Done

Wow it's been a while.

Last week was the final week of school: finals, graduation, out.

Finals went fairly well. 4 students got a D or lower, which means they will need to repeat the course. One I saw coming: this student had checked out from day 1, their average was below %50 going into the final, done deal. Two were somewhat of a surprise: they were doing low Cish work, but they bombed on the final. I feel like it's a fair cop though: they both put in middling effort and definitely did not really understand what was going on.

The last was a heart-breaker, a student who worked harder than anyone else in the class, bar none, but just has *so* much trouble with math. For all of their effort, they went into the final with a high D and came out with a lower D.

Graduation was amazing. 40 students graduated in front of a huge crowd of family, extended family, and sponsors. It was interesting to see this crowd of ethnic, working-class families shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of wealthy middle-aged Silicon Valley philanthropist types, all cheering for these graduates. And boy did they cheer. There were no polite golf claps. Signs, posters, horns (like trumpets and those air horns), noise-makers, etc. Crazy.

All of the teachers wore the traditional gown and hood getup and we sat onstage with the graduates. Each student stood up in turn and one teacher shared a bit about that student (I didn't do any talking as I never had any of these students). I was particularly moved by one student who has basically acted as a parent to their younger siblings and their aunt's child. For four years they put in a full day of school, then went home to homework, housework, cooking dinner and caring for several young kids. And they did volunteer work on top of this. Amazing.

On Tuesday there was a student faculty volleyball game. It was a profound blowout: one of the teachers played NCAA volleyball, and another one is on the national team for Morocco. The two of them alone could have devastated the students. Add in two more teachers who coach and play regularly, and it was all over. I managed to do a head-on collision with another teacher (at least my head was involved) and got my head split. Game stopped, blood everywhere. Later that evening got 5 staples in my head.

I knew this would happen, but I am very sentimental and finding it difficult to let go of the students. I had them all sign my yearbook. I wrote up a final sheet of things I wanted them to learn (like non-geometry life things) and things I learned from them. And I am currently in the middle of writing emails to each one of them to point out good things I see in them and encourage them for the future. I hope that's not weird.

So now it's on to new adventures. I have a month of teaching improv to some of the students (first class is today), but that's only a few hours a week. My main gig in June will be resting and relaxing, and looking for a new job.

Bottom line: it was a great year. Absolutely no regrets at all. I was blessed beyond words to get to work at such a great school. And, contrary to my initial concerns, it has only made the future seem more open and full of possibilities. While I am still sorting all kinds of things out, I am much more comfortable now with who I am and what I want to do. And, just as important, who I am not and what I don't want to do.

If anyone reading this has ever thought about taking a year to teach, I'd recommend it. There were plenty of challenges and frustrations, but all totally worth it.

Thanks for reading!

Doity Rat

I have been struggling recently with some of the students in resource. They just seem to have given up. In class they are easily distracted, joking, wandering, forgetting materials, going to the bathroom, doing anything but work. And when I try to help them with a problem they are actively hostile, like get out of my face.

Today, the mother of one such student wrote an email to ask how things are going.

Well, well, well....

I wrote back to her, cc-ing the student, about the state of things. She wrote back, understandably disappointed in her child. I have to say I wickedly savored the idea that this student is going to get chewed out by Mom when they get home.

But now I am having second thoughts. While I won the battle (I have an ally in motivating the student to change their ways), I may lose the war because I was a rat fink and played the Mom card. That may firmly and permanently put me in the bad guy camp. Where I probably already live. As the Earl of Badness.

Waiting for Superman

I just saw this trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKTfaro96dg

It literally made me cry, just the trailer. It's so overwhelming to think about the scope of the problem. I see the people at Eastside working so hard and making a tremendous difference, but relatively speaking it's such a tiny fraction of all the students who really need help.

Just thinking about it stirs up all these questions about what my next move should be. Can I really walk away from this?

The Payoff

On Weds, I think it was, they had what they call the "College Assembly", a yearly tradition at Eastside.

Once again (like every year in the school's history), every single graduating senior got into at least one four-year college, and will be attending in the fall.

One of the teachers made a PowerPoint presentation from all this. There's a little piece on each school where an Eastside graduate will be going. They announce the school and the seniors who will be going there come out on stage, all decked out in college gear (sweatshirts and hats) and holding signs and posters for the school, cheering and pumping their fists and all. They give some interesting facts on the school (year of founding, size, famous alumni), and the number of past Eastside graduates who went to or are still enrolled at that school.

And the all the rest of the school, freshmen through juniors, along with the teachers, are in the audience cheering like crazy.

It was so, so, so cool. Definitely made me tear up. I think about how hard all the kids in my class work, the 9 hour school days, the late work, etc. All paying off in this huge, tremendous victory. These kids are going to college, the first in their family.

And we are talking some great schools, too. Barnard, Pomona, Occidental, UCLA, and *3* going to Stanford. That last one blew me away. In a graduating class of 40 students, from the poorest neighborhoods in the Bay Area, we are sending *3* kids to Stanford.

They ended with all the seniors onstage, and then they announced the amount of financial aid they got, all told. I forgot that number but it was a *lot*. For most of these kids college is out of the question without some financial aid, and Eastside has the financial-aid-getting game down to a science.

It was very moving for me, and I don't really know the kids who were graduating. I saw their faces all year but never had them in my classes. I can only imagine if they were kids I had been teaching for the past 4 year, or in some cases 6 (those who came through the middle school). I would be crying like a little girl (sorry little girls, first analogy that came to mind).

I am *really* going to miss this place.

3d!!!

I am pretty concerned about this chapter on surface area and volume, some students are really struggling.

I spoke to some of the other math teachers about it and they made some interesting points.

Some of the students have a hard time understanding the line drawings as 3-d objects. To me that comes so natural, it hadn't even crossed my mind that they might have that issue. But now that they mention it I can see their point: it may be very confusing to look at a series of black lines on a page and try to move that into 3-d space, especially when you can't rotate the drawing or see it from different angles. And the real kicker is I don't know how to explain it: how you teach someone to visualize a 3-d object based on a line drawing? How you do you lead someone to "see" something, or form a mental image?

Also, composite objects are always a problem. A shape made up of a cylinder, a block, and a hemisphere will freak them out every time.

The other teachers suggested using lots (and lots) of real 3-d models in class. And to work at it 'backwards': instead of starting with a composite object and pulling it apart into simpler shapes, start with simpler shapes. Get them to buy into the idea that this one has volume V and that one has volume Q. What's the volume of both of them together? V + Q. What if I physically stick them together, now what's the volume? V + Q. What if I move the pieces around and stick them together in a different configuration? Etc.

I tried this today and it had some success. More people seemed to be getting it. I took a cyclindrical can of wipes and taped two hemispheres to either end (rougly same radius) so I had a capsule shape, and we talked about finding the volume and surface area.

Which brought up another tricky point: with volume you can just break into parts and add: Part 1 + part 2 + part 3. But for surface area it's a mess because when you stick parts together, things that were on the surface are no longer on the surface. One student in particular was having such a hard time with this. They could not understand why the lid and bottom of the can of wipes didn't count towards the surface area of the whole capsule (probably didn't help that the hemispheres were see-through, so you could still actually see the bases of the cylinder when they whole capsule was assembled.

The good news in all this is I am feeling more free to slow down. We have a final at the end of May and this is the last chapter of really new material. The next chapter is more prep for the SAT (review) and prep for the final. So I feel like I can lose a day and just slow down to review things, play with models, try to dig deeper into existing subjects. If we were in the middle of the year I might have been more uptight about spending so much time today on just the one capsule problem, but I think it was time well spent.

Because I wanted to spend time on the model business, I was trying to rush in just presenting the new topics: surface area and volume of sphere. I was really tempted to just give them the formulae and call it day, no explaination of why it's true. This class in particular seems to not really care "why". When I covered surface area I gave a handwavy explaination that you can imagine peeling the cover off a baseball, it makes two peanuts, each lobe of each peanut is roughly a circle of radius r, total is 4 * pi * r^2. When I got to volume of a cube (4/3 * pi * r ^3), I didn't even bother with a 'why' because the 'why' is pretty complicated. I thought they wouldn't care.

Then this one student, who has really struggled and generally been pretty volatile at times, raises their hand with a big smile and says "Why is that"? They really seemed to want to know. So I took a few minutes to explain it all. Not sure it registered but it was touching to me that that student in particular proved me wrong: they are curious.

Inertia

The new chapter has to do with finding the surface area of geometric solids. Started with prisms, and that involves finding the area of the polygon at the base.

We had several lessons on finding the area of polygons back in Chapter 5 (this is chapter 10).

I was surprised at how they handled this on the first set of homework. Maybe not so much surprised as disheartened. On so many papers I see the evidence of the same pattern:

* I don't remember how to find the area of a polygon.
* It's too much work to look back in the book or at earlier notes.
* I will just copy the answer out of the back of the book (evident because the entire answer is just a number, with no indication they did any actual calculations).

The first point is a bummer but there you go: for those who approach this as "memorize random facts without really understanding why", I can understand that those facts will atrophy pretty quick.

But the second and third ones are even more discouraging. Rather than do even a little work, I will resort to trickery. This homework problem is worth a tiny tiny portion of my grade, but I'm going to take a shortcut here that guarantees I won't really understand anything.

Grumble grumble.

I am very tempted to give a quiz, just to the ones who clearly did the copying, where I ask them the exact same questions.

Rounding

I just graded 2/3 of the trig tests. So far so good: scores are generally higher than they have been. And in some cases, students who have really been struggling got A's, which is very gratifying.

But...

There was a lot of trouble with rounding. Again, I keep getting surprised by what they stumble over. They are doing trig like nobody's business, setting up the ratios correctly and all. But all kinds of trouble comes up with rounding the answer.

The test says at the top "Round all answers to the nearest tenth". Some individual questions say "Round to the nearest foot" or whatever. In all classes I specifically called these out, multiple times. "Note that all answers should be rounded to the nearest 10th, unless the directions specifically say otherwise." Still, lots of people missed it altogether, just rounded willy nilly.

Then, there's confusion about when to round. Even though we talked about when to round (at the very end) in class, they are still taking the trig ration (e.g. 0.234576...), then rounding *that* to the nearest 10th (0.2), then using that for the rest of the calculations.

Finally, there's confusion about how to round. Some of them think rounding to the nearest tenth is the same as rounding to the nearest ten. Some think that means using the tenth decimal to round the one decimal up or down. Etc.

The net result being some people lost up to a fifth of the total points on rounding alone. Which I felt really conflicted about. On one hand, the main 'point' of the test is trig, and they are doing the trig basically right. On the other hand, we definitely spent time in class talking about all this (directions, when to round, how to round). And at the end of the day, the answer they are giving is wrong. In the merciless world of standardized tests, there will no grace given for rounding incorrectly. So I want to get their attention now, when it matters less.

Still I feel like an ogre.