Graduation bouquet...who will get one?

18.2% of California students drop out before they finish high school, or receive a GED. And apparently, it starts at the 8th grade.

Dude. I teach 8th grade. Some of my students will drop out, statistically speaking. But why?

Pressure to work? Pregnancy and pressure to start families? Did they move out of state? Did they unfortunately meet with an accident and pass away?

Are they freaked out about college pressure? Do they not see themselves fitting into a college experience? Do they enter a vocation track?

Or do they turn to crime? Become imprisoned? Sit at home in their parents/grandparents/guardians' places and live a life of "hikikomori?"

I would like to know more about the reasons, the why, and less about the percentages. Because, even this math teacher knows, percentages can only get you so far.

Read about it here. And here.

And tape. THAT STICKS.

Thanks Target. Your encouragement towards consumerism comes at just the right time.

EDIT: Here's the 8th grade PE coach version. Thanks to dkzody for the heads up.

The rebel and the sloth

Hm. This is interesting. One the one hand, states are standing up and being heard with their dissent for NCLB. On the other hand...without a doubt, something needs to change. It's just that change doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of NCLB, and the like.

In other news, the countdown to the first day of school begins! I've got 22 days - well, 21 in reality. Today is almost over. It's been a really great summer. No clock watching, no calendar ticking, no need to keep track of time at all. Just what I needed.

Business minded

Some people think schools should be run more like businesses. Opponents immediately balk when they hear this. But today, I want to ask: which business?

Because I wouldn't mind schools running along the lines of Zappos.

Their core values are here.

Doesn't that sound like a wonderful place to work? Doesn't that sound like what education needs right at this moment? Doing the unconventional, innovative, fun, and weird stuff. Grow by learning, communicating, and doing more with less. Building a family spirit. Being humble.

Actually, that's all what American society at this moment needs a bit more of.

Augmented Reality

I saw this awhile back on another edublogger's page and have been meaning to write about it. I thought and thought and thought and I'm still not sure what I think about the "augmented reality" aka extrapolation, aka wishful thinking (?) part of the timeline. Quote:

The future history presented is intended to be edgy, but also as a conversation starter on futures for education and future thinking in human capital development.

Edgy, certainly. I'm all for edgy things. I'm just not sure I would want to worry about the future - especially as far off as 2045 - when there's so much to worry about the today. It's a good idea to keep a balance in mind I suppose. Where I want the future to go affects what my decisions today are.

So, in the end, no big epiphany here. Just...more questions and wonderings. Which I guess is the whole point.

By the way, is anyone else a little squeamish at the term "human capital development?" Just me? Hm.

Re-thinking the way we re-think

Seagulls...are they related to this post? Yes. Why? I leave that up to you.

Despite the profuse supply of The Bachelorette video clips and the like, the internet is still a grand source of inspiration and thoughtfulness.

Any savvy consumer of information would have by now encountered kottke.org by now. I stumbled upon this article there and it very concisely phrased what I've been trying to put into words. Granted, the writer is talking about workspace design and working, while I'm talking about technology and teaching. But in essence, it's the same.

I love technology, I really do. But my use of it for teaching is not what will make me a great teacher in the end. I can show endless Khan Academy videos, use those little remote control "voting" things for students to punch in their answer, wear out my (non-existent) SmartBoard and (arrived! or at least my colleague's has; I'm assuming mine is here too since the principal ordered both of ours at the same time, although I haven't checked yet) ELMO, and go through enough cans of Dust Air cleaning my LCD projector and it STILL will not make me a great teacher.

What will make me a great teacher?

~ practice

~ life-long learning

~ bouncing ideas off of colleagues

~ professional respect and trust

~ discovering new ideas in both familiar and surprising places

~ experimentation (aka "making mistakes")

~ time and space to recharge my batteries

So what will make my students great learners? Laptops for all? Fancy phones that can text their answers to the professor's iPad? Olympic-sized school swimming pools? Shiny, new hardback textbooks? I don't know about all that.

I only know that this coming school year, I will fuss less about the arrangement of student desks in my oddly proportioned classroom.

Planning for change

From the start, this has been the most frightening thing about teaching to me. Not the possibility of weapons or gangs on campus, not learning to deal with violent or serious behaviors (that comes a close second though), not even the fact that I might be pink slipped at any time.

I'm scared of quitting. More specifically, I'm scared of being backed into a corner, like the teacher in the CNN interview, and having no better option than to quit.

Quitting any job isn't a simple decision, although people water down their explanations so that they sound much more sane to their family and friends:

"I want to travel and spend more time with my family."

"I'm not working at my fullest potential."

"I've hit a pay wall."

"I'm just being shuffled from side to side in the company."

All really logical and proper and socially acceptable reasons to quit. But I really believe that underneath the soothing words are much more complicated things happening.

Of course, once again, I am astounded at how lucky I am that I got the position I have today. According to my district's salary schedule, I won't hit a pay wall until my 17th year. I started out at a significantly higher salary than the teacher in the CNN interview. As I accrue units and finally complete my masters, I'll have additional stipends. There is even a stipend schedule for Ph.D..

I am also young, healthy, and single: no kids, no car payments, no mortgage payments, no serious medical expenses. I don't even have credit card balances or student loan debt. Bureaucratic interference is easy to ignore. My district office does have some rather incompetent people, but it's saved by the genius who created and installed the system years ago. Morale is medium to high at my school, for the most part. Yeah, there are certain lack of resources that plague me but I've found creative ways to get around it. My principal has been nothing but supportive of me. The compensation isn't spectacular, but it's also not horrendous either. Too-little decision making authority...hm, frankly I don't think I want to make any of the big, nasty decisions - let me stick with the small ones that are of no matter on paper. Too little time for planning...fake it 'till you make it - lost count of how many times I've flown with no lesson plan, or had to scrap plans and completely wing it. Accountability pressures...sure, I feel the CST pain, but once again I'm lucky to be at a school that has (yet) to be touched by PI status. My team that I work with is awesome. Weird of course, and sometimes we grate on each other socially, but I know they are good teachers and they trust that I aim for excellence as well.

So by any standard, I've been lucky. Yet, the fear lingers. All of that luck can change instantaneously. Expect change. Plan for it. Be prepared.

Queen had it right

Bicycles! Bicycles!


This is way cool. I'm all for greener urban living. And this, well, this takes the cake.


On a math note: 175,000 bikes @ 1 RMB per bike per day = US$27,144.77. Um, city debt reduction plan #1, right here. That's if American cities charges riders the same as Hangzhou does - approximately 15 cents for the 2nd hour. Because, remember the first is free.


But of course, Americans would never charge that cheap. Let's say $1 per hour, with the typical bulk shopping mentality of "increasing number of hours at a discounted cost" that Americans love so much. And we're even scratching that "first hour free" thing. And let's decrease the amount of rental bikes to 50,000 in, say, San Francisco.


If all 50,000 bikes were used at least once per day, which wouldn't be a far reach in a place like SF, that would be an income of $1,500,000 per month for something that is relatively low maintenance (unlike, say, buses - and rental bikes in strategic locations would increase the use of buses anyway, hence another added layer of income). Yep, that's in the millions, baby. Hey politicians and voters, let's make this happen.


Although, oddly enough, the most astounding thing to me was that one dude who said "the people love the bikes and won't do anything to ruin them" or something to that effect. That's real ownership of a city. It's our city. It's our earth. We take care of it.


Hey parents and teachers, let's make THAT happen.

But they they'll be the type of people who know math

Thanks for the laughs, http://www.joannejacobs.com/.

Linked

Today's chain email.

One of my goals is to do one of these WCYDWT activities per term.

And this completely unrelated conversation:


Student: Ms. B, do you like spring break?

Me: Yes I do!

Student: Oh, I thought teachers didn't like breaks from school.


Debunking misconceptions since 1983. That's me.

Demoralized

I watched the March 3rd Daily Show this weekend. This interview, and Ravitch's book, is interesting. I haven't actually read the book, but I've flipped through it recently at the bookstore and would like to read it in depth some time.

The Daily Show interview with Diane Ravitch

A couple funny things: first, the discussion on the education system in Finland. Over a year ago, I wrote a paper citing Finland's turn around of failing schools for one of my master's classes. I actually knew what they were talking about! In detail! This rarely happens for me. I don't read primary source articles often enough, which is why my default statement when asked about what I think on current issues is, "I don't know that much about it, I'll need to study up a bit to form an opinion."

Second, I was highly amused by Stewart's comment on how the teachers who leave work at 2:30 to go shopping with their kids are "sh*t teachers." I know this may or may not be - some of my colleagues do leave school right away, to pick up their own kids and to take care of their families (which probably includes shopping at some point in life). But I also know that these same colleagues put their kids to bed and come back to campus to work in the classroom in the evenings (it's one of the reasons why our school gates don't get locked up until 9pm from Mondays through Thursdays). From waitressing to movie theater ushering to teaching to being the CEO of a company - I believe that you really aren't working at your highest potential until there's some blood, sweat, and tears involved.

Thirdly, there ARE bad workers everywhere. This is why I frequent certain shops and gas stations. Safeway is usually better than Food 4 Less. Chevron is usually better than the local QuikMart. Tacos from a taco truck taste better than Taco Bell's. Even for fast food, Panera and the like are a cut above Subway. There are going to be bad teachers. There are going to be bad days for good teachers. There are going to be good days for bad teachers. There are going to be good teachers. Such a wide variety of situations makes a one-size-fits-all-type system rather ridiculous.

Fourth, the problems of our education system is highly interwined with the problems of our cities and towns. Poverty, crime, unemployment, a lack of community, homeless rates, division between the wealthy and the poor, race tensions, cultural and language differences. Public schools is the locus where all these things meet under one roof. And because it happens in the schoolhouse, the schoolhouse is blamed.

Last but not least: teachers are demoralized. We are wiped out. Exhausted. Broken down. We haven't been able to catch a break since NCLB began. I've experienced this too. I've just gotten lucky with my school and the demographics I teach. I can still teach Title 1 students, but in a place where I am supported by the admin, the veteran staff, and the resources of the community. I have variety in the type of students I teach, from high achieving, high SES, to low achieving, low SES, and everything in between. Despite all the frustrations, I'm constantly reminded by how fortunate I am. This really is the best first year teaching that I could have ever asked for.

Not many teachers have that same luck. Many first year teachers are thrown into an urban, segregated school with little more than warped desks and a cracked whiteboard. And they still perform the miracles that they do: the miracle of teaching a 5th grader how to read a kinder level book. The miracle of convincing 9th graders that they can acheive more than the occupations of their migrant worker parents. The miracle of managing to get through 6 hours without students from rival gangs killing each other because they were enclosed in the same room with bars over the windows.

It's no wonder the nation sees the test scores that it does. It's no wonder that 3 out of 5 teacher quit after their first 2 years.

What is a wonder: that those statistics are not any worse. I'm the first to admit that I can improve my pedagogical skills. But really, it could be worse, much, much worse. Especially if certain policy makers truly have their own way.

From here.

It's posts like the picture above that make me want to switch over to Tumblr permanently.

In reality, I just need to work on the content of this blog. It doesn't matter which blogging platform I use - crap will still be crap on either side of the fence.

oh-uh-oh-uh-u-h-oooh-oohowhooa-oh-uh-uh-oh

From here.

There is nothing to do here today, but laugh.

Values, part 2

A perfectly valid reason: being able to put food on the table.

Awhile ago, I commented about wanting to perform this experiment on my Algebra Readiness students.

Well, this past Friday, I did. A mini version, that is. Most of the quizzes we give fro Algebra Readiness are written by one of my co-workers, who is an excellent teacher. She likes to put random "Starter Questions" for students to answer in the space directly under where they are supposed to write their names. Some sample questions from the past quizzes this year were:

What is your favorite color?

Pepsi or Coke?

What is your favorite candy?

Where would you like to travel?

The students like answering these questions - or I assume they do, since nearly everyone always writes something down pertaining to the Starter Question. It's pretty fun to read them.

The quiz this past Friday was an unplanned quiz that I ended up doing because the math instructional consultant for my school district asked to do a demo lesson for me on Thursday, and she mentioned a quiz to the students. I hadn't told her we would be doing a quiz. I think she just assumed because the lesson she demo-ed on was a mid-chapter review. However the current chapter is so short - only 4 sections - that all the AR teachers just agreed to skip the quiz, even though we all did a mid-chapter review lesson.

Anyway, we had a quiz. I didn't want to back out on that since I had the time and it was a good idea to quiz them before moving on to the next section's material anyway. Most did decently well, which is good.

But since this quiz didn't exist in the first place, I had to write it up myself. As I was writing it, I also took the opportunity to make my own Starter Question.

That is how the story finally comes full circle and relates back to the Scientific American article about students and their values. My question was:

What is your reason for doing well in school?

I did a little number crunching while grading these quizzes. Out of the 49 students who took the quiz, here were their answers:

3 said I don't know

3 said they just wanted to work hard/liked working

3 said they were doing it for the grades

4 wanted good jobs/money

4 wanted to be on sports teams and go to field trips (which require a certain GPA, as well as other things, at my school)

4 said they wanted to succeed/be somebody in life

5 said they wanted to please their parents OR to get their parents off their backs

7 said they wanted to go to college

If you are counting, that's 33 students with one of those above answers so far.

The remaining 16 left it blank.

As I said earlier, nearly all students write something when it comes to these Starter Questions. It's rare to have more than a handful who don't write anything at all. So why 16?

Possible reason #1: They don't know what their reason is, so left it blank.

Possible reason #2: They felt rushed on the quiz (I only gave them 15 minutes on 10 questions - unplanned quizzes are rushed, that's a lesson for me) and skipped it.

Possible reason #3: They don't really care about doing well in school, which is similar to the "I don't know" answer.

Weirdly, most students finished the quiz well within the time limit. So for the purpose of my experiment, I'm going to assume that these 16 blank answers are "I don't knows," making a total of 19 "I don't knows." This assumption may or may not be valid. Further study needs to be done - quite possibly in a more systematic and scientific way than this little mini experiment turned out to be.

19 out of 49 of my 8th graders say they don't know their reason for doing well in school. That's almost 39%.

Wow.

Demographics

This is really cool.

Really, really cool. It goes down to ethnicity and all the way back to the 1940s. Interesting...

Tiger teacher

Yeah, yeah, it's a lion, but that's the closest photo I have.

No, I haven't read the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It sounds interesting, but it's not at the top of the my To Read list. Maybe because I had a Tiger Mother, and so the story would be old news to me.

The commentary surrounding the book is more immediately consuming for me, particularly two quotes from Nancy Gibb's essay in Time.

First:

Their [what Gibbs calls "Choppers" aka helicopter parents] fury at a bad grade is more likely to land on the teacher than on the child.

And this one:

I suspect one reason the book has touched such a nerve is a suspicion among the Choppers that an excessive fear of failure guarantees it - that if you don't let your kids get clobbered now and then by a tough teacher, they'll never have the resilience to thrive as adults in a competitive economy.

These two quotes basically sum up my week. It's the end of the semester, and I gave some low grades to students who can do better than what they got but didn't, because they didn't turn in assignments on time, or showed little-to-no effort, or were just making some jerk wad choices. I clobbered some of my students because I expected better from them.

And the backlash from certain parents towards my choices have been overwhelming. Not just the parent of T, by the way. There are more.

I know I can't give up being a tough teacher. I can't let myself allow students to slack off. I can't slack off myself. It really is a tiger battle with my students. And the path of least resistance is one I don't want to take.

But sometimes, a tiger needs a quiet place sheltered from the battle to lick its wounds.

Chinese Mothers

On a related note to yesterday's post, here's something interesting to read.

And yes, I am a TOTAL Chinese Mother to my students - and it is indeed a war zone. Every single day.

Singing Sewermen

Would be a good name for a rock band too.

Also, it would really be nice if every workplace was like this (yeah, like a sewer). People who take their job seriously, but not themselves seriously. It would be nice if my students can do the same too.

Blogger of the Week: Better D.C. School Food

In which your lunch shouldn't consist of a boxed lemon tea and Kinder Egg Surprises.

I really like Better D.C. School Food. It's such a informative, homey-kind of read. Kids make things from scratch here. There's gardening, and lunch descriptions, and policy, and economics.

And in a note related to my teaching field, there's got to be so. Freaking. Many. Math lessons here that I don't even know where to begin.

Orwellian, no joke

This video reminds me of those digital simulations of car accidents on Chinese television news.

Frankly, both sides that these "people" represent seem rather ridiculous. Come on, who on EARTH actually uses the word "Orwellian" in normal conversation? And Mr. Admin Dude, you are not better off, being so argumentative about everything except your own opinion.

Truly, it doesn't help the situation anymore than all the fights and hate and "I'm right you're wrong" mentality going on. Rather, the video kinda fuels it - just read the comments in Youtube.

Um, I think I'll go back to my classroom now, to do what I can, with whatever I've got. k'bye.