Success

Okay, I have to admit, I haven’t really designed my own curriculum for algebra 2 before. I just looked at the district blueprint, saw what chapters they expected me to cover, and did that. Sometimes I figured out homework assignments the morning of. Sometimes I had homework planned out weeks in advance. But I had never really thought about how to teach the curriculum from the top down before.

And then I met Holly Young and the Washoe County School Districts RPDP and began the Student Learning Facilitator program (SLF) and began to read the book Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe (UbD).

Darn her! She threw my whole process upside down and made me realize how much I sucked. And then my school changed their schedule to a odd block arrangement which takes our class minutes from 90 to 71 (but increases minutes over the semester and increases class meetings! Yea!) And then the Common Core State Standards is coming out, and we will have to rewrite everything anyway.

So this summer, another teacher and I sat down immediately after school was out to start planning next year’s Algebra 2 class. It is the first time she has taught it, and it I have not taught it for 2 years, so it is new to me, given the changes to our school this year.

Read on to see some of the details of our planning.

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I am very much a fan of repurposing objects and creating my own solutions to tech problems. Often times, you can do for your self much cheaper and get better quality if you think outside the box and create your own solutions instead of buying a premade solution.

A long time ago, I wrote about how I used a KVM switch to connect multiple sources to my projector. After two years, I am very happy with it. I use it daily to connect my Elmo to my projector, along with my laptop and 2 empty ports all through a single wire. It makes me very flexible with my tech usage.

When my Elmo finally dies (it is a fairly old model, the precursor to the HV-110u Digital Visual Presenter that I bought on eBay for around $80) I think I will make my own instead of buying another. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Elmo. I use it often. I also won’t spend a couple of hundred dollars to buy what essentially is a webcam on a stick.

Speaking of webcam on a stick, guess what! Another math teacher figured out how to mount a web cam inside of an old light mount and accomplish the same thing the Elmo does!

Now that is awesome. When it comes time to replace my old trusty Elmo, I will be using a web cam, purchased on sale, some inexpensive LED lights from Target or Walmart, and a light arm scrounged from a garage sale. At that point, I have a $200 Elmo for a quarter of the cost. Even better, because I can upgrade the webcam and modify it as needed. It is more flexible and useful than the Elmo ever could be.

We are only limited by our imagination, once we give up the idea that things have to be made for us.

Back when I was in grad school working on my M.Ed., I had to do one of those philosophy papers on my personal teaching philosophy. All my classmates whined and groaned, but as someone with a philosophy degree, I take that kind of assignment very seriously. In the end, I decided one thing for sure out of that assignment, that I did not want to teach students, but wanted to teach learners.

Yea, uh, okay. What is the difference? To me, I looked at the root of the words. “Student” is based on the root “study” while “Learner” is based on the root “learn”. Do I want the kids in my room to be studying or learning? I choose learning, therefore I need to create an environment where learning can happen instead of studying.

Yea, uh, okay. What does that mean? To be honest, not sure. The first thing I did four years ago is banish the word “student” from my vocabulary. That started a philosophical change in the way I approached teaching. I could not allow myself to call the people in my classroom “students”. By forcing a change in language (key Wittgenstein and his language games here folks) I changed my thinking about what I was doing.

Did it work? The first year I would say no. It was a failure. I taught like I had been taught. It sucked. I got more comfortable with the vocabulary though, and it make me more careful. I kept working at it. After year 4, I can say I am much much better at learning in the classroom instead of studying. That is good. I am not there by any means though.

So what prompted this posting today? In my Reader, up popped this post today by Scott McLeod. And I read it with great zeal. It mirrored some of my long time thinking. And there was the terrific chart in it that clarified what a learner was and what a student was.

This chart was originally created by David Warlick in 2010.

Okay, that does a great job at breaking down the different aspects of why the words mean different things. I can honestly say that the “compensation” and the “Why?” are two reasons that I originally make the commitment to learning in my classroom.

Today, at the end of my 4th real year of teaching, I can say that t he relationships with educators and peers is another reason I have fully tried to commit to. The motivation and mode of operation are harder. Those are me creating an environment where those to can flourish. I try, but I don’t think I am always successful.

Assessment is still the killer. How do you create authentic assessments that will measure what the learner can do?

After 4 years, I can say I am beginning to be a decent teacher who is creating an environment where learning is the focus and studying is not. Let’s see what year 5 can bring my way!

The FRQ review that I did last class was fairly successful. The learners worked their problems, thought about how to teach that problem, and gave good presentations to the class. The one thing I was very disappointed in was the lack of questions on how to do the problems the class was teaching. They all said, “yup, I understand how to do it, that makes sense.”

Come on, as a teacher, I know that is b.s. They were just humoring their classmates giving the presentation on the problem.

Today I am giving them another MC practice exam. I am still mixing it up though. I numbered them off by 1,2′s. Now they all have an odd or an even number. The ones went to one side of the room, the evens to the other.  I gave them 5 minutes to work on as many problems as they can in pairs, then called “switch”. Then they worked more problems for 5 minutes before switching again. And again. And again.

When the class was half way over, I required them do a “switch different”. Now they were paired up 1-2 instead of 1-1, and they were teaching each other the problems they already did.

It is a modification of a think-pair-share but for AP Stats review.

First period went off terrifically! Second period also! At great day of reviewing multiple choice problems where everyone was engaged and focused on the problems at hand.

I was having a conversation the other day with a recent graduate of my high school. This person was shocked at how bad education is, because they are in college and doing well. All the things they hear in the media was creating a huge cloud over their head because they had a great high school experience, learned a ton, challenged themselves daily, and is now excelling in college.

They asked, “How did education go so downhill in such a short amount of time.” Essentially, the graduate didn’t understand how, in the span of two short years, education went from being something people support and want to succeed, to something people are constantly attacking. This post is for that learner, as well as to consolidate some of the information I have for that person and have it for myself in an easier to locate place.

First off, the issue that is most frustrating is the constant barrage of bad, wrong and very negative information about teachers and teaching. Bill Ferriter, at The Tempered Radical summed it up very succinctly. It really isn’t easy to be positive everyday in the classroom when you know that people who would be lividly angry if someone told them how to do their job feel that they are “experts” at education and start demeaning teachers and telling us how to do our job. They believe they are somehow experts at education just because they went to school 20 years ago.

Then you have the Governor of Minnesota declare war on educators, oh sorry, just the unions. And it goes on. Creationist attacks on science education occurred in over 10 states last year. School vouchers, which are code words for allowing public money to be used at religious schools are brought up every year by the republicans.

It goes on and on and on. Education is under a concerted and organized attack in the United States. Our learners are being tested to the point where teachers can’t teach anything but the material on the test, the tests are re-written every few years to make them harder and harder, and then the republicans scream bloody murder because the same number of learners are passing the tests. Duh.

And everyone just allows the republicans to get away with the lies, the distortions and the rampant framing of the debate. Randy Turner has a great piece entitled “Gutless media has failed American Schools.” Absolutely correct.

The media has not challenged the rampant lies about education. The facts are easy to find and dig up. Not only have the scores gone UP on the NEAP exam, but they have gone up significantly! The number of graduates from American colleges have DOUBLED in the last decade! (But Bill Gates is allowed to spin this as a negative?) The number of kids graduating high school is at an all time HIGH! (But the graduation rates are so low? How are graduation rates calculated? Do you know? I do. It is a shell game, designed to make the numbers appear lower. This school district has a good explanation of the game.)

So the politicians have defined schools as failing, independent of any facts. The media has gutlessly gone along with the redefinitions, therefore allowing the entire discussion to be framed in purely negative terms.

If this was the military, people would be screaming bloody murder! When the soldiers in the field do not accomplish the goals set out for them, we do not blame them, we blame the generals. but in education …

When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives. via

Not for teachers though. The gutless media has allowed the debate to be framed entirely in the context of greedy teachers (who have to work second jobs to make ends meet) and failing schools (that will see record cuts this year because they are failing?)

No. This is wrong. I, for one, will be standing up to anyone who repeats the framing of the discussion. In formal debate terms, the framework is being rejected by this debater. I will explain this in public, in person face to face, and in public on the internet.

As teachers, we need to stop being complacent and allowing the people who created the problem to frame the discussion about how to “fix” the problem. Instead, we need to reject their assumptions and start over.

Now.

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Edit: 14 May 2011.  The facts are even easier to find as people start actually looking at the economy and taxes.

I wonder where this terrific economic “trickle down” is? Clearly the richest Americans are making more, but they are paying taxes less than ever, and they certainly are not creating jobs with that wealth. Well, maybe jobs in China (manufacturing) or Switzerland (banking).

Edit 31 May 2011

And more evidence of the fact that effective tax rates are the lowest not only in the recent history of the US, but that the US has the lowest corportate tax rate of all industrialized nations. From the NY Times.

Edit 1 June 2011

Well, the issue of when is still open, but how is pretty well detailed. I have been on the receiving end of the religious right’s anger before, so I do understand exactly what is the issue here. Susan Ohanian, who has won awards for her investigative journalism has followed the money trails on the attacks on education and teachers. The religious right is a large mover in this, because they want to dismantle the public education system in the US, as well as Bill Gates and friends. The money rarely lies in issues such as these.

Edit 6 June 2011

This just gets worse and worse. At the federal level, corporations are taxed less than citizens are. The website ThinkProgress breaks down an article on 12 corporations that had $173 BILLION in profits and payed no taxes! Really.  This is based off of an article by Citizens for Tax Justice that shows clearly our revenue problem in the United States.  I guess idealogues like InvestorJunkie have less and less leg to stand on, just the same lame arguments based on a flawed and outdated ideology.

Edit 10 June 2011

Wow, the edits on this post are going to deserve a post of themselves, I think.  One of the complaints is that teachers are “ineffective”, whatever that means. Usually, what they mean is that the test scores of the teacher don’t meet some arbitrary and illusory criteria that will change every year in order to make more teachers appear to be ineffective.  Of course, the reality is that the learners family income level matters more than a teacher ever could. The quantity of research on this is staggering, but the ideologues dismiss it all with things like, “the poor in the US are better off than the rich in other countries,” as if that comparison actually means anything.

Edit 25 July 2011

As the summer winds on, the debt ceiling debate rages on, and the republicans are lying to the public continuously about the debt and why / how it occurred.  The rational person sees the evidence and realizes that the Bush tax cuts are a major cause of the current problem, and need to be reversed. The delusional just keep denying the evidence as usual.

Edit 7 Aug 2011

Scott McLoud posted this graphic today showing the true amount of dollars in taxes actually paid in the US both compared to other countries and ourselves over time. It is very telling, as well as indicative of just how much the teabaggers lie about taxes. Something has to give.

This week is review. All review. It is as interesting and as fun as watching paint dry. It is also necessary. I have 90 minute blocks, so I can give them the full exam in two periods. The first period I gave them the multiple choice, ran it through the scanner, and handed them their results, answer sheets and the worked out solutions as they headed out the door.

Let’s just say they didn’t realize what 90 minutes of sustained effort on a Stats exam felt like until then.

The next time I saw them, I gave them the free response. Now I have to grade them all, so it will take the weekend for me to give them their results back, the effort will be worth it (I hope).

But … there is no way I can justify giving them another set of exams like that. Just working problems in a silent room will not be the best way to learn.

For the next class period’s review I am going to give them a card when the walk in. That card will group them into one of 6 groups. It will be random, so the question of favoritism can not come into play, and after the class starts I will assign the groups one of the 6 FRQ’s from 2009. I will try to give #6 to the strongest group. Each group will have 30 minutes to create a presentation to the class on what the correct answer is. 15 of the minutes will be without the answers, so they will have to actually work the FRQ honestly.  I will give them the answer packet after 15 minutes, so they can check their answer.

Finally, they will have to come up with (in the 30 minutes) a presentation to the class to TEACH the correct answer, including the language, graphs, and anything else needed.

My goal is to have the learners discuss the correct and incorrect answers, answer questions and become experts on the questions and then model the expert behavior for a more successful exam scenario in two weeks.

Let’ s see if it works. I will let you know. Monday will be the day I do this. It has to work better then me standing in front of the room telling them. How long will they retain that?

I kind of reached a breaking point last week. No, wait. I did reach a breaking point last week. I will no longer sit by when I hear people say obviously wrong things.  You know, the kind of wrong things about teaching and what affects teaching you hear every day if you watched Faux News. But this is also a cautionary tale. What to expect when you start actually confronting the ideologues.

Really, I have had enough. I am not the only one. Chris Lehmann has a great piece on the fact that both sides of the issues are not that far off, but the rhetoric is out of control. Otherwise sensible people are saying some incredibly stupid things simply because they have bought into the rhetoric. Things like, “No more taxes”. That is stupid. Americans are taxed at the lowest rates in over 60 years.

That is a fact. Not an opinion. The evidence can be found in 30 seconds with a Google search. Heck it is even published nationally in local newspapers. PolitaFact, a very unbiased source, found the same thing.  And PolitaFact’s article is very nice because it includes sources that can be checked.

So, we are paying the lowest tax rates in the modern history of our country and people are screaming for them to go lower? Why would that be? What is the effect of lowering the tax rates more? After all, the evidence, again, non-partisan evidence, shows that one of the major causes of the deficit we are running right now IS because of tax cuts!

 Source

Yup, you read it right. That GIANT brown area in the middle of the graph shows that a MAJOR cause of the deficits that are killing schools right now (no taxes, ugh, must destroy schools to balance budget) is the Bush Era tax cuts.

So why are they screaming for lower taxes? What would the purpose be? After all, Dick Cheney is on record saying, “Deficits don’t matter.” The Republicans used to love deficits. So of course they want to cut taxes more. It creates more deficits, and they can use those deficits as reason to attack schools and education more!  That is a personal opinion that I am not going to support now. Of course, as they realize the Industrial Revolution is over, and what they really need is a smarter population, this will backfire on the ideologues.

So, on to the problem. I have in my news feed a site called InvestorJunkie. I watch it because I teach a unit on financial mathematics, and I really like to read a broad range of ideas to make sure I am up with the current knowledge on financial issues. The learners ask TONS of questions on a huge range of topics, and InvestorJunkie generally does a great job at covering a lot of good investor ideas.

But the other day, he posts a typical screed of the ideologues rant, “ugh, taxes bad, no raise taxes.” Of course, he gives some good ideological arguments with the standard graphs, and says the typical statement, we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem (despite all the evidence to the contrary, we have a spending AND REVENUE problem).

I challenge him on it. I repeatedly ask him to explain how going back to the tax rates of the Reagan years would be bad. I give him the evidence. I ask him to explain again. And again. I point out some assumptions he makes about peoples value. He confirms those assumptions. He asks if I have a plan, or just attack him. I give him a plan. He ignores it.

And then he bans me, because I didn’t fall into his neat idea of a teacher who is willing to fold under pressure. Okay, not his words. He calls me a troll and says he rebutted my points and I failed to answer his. [Can I tell you how funny that is? I teach competitive debate. My debaters are among the top tier in the league. I laughed for days!]

So the moral of the story, my fellow teachers, is when you stand up for yourself and knowledge, be ready to be called names. Be ready for the ideologues to attack and deflect and do everything but answer your points. Be ready with the facts and the evidence from non-partisan and business sources so they can not challenge the credibility of your evidence.

They will still not read anything you have written, but we need to stand up for knowledge instead of hysteria, truth instead of opinion, and the fact the world is changing on the ideologues, and they need to join the 21st century.

And we need to start reframing the education debate instead of allowing the ideologues who have created the problem to frame it for us.

My AP stats kids are really not wanting to learn the calculator skills. It is killing me! They want to do it all by hand and then type in the math in the normal screen instead of using “stats” and “ttest” instead. KILLING ME!

So, to force the issue, and give them something interesting to work on I turned to the intertubes and my Google Reader for inspiration. As I was reading this morning, I came across this article.  Hmm, that sounds worth while. I am not a huge baseball fan, but I do like the stats!

Hmm, now the article used the data from every player, and I don’t want my learners needing to use a computer. They need a data set that is manageable on the calculators.  So I poke around on one of provided links and find this link that has team data. 

That looks promising. But I better look at it myself before I give it to them, right? I take the team data and graph it using JMP and find out it is no-where near normal. That is good. It means that the learners will run into problems doing the t-test if they actually LOOK at the data as I keep asking them to. If they don’t graph the data, they will get a happy answer, and it will be wrong. Nice.

I did the t-tests, and no matter how you slice it, none of them are significant. The means are all around .26 (hmm, regression to the mean comes up here as well.)

Then I think I will give them Barry Bond’s highest batting average (2002, .443 found here) and ask the groups to decide what data they need (and then give it to them) to determine if Barry’s batting average is significant.

So, the instructions, purposefully vague, will be:

Is the National League or American League’s batting averages significantly different in 2000? How about 2010?

Are the averages significantly different between 2000 and 2010?

What information do you need to decide if Barry Bond’s batting average is significantly higher than the leagues, and then is it significant?

The learners, working in groups, will need to write an appropriate Ho, Ha, do all conditions checks, and then, if appropriate, do the appropriate tests.

The conditions checks will fail on the nearly normal condition, but I will ask them to continue anyway and explain the problem in their conclusion.

Any feedback on this project?

I really find the concept behind the site Maths in the City to be very interesting. Real world math, based on the urban environment around us. It is a British site, but that does not mean it will not end up with some really cool pictures and videos from around the world.

Now, what can I find to contribute?

hmmm.  I must go and think now.

I don’t often post political issues here, but I was doing a bit of reading this morning and felt the need to consolidate some of the posts as well as express some opinions on the issues.

Of course, we all read the news, and know of the constant and abusive attacks on teachers and education by a certain political party. It is unfortunate that the person who is best showing the rampant hypocrisy of the that party is a comedian! None of the traditional news outlets are highlighting the fact that the Republican party has framed the debate very carefully as an “us vs. them” situation where “us” really is incredibly rich vs. the “them” of educators. Jon Stewart’s “Crisis in Dairyland” shows  this incredibly well. (Teachers v. Wall Street,  For Richer and Poorer, Interview with Diane Ravitch and Angry Curds.)

During  the height of the Wisconsin tragedy, I had a very impassioned discussion with some wall street type folks here.  What I realized out of this discussion is that they are brain dead. No seriously. Brain dead. Walking zombies who have come to the conclusion that it is okay to break contracts with teachers, but not with them, that they have no clue what it takes to educate, and that the entire problem with education can be solved by simply throwing a couple of bucks at teachers if the teachers raise scores on a test.

Of course, the wall street banker assumed that everyone is motivated by money, and that the only type of motivation that is allowed, possible, or important is extrinsic motivation. Motivate the teachers to teacher better and all the problems are solved! Yippee!

But wait! This assumes that the truly important people in this discussion have only to sit there and allow the supremely motivated teacher pour knowledge into their heads like wonderfully passive little widgets. What a terrific idea! (I guess we know why the bankers have brought our country to near ruin through the banking crisis. See what I mean; brain dead zombies.)

And then Tim Stahmer posts on his blog about a couple of studies done on extrinsic motivation and education. Guess what! Extrinsically motivating teachers is a recipe for failure! Why? Because the motivation of the TEACHERS is irrelevant. It is the motivation of the LEARNERS that matter! Throwing a few bucks at me will not mean my learners are more motivated!

So let’s look at these studies. Maybe the studies were severely biased, and that is the problem. The Washington Post has an article on one of the studies, (and here is a pdf of the story in case it disappears.) Wow, $15,000 is a lot of money! That is over 1/3 of my salary right now, and yet that huge amount of money did not cause students to do better? Imagine that? Paying the teachers did not cause the learners to do better!

But that is just one study. Not too conclusive at all. After all, one study in one school district means really nothing in the grand scheme of things. So Harvard does another study in a different school district. Guess what. Same thing. (here is the pdf text of the study.)

When are Michelle Rhee and company going to be thrown in the trash bin where they belong? They really have no plan, just more tired and wrong conclusions that do more damage than success. That is clear. If you read the book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” it is pretty clear they are causing significant damage to education.

But then, the brain dead zombies don’t want a good education system, do they? They want a system where they can teach creationism and can create good little worker bees who will be satisfied with low pay and no benefits. It is the educated citizen who demands more.

Lest you think that I am just complaining without offering a suggestion for improvement, I offer the following article. Bill Ferriter is a person who does suggest a positive vision for improving education. It is not an easy, magic bullet like merit pay. It is a hard slog. Structurally change how we teach. Change what we teach.

Yes, we can learn a lot of lesson from handwashing. Unfortunately for reality, it is not easy, but it is worth the price of admission.