Shopping is fun, math is hard

short version:

….heard during a class debate on whether our school should have single sex classes for core subjects next year: “Well, since girls are naturally better at English and History, and boys are better at Science and Math…..”

This from the girl who is at the top of all of her classes *and* got one of the -if not the highest grades on the state standardized test in Math.

*sigh*

long version:

My first period class was in an uproar this morning because they heard a rumor that we are considering having single sex English, Math, History and Science classes next year.

I was drinking my morning coffee when they brought it up, but derisive laughter caused me to spray it out of my nose.

If you have any kind of memory, it won’t be a surprise when I say that seventh graders have a hard time concentrating in class because of their HORMONES.  I have to shout it in all caps because that’s what hormones are like in the seventh grade: distracting and awkward.  While I am talking about Literature, red faced glances are being exchanged, relationships are starting and ending, sneakers are furtively frolicking under the tables and names are lovingly being joined together in glitter – pen monograms.

…………except in my first period class.  Arranging tables and desks in a classroom is like a giant tangram puzzle, and mine has undergone countless transmutations over the course of the school year.  There was the Fortress of Solitude (an isolated single desk in a back corner), which we phased out after Spring Break.  Alcatraz – a lone round table floating apart from clusters of rectangular table was a punishment for some classes and a coveted resort in others.    Months ago I snatched up a desk that I’d long coveted from another teacher: a big crescent.  We call it the Half Moon, and it inspired the most lasting table configuration: The Circle of Trust.  I managed it by wedging trapezoidal tables among the long, rectangular tables.  (The kids pointed out that it’s really just a Half Circle of Trust, but that’s just semantics).

Whatever the arrangement has been, first period has managed to segregate genders as much as possible.  If I didn’t force them into the Circle of Trust, they’d be clustered in opposing corners of the room.  There’s a forced civility that has skirted just this side of hostility.  Communication is mostly through me: “Ms. Plainy, would you please tell Them that They are taking up too much space?”, etc.

I’ve tried to force a little interaction for the same reasons that I limit the vampire/manga/zombie loving kids to books about kittens and rainbows: they need to stretch a little bit.

So, this morning when this group went up in arms over the possibility of having classes with only boys or only girls, it just cracked me up.  Hence the more formal debate: I was all ears about why they are so keen on being able to take classes with a group they’ve been actively avoiding all year, at least in my class.

And then they come at me with the  Science and Math comment.

Oh, Larry Summers.

the one that got away

Today I drove out to Caddo Lake in East Texas with a troop of new and newish friends.  It’s been pretty fantastic.  I’ve been making mental notes all day about Things to Write About, but I find that I just don’t have the energy now before going off to blissful sleep. 

I took pictures all day, manically, but the one that sticks out in my mind is The One I Didn’t Take.We took a steamboat ride on the lake and left from a tiny dock in Uncertain, Texas, next to the most adorable cafe I’ve ever experienced in my life.  Parked outside the cafe was a white church van with the name of the church in big lettering all over it: THE CHURCH OF UNCERTAIN.

I like to do the voices

This op-ed in the NY Times caught my eye just now.  It’s all about how we’ve lost the art of reading out loud.  Most of my classroom persona is a crustier version of my real self- I’ve always been theatric and sarcastic, but at school I also police gum chewing.  I have to admit that the pleasure I take in reading out loud to my students is one thing that I feel sheepish about.  

I’ve always loved reading out loud and being read to – who doesn’t?  It’s why I listen so obsessively to the radio.  In college a bunch of my friends had a kid’s radio show where we acted out folk tales – it was probably ten times more fun to put together than it was to hear, I’m sure.  All of my art projects are executed while listening to This American Life.  I just love listening to stories, much more than watching them.  Even when I watch TV shows or movies online, I generally have another window open and play a repetitive game at the same time.  

All this to say that I love reading out loud to the kids.  I feel guilty because I should be pushing them more to practice reading out loud themselves so that they don’t sound like affect-less robots.  And while I have no qualms in forcing them to listen to opera, I worry all the time that I’m the only one having fun when I read.  Not only that- when they do read out loud, I save the good scenes for myself.  It gets painful to read for all classes – I’ve got six – and when we’re in the middle of a novel I usually lose my voice for a day or two.  

I’m so good at it that by the fifth class I can modulate the pitch and dynamics of my voice (high, fast and loud just before an important part- then slower, lower and softer for Dramatic Effect) while only glancing at the page every two sentences or so.  This while using my facial expression to control the class.  I can tell someone to spit out their gum, give someone else permission to go to the bathroom and admonish a third for not paying attention with my eyebrows while not missing a beat.  

So there it is – I take an inordinate amount of pride in my reading -out – loud skills, and am probably forcing them to sit through something they’d much rather do themselves.  

Then again, it does make them laugh.

O Frabjous Day

I know that There Have Been Deaths, and that the swine flu Situation is a Grave Situation, but last evening my school district decided to shut down all schools until at least 11 May, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel like a snow day.  

I finally saved up enough for a new mac, so I bought one today.  AND, I found a decent independent coffee shop, and they finally have evening hours.  So, I’m sitting here at a coffee shop typing on my new compu after months of typing abstinence and it’s just hard for me to feel the full Gravity of the Situation.  

So, hello, all!  I’m back!  I don’t have Swine Flu!  I’m not technically under a quarantine!

post-diluvian

The last week has been overwhelming at school- more on this later.

Among some academic concerns I’ve got,  the wastefulness in the classroom has been driving me cuckoo nuts.  Everyday I’m rescuing piles of paper from the trash to put in the recycle bin, or our clean paper pile.  New packages of pencils disappear within hours, to be found in pieces around the floor.  I only get one dry erase marker from the office at a time, because as soon as I lay it on the tray, the end gets jammed in.

Paradoxically, the same kids who have no qualms about turning in their work in slovenly handwriting on crumpled up paper turn their noses up at reusing any paper that might “have something on it”, say a stray mark in pencil that might easily be erased.

Waste, waste, waste and destroy.

SO.  Yesterday I tried something new.

On Monday, we’re going to have a big vocabulary test.  Their assignment yesterday and today is to come up with a game to help them remember the meaning of the words.   They had to turn in an instruction sheet and materials list, and most groups got pretty far along in putting their game together.   I told them that extra points would be awarded for either re-using materials that would otherwise be thrown out, or coming up with a game that required few new resources to be used.

About twenty minutes into the class period the light seemed to go off, and they started looking at the room in a new way.  Empty cardboard box?  Gameboard!  Stack of tattered manila folders in teh recycle bin?  Cardstock!

A baby step, but hopefully one in the right direction.

I’m excited to see what the finished product- after they’re all turned in, each class will vote on the best game, and we’ll use that to review for the next test.

tightly wound

Yesterday I told a child that if she continued to use multiple exclamation points to end sentences and all caps for emphasis, that it might end in drug and alcohol use and possibly make the difference between a life spent drifting in and out of jail or a stellar career.

I was only twenty per cent kidding.

I will be glad when grades and portfolios are in next week, and I can get some sleep.

Math.is.Not.Cool.

At long last, I finally have reliable wireless internet at home. It feels like a tiny miracle. I’m going to celebrate by writing a cranky post.

This kind of alarmist “american kids stink at math” article is beginning to bother me. Not that it’s an unworthy topic – american kids, at least the ones that I see every day, *do* stink at math. It’s a serious problem, but as a society we approach it in deeply flawed and deeply unserious way.

Consider this quote from a parent:

““Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, ‘If I’m not an Asian or a nerd, I’d better not be on the math team.’ Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they’re not even trying.”

Here’s another from a former Math Olympias silver medalist (and current Princeton doctoral student):

“There’s just a stigma in this country about math being really hard and feared, and people who do it being strange,” she said in a telephone interview. “It’s particularly hard for girls, especially at the ages when people start doing competitions. If you look at schools, there is often a social group of nerdy boys. There’s that image of what it is to be a nerdy boy in mathematics. It’s still in some way socially unacceptable for boys, but at least it’s a position and it’s clearly defined.”

These quotes, and the study that prompted the article seem to identify the problem as this:

Only nerdy kids like math, and kids don’t like to be thought of as nerds, so kids don’t like math.

Or, expressed in another way:

“Math is uncool”

…with the implication being that if we could just make math cool enough, mean girls and guys would be making room on their varsity letter jackets to proudly flaunt their Math Olympiad patches.

This kind of asinine reasoning would be merely funny if it wasn’t so prevalent and so insidious. I hear different versions of this “if we only made it zany and cool enough, kids would love it” at teacher trainings pretty consistently from on high and from down below. The most ridiculous example was a colorful book I was offered from my former school’s math and science library by a wonderful teacher. I’ve probably described it before, since it gave me such an epiphany. The brightly illustrated pages were filled with paintings of adorable anthropormorphised geometric shapes frolicking down hills and across meadows. “Geometry is fun!” these pages seemed to shout.

But how much geometry would an elementary aged child pick up from reading that book or similarly themed materials? Almost nothing.

This kind of reasoning and these kinds of solutions completely ignore the more pressing question: what’s wrong with our pedagogy?

What is it about the way that we teach math that is different (and worse) than other countries that produce better grade school mathmeticians? My daily observation of middle schoolers is that they don’t hate math because it’s uncool, they hate it because they’re not good at it. It’s the same observation I made at my last school, but in conversation with others it was obscured by the fact that all the children I was teaching math to were poor and non-native English speakers. At my current school, there’s an unusually even ethnic and socio-economic mix, especially for an urban school. Still, I observe the same thing: the kids – even (maybe even especially) the academic high achievers- are completely frustrated by the curriculum because they don’t have basic computation skills.

In the admirable rush towards introducing critical thinking skills and abandoning “drill and kill” methods, teaching anything that involves memorization (like multiplication tables) has become almost anathema.  The local math curriculum is much more structured than say, the English or History curriculum, with frustrating results.  Even though it’s obvious to the Math teacher at our school that the reason the children are doing poorly with multiplying and diving fractions is that they don’t know how to multiply or divide easily, the powers that be think consider a program “behind schedule” when the teacher pauses to fill in knowledge gaps.  But what’s the point of moving on to dividing decimals when students don’t know how to do long division and aren’t sure what 16 divided by four is without using their fingers?  And why are children in a reasonably well funded school district not mastering these skills in elementary school?

These are some of the observations I’ve made in a very short stint as a math teacher and in my current foray into thank-the-SBJ-I’m-teaching-English-and-not-Math. I’m no expert, and I don’t have the time or the resources to compare our local pedagogical methods with those across the state, much less across the country in the world.

Still,  when the NYTImes mentions that

“relatively small Bulgaria has sent 21 girls to the competition since 1959 (six since 1988)”

I’m going to make an educated guess that they probably make children memorize multiplication tables in elementary school in Bulgaria, and and their success has less to do with math being cooler among Bulgarian teens.

Madrina

In my long absence, all kinds of lovely things have happened. I’m a new city (Fort Worth), living in a new apartment and teaching a different school. Also, I am a godmother!  The excitement never stops.  As soon as I have reliable internet (soon and soon), I’ll give more details.

Back on the Road

I’ve now embarked on my abbreviated but ambitious trip.  It’s a domestic jaunt in the spirit of Commuter RailFest 2003 and I love America 2006, but it doesn’t have a name yet.  First stop is Norfolk, VA to attend a fancy dinner in honor of my sister ad the other senior residents in her program.  My mother will be staying for a bit and helping her move to NYC for a yearlong fellowship, but I am off to next stop.

out of the storage room, into the fire

I am going to try and run over to school today and get some pictures of the storage room/band room I’ve been teaching in for the past few months before they (hopefully) come clear away the detritus tomorrow morning.  It wasn’t pleasant when I had ten to fourteen children, but I didn’t complain (in fact, I was very positive) because the alternative was to be in the corner of someone else’s room.  However, now that I have 23 for most of the afternoon, the space problem reached crisis proportions.   One day last week, I got bumped from five different rooms (read: wandered around the building with my students looking for a space to teach in) and finally ended up cramming them all into the on campus suspension room. 

The best parts of next fall?  A desk so I don’t have to carry around all papers in my arms, a book shelf so I don’t have to carry around books in a backpack all day, a computer.  Next best: my own classroom, so I don’t have to hunt for classroom space several times a week.  Best best:  my own class, from the beginning of the year.