On Deck and In the Hole

I couldn't resist the baseball title considering pitchers and catchers report within the next 7 days. With baseball season coming, the urgency of teaching starts to kick in. It certainly has been there, but I feel like it is ratcheted up a notch (or five). Why? Well, state testing starts in early May. While testing is maligned for a myriad of reasons, the reality is that schools are evaluated in one way or another on their test scores.

Right or wrong, the scores are a reflection on the schools, teachers, and students. If you have 92% pass, then many will say that the teachers and students are brilliant. If 35% pass, then your school is seen as a failure. Those numbers are arbitrary, but the thinking isn't. For me, I don't want to be the weak link on my team that could potentially bring down the scores for the cohort as a whole. Is my instruction the major push in either direction? I don't think so. We're all in this together, and the instruction throughout the course of a student's life will be the driving force. But that doesn't stop me from feeling self-conscious, nor does it diminish the urgency in my teaching.

As far as content is concerned, we'll start diving into the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. We'll also explore the branches of government. The content is exciting to me, and should be to the kids. If the loyalist/patriot debate is an omen, then this should be received very well.

Short Week, Deep Breath

My school district has a funky midwinter break. Instead of President's Day week off, we have the Thursday and Friday before Pres. Day off. We then get the holiday off, and are back at it on Tuesday. As a whole, I'm excited for the break. I've got lots to do, and some sleep to catch up on.

We got a bunch done during the short week, but yet didn't make a dent in the content that needs to be covered. Why the running in place? Well because of our current events summaries. Backing up to the Super Bowl, I sat down to read 60 summaries of news events written by my kids (52-3 if you subtract kids who forgot their articles). The summaries just weren't of the quality that the group can produce. In fact, the words I would use to describe the effort would be: thoughtless and lazy.

Each rotation got a chance to hear some of the student work, from sentences that don't make sense to seeing sight words misspelled (ie precedent oboma, priuseos). They also heard work that was significantly over grade level, ie plagiarized ("Hey that sounds like the author of my article!"). I did so carefully, not naming names and allowing kids to keep their dignity. But you can bet that everyone was embarrassed with the quality of work to some degree. Usually I'll let a misspelling or an awkward sentence slide, but the number of careless errors littering the papers was alarming (lacking periods, no capitalization, fragments, misspelling names from the title, etc).

So we re-did them. I re-taught how to find a main idea, how to craft a main idea into a sentence that makes sense, as well as how to put it all together. What was the result? Significantly improved summaries. I told them I'd take the higher of the two scores, and discard the other as that would likely confuse them more than help them. The combination of high expectations for student work, and explicit reteaching made the time useful for everyone.

Many Ways to Solve

While I don't technically teach math, it doesn't stop my love for it. Our rotations have broken up the division of labor so that my team essentially has specialists for math, reading/social studies, and science. I'll admit, my math usage in social studies has been minimal this year, but I hope to pick it up. Alas I digress.

In cleaning out my Google Reader, and the 200+ blog postings sitting awaiting my perusal, I stumbled upon a link from Dan Meyer. The general gist is that you have a pyramid of circles (many many circles) and you ask kids to "find the total number of circles." I imagine how my 5th graders would solve it. Counting them up for the less experience/savvy. Algebraically for the math savvy. Geometrically for the visual spatial. I looked at the table sitting next to it, which provided the row and number in each row, but quickly discarded it. I saw two triangles, and was going to find the total for each, at which point I stumbled upon the fact that they fit together to make what appears to be a square- LxW! Count up and down, multiply.

Our kids are doing double digit multiplication, which would mesh quite well. I'm considering taking it out on Wednesday prior to leaving for our midwinter break (probably not, but we'll see). To me there are two very clear illustrations: 1) there are a myriad of ways to solve math problems, you just need to find the one that works for you (no matter what problem), and 2) strong number sense and math fact knowledge will serve you well. Geometric sense/knowledge would be a bonus, but number sense for sure. If you are aware of patterns you will be in good shape- seeing each row increase by 2 (total and add). Or simply being able to break into parts and multiply.

Let it go

I finally worked my way through the bag of papers. They are complete, graded, marked in my spreadsheet, and sitting in folders to be picked up by the kiddos. Why did I carry them around? A perceived lack of time led to pushing it off. Then the more time that passed, the more guilt that built up. Eventually you need to release the guilt and make it happen. Otherwise the papers stay in the bag, and you retain the guilt.

More lessons learned during year one.