3rd Term with a Vengeance!

It is 3rd term.

I have been terrible about updating, but let me make a bunch of lame excuses why.

Christmas.

Finals two weeks after Christmas.

Planning an entire new curriculum for a class I've never taught in a three week period.

Are those excuses sufficient?

I hope so. Now it's time for elaboration.

Christmas was a wonderful respite, but not entirely a respite. While Christmas is a great time to not have to go to work, it's always a busy time of year with this family function here and this family function there. And then there's the fact that teachers never really take time off. I allotted several hours every day to do lesson planning and prepping for the rest of the year.

Our school district is also a little weird with their schedule. Finals happen to be two weeks after we return from Christmas break. It's kind of nice, because once the finals are written, the job for me is easy, but it's stressful on the kids.

And I am teaching a new class this term. We have several juniors/seniors who need 1/2 or a full credit of math, but they are not really college track so we don't want to set them up to fail in Algebra II. I have been developing a Business Math class. While the math side is easy, I had no resources to speak of when I started and have had to scrounge/beg/plead with other teachers for resources and materials. They have been a wonderful help and sent me TONS of materials to go through. Because of the immense amount of help I got from teachers at the main campus, I have been able to piece together something that I'm actually pretty proud of.

And here we are, two weeks into 3rd term. We accepted some new students, so we have acclimated them to the environment of our school. The other teachers in the building have decided to implement some more standard procedures across the board. I think it's great because now we have consistent procedures throughout the whole school. It gives the kids more security and that's just what they need. I think it's added a lot to the positive environment of the school too, because the kids know exactly what is expected of them at all times - no matter whose classroom they are in.

The only hard aspect of coming back is that our attendance is starting to drop. Some kids (especially the seniors) are starting to slip in attendance. For a lot of them, that was their main problem at the main campus and now it's starting to be a problem for them again. We keep encouraging them not to go down that path. Some of them are listening, some of them aren't. What else can we do but encourage?

I've been sick this last week. That coupled with the exhaustion of the work load have made the last few weeks very difficult, but my overall outlook about the program is still good. We have made some real progress with kids that the mainstream system had given up on. I'm so proud of them.

The After Thanksgiving Blues

Well, the last full holiday before Winter Break is over. This is the time that the burn out begins until Christmas hits. But today I'm trying to spin things for myself in a positive way.

The last few weeks I've been contemplating whether I'm making a difference with my kids at all. I think I am.

Case #1 - FP told me that he started out the year thinking I was mean and tried to "treat me." In kidspeak that means that he tried to give me a hard time. But at some point during the term, he discovered that he was actually learning more from me than he had ever learned in a math class before. He committed to trying harder in class and doing all his work.

The bad side....FP is in my first block and has been tardy to school every day since that conversation. He has been absent more days in my class than he has been present and is now failing.

Case #2 - One of our students now thinks she wants to go to college and be a teacher. That is not all my doing. In fact, I'm not sure that it's any of my doing, but I know that the environment that we as a staff at the alternative school have provided has influenced this young lady.

Case #3 - I teach a pair of sisters who never thought they were good at math. I get the feeling that they never felt that they were good at academics at all. Now, they are getting A's and B's on everything and feel confident in their abilities.

Case #4 - The student that I was having trouble with at the beginning of the year (being rude, yelling at me, almost violent outbursts in class) said that he has learned more in the last three weeks than he has learned in a math class in the last two years that he has been in high school.

Not all stories are this positive, but really a lot of our students are excelling more than they have in years. Today I just wanted to focus on the positive. I'm so proud of them and how hard they have worked. They overcome personal obstacles every day. Sometimes they have to overcome those obstacles just to get to school in the morning.

If nothing else, I feel like I am doing something good - not just for them, but for me too.

The Downward Slope until Christmas

Well we've made it through the hard part of the first semester. Really, November and December go by quickly for me. There is only one full week of school from now until Thanksgiving and then only three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's manageable.

So, on to the reflections....

First term is officially over. Grades were turned in and rosters have changed. I failed three students and had one student with an incomplete. I thought that was pretty good. The students who failed didn't show up for finals and I was told to fail them. But I've made some changes.

I was asked by my administrator to "find a way to have my students pass." So I changed my original homework policy and accepted late work from students who hadn't turned in any work. This led to hours and hours of grading for me each night. That will not be done again. I told my administrator that I am going back to my original policy and it makes my life so much easier.

My homework policy is as follows:
-Late work is accepted but at a penalty. I take 10% off of whatever score would have been received for each day that the assignment is lately. Eventually after 10 days, the assignment is worth nothing and I will no longer accept it.
-To make up for this and to give students a chance to catch up if they have fallen behind, I always provide a make up assignment and an extra credit assignment every Friday. This adds up to essentially 1 1/2 homework assignments each week. I take make up and extra credit assignments at any time during the term. These assignments are easier to grade and I don't mind taking them whenever students get them in.

It's only been one week in the new term, and this has been so much better. Less hours spent grading makes for a much happier teacher. So far, the kids are taking me seriously and turning in much more of their work. We'll see how long that lasts.

Service Projects

It has been way too long since I've written a post. There is no way that I could recap all the important things that have happened over the last few weeks. My husband and I moved into a new apartment and I've been behind on just about everything, including blogging. But now I need some help with ideas.

I'm going to try to institute some service projects for my 4th block students. I got the idea at a faculty meeting last week. We need something more for our students to help them accomplish not just getting their diplomas, but becoming productive and thoughtful adults. As a staff, we have been brainstorming ideas about how we could do this and we had two that I thought I could do with my 4th block class.

Why 4th block? My 4th block is relatively small (7 students) and more advanced than my other students. I always have to plan for an extra enrichment activity for this class because they work so hard and finish all their work early. I have decided that I could use this extra time at the end of class to plan for some service opportunities. Here are my ideas:

1. The main high school campus paper has offered our students a full page if they write some articles. I proposed this idea to my students and they loved it. There is one student who was already planning on writing an article on how she spends her typical day at our alternative school. I was looking for more ideas I could give my students to help them get started with writing. I'm not knowledgeable in the field of high school journalism, and I need to get some ideas to help them get started.

2. Our school is next door to an elementary school. One of the self-contained special education classes comes over every day at 2 pm and uses our little gym for their P.E. class. The teacher has said that he would love to have our students help out with these kids if they wanted to. If our kids would submit a simple lesson plan idea, he would approve it and let them come and work with the kids.

I have a couple students in my 4th block who are thinking about being teachers. I proposed to them today that I could teach them the basics of how to plan a lesson and we could email some lesson plans to this P.E. teacher at the elementary school. They loved the idea and think that it would be great to do something nice for these children. But neither they nor I know where to start. Elementary special education is not really my specialty. Neither is physical education. I'm good at math...and science...and occasionally english. So I need to come up with some basic ideas for games that elementary special education kids would be able to play and also have fun with as well so that I can help my students put together some fun activities to do with these younger children.

Any ideas?

The Retention Problem

Today has been a fun day so far. I've done two projects with the kids this week and today was a project day. We've been studying perimeter and area - today we did an application project where they designed their own house and found the perimeter and area of different parts of their floor plan. The kids get creative and have a lot of fun with it, and of course, it's a nice day for me - I just get to facilitate, observe, and enjoy.

But there's still something that's been bothering me. Retention is still such a problem. I teach high school math and I'm still having to teach kids how to find perimeter and area of simple objects like squares and rectangles. Why does this happen? It's not just the fault of previous teachers either. I just taught them this stuff yesterday and they still don't know how to do it today.

Where does this problem really come from? I've been musing on my lunch break about the real origins of the Retention Problem.

Finding perimeter and area of squares and rectangles are ideas that kids are taught in early grade school. It's a very basic concept. How big around is your backyard? How much sand is in the sand box? I know that these things are taught. So why do kids forget things year after year after year? Is it teachers? Is it the long summer break? What is it?

I don't have the answer, but I did start to think about reasons why I retained information...but that didn't help either. I know that there must be a reason why I remembered how to do these things and so many of my high school students don't. I started to try to think of why.

Was it because of my parents? They are educated people who placed a value on my learning. They could help me with my homework and encouraged me to do well. Is that the reason?

Was it because of my teachers? I had good teachers and I had some not so good teachers. Did the good teachers make that much of a difference? There are some specific lessons that I remember clearly to this day. For example, 8th grade earth science with my most favorite teacher - we learned about how the earth rotates around the sun and the moon rotates around the earth. I remember very clearly that Mr. B. let me stand on a table in the middle of the room and be the sun while other students were the moon and the earth rotating around each other and the sun too. That was an amazing lesson and one that I will always remember. Was it because of teachers like that that I did so well?

I don't think that's the only reason either. There are a lot of things that I know how to do and I don't remember the specific time when I learned them. I know how to add and subtract, how to graph a function, and how to calculate an integral within a certain domain, but I don't remember exactly how I learned those things.

Also, I'm sure that Mr. B. and many of my other teachers had lots of fun and engaging lessons that I don't necessarily remember in detail. That's not to say that those weren't lessons, but not all great lessons stick in our minds as we age either.

Is it repetition? Yes, we learn by repetition. I add and subtract every day, so is that why I remember how to do it? No, because I don't necessarily calculate integrals everyday anymore now that I am no longer an undergraduate math student, but I still remember how to do it. Does repetition help? Yes, but I don't think that's the only way to retention either.

Is it my attitude about education and learning? I have a passion for it. I work really hard at learning. Is that what makes the difference? I don't think that's it either, because until the 8th grade I was not as motivated a student as I am now.

But somehow I retained things better than my students do now. I know I did, because I did not need to constantly be reminded of how to find perimeter and area when I was a junior in high school.

Yesterday we had a lesson with dot paper and finding shapes of certain perimeters and areas. We did tons of examples. We practiced over and over. But today I still had kids come up to me and say, "How do I find the perimeter of this bedroom I drew in my house?" or "Can I just count the boxes inside the room instead of multiplying? I don't remember how to do it," or "I don't remember what perimeter is."

So what makes the difference? Is it a combination of all those things? And what can we really do to fix it? I don't know that all the engaging and meaningful lessons in the world will always make a difference. I try to teach with fun activities every day and kids still forget how to do things from day to day.

And I don't know that reading all the "in" literature on how kids retain knowledge have the solution either.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth: In the end, it's up to the kids. I can make great lessons that engage kids and that might motivate them, but, in the end, no matter what the parents do, no matter what the teachers do, no matter what their peers do, if kids don't decide to internalize knowledge, nothing else will really help them remember what they learn.

Almost Midterm

The end of this week is officially midterm. I think things have gone pretty well. All students who have put forth a decent amount of effort are passing. Those who aren't passing are the students who don't do a single bit of homework or work in class either.

Overall, I think things are going pretty well at our little alternative school. Most of the kids are starting to get used to the routine. We as teachers are starting to feel the rhythm too, but we're also starting to feel the work load - or at least I am.

I've tried to be more organized and on top of things. Most nights I do ok, but some nights, I get carried away with all the things I could/should be preparing for that I end up spending my entire night working until I go to bed. I have to reign myself back in and stop myself. Sometimes I have to just do what needs to be done for the next day and then take a break for the rest of the night. Take it one day at a time.

I did have my first evaluation. The class went well except for the one student who simply refused to do anything. I'm pretty sure my evaluator took that with a grain of salt though. I'll find out on Monday when we have our post-observation conference.

I'm getting better at planning for the block scheduling. That's a plus too. It's rather intimidating planning for 75-80 minutes of instruction, but I'm getting better at managing the time.

All in all, a decent week. And this Friday we are having a shortened schedule to take our kids over to the main campus for the Homecoming Assembly. Always fun to have shortened schedule.

A Bright Moment

Today in the middle of the almost unbearable heat of 3rd block, I had a wonderful teaching moment.

We were playing Review Jeopardy today because my classes have a test tomorrow. All of a sudden, RJ (alias used for a student) turns to me and says:

"Why is it that you make this class so fun and interesting when no other teachers have done that before? Not even at the regular high school. They never make math fun."

My heart just breaks. The best part of my day. I tried not to get too emotional. I just said, "Well, maybe it's because I really love high school students. They are my favorite students to teach. I love math and I love my students, and maybe that makes all the difference."