School Culture: Sestina or Sonnet?

I work at one of those charter schools where culture is paramount (think KIPP). This extends to expectations for teachers. We produce lesson plans that are reviewed every two weeks. We follow specific assessment procedures. We discipline our students and mete out consequences in a consistent way. We all use the same phrase — SUP! as in “wazzup!” — to get our students to track the Speaker, sit Up straight and Participate.

Twyla Tharp says in her book The Creative Habit:

Poems come in many forms, from sonnets to villanelles to pantoums and sestinas. Some forms confine the poet, others make him or her sing.

Does our school culture confine me or make me sing?

Tharp distinguishes between the sestina, “more of a parlor trick than a deeply felt poem” and the sonnet, whose “length and rhymes make it pleasing to the ear, and provide room for linguistic and thematic invention.”

She says:

Creating is all about playing and innovating within familiar forms. It’s natural to want to establish as many ground rules as possible about form before we get down to work, but you have to choose the form that’s not only appropriate for you but right for your particular idea.

I find myself wondering, is my school’s culture and administrative approach more sestina, confining in restrictive and arbitrary ways, or sonnet, releasing creativity by establishing rhyme and consistency and a beginning and end to my work?

For now it feels like a sonnet, though I chafe sometimes at the expectations and restrictions.

Are you wondering if teaching is creative anyway? I think it is — from making lesson plans to performing them (it is a performance and that is the part I really need to improve) to figuring out how to make meaning… teaching is an exercise in creation and maybe that’s why I love it so well.

[Thank you Merlin Mann for suggesting Tharp's book.]

What Worked: Pre-Algebra Seminar Edition

Three out of my five Pre-Algebra Seminar kids passed their main math class this trimester. That means two failed. Not a great record. This trimester I hope to do better. I feel like I have a much better idea what to do and yet I feel scared. What if I just suck as a teacher?

When I start to think things like that, I remind myself that I should take a growth mindset with regard to my teaching, just like I try to instill a growth mindset into my students. It doesn’t matter if you get an F this trimester or if you were the worst, most boring, and least energetic teacher ever. Figure out what you need to do to improve. Check what other more proficient students/teachers do. Reflect on your results. Get better.

So here are some reflections on what seemed to work this past trimester with my algebra support class. Did they really work? I dunno — it’s not feasible to run a controlled experiment on my five students. But I know what engaged them and what seemed to promote improvement even if almost infinitesimal. And I know what was boring and disengaging to all of us.

What worked:

  • Linear vs. exponential growth sticker activity — I had the students use stickers to explore the difference between linear growth and exponential during their unit on linear functions. Okay, they didn’t need to know about exponential growth; it’s not on the standards. But I want them to start realizing that the world isn’t made of nice linear processes even though people tend to think linearly. Population growth, compound interest, infectious disease — all these things require an understanding of exponential growth. Having to peel off 64 stickers and put them on a page vs. say, 8 stickers,  demonstrates how exponential growth gets crazy fast. And the kids like having their hands busy. I didn’t have to do anything to motivate them to put on the stickers. They just did it with zero complaints.
  • Make-your-own tangrams — they’re starting geometry today and I wanted to get them in a geometric mood. So they did a paper folding/cutting activity in which they made their own tangram set. Then they explored the Pythagorean theorem with it. Again, it was good because it got their minds and hands engaged at the same time. My student who did worst on the trimester final made his tangram set the fastest and with the most accuracy — does he have some hidden geometro-spatial abilities I need to tap into? After we put out the squares to show the squared sides and hypotenuses of a right triangle one of the students yelled out, “I get it!” and her eyes were lit up like I’ve never seen.
  • White board drills with gate problems — right before the final I drilled the kids hard on topics I knew would give them trouble on the exam. I told them that once they showed me they knew how to do a particular kind of problem they could work on their homework. One student pressed me for extra problems to make sure he had mastered them. It was like being in the calculus class — he genuinely wanted to learn. That’s where I want to get with these kids. I’m not starting from scratch: they come to class; they do their work; they want to succeed. Yet sometimes they need help finding that inner spark that drives them to really want to understand not just pass the class.
  • M&M proportions — I don’t want to buy the kids off with sugary treats, but we did use M&Ms to calculate percentages and proportions and it’s an activity I’d definitely do again. They were so motivated to eat the candy that they jammed through the percentage calculations.
  • Multiplication mad minutes — Most of us need help on our 12 times tables and my algebra students are no different. I saw them get steadily better at multiplication through the semester as we did weekly mad minutes focused on 8s, 9s, and 12s time tables. Next step I think is to do division because they could stand to improve their speed on that.

What didn’t work? A lot of things: letting them have unstructured time to work on homework, allowing disruptive students to derail the class, reteaching things in boring ways instead of hooking them up with new ways of experiencing math, moving slowly instead of quickly, generally following the last teacher’s recommendations instead of finding my own way with this group.

What’s happening…

With my blog? The delicious link posting stopped working so I turned it off. I’ve been busy teaching and preparing to teach and recovering from teaching so I haven’t had time to write anything.

I want to write — I’d like to blog about my experiences teaching and more generally about education — but I think I’d rather do it at another site. This has been a great experience for me here, but it was really about getting up to speed on the world of web technology after being away from it for a few years. I did that, and I realized I want to deal with web technology only as a sideline to some other grander purpose. I love teaching; I love learning; I love how they feed upon each other in a virtual cycle of knowledge and (I hope) wisdom. I want to know more about education. I want to write about charter schools, online learning, and remixing educational content. I want to write about economics too. I want to write about mathematical models in the social sciences, because those models and the insights they give into the human condition are why I’m fascinated with math. I want to write about how calculus suggests that the happiness research on kids is wrong.

I want to write about how my 12-year-old son wanted to be a writer when I was writing a book and now thinks he might want to be a math teacher. He’s excited by my TI-89 Titanium calculator (so am I). And his math teacher this year is awesome. I want to be like her.

I want to write about how in a week we’re getting a new dog, and it makes me miss Sally so much.

I want to start tweeting again too but it seems weird to start out of nowhere just like it was weird to stop out of nowhere. And doubly weird because I stopped when Sally was diagnosed with cancer and now I’m going to start just as we get a new dog?

I want to write about what happened last January and how I fixed myself and why I never want to go through that again but I fear it’s inevitable. But I don’t have enough courage (or maybe I should say foolishness) to write about that.

Maybe in January a new January I will find myself in a place where I can connect again online.

links for 2008-10-30

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  • This is the main reason I am hesitant to vote for Obama: because he has slandered McCain's plans for taxing health care benefits even though economically, Mcain's plan is the right thing to do. There is no reason we should further entrench the employer-based health care approach as Obama plans with his penalties for employers who don't offer health care; this distorts our labor and health care markets and does not move us to a more sane system.
  • Thinking of having my algebra students create a chart from this. Saw an interesting voter turnout chart in National Geographic this month that inspired me. Would tie together last week's topic — percentages — with this week's — graphing.
  • "Energy independence is no more desirable than coffee independence, banana independence, or car independence. The case for free trade does not break down just because the good being exchanged is important, as oil is. It doesn't generally make sense, if your goal is the wellbeing of country A's citizens, for country A's government to impose tariffs or import quotas on a product from other countries. Even if we put the moral arguments against coercion aside, and even if we nationalistically care only about Americans (I don't care only about Americans), the gains to the domestic producers from reducing trade are less than the losses to domestic consumers."

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