So I’ve been trying to get on the blogging initiative, but I wasn’t really able to get everything together, so here is my second entry.

My school doesn’t assign classrooms to teachers. Each classroom is usually shared between a group of teachers, who all want to do different things with the room. This means if you want the room set up a certain way for your lesson, you usually have only the 5 minute passing period to make it happen. My favorite room configurations are ones that work well with our school’s room sharing.

I’ve had some success when I trained my kids to whip the desks into a different shape early in the period. When I shared the class with my colleague Marcus, the room was frequently in a U-shape. On the first day I trained students sitting in the ‘legs’, and ‘base’ of the U to drag their tables into small groups. I even taped labeled pieces of paper on the tables so kids knew which ones to push together. They became pretty good at getting them into position. I, on the other hand, was only average at remembering to ask them to put it back before the end of class, meaning I had to spend a lot of time after class getting the desks back in place for Marcus’s class.

My favorite arrangement for a classroom in is the “Banquet” table set up. This set up is favored by the 3 other math teachers in 302, so if you teach in that room, no moving desks! I call it the banquet table because the seats are all facing each other in two long columns from the front to the back of the room. No one’s back is to the board and kids can easily collaborate. If I’m in the central aisle, I can see what everyone is working on in one glance, and I have lots of space to pull a kid aside if needed. If I’m standing at the front of one table I can quickly get all of their attention. At the beginning of class when no one has their stuff out, I can slide their folders down the long table like an old-timey bartender.

This arrangement also really supports doing group work for our school. As a transfer school, our attendance is unpredictable, so this setting lets student naturally sit where they can work with neighbors. Typically when kids work in assigned groups there is always one group who has 2 or 3 kids missing or late each day.

I’ve been an absentee owner of this blog to start the 2016. If this blog was a house, dust would be everywhere, the shutters would be hanging loose and the weeds would be out of control. To be fair, I did start the January Blogging Initiative, and my “Drafts” section has two of the posts which have only gathered a light coating of dust. Talking about teaching and learning has been pretty absent here, but that is going to change tangibly, for a number of reasons.

The number one reason things will change on this blog is that I’m going to be teaching math! As an AP, I am lucky to get to teach even one class, and so far this year that has been Exploring Computer Science. ECS has been a lot of fun. Watching kids’ eyes light up as they make an HTML page or a scratch animation is pretty nice, but it’s nothing like seeing a student connect mathematical concepts in their head. As my students leave to college, a well-crafted math experience could be more valuable than the computing in my opinion. Let’s hope that I can craft that math class into the experience my students need.

A very interesting math class has been rolling around in my head since around thanksgiving. After sitting on the sidelines and watching teachers roll out lots of new techniques in there lesson I have collected a number of ideas for teaching. I also read Jo Boaler’s new book along with a number of other posts and articles. The time away from teaching has also given me time to reflect on a number of things from previous classes that I want to do in a different way. With all of these ideas swirling around in my head, writing about them well ensure that they can get into a tangible form well before the period starts.

The big thing is, it’s time to try harder. After honestly taking a step back from the digital world after the birth of Julianne, and from starting this new job, I think it is time I hold myself accountable towards what I plan to do. I have been writing a lot at home and work about other things, but I haven’t written about my teaching. The act of putting my ideas on paper has proved to refine my thinking in ways that I might not get otherwise. Also filling a role where my growth as a teacher is not a high priority, it is important that I make it a priority to write about it so I can ensure that I am thinking thoroughly about each lesson.

This is the first year in a decade where my official title isn’t ‘teacher’, and it’s going ok so far. My new day-to-day life is quite a shift, so hopefully my entry for the #MTBoS Blogging initiative’s ‘Day-In-The-Life’ will still be relevant, even thought it is not as teacher-y as many other posts. Without further ado, here is my day as an administrator!

The day starts as I come up the stairs and see a couple of teachers chatting by the time clock to start the day. A year ago I would join in and chat about their life either in the class or outside of school. Instead, pupil personnel secretary flies in across the office and delivers me a confusing transcript request. A 40+ year old alumnus of our school wanted to have all of the school records sent to them. This was a standard request that didn’t really warrant an early morning cross-office sprint. Apparently this alumnus had recently transitioned genders and changed names (which is awesome) and they wanted to go back to college (also awesome) so they requested to not only receive all of the records, but also to have the name changed on the records to reflect this person’s new name which was sent to us on the court documents. The secretary wanted to know if we have to alter government documents, and face potential legal scrutiny, or if we have to send out the documents with no name changes and potentially spoil the chance of a fresh start for this former student’s  new college enrollment. By the way, for people whose records are this old changes must be made on the physical documents, so it’s an either or choice. While I tried to not look utterly stumped at this secretary’s dilemma, the two teachers finished their conversation and headed up the stairs. For a second, I missed not being able to go up the stairs with them.

After I got to my desk and took my coat off, I immediately went into a flurry of meetings. First I planned and then facilitated the Attendance Committee meeting. We started talking about how difficult it is to bring students back in touch with their academics after being absent for 3-10 days straight. These kinds of absences are commonplace at a transfer school, and the failure to recover from them leads many students to giving up on school for this marking period, or in general.

When I finished the meeting, I threw out a series of Math Textbooks which were sent to us by one of the big publishing houses that the purchasing secretary left in my office. To legally throw these out we are supposed to cut off the front cover, but I was ripping both of covers off with my bare hands. Why did I decide to manhandle a bunch 500 page textbooks at 10 AM? Perhaps talking about attendance was a little frustrating.

Following this I began working with my Student Assistant on making a teacher profile page on the website. Our school has lots of internships around the city, but we also host internships in the building. This student was typing up interviews he had done with teachers while I gave him some advice (and in between I caught up on some emails).

At lunch I joined my Principal in preparing for the School Quality Review. The School Quality Review is the biggest thing that we as a school have to show our validity to the outside world. The reviewer comes to the school and works to understand all parts of the school. He meets with teachers, students, and parents, he observes classes, he reviews our artifacts. Then, a little after lunch, he locks himself in our office and determines the writing that will, for a lot of people, define our school for the next two years. I am sure the reviewer is a ‘he’ because we already know who the reviewer is. He also happens to be the director of the department of School Quality Reviews for the city. Needless to say, this is going to be a big deal. During lunch my principal and I explained all of this to small groups of staff in preparation.

Following the meeting I headed back to the desk with my assistant, but while he is working on the website I am preparing for my class. I am very lucky to be able to still teach a class as an administrator. This class is not a math class, and is an introductory computer science class, but I try my best to squeeze in some math along the way. I had one problem where the people had to program the game bizz buzz using Scratch. (I’m writing this well after the fact, so I think this might be what I did that day, I’m not sure…).

At the end of the class I headed back down to my office and prepared for the final meeting, which is the PD committee. This committee is a collaboration of the administration and our teaching staff to work together to design our staff’s professional development for the year. One of the new changes this year is that schools have to provide almost 3 times as much PD as they had the year prior. It was obvious that all schools would have trouble making use of the time, and we are no exception. These meetings have had a degree of friction this year, but it’s been positive friction. The kind of friction necessary before things get on the right track.

After that meeting, I frantically went back to my desk and tried to get random tasks finished. At the end of the meeting I only have about a half hour before heading to daycare to pick up Julianne, and I always end up going late. There is no worse feeling than showing up late to daycare and seeing my 6-month old with that “Why did all the other babies get to leave before me!!!” look on her face. Certainly I am going to have some of those days as we head towards the SQR, but luckily today wasn’t one of them.

So that’s my day in the life!

As September slowly crawls it’s way here it is hard to see far enough ahead to what will be needed in the next school year to make productive use of the summer vacation. Usually I don’t plan anything, I just kind of wait until summer comes, watch an entire series of something on Netflix (i.e. How I Met Your Mother), and put off planning the for the school year til late august.  This year summer has been different with all of the parenting I’ve had to do. Any downtime I have should be laser focused on growth, yet I’ve worked through all of Parks and Rec, and haven’t looked at any of last years work in the projects. What should I do?

In moments of confusion, I tend to look at sports as a guide. (Doesn’t everybody?) Let’s refer to what’s left of summer as an “Offseason” and look to improve with a series of focused activities in the way an NBA player improves during their offseason.  Here is a video that shows an example of an aspiring NBA player working in the offseason to improve:

This is Jeremy Lin in the offseason as he was still trying to break in to the NBA. This was before Lin-sanity was on T-shirts when he was just a hopeful NBA prospect looking to stick with the the Golden State Warriors in the following fall. He didn’t make it with GSW, and he spent the season a D-league team, and a Chinese team before finding the Knicks, and you should know the rest.  He is trying to be a better basketball player and he spends his time lifting weights and doing other physical fitness activities, Shooting jumpshots and other skill development, and of course actually playing basketball.  These three things, strength and fitness, skill development, and playing basketball could probably be neatly translated to teaching.

Strength and Fitness

Strength and Fitness for math teachers means doing math.  Taking time to actually do math would be the equivalent of lifting weights. Advanced math may not be needed to teach the same content that I taught last year, just like 1-legged squats are not part of basketball, but doing these exercises can help build strength. Learning new math content allows you to sympathize with how the students feel.

• Find classes to do math online through Coursera, edx or udemy to brush up on advanced content.
• Follow along with the PCMI math worksheets as they become available.
• Look for local math circle courses in your area.
• Try to use math in more flexible ways like learning how to code, or how to count cards, or constructing some crazy origami stuff.

Of course there are lots of things all teachers can do to help out in this regard like learning more about your community and your students, but for math teachers, learning content is very important.

Skill Development

Skill development for math teachers would mean practicing and rehearsing the kinds of moves that you would need during the actual season. This could mean learning new approaches to different topics, seeing ways to improve upon your things that didn’t go well last year, and reflecting on the things that did go well to make them even better. Luckily the #MTBoS would provide a number of ways to work on your skills:

• Read through the various collections of problems and lessons for the topics you will teach next year.
• Write about the projects and lessons you did and ask the #MTBoS for any ideas and feedback. Don’t forget to give other people feedback on their lessons and projects, you can sharpen your thinking along the way.
• Watch videos of teachers teaching math to see what they choose to do, (and what they choose to not do).

Playing Basketball

Playing basketball for a basketball player seems to align with teaching math for a math teacher. It is where all the other work comes together.  Where will you get space to work on coming actually teaching during the “off-season” (aside from being one of the brave souls who teach summer school)?

• Tutor a cousin or nearby student or adult in some math concepts. Perhaps SAT tutoring, GRE tutoring or something else. You probably know someone who could use help, and they will probably buy you a beverage or two to say thanks for some needed tutoring.
• Form a critical friends group and try running your lessons and projects past them. While having a an actual class of students is hard to come by, letting teachers who are familiar with your student population run your lesson/project through a battery of questions will give you a chance to test out new ideas.
• Facilitate a session of #probchat!  More on this in an upcoming post.

There is of course one missing piece that I didn’t mention. In the last scene of the video you see Jeremy Lin going out and having fun, not worrying about Basketball. Make sure you take time to do that as too much working out will lead to injury in sports, and burnout in teaching.

For what it’s worth, here is my plan for the rest of my summer.