Friday, October 31, 2014

How it Must Feel

Imagine yourself as a student who has always had a hard time with math. Honestly, you are not even sure why there are sometimes multiple variables in the same formula. When the teacher starts a new topic, you may need to see it 4 different ways and have it be repeated a lot of times in order to become somewhat proficient at the skills involved, even though the general idea is sometimes (not always) accessible to you. When other people discuss mathematics in groups, the speed at which they are discussing the ideas often flies right over your head, but you feel embarrassed to ask them to explain every part to you, because other people all seem to understand it fine. So, you do ask some questions during class, enough to make some progress on the work, and then you wait until you can find the teacher to ask for more help. You can only find the teacher to meet outside of class about once a week, and by then you already have more questions accumulated than can be answered in one session, so that although you think the concept is probably important, you just want to know the bottom line of how to get through the various problems you are going to see on the quizzes. So, the quiz comes and goes and you feel defeated by your score, even though you are working hard everyday in class and your teacher can also see that, too. You go home with the quiz and you don't want to even look at it for now, even though you know that you probably should start thinking about the re-quiz and that the teacher will probably start something new either tomorrow or the next day, and that the cycle will likely repeat itself.

What do you do?

In every class I teach, there are some kids whom I meet outside of class on a weekly basis. For many of them, that is enough. For some, that isn't. I love the idea of heterogeneous grouping, because I believe in all the things that other math educators believe, which is that it promotes safer learning environments, teaches diverse students to work together, promotes growth mindset, etc. But, at the end of the day, I don't know what to do in a practical sense to help these kids who experience those cycles of disappointment in every unit. I try to vary up what I do to help them build the conceptual understanding of underlying topics (ie. Math Talk, problem-based learning, visual representations), but realistically I have to balance too much going-back-to-basics against the majority of the class's need to develop other, more sophisticated, skills and concepts. Open-ended problems sound awesome in theory, but in reality we still need coherent conceptual and skills development the majority of the time. 

So, what do you do besides trying to be empathetic?

I don't have an answer right now. In the past, I have had great success in homogeneous grouping at helping the slower-paced classes build confidence and feel successful with a smaller set of topics, but I find that goal very challenging/elusive when those lower-confidence students are situated in an environment that is perhaps just faster-paced than they can handle. I am fortunate that most of my students give me 100%. I have no doubt about that. But, how can I grade them all on an absolute scale based on what they know, if they are all starting off at very different places along the spectrum of prior algebra experience? And, more so than grading, how can I serve them all? 

Those are open questions in my mind. Would love if you could chime in to enlighten me in your thoughts about this. 

Thursday, October 2, 2014

What to Do When You Are Busy

Today, one of the things I read over the summer came back to me. The thing I read was written by a therapist, regarding his patients who are stressed and unhappy because they feel like they're spread too thin among work, family, friends, etc. The therapist's advice is that you cannot make more minutes in a day, but you can increase the quality of your minutes in the day. If you're thinking of work when you are at home, and thinking of home when you're at work, then you're not making anyone feel valued and therefore the quality of your minutes spent with them is low. This way, everyone around you will feel dissatisfied, and you'll feel unhappy as a result. The wisdom he shares is to focus on making the people you are presently with feel like you are 110% present. Be proactive about it, instead of trying to coast by with little engagement. (In terms of active engagement, he distinguishes between your son telling you about his upcoming soccer game, and you remembering it yourself and mentioning, without being prompted, how much you already look forward to it. In both cases, your time commitment is the same -- you're still going to watch his game -- but just by being a little bit more thoughtful, the reception of your time spent will be very different.)

I thought of this today because I noticed that I have been working a lot of extra hours. But, when I meet with my students outside of class, it's not helpful for me to think even fleetingly about the many things that I still need to do that day. Instead, being fully present and taking an extra 10 minutes to let the kid slowly organize their binder or to tell me about their week before we start to look at where they need help in math, is so valuable. It slows me down and it slows them down, and it allows me to make them feel important before, during, and after our meeting. Maybe I cannot increase the amount of time that I have for them on a regular basis (and maybe I cannot solve all of their math troubles in one meeting), but I can make each encounter outside of class more meaningful by just taking a little extra time.

So, here is a reminder to myself to keep building the quality of my minutes in a day, especially as it gets really busy.