Day Five: Earning It
How can we teach kids we don't know? We think it's a simple question with a simple answer, but for the answer and its profundity (we can't, that's obvious), we do it all the time. We start our years not knowing kids. We get fractions of an hour with our kids each day. We attempt to form advisories, small "communities" of students that we know well, but we don't even know people well when we spend time with them for what amounts to around 135 hours a year. So why do we persist?
I think we want to, but we're wedded to an educational system that prevents it. Getting to know people is messy, and high schools can't afford that messiness. The structure is proof enough. Short, numerous classes. A hodgepodge system of advisories or homerooms with the intended purpose of interfacing with a single adult and a small group of peers. Lunches that are in-and-out, linear hallways, floors, symmetry. Schools are built for efficiency, and getting to know someone is not efficient.
---------------------------------------------------
On the evening of Day Four, my coworker, Julie, calls me with a charge. "Tomorrow is going to be sad. Get them a treat." I know she's right, and it betrays every instinct I have as a teacher: don't reward with food, and don't invest in unnecessary incentives. But I'm learning something quickly from this week in Lawrence: incentives work. They work. How else can you explain 90% attendance in an 'acceleration academy' happening during the warmest vacation of the school year? LPS is giving away Kindle Fires and Nintendo Wiis. Kids that attend all five days get a $40 gift card, guaranteed. A few of the middle schools have money booths, and there are further rewards for good behavior in the elementary schools.
On the morning of Day Five, I drive in to a CVS and buy a few thank you cards. I also stop at Market Basket and get a bag of apples and clementines, Coke, Sprite, and Moxie for me (I like my old-man-soda). Two of the other Sontag Prize teachers are there buying goods for their students as well. And I am buying them pizza. Alofoke*. But I'm not about to let them have it without earning it.
When I arrive, I work urgently. I write five big chart paper pages full of problems about pizza, all of them about the MCAS standards we've covered. They are as follows:
1) A 16" pizza is 16" in diameter. What is the radius of the pizza? What is its area? What is the length of the crust?
2) Three menus from pizza restaurants in Lawrence are shown below. The menus give the price of cheese pizzas (no toppings) and 1, 2, and 3 toppings. Make a scatter plot of the data and draw the line of best fit. What does the y-intercept mean? What is the average price of a 2-topping pizza? (Scatter plot on a separate page.)
3) A pizza is really a cylinder. Suppose a cooked pizza is 1/2" thick. What is its volume? What size box is required to fit this pizza just right? How much plastic do you need to wrap it for freezing?
My next door neighbor, AJ, is impressed, as is the assistant principal and another teacher next door. I know this is going to be good. Sure enough, the students do well with it, especially with the charge I've given them at the beginning: I'm not buying until these problems are right. But when they are, I'll order. And sure enough, after some struggles with terms (cylinder? toppings?), the students fight their way through it.
At the end of the day, I raffle off two Dunkin' Donuts gift cards and order pizza. It arrives at 11:30. Suddenly, I am everyone's friend and favorite teacher. I get handshakes and random visits from students hopping around the halls. The pizzas arrive and we eat around 11:30, and I have to fight off other students to defend the food for my class. The toppings are veggie, chicken (pollo), and pepperoni. I stave off students while my class gets their food. After ten minutes, they start yelling at me. "Mister, you eat!" "Do you have everything you want?" "Yes! Please eat, Mister." I grab one piece of veggie. I really haven't eaten well this week. After I eat, my class finishes what's left. They were waiting for me, which I find out later is a sign of community and respect. It is rude to get seconds until everyone has eaten in some of their families.
Class is essentially over then. I spend my time getting to know kids. Most of my students come from the Dominican Republic, and other kids from other classes ask me questions. Where am I from? Why don't I speak Spanish? What is my school like? What do I teach? It's a great conversation. My favorite question is what I took for a language in high school. I took French because I thought I'd be most likely to need that language living in Maine. If I had known where my career would take me, I'd have made a different choice, I tell kids.
After that, I get a compliment from a few of them. I'm a good person and a good teacher. I like your class. The words are simple, as they have been all week, but they mean a lot.
-------------------------------------------
Did I earn the Sontag Prize? I don't know. I worked my tail off, sure. I learned a lot and I was humbled by the experience. Will those kids pass the MCAS? If their written work is any indication, I think they stand as good a chance as any. None of this means I earned that prize.
I think whether or not we earn our keep as teachers should be largely up to our students. What do they think of our performance? Will they look back in a year, or two, or five, or ten, and think we've done them a service or a disservice? This method of evaluation is hard to work with in a useful way in hindsight, but it should be what we think about as we work day-to-day, moving forward. The Understanding by Design method of curriculum design emphasizes the idea of Enduring Understanding. What should students know in your curriculum that absolutely must endure if the work is truly effective? The Essential Question stems from this idea as well. It's a question that doesn't have a right answer, and has no preferred interpretation, but that students could instantly draw from your curriculum to answer if you've done it right. In five years, will a student remember an individual assignment or lecture? Maybe not. I am shooting for remembering the big picture; the rest of the details can be retained or attained through refined focus.
-------------------------------------------
I walk my students out to the hall on the last day. The work they have done covers nearly 50 feet of wall space. "This is our work this week," I say. "You should be proud of how far you've come." I can tell they are. While they watch, I take a picture, which they immediately pose for. In some ways, teenagers are easy to know and predict.
I give a post-test identical to my pre-test. I'll know where five of my nine kids stand on Monday when I grade them. The other four were so anxious to go home that they walked right out the door with the tests. More blind faith, but I know in my heart their chances are better, and that I helped give them that chance.
Going home, everything looked differently. My new car, my new school, the highways and the cities and the borders of those cities and the state line I drive over every day to go to work. My home in white rural America, and the coming of the spring flowers. The written English language. I saw it all differently.
-------------------------------------------
*A note on 'alofoke': this was said a lot on Day Four by a student who really didn't want to be there. Constantly checking his phone and answering it. When I tried to stop him, I pulled him aside and asked him not to answer, which he said he could not do. Turns out, he works for a catering business, which employs his entire family. Every day he came, he left at noon, but on the last day, he stayed the full day. He explained that 'alofoke' means to 'just go with it' in Dominican slang. I insisted it sounded like an English profanity, and sure enough, Urban Dictionary confirmed my suspicion. I told him it was a 'bad word' but 'not a bad word'. He looked a little scared I was going to refer him for his language, but I assured him I didn't judge. He smiled. I smiled. He winked at me. "Alofoke," he said, shrugging his shoulders.
I think we want to, but we're wedded to an educational system that prevents it. Getting to know people is messy, and high schools can't afford that messiness. The structure is proof enough. Short, numerous classes. A hodgepodge system of advisories or homerooms with the intended purpose of interfacing with a single adult and a small group of peers. Lunches that are in-and-out, linear hallways, floors, symmetry. Schools are built for efficiency, and getting to know someone is not efficient.
---------------------------------------------------
On the evening of Day Four, my coworker, Julie, calls me with a charge. "Tomorrow is going to be sad. Get them a treat." I know she's right, and it betrays every instinct I have as a teacher: don't reward with food, and don't invest in unnecessary incentives. But I'm learning something quickly from this week in Lawrence: incentives work. They work. How else can you explain 90% attendance in an 'acceleration academy' happening during the warmest vacation of the school year? LPS is giving away Kindle Fires and Nintendo Wiis. Kids that attend all five days get a $40 gift card, guaranteed. A few of the middle schools have money booths, and there are further rewards for good behavior in the elementary schools.
On the morning of Day Five, I drive in to a CVS and buy a few thank you cards. I also stop at Market Basket and get a bag of apples and clementines, Coke, Sprite, and Moxie for me (I like my old-man-soda). Two of the other Sontag Prize teachers are there buying goods for their students as well. And I am buying them pizza. Alofoke*. But I'm not about to let them have it without earning it.
When I arrive, I work urgently. I write five big chart paper pages full of problems about pizza, all of them about the MCAS standards we've covered. They are as follows:
1) A 16" pizza is 16" in diameter. What is the radius of the pizza? What is its area? What is the length of the crust?
2) Three menus from pizza restaurants in Lawrence are shown below. The menus give the price of cheese pizzas (no toppings) and 1, 2, and 3 toppings. Make a scatter plot of the data and draw the line of best fit. What does the y-intercept mean? What is the average price of a 2-topping pizza? (Scatter plot on a separate page.)
3) A pizza is really a cylinder. Suppose a cooked pizza is 1/2" thick. What is its volume? What size box is required to fit this pizza just right? How much plastic do you need to wrap it for freezing?
My next door neighbor, AJ, is impressed, as is the assistant principal and another teacher next door. I know this is going to be good. Sure enough, the students do well with it, especially with the charge I've given them at the beginning: I'm not buying until these problems are right. But when they are, I'll order. And sure enough, after some struggles with terms (cylinder? toppings?), the students fight their way through it.
At the end of the day, I raffle off two Dunkin' Donuts gift cards and order pizza. It arrives at 11:30. Suddenly, I am everyone's friend and favorite teacher. I get handshakes and random visits from students hopping around the halls. The pizzas arrive and we eat around 11:30, and I have to fight off other students to defend the food for my class. The toppings are veggie, chicken (pollo), and pepperoni. I stave off students while my class gets their food. After ten minutes, they start yelling at me. "Mister, you eat!" "Do you have everything you want?" "Yes! Please eat, Mister." I grab one piece of veggie. I really haven't eaten well this week. After I eat, my class finishes what's left. They were waiting for me, which I find out later is a sign of community and respect. It is rude to get seconds until everyone has eaten in some of their families.
Class is essentially over then. I spend my time getting to know kids. Most of my students come from the Dominican Republic, and other kids from other classes ask me questions. Where am I from? Why don't I speak Spanish? What is my school like? What do I teach? It's a great conversation. My favorite question is what I took for a language in high school. I took French because I thought I'd be most likely to need that language living in Maine. If I had known where my career would take me, I'd have made a different choice, I tell kids.
After that, I get a compliment from a few of them. I'm a good person and a good teacher. I like your class. The words are simple, as they have been all week, but they mean a lot.
-------------------------------------------
Did I earn the Sontag Prize? I don't know. I worked my tail off, sure. I learned a lot and I was humbled by the experience. Will those kids pass the MCAS? If their written work is any indication, I think they stand as good a chance as any. None of this means I earned that prize.
I think whether or not we earn our keep as teachers should be largely up to our students. What do they think of our performance? Will they look back in a year, or two, or five, or ten, and think we've done them a service or a disservice? This method of evaluation is hard to work with in a useful way in hindsight, but it should be what we think about as we work day-to-day, moving forward. The Understanding by Design method of curriculum design emphasizes the idea of Enduring Understanding. What should students know in your curriculum that absolutely must endure if the work is truly effective? The Essential Question stems from this idea as well. It's a question that doesn't have a right answer, and has no preferred interpretation, but that students could instantly draw from your curriculum to answer if you've done it right. In five years, will a student remember an individual assignment or lecture? Maybe not. I am shooting for remembering the big picture; the rest of the details can be retained or attained through refined focus.
-------------------------------------------
I walk my students out to the hall on the last day. The work they have done covers nearly 50 feet of wall space. "This is our work this week," I say. "You should be proud of how far you've come." I can tell they are. While they watch, I take a picture, which they immediately pose for. In some ways, teenagers are easy to know and predict.
I give a post-test identical to my pre-test. I'll know where five of my nine kids stand on Monday when I grade them. The other four were so anxious to go home that they walked right out the door with the tests. More blind faith, but I know in my heart their chances are better, and that I helped give them that chance.
Going home, everything looked differently. My new car, my new school, the highways and the cities and the borders of those cities and the state line I drive over every day to go to work. My home in white rural America, and the coming of the spring flowers. The written English language. I saw it all differently.
-------------------------------------------
*A note on 'alofoke': this was said a lot on Day Four by a student who really didn't want to be there. Constantly checking his phone and answering it. When I tried to stop him, I pulled him aside and asked him not to answer, which he said he could not do. Turns out, he works for a catering business, which employs his entire family. Every day he came, he left at noon, but on the last day, he stayed the full day. He explained that 'alofoke' means to 'just go with it' in Dominican slang. I insisted it sounded like an English profanity, and sure enough, Urban Dictionary confirmed my suspicion. I told him it was a 'bad word' but 'not a bad word'. He looked a little scared I was going to refer him for his language, but I assured him I didn't judge. He smiled. I smiled. He winked at me. "Alofoke," he said, shrugging his shoulders.
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