So this time, every kid gets a go:

Get a bucket of Lakeshore kid counters, and print out a bunch of number lines¹. Have a talk about the difference between positive/negative and adding/subtracting. (i.e one thing is a property of a number, the other is something you do between two numbers). Once they kind of get it (it doesn't need to be perfect, they just kind of need to know that there is a difference), go through a couple of example expressions just having them identify whether the expression involves addition or subtraction, and whether each term is positive or negative. Once they get pretty good, have them them fill in the hint blanks with walking forward/backward² for positive/negative, and facing right/left for adding/subtracting.

Now comes the easy part. They find the first number on the number line, decide which way their kid should face, and whether he should go forwards or backwards. By carefully choosing mirroring problems, they can see both the difference and the similarity between swapping both operation and sign. Eventually sneak in problems that drift off of the number line, and let them start proposing rules for how to solve those problems.

¹ Numberline pdf (back)

² A couple of kids in my third period were fixated on forward=right, backward=left, regardless of which way their kid was facing. With them I had better luck using walk/moonwalk. Feel free to demonstrate as your ability allows. (back)

And I'm not using it.

Take this recent lesson from my pre algebra class, for example.

The obvious WCYDWT is fractions.

The trick, what made my lesson work, is that I had kids figuring out how many people you could split it between, smallest number you couldn't split it between, ways of changing them so you could still split them amongst the same number of people. Then they got to do it again with this:

This went for about a day and a half before I even broached the idea of numerator or denominator. These are kids who've heard those terms before, and for whom they are big off switches. They see fractions, and their brain shuts off.

By ignoring the nomenclature, and making them do all the work with pictures of chocolate bars of various dimensions, they've now got a handle on what some of the relationships are - they get common multiples and equivalent fractions in a visceral way, rather than just symbols on a page.

And to get them there, I need just those images, not much more. everything else follows on what they've done, building on their work. (I need a good way to integrate a document camera and annotation software into Keynote. I'm desperate for it. I would sacrifice a thousand IWBs to get that capability).

But I have no idea how to make this work as a written lesson plan. Sure, I can write something up that would satisfy an administrator. But the actual learning, the pacing, the building up on previous knowledge, is all so dependent on the student and the class, on how they react to it, that I can't create an algorithm to describe it. The best I can do is make a map for people whose skills are similar to mine. Or I could let them come watch. But how do you index that, and how do I distill the good essence without poisoning it with the dozens of mistakes I make (and learn from) along the way?

Making lessons is easy.

Sharing them is hard.

To be fair to my administration, the classroom hasn't been officially released by the district (apparently the school does not retain control of rooms that are being remodeled) and it is still being used as storage for other classrooms that are being remodeled - hence the stacks of tables and desks against the walls. And the order of new furniture was, ahem, kindergarden sized. As in those teeny chairs. Which I almost wish I'd been able to keep.

I've been promised that I'll have chairs for my tables before classes start tomorrow.

I'm teaching two periods of Algebra Readiness, with between 25-30 kids per class.

I got 30 textbooks for the two periods.

But I have 120 workbooks.

I know I have a room¹. I know what grade level I'm going to be teaching. I've had my first department meeting, and all of my fellow teachers are interested both in math, and in teaching. I know that I'm going to have a projector, and I know when my conference period is.

I've gone from being a bundle of stress to looking forward to meet the kids.

I'm ready to go.

¹ It's even a pretty nice room - freshly remodeled. It's got a ceiling mounted projector, and sliding whiteboards with tons of storage behind them, a good amount of room, high windows, and good broad spectrum flourescents. And it has a view of downtown - I know that doesn't seem like much, but it does give me an opportunity to be aware of the world outside the bounds of my school during every passing period. (back)

I don't even know if there is going to be a new teacher orientation day, or more than one staff day before classes start.

I don't know which grade I'm going to teach, or if I'm going to teach all of them.

I don't know what my classroom looks like, or if I'm even going to have my own classroom¹.

I have no idea what sort of technology support I can expect.

I don't know how large my classes are going to be (though I expect them to be less than 24 students - that's part of why I was hired.)

So, as other teachers are trying to make good on their new years resolutions (of either the start or stop doing something variety), mine is going to be a whole lot simpler. It's based in part on my best year of teaching, where I had set myself such low expectations that after 2 weeks I felt free to try out anything that I wanted to.

My resolution is to minimize my expectations, and to simply try to create a decent learning environment for myself and for my kids, and then just go with whatever happens as a result of that.

¹ As a result of hiring more teachers, they've run out of classrooms. A couple of teachers will be roaming, with no rooms of their own. (back)

After the first year, he's quite happy to be able to take credit for some big progress.

I could go on the usual rant here about politicians getting involved in stuff the know nothing about, and taking credit for things they didn't actually do. And for the mayor, that'd be pretty darn correct. The partnership itself admitted the first year (at least) would be about getting their bearings, and that they didn't expect to see a lot of results right away. Those improved results are not out of line with LAUSD's overall improvements, and are easily explained by processes that were already in place.

Here's the thing, though. I think the Partnership, and the people running it, are lining themselves up to do a pretty good job.

Most teachers hate them. They lost a no confidence vote at the high school across the street. The only reason that didn't happen at our school is because our union leadership recommended against it.

But the biggest complaints seem to be from the people who say (and this is a quote): "We're doing our best. It's not our fault the students are failing. You can't expect us to do better."

I think the biggest failing of the Partnership is that they did not realize how dysfunctional the systems they were getting involved with were. They compound that by striving for a full democracy, where every teacher, student, and parent has a say in what happens to the school.

They weight all input equally, and if the majority of that input comes from people that are accustomed to a failing system, they'll get corresponding results. During the final meeting of the year, one of our other teachers (who has also since left that school) suggested that ideally you'd want a meritocracy, where the successful people provide input and guidance. That makes sense to me, but I also suspect that putting that into practice would result in a lot of chaos as the result of bruised and battered fragile egos. During that same meeting, I saw some from frustration from Marshall Tuck, the president of the partnership. The frustration wasn't that with the failures - it was with the paranoid social environment that stymied his efforts. Fortunately for the Partnership and its school, I have also found him to be eternally responsive and dedicated. He's willing to play by your rules, and is confident that he can still achieve his goals. I know I wouldn't have that perseverance (which is why I have since moved on), but I suspect that if anyone can make it work, it's him.

I wish him, my old school, and all of the staff and students there the best of luck.

The thing is, I'd already come to this conclusion on my own. All¹ of the teachers that I respected at that school followed this strategy. They minimized their interaction with other faculty, ignored what other teachers did, and just worked on their own. Put your head down, don't try to change the school, just worry about your own classes and your own students.

This is a losing strategy. Isolationism may be somewhat effective short term, but even teachers need to interact with each other, and intentionally cutting yourself off from them will only serve to empower those that do maintain strong social ties to other teachers, regardless of their actual teaching skill.

And, right as I was mulling this post, along comes some new research from Cornell

We find that students perform better when their teachers' peers have better observable characteristics. In models that use teacher value-added (based on historical student achievement gains) as a measure of teacher quality, we find that students experience greater test score gains when their teacher's peers have higher mean estimated value-added in both math and reading.

In English that says "A teacher's improvement is proportional to the strength of their colleagues." It's sort of a pedagogical version of Newton's law of cooling.

I'd already come to that conclusion myself, as well. Those strong teachers that I had a comfortable relationship with would freely admit that, while they had to shut their doors and isolate themselves, also were not improving (and if anything, losing) their skills. What I was looking at was ongoing frustration and a decline in whatever talents I'd developed.

So, I jumped ship. I'm going to be teaching at a new school in two weeks. I looked for a school that set high expectations for their teachers as well as their students, had low staff turnover², and a well defined set of expectations for everyone from administration down to the students. I think I've found that, though I may be giving up a lot in other things I'd gotten comfortable with. I need a good foundation, though, and I've got high hopes this new school will give me something to build on.

¹ There was one exception - she was very active in many facets of the school. However, she also used her influence to shift schedules and teams, so that in practice she spent most of her time collaborating with only stronger teachers. (back)

² The old school had about 15-20% turnover in teachers every year. The only reason there were openings at the new school is because of class size reduction mandated by QIEA: the needed new teachers - none of the old ones were leaving. (back)

I've obviously dropped off on posting for a while. I've been blocked. As you can tell, from reading back a bit, a big part of that has been due to my frustrations and feelings of failure. I've been thinking of how to express those, how to evaluate my contributions to that, and how to learn from it.

A big part of the problem is that I signed up to do more than I should. I had two preps that I'd never taught before, and I was department chair, a learning groups facilitator, and the new teacher coordinator.

The only one of those things I did well was the new teacher thing. We only had one official meeting, and the rest was either managed by emailing them instructions, or making rounds visiting them during lunch & nutrition. Being a new teacher is outrageously time intensive, and I didn't want to make them sit through another time suck when they felt they could be doing something else. Based on the feedback I got from them, this was the right approach - they all still felt supported rather than burdened by my interactions.

So much for the good stuff.

I should have known the department chair thing was going to suck when everyone, and I mean everyone, ducked the nominations. It wasn't until halfway through second semester that I found out just how many people who were still there had done it before, and how many refused to talk to each other. It was a big part of the reason that the 6th grade teachers lobbied (and succeeded) in breaking off to develop their own department. The amount of passive aggressive sabotage was amazing.

Here's the stupid part, though - nothing that happened was anything worse than what students have done to try to upset my classrooms. I've learned to win over intentionally hostile and disruptive students - I should be able to do the same with teachers. I've sat through enough faculty meetings to know that teachers, as a rule, don't behave very well as professionals¹. If I had known what to expect, if I had been comfortable with all the different archetypes, I could have created an environment where something got done. Instead, like so many of the chairs before me, I burned out.

One of the useful books I read this year was If You Don't Feed the Teachers They Eat the Students. It's written for administrators, and I read it to get an idea of what I should expect from a decent administration. The both surprising, and completely obvious take away from this is that a lot of the things that make you a good teacher (Provide structure, provide empowerment within that structure, eliminate distractions, and make the work its own reward) are exactly the same things that make a good administrator. I certainly didn't pull that off, but should I ever be in that situation again², I think I'll have some ways of approaching my job.

¹ There were two other teachers that I interacted with regularly who had corporate lives before becoming teachers. We would often commiserate on the difference between corporate expectations, and those at schools. (back)

² I've jumped ship. Details to follow in a later post. (back)

I'm still almost four weeks away from the first day of class. Which is okay, I guess. I'm enjoying my summer.

But, we also have a month and a half of school after the CST tests that are of dubious value, ratings wise. It gives me a chance to focus on stuff that they'll need for the next year, regardless of how it's weighted by the standards. But none of that shows up in our scores, and the attitudes of some teachers leak out into the general populace, and the learning efforts just aren't the same afterwards.

Still, it seems like our district could shift everything forward by a couple of weeks, to maximize the time in school before the test.

Maybe I'll write a letter.

The problem is that the kids have no idea that I'm modeling. They just think that's what teachers do.

So, on the last day of school (actually, second to last, because my students are going to be going through culmination tomorrow) I come in dressed for vacation.

This is a fairly strong style makeover. Last year (my first at this school) the secretary in the front office wanted to know who I was subbing for, and a good 50% of my students didn't recognize me until I actually called them by name.

This begs to be one of those "throw it out to the class, and let them figure it out" type of lessons.

It turns out, the movie is a lot more familiar this time around. The orange bulletin board in the office from the opening scene still looks like it still has the same construction paper on it, 20 years later. The commute passes al the same landmarks as mine, except in the opposite order. And the desk nearly dropping on Eddie Olmos's head happens right outside of my last year's classroom, and the chase scene after that goes right by where I broke up a fight earlier today.

It's too bad that the movie got turned into teacher porn. The real story probably has some valuable lessons...

Today I tested my kids on graphing point slope form (very old, and something they'd struggled with) and multiplying binomials (new, and I needed to get a test in).

They killed it. More perfect scores than I'd seen ever from them. Enough that enough of their grades changed and I promised to sneak in the changes (which is what will be mailed home) even though they won't match the paper record as of yesterday.

Why now, instead of 6 months ago?

And I think I did this in the wrong order.

State testing is done, and I have a bunch of kids who still want to graduate.

So I decided to just teach them the procedures, and relax on actual comprehension. If they can at least go through the motions, understanding might come later.

The big stupid surprise?

All of a sudden, I have classrooms of focused kids who are happily solving pages of problems. I'm waiting for one of them to complain that I hadn't taught this way all year.

I'm starting to think (albeit a bit late) that expecting these kids to step out of their comfort zone before they have any clue is too much. The problem, of course, is that as soon as they think they get it, they stop looking for deeper understanding. It's an anti chicken and egg problem - not which comes first, but how to make sure that the part that is supposed to come second actually happens.

At least I still have something to think about for the next time I teach this class.