The night after

I just realized that my last post says that it was posted on October 4, 2009. That is totally wrong, and I'm not really sure why that's the date it has. Unless my mind has entered into some type of pre-temporal time vortex landing me back over a month, I am confident that I wrote that post just last Sunday while I was preparing for my Sunday School lesson. Which I did. I've gotta keep these sanity checks online, who knows where I might find myself on a daily basis.

Yesterday I administered my second unit test in both my 6th and 7th grade classes. I hated it, because I knew that the majority of the students weren't prepared for the test. But I did know that the students who have been following along, doing their homework, and not screwing around in the classroom were going to be ready. Plus, I'm about 1.5-2 weeks behind on my long term plan, and I can't afford to waste any more time. So it was time to move on, and I had to give the test anyhow.

It's a weird thing, as a teacher, the things that you get excited about. For instance, when I'm walking through the halls and I see a pencil on the floor, I get excited, because well, hey, free pencil! Or a new ream of paper for the copy machine - when Chris walks in carrying that new package of paper at 7:30 am after I've been nervously waiting for it since I arrived at the school at 6:45, it's like Christmas day has finally arrived. And on the line of strange things you get excited about, one is assessment data, like tests and quizzes - for it's a chance to really see how well your students grasped what you've been pouring your soul into for the last better part of your life. So I excitedly rushed into my little apartment last night, excited to see how my students did on a test, that I unfortunately knew beforehand that they didn't do well on - my excitement stemming from the fact that maybe in this steaming pile of failure there will be a diamond or two of success. I haven't finished grading the 7th grade tests yet, but I can say with certainty that in the 6th grade, there were more than two. In fact, to be exact, there were 5. 5 out of 34 students who did amazingly awesome on the exam.

My hopes were particularly set with one of my students, DJ, who pulled me aside during the exam and whispered to me "I think I aced this." My heart lept for joy, in the fact that I KNOW DJ is totally capable of doing so, for he is brilliant, but immediately sank as I recalled he had told me the same thing with the last exam. And it's not that he did horribly last time, because he did get one of the better scores in the class. But unfortunately, with how low my scores were last time, it wasn't hard.

Well, last night at 2:45 am as I was wrapping up grading the 6th grade exams, I about broke down in tears as I pulled out DJ's test, and graded it, cruising from answer to answer. DJ's intuition was right on this time, as he scored the class high of 51/53 - 96%. These students have the capacity to be brilliant, I just need to figure out how to get them to tap it.

But on the other end of the scale, these students blow my mind - in a number of ways. Allow me to title them, and then I'll expound.

1. We had homework?

2. What's this pencil you speak of?

3. Does this test count towards my grade?

1. With education, it's essential to establish routines so that your students know at any given time what is expected of them. My question is, how long does it take for a routine to be established? I'm hoping it's longer than 13 weeks, because that's how long I've been doing THE EXACT SAME THING EVERY DAY IN CLASS and my students are still like - "We had homework?"

YES! Every day for the last 13 weeks, with a few exceptions, YOU HAVE HOMEWORK! And what do I expect you to do with it? Well if you were to guess according to their actions, it would be leave it in the bottom of my backpack, throw it on the floor, put it on the overhead, put it on Mr. Woahn's desk, or essentially anywhere except for the BASKET THAT HAS YOUR PERIOD'S HOMEWORK LABELED ON IT! That just wouldn't make sense.

Or in addition to this, my next favorite response is, as I walk around collecting homework from EVERY PERSON AROUND YOU, to hear a student say "You didn't give it to me." Well, buck-o, somehow every person who was sitting around you yesterday in class got the homework, and if I had to postulate based on the evidence, I'd be willing to wager that you did, and it got left in the same place where you put your reminder to do math homework last night.

2. So if 13 weeks isn't long enough to establish routines, you'd think that 5-6 YEARS of going to school might be? WRONG! Let me share a little epiphany that my students seem to rediscover on a daily basis. Come over here, so I can whisper this into your ear... So, did you know that when you get to class, you need a pencil? Yeah, incredible isn't it?! It will change your life! I'd think that after 5-6 years of school, this is something that you might realize by now, but evidently, it's still an evasive secret. Or at least it is to a number of students, who, on a daily basis I can guarantee with a higher certainty of success than I could predict the sunrise, which students will DAILY tell me that they need a pencil.

For the first two weeks of school, I just gave them pencils. You've never seen 400 pencils disappear so quickly. Then I started trading them whatever they had in their pockets for pencils - gum, rubber bands, toys, cell phones, keys, wallets. However, as is evidenced by the drawer full of miscellaneous items, the only thing that happens from trading is that I get a drawer full of random student possessions. So I started selling pencils to them. 5 cents, or whatever coin they have in their pocket. And I don't give change back.

I think the thing that bothers me the most about the pencils, besides the fact that it's only been 6 years, which evidently isn't enough time to ingrain the thought that EVERY DAY IN CLASS YOU'RE GOING TO NEED A PENCIL, is that when they don't have a pencil, many of the students think they're punishing me by saying "Well then, I'm not doing anything today." At this same time, they could ask their neighbor, who likely has 100 pencils in their backpack. Or at least I'd think they would, because seriously - where in the world are all of these pencils disappearing to?

Next week, I'm starting a classroom incentive to start bringing pencils to class. It's going to be part of a larger classroom management system that I'm putting into effect, but essentially one of the way these guys can earn points is by everyone bringing a pencil to class, or at the very least not asking ME for a pencil.

3. And last of this posting rant, is "Does this test count towards my grade?" Yes, I literally had about 15 students ask me that yesterday. Does this test count? Well, let's consider the following:

After the last test, we spent an entire day talking about your score, examining the questions that you missed, and setting goals about what you were going to do to score better on the next test. Every day for the last 7 weeks, I've been telling you that the questions on the Quiz are going to be JUST LIKE the ones on the test, the important one where I can determine how well you understood the material. That EVERY DAY for the last 7 days, I've been talking about how we have a test this Friday, and that if you have questions about any of the homework, to come talk to me so we can get you ready for the test. Or how about the fact that we spent the ENTIRE last two days just reviewing for the test? Or the fact that every day on the Do Now for the last week, I've been talking about how this test has the potential to bring your grade up if you do well? That not studying, or worse, not taking the test, will seriously bring your grade down?

Do any of these suggest that the test might count towards your grade? Oh, not explicit enough? Ok, well, yeah, it counts. Good luck!

Seriously though, I love these kids. So much, that it kills me to grade these tests. It seriously puts my own ability to teach in question here, and if it weren't for the fact that I had a few students who totally rocked the test, I'd feel like a complete failure.

I just need to take into account the successes that I have had - the few inside of the classroom, but additionally the ones outside of it. I had one of my students run up to me after school the other day and genuinely give me a hug after her basketball game. I had another student come talk with me last night after school for an hour, just because. I had another student walk up to me randomly between periods while I was waiting for my next class to arrive, and randomly challenge me to a thumb war. These victories, one by one, are how this battle is going to eventually be won. And I will win - there is no other option.

Back (again)

If you were to read my journal, I start just about every entry like this:

"It's been awhile since I've written in here, and I really need to do it more. I was thinking about this today, and I'm going to start doing so now - at least once a week, hopefully more often..."

Then about 3-4 months later, there is a similar entry. I feel that is what has happened with this blog, and I don't want it to be like that.

Since I've been living by myself, I've started to talk to myself a lot. I'll pose questions to myself, and I will then respond to myself as if I were a different person. This doesn't seem excessively strange to me to think about, because I think a lot of people do this - but it does seem frighteningly real when I'm looking in the mirror at myself, and I am genuinely expecting an unanticipated response from the guy staring back at me. It's becoming apparent to me how Tom Hanks went crazy in that Cast Away movie. If I start referring to my roommate, Wilson, start getting worried.

But seriously, I've been thinking a lot over the last few days about this blog because today I am teaching a Sunday School lesson on finding joy in Family History work, and one of the ways that the lesson manual suggests that we might find joy in it is by writing in our journals. Which of course caused me to reflect on my own journal, and how long it's been since I wrote in there, which in turn caused me to think about this blog and consider how long it's been since I've written here. And when coupled with the huge demand that I've received from people, inquiring as to why I haven't written, I think it's about time to get back on the horse.

With that said, I need to finish preparing my lesson. But, I'm fully anticipating getting another entry in later tonight with some updates on how things are going. There are plenty of stories to be told - I just need to start telling them to someone other than myself.

I'm back

It's been what, two weeks now since I last wrote? All you faithful followers are probably wondering what's been happening, and for now the answer is: not much.

Following the last day of summer school for us, I went back home to Utah for about a week, where I spent the time with my family, having lunch with lots of friends, and preparing my belongings to take to San Francisco.

At the end of the week, my parents drove with me and all my temporal possessions to California, and commenced on a three day apartment hunt that resulted in my current location. That was about a week ago. Since then, I've been in the dark, disconnected, or as it is also known - without internet. It's been painful, I assure you, but after that long wait my patience has finally been rewarded. This afternoon a little malaysian man came to the apartment, hooked me up with cable internet, and now it's time to party.

So expect more updates coming soon. Particularly, I'd check back next week seeing as how school will be starting on Monday. From everything I've heard from the staff at my school, it's going to be an experience unlike anything I've ever seen before.

BTW - I have a job teaching 6-7th grade math at a 4-8 middle school in San Francisco. Guess I forgot to mention that...

152%

That's how much our students surpassed their summer growth goals by. I talked about the diagnostic that we gave the students at the beginning of the summer - and then we go ahead and teach them a bunch of units and subjects for the next four weeks, and then at the end we give them the final exam.

Turns out the final test is the exact same test that they took at the beginning of the summer. Using the initial diagnostic, we use their test results, and many summers of TFA data to determine what their approximate growth goal should be by the end of our time with them. For instance, if a student scored 30% on the initial diagnostic, using the TFA math magic, it calculates their growth goal should be somewhere in the vacinity of 70% by the end of the summer. So when they take the final exam, their score should be around 70%. If they scored 70%, then that means they met their summer growth goal by 100%. However, if they scored something like 50%, that means they met 50% of their summer growth goal. But if a student scores 90% on the final exam, that's like saying they met 150% of their summer growth goal.

The average on the final was 87%.

I don't know any facts or figures for certain, but I would be willing to bet that our students have one of the highest growth goal completions in all of LA institute, if not TFA. Most of the other collabs were reporting scores of 99%, 107%, which is fantastic, don't get me wrong. But I am so proud of our students for completely blowing the statistic out of the water.

It was hilarious because this morning, when we got to school, we all had this really somber attitude, and the students were heavily picking up on it. They were all really psyched to see how they did, and they could tell that we didn't seem very happy. So they were all getting super paranoid... And then we broke the news to them - that they had averaged 87% on the final, and they all started cheering.

Afterwards we met with them, one on one in the hallway, and talked to them about their goals, what they did to get there, and what they can do to continue on that path.

This was such an amazing experience - I can't believe how close I've become to these students after only four weeks. It's hard to imagine what thing will be like after an entire school year.

There were a number of awesome moments that stuck out from today. One is that I spent about 45 minutes talking to the class about a bunch of the projects that I worked on throughout my engineering education, and showed them some videos and pictures of my projects. After class, I had no less than three students who mentioned to me that they had been thinking about doing engineering, and after listening to me they felt a lot more confident about the idea.

Another moment was during class. One of our students, Amber (the same one who organized the cake for my birthday) pulled all four of us aside, and gave us each a card, and then proceeded to tell us what an amazing impact we had had in her life. She said that prior to coming to our class, she felt that she didn't understand math, that it was impossible and that she wasn't very good at it. But somehow, through our instruction, we showed her that not only was she capable of doing math, but she could do it well. She told us that we taught her to believe in herself, to have self confidence, and know that she could achieve what she set her mind to do.

This blew me away... This was the entire reason that I really wanted to join TFA, and I figured that this was an impact that I could perhaps have over the course of an entire school year. But never in four weeks. And yet, somehow it happened.

And lastly (of the many), was another student, Jessica. She stuck around after class, and had something to say to all the four of us. First, I should give a precursor about Jessica. Jessica is brilliant, but she was really sick for a lot of summer school (she missed at least an entire week, which when you consider the fact that we covered four topics daily, is like missing about 2 months of class during the regular school year), and so it was a tough road for her. But she came, she got all the homework, she worked on it, she studied it, and when it came to test time, she rocked it. Jessica had to get up at 5 am, and ride two different buses in order for her to arrive at Hamilton on time.

Jessica started off by telling us that she had had awful math experiences in the past. Her last math teacher failed her because he lost her homework, he lost her test scores, and never gave her mother an audience for a parent teacher conference. She had another math teacher who she said didn't teach her anything, who's life was threatened by a student to give him an A, and he did it. He had no control over the classroom, and she said it was literally a waste of time. She said prior to us, she hated math.

But over the course of the last four weeks, that opinion somehow changed. Jessica has ambitions of attending Berkely, and wants to become a teacher. She always had figured it would be in history or English, two subjects that she feels really strongly about. But not anymore. Now she says she's considering math, because she loves the way that we were able to break things down for her, how she was able to grasp the concepts, feel in control, and actually have fun with it!

And of course, we cried. In all of them, we cried.

What an incredible experience... it's been somewhat like a dream, there have been some definite highs and lows, but at the end of the day, one thing is certain: I'm making a difference.

The Calm Before the Storm

We're administering the final exam today. This will be the culminating event of my summer school experience, and in about 5 hours from now, I'll really be able to tell what kind of improvement my kids have made.

Four weeks. That's all I've had with these guys. And I feel that they are ready for this test today, for the most part. However, the thing that I struggle with the most is that I feel we've been grooming them to take this test, and that were they left to their own resources, they are still unprepared to address many of the principles that we have taught them. We have literally stripped the lessons down to the bare minimum, and made sure that they've mastered that. And those are the kind of questions that are going to be on this test.

The test we're giving them is the same one that we administered the first day of school. The students take the test to see where they're starting from, and then we teach them all summer, and then the last day we give them the exact same test again. The idea is that they should have learned how to do the problems they'll be seeing again, and so they should improve. This is how we're teaching for the test.

I hate teaching for the test. It does very little to support a person in further mathematics. Sure, there are a few kids in the class who have grasped the concepts, and I'd feel confident in seeming them progress further, but for now... it's frustrating. I just hope that once I get into my own classroom, I don't have to do this as much.

It will be good to have today over though. This has been a frustrating week for me, and the highlight of it will be to see it come to a close. And to top it all off, I get to end my week with a 4 hour test on Saturday. Fabulous, eh? .... I can't wait.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

One thing I've come to realize is that I love to mess with my students' heads. I know that math can sometimes be a somewhat tedious classroom experience, and so as part of my quest to continually improve the process and make it more enjoyable for everyone involved, one things that I've found that works is to tell stories.

Given, most of the stories that I've told thus far have been rather humdrum, but the key element is to somehow find a way to relate it to math. So for instance, on my first day of school, I told the kids how as I got closer to California, gas went up in price. Being the math-philiac that I am, I told them that I made a function to model the price of gas, and how much it would cost me to fill up my gas tank. See how I pulled math in there? I made a function? Or anther time I talked about how I went to Mexico last summer, and I exchanged some dollars into pesos, ate some awesome Orange Chicken at this restaurant called "The Blue Dolphin", and then on my way back I exchanged my leftover pesos into dollars. I used this example to represent to represent an inverse function. See here? More math.

There are many more examples, but every one of my stories have something in common. They're only loosly based on true life. For instance, I really did go to Mexico, and I really did eat Orange Chicken at the Blue Dolphin. But I didn't exchange any dollars or pesos, and I didn't really make a function for these things. I just tell them that's what I did.

One time I told them that I hiked Timpanogous, which I did, and when I got home from the hike, I wanted to know how high we had gone. So I did some calculations, and made a function that represented how high we hiked. Their reactions to this were absolutely priceless - I heard everything form gasps of amazement to one kids' comment of "Why in the world are you teaching us mathematics?"

The key is to keep the stories common enough that it seems plausible, yet mathematically dorky enough that my students will think "He can't possibly be this nerdy, it can't all be true." I usually leave it up to them to sort out fact from fiction, and it's the best because at the end of class they always have questions about it. I love it.

So on Friday, I couldn't think of a good story to correlate with the content, and so I made up a whopper, that I thought would be particularly outrageous and they would see through it from the start.

I started off telling them about the neighborhood that I had grown up in, how we lived at the bottom of a cul de sac, and there was a line of trees that separated the houses from the field. I then told them how as a child, we spent a lot of time playing in those trees, and in the fields. One summer in particular, we decided to build a fort down in these trees, and as any fort-building-intent youth would do, we started by digging the deepest hole possible.

This is where the story departed from fact. I told them that we dug for a long time, and we found... (Insert dramatic pause. The students are hanging on my last words. Possible answers are being shouted out... "A body!", "A treasure chest!" etc.) A Rock!

"A ROCK!?!? You found a ROCK?"

"Yes, a rock," I say. "But this was no ordinary rock - it was neon green and glowing brilliantly!"

They're eating this up with a spoon. In my mind, I'm simultaneously thinking "I have them!" and "Oh shoot, they're actually believing this..." So as with any good story, when you have your audience captive - I continued.. I told them that none of us had ever seen a rock like this, and we wanted to know what it was. So we took it down to the local university, and showed it to a professor. He told us it was a special rock, that decayed exponentially.

I used this point as an opportunity to teach them that exponential decay was the rate at which something fell apart, or decayed. "Like a corpse?" Yes Patrick, like a corpse. They grasped it pretty quickly, so we moved on.

I then told them that after he told us what kind of rock it was, being the little math-aholic that I am, I rushed home and created a formula to calculate how much of the rock would remain after 600 years from now. And then I used this as a launching pad to introduce the rest of my material.

From my perspective, this was the end of the story. However, what I had failed to notice was that the class had bought my entire story, and in their bright young minds, questions regarding the rock, the professor, and my equation are beginning to burn anxiously in their heads.

We continue with the lesson, we calculate how much of the rock would remain 600 years from now, and they get some practice in. Following the practice, I gave them an assessment to determine how well they had grasped the concept of the day, and for this particular day, they did pretty well. For the most part, they were able to decipher the process of how to solve exponential decay functions, but it revealed to me that their greatest obstacle wasn't with the exponential functions, but with the multiplication and distribution of exponents. Mental note - do some more practice with exponential multiplication.

After the assessment was done, we had about 5 minutes in class left, and the second that I finished gathering it a hand shot in the air.

"Do you still have the rock?"

I checked Kiyah's eyes for intent - she was serious. As I looked around the room, I could tell that she wasn't the only one who wondered about this, and it unleashed a floodgate of questions.

"What did you do with it? How much of it is left? Did you ever figure out what kind of rock it was?" and so forth.

Evidently there was a breakdown in communication somewhere along the line, and in my head either one of three things took place. Either I had seriously misjudged their ability to sort out fact from fiction, I was a much more convincing story teller than I had originally supposed, or these kids placed a whole lot more confidence in me as their teacher than I had ever realized, and as a result clung to the words that left my mouth.

I had to break down at this point, and tell them everything up to the rock part was true. We did find rocks, but none of them were neon green or glowing, we didn't go to the University to get the rock examined, and I never made a function to model the decay of the rock.

The classroom exploded. "So how much of that story was true then?", "I think it was all a lie!", "We can't believe anything you say!", "We're never listening to you again!"

So I'm left the weekend to ponder - were they serious? But in my heart, I know the answer. They loved it, and they want more of it. Just wait until they see what I have for them next week... :)

Some days it blows my mind to think I've only been teaching these kids for three weeks. I feel like I have known them for much, much longer than that. I can only imagine what this is going to be like once I've been with the same kids for an entire year - they'll be like an extension of my family. One week left. This might be harder than I had imagined.

Over the Hill

Somehow the word got out in my classroom that my birthday was on Sunday. I didn't tell anyone, except my collab, so I'm guessing it leaked through them somehow.

On Tuesday, sometime during the day after the news had leaked out, the class started guessing on how old I was (while I wasn't in the room, mind you). When I walked into teach my period later that day, someone had written on the board "Happy 40th Birthday Mr. Woahn!" I laughed.

Jump to today. Just before class started, Amber, one of my students, walked into the room carrying this enormous cake that said "Happy Birthday Mr. Woahn" with a solitary candle that said "Over the Hill." I cried.

This just blew me away, I never would have expected anything of this sort within such a short period of time, but I think it's indicative of the type of classroom environment that we've fostered. We have some awesome kids, and it's been such a great experience to work with them. Today my FA said that she had talked with TFA to see if she could hire us to finish the last two weeks of class. I'd guess that means we've been doing a good job.

I played "Logarithmic Jeopardy" with my class today, and I think if I had to surmise the experience in a single word, it would be pandemonium. Great kids, but boy are they competitive.

And then I got in a bike ride this evening... what more can I ask for?