September 26, 2008 – 8:13 am
How do you both support a student and ensure they learn to learn on their own? How do you pick them up when they fall without teaching them they can always fall into a soft cushion of institutional culture? Maybe scaffolded instruction needs to be brought not just into individual classes but also into teaching students how to take independent responsibility for their academic career.
Via Slate’s Schoolhouse Rock blog, a charter school serving a low income, high minority population is facing problems after opening a high school. New Haven-based Amistad Academy succeeded in closing the achievement gap for middle schoolers but is retaining large percentages of 9th graders because they failed at least one of their classes.
Why is this happening? One reason could be the culture of support:
Amistad is … evaluating whether the institutional attitude of “we will not let kids fail” has in turn failed to teach students how to learn independently. “Independence is something you teach and develop and cultivate, we need to be more thoughtful and more intentional about doing that,” said Toll.
I’m wondering if I need to do a better job of scaffolding not just learning but also academic responsibility in my students.
September 25, 2008 – 6:36 pm
As a new teacher I often feel like the proverbial blind squirrel, wandering around hoping I run into a nut. Today I ran into a nut, a really big one! And it tasted yummy.
Busy writing finals, which take me a long time to write for various reasons, I realized I had little time to prepare a presentation on tests of convergence and divergence for infinite series. I like to prepare powerpoints because I’m not a fluent speaker when I’m thinking about math. So having the math in a presentation makes my lectures flow much more smoothly. I find I am much more likely to usefully cover material and helpfully answer questions if I’m not trying to write out equations at the same time.
I hit upon the idea of outsourcing my lecture to the students — crowdsourcing it, wikifying it, though they didn’t get to choose which part of the lesson they were to teach which would really be required for true wikification. I assigned each student one test and one problem using that test. They had 10 minutes to study their test and figure out their problem. Then they each presented the test with its demo problem.
I was amazed at how energetically they each tackled their portion of the lesson. I ran around the room explaining bits and pieces and showing my own notes as to how to solve the given problem. I did take the time to work each problem beforehand — a key strategy in successful math teaching is actually having done the problems before the student. Strange that I didn’t realize that at first; I thought I could wing it.
The wiki lectures themselves took longer than I hoped so we’ll be continuing them tomorrow. That’s not altogether a bad thing since it means I don’t have to prepare as much for tomorrow as usual.
I’m not sure how this would work with a topic that weren’t so easily broken up. There were nine tests of convergence/divergence to cover and eight students, so I assigned each student one test (one student got two related ones, p-series and harmonic series).
It’s great to come out of class feeling totally energized and inspired — that’s exactly why I went into teaching.
September 2, 2008 – 5:33 pm
Random thoughts after one week of teaching.
- I love this job. I love every part of it, even the parts that make me crazy. I love the planning; I love the people; I love the learning; I love making my plans real every day; I love getting to know the students.
- I’m exhausted. How do people teach full time? I am working 60 hours a week at this half time job. There are good reasons: I’m new to teaching, I’m teaching a class that’s never been taught at my school, and unlike many of the teachers there I don’t have a partner who’s teaching other sections of the same class. But STILL. I only teach two sections and one doesn’t have homework assigned!
- Our calculus textbook doesn’t teach calculus the way I want to. It introduces concepts in an exploratory fashion then postpones formally dealing with them until many sections later. My students want to understand it right then so it would be better (though granted less innovative) to introduce topics in a more traditional order. For example, for infinite series, I’d start with famous series (geometric, arithmetic, p-series, telescoping, harmonic) then do series convergence then do power series then do Taylor and Maclaurin then radius of convergence. Our textbook does an exploration on representing a function with a series then geometric series then power series then Taylor then radius of convergence then tests of convergence. Seems all out of order to me.
- For calculus II notes, nothing beats Paul’s Online Math Notes. I think I will start teaching out of them instead of straight out of the textbook. I do really love the exploratory projects in our textbook; I just think they’re coming at the wrong time for me and for my class.
It’s been an intense spring and summer of rethinking my career and preparing for something altogether different. It came together this week: I accepted a half-time math teaching job at a Denver high school and I also received news that I passed Colorado’s math content exam for teachers.
I don’t know whether I’ll blog about teaching or not — there are a number of difficulties top of which is maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of those I work with, especially the kids I teach. When I was focused on succeeding as a web technologist, blogging was almost entirely a good thing. Now my personal landscape has changed and blogging comes with significant tradeoffs.
Leisa addressed this in her post Ambient Exposure, where she talks about how life changes can bring new risks, new vulnerability to blogging and other online social activities.
I’ve lost much of my will to blog for now anyway. (I guess I’m not the only one).
Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the feeling of knowing what I want and where I’m headed work-wise.
