Student: Hey, other student, is the answer to problem 3 40?

Miss Klaus: Are you kidding me?

Student: Gee sorry, I guess I didn’t take it that serious!

I can’t say very many good things about my fourth grade year. In fact, even the activity I’m writing about left me thinking “so what?” about what we were supposed to learn that day, though I think I learned more than I was intended to.

Ms. M. handed out strips of paper and tape, and told us to twist the paper once and tape the edges together. Then, she asked us how many edges the new shape had. I remember realizing that it only had one edge, because when I used my finger to trace the edge, it went all the way around on both sides.

I still don’t know what the Möbius Strip is to me, or I am to it, that I should care that it has only one edge, nor do I know what a fourth grader was supposed to get out of that. But I do remember having the idea that someone must have been the first to do that, and to realize what they’d done, and that on that day I’d done the same thing. So that’s what school is doing, I thought, taking us down the same path of figuring things out that other people have already been on. Although I didn’t tie that idea in with anything else for the next few years, it was in the back of my mind.

By sixth grade, I had picked up pi=3.14 from somewhere. I didn’t yet know that even that was an approximation, so I thought I was hot stuff when we measured diameters and cirucmferences and I was a step ahead when someone said, at the teacher’s prompting, that going from the diameter to the circumference was like multiplying by 3. But then I realized that what we were doing in that classroom had been done before by some ancient people, to figure out first that it was close to 3, then that it was 3.14. I found out later by playing with a calculator that there were more digits; later still, I found out that the digits went on forever. Once I knew that, it wasn’t any real surprise to me that people are still calculating the digits of pi, though I hope they’ve moved beyond measuring some round object and dividing by now.

Not long ago, I asked my at-the-time students to write a page starting in “Math is…” or “Math is good for…” Most of them couldn’t do it. They’ve been trained to do pass tests by doing mathematical tricks, but not taught to think about math. These were smart kids, but abstract thinking–anything that can’t be measured by a fill-in-the-bubbles test–isn’t in their curriculum any more.

I’m not ranting about NCLB or the testing systems. That’s been done, and anyway, the alternative (e.g. Oregon’s overall sub-40%, and lower in high school, pass rates before NCLB threatened the districts’ wallet) was worse. I’m talking about the best way of getting things done, which is a conversation that should be separate from “how do we beat the tests?”

Pure direct instruction does not work. There, I’ve said it. I can’t prove is, because as far as I know we’re not measuring the kids on the important stuff that direct instruction fails at–the easy things to measure, like whether the kids can do something, are all well within the range of things direct instruction is good at. Whether the kids can think something through, though–that’s not so easily measured, and they don’t learn it from being told and imitating.

I’ve gone back and forth on this one, because of some of the nonsense that sneaks in disguised as “reform” math, and I do think that there’s a place for direct instruction, contrary to what the radical philosophical constructivists say. However, I don’t think it should be considered the be-all end-all of teaching. Sometimes, yes, it works best for the knowledge to go from the teacher to the student, but if the students are to be active learners rather than passive receptacles, the emphasis needs to be on the teacher setting up the activity so that the student will figure it out. This will give students a reason to think that it matters if they try, and a sense of their own ability to figure things out.

I may not have cared about the one-edged Möbius Strip, other than as a curiosity. But because of what I saw in the Möbius Strip, I cared about learning.

*while class is copying a graph with notes on it into their math draftbooks*

Student: Are we ever going to take notes in this class?

Miss Klaus: What do you think you’re doing right now?

Another one learns that the way it was done last year isn’t the only way.

From a student: “I don’t think any are similar by their confusing perimeters, it’s hard to similate.”  Apparently “similate” = “determine whether two figures are similar”…decent word for it, at that.

So…I told the seventh graders how they’re doing (yikes) and handed out Friday detentions, for more than three missing assignments, to over half the class…they’ve got until Friday to redeem themselves from that by bringing in three past due assignments.  I’ll probably still have a bunch.  BUT…the class’s average should bounce up a bit, from this…I hope.

Here’s what got to me: someone (I really didn’t see who, or recognize the voice since it was whiny) had the gall to ask why it was taking so long to get through the book.  Hellllllll-lo!  Maybe because I have to explain everything three times because people talk while I’m trying to give directions, and then “don’t get it” because they didn’t do the homework!  There’s just a chance that that has something to do with why we’ve been going at, pretty much, half-speed.

Today was better, at least.

My cooperating teacher mentioned the other day that there were some issues with students of different races not really associating on a social level in this school.  Now, I’d noticed that race was part of it–the white students sit together in the cafeteria–but it seemed to me that cliques were a bigger part of it, since there are a lot of Latino/a students who don’t get along too, and some mixed groups.

Then I noticed, just now…two boys, one white and one Latino, just came in from the other room to get their homework folders, and were kidding around a bit, like friends just normally do.  I can think of several other mixed pairs of boys that could have done much the same thing; I can’t think of a mixed pair of girls.

Thinking back, my initial impression from this perspective is that the “higher-end” boys–not necessarily TAG, in fact only girls have been identified as TAG in this class (something’s wrong there too…), but the ones that tend to be hard-working, nice to most people, and one way or another really decent people–seem to hang out regardless of race.  The girls, on the other hand, pretty much split by race, and then into smaller cliques…which is a problem for one student in particular that comes to mind (long story).  The white girls, which includes most of the identified TAG students, sometimes also include some of the boys in their group, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them include Latino boys.

Five, six years ought to be enough time to at least be comfortable with specific people, right?  What’s going on?

Kids do the darnedest things to computers. Like rotate the monitor display…I spent 15 minutes mucking about in monitor settings, until I got sort of frustrated, Googled, and came up with this. Turned out to be the graphics card setting thing. Googled from my laptop, ’cause it’s really hard to use a mouse at a 270 degree rotation.

I just wonder if it was an accident or deliberate. If it was an accident, the kid undoubtedly just freaked out…if it was deliberate, well, that’s relatively funny as harmless pranks go…

Student: “Spiderman’s a superheater–a superhero.”

Today, I experienced a truly lame degree of human cruddiness. I know my car’s range; it had another 30 miles in that tank. And yet, it was definitely an out-of-gas type problem, since gas fixed it. I’m also now the proud owner of a 2.5 gallon gas can. I wonder if getting a locking gas cap is a rite of passage for teachers (or student teachers) in gang-territory schools…anyway, there’s my next weekend project, most likely.

But after I wandered a few blocks (most of them in an ultimately useful direction), bought and filled the gas can, and walked back, I also experienced human decency: a few of my students, when they saw me pouring gas into my car, asked if they could help me with anything.

Amazing how human cruddiness and human decency are so often experienced at or almost at the same time.

Multi-store shopping trip today, and not for fun stuff. Food and kitchen stuff. Oh well. At least there was a little bit of chocolate involved, and popcorn.

In the last store, I ran into one of my former students…from two years ago. She was in third grade then. It took me a minute to think it through: now she’s in fifth grade, same as my students at Grant. Crazy. I’ve been in this town a long time.

And next year, odds are I won’t be, since Oregon is getting on my nerves and ~95% of the people I actually WANT to be around either already are somewhere else or might be next year anyway. I could be pretty much anywhere but here and be closer to my friends.

Small town would be nice. It means always being on good behavior in public, of course…but…I kind of like living and teaching in the same place, so that I run into my students around town. It’s neat to see how they’re turning out. And to overhear one say to her mom, “That’s the girl that helped me!” as I wandered further into the store a different time. Of course there are small towns everywhere, so that’s still not much of a starting point…but it is something that could narrow the field eventually…