have a shot at passing his Algebra 1 End of Instruction exam (the all-important, must-pass-or-you-don’t-graduate test).  He stayed after school every day last week, and did more work than I’ve seen him do all year combined.

Yesterday, when my students had finished the first half of the test, he walked up to me and said, “Hey Miss, you know how you told us you wanted us to be able to look you in the eye and say we tried on every single problem?”  He grabbed my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “I tried on every single problem.”

Today, when he clicked submit on the second part of that test, his score popped up—solidly passing.

I got to call his mom after school, and had a sibling translate how incredibly proud she should be.  He came by my room after school, with a few other students… not for tutoring, but just to hang out.

I just hope this pushes him one step closer to graduation rather than dropping out.

 

*Months later, he admitted to the tagging, and apologized.

I’d Rather Be Taking Out the Garbage

This seems worthwhile.  

I wish I had the time or the know-how to create interesting questions like they seem to be working on.  

61% of students say they’d rather take out the garbage than do math?  

WE’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG

 

On an unrelated note, my students take their End Of Instruction test tomorrow, so I’ll find out if I’ve taught them anything.  Look out, world.  US Grant is going to blow your mind.