Comments (0) Passion Pit – Dreams
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…screen shot courtesy of Wolfram Alpha, with a few subtle Photoshop edits.
Harry Nilsson – I Yam What I Yam
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If it wasn’t for my students, I’d have nothing to blog about. Furthermore, it’s amazing how one entirely inane comment from a student can completely brighten an otherwise mundane day.
Today around 12:30pm, one of my students walked into my lunchroom with great melancholy, sat down, hung his head, and quietly proclaimed:
“I’ve not yet mastered glue.”
I shouldn’t have laughed. I know, I know, I’m supposed to be the mature and responsible adult, but it took all the muster I could manage to hold back. Simply hearing this comment entirely out of any type of a context produced a result that could only be described with the noun “hilarity”. Luckily, a few moments later, this student had definitively cheered up, and could now laugh at the fact that he had not had such a great day with the glue in his previous class. Better luck next time.
David Byrne and Brian Eno –Strange Overtones
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Yes, I’m a teacher, but I’m also a student. In addition to having completed education classes at LMU during my two years in the Teach For America cult organization, I’ve been taking online classes at local Santa Monica College for the past three years. Why? Currently, rather than having useful ways to earn raises in wonderful LAUSD (like increasing student performance, or taking on school-leadership responsibilities), our salary allocation office has decided that simply taking classes is sufficient to earn a raise.
In that spirit, I’ve been doing that for the past few years, responding to online discussions, writing an occasional 2-3 page paper, and performing decently on a weekly quiz or so.
That mild inconvenience of this escalated in a major way this last weekend as I had to compose a 15-page paper. I’ve not done something that long since undergrad, and so getting into writing and thinking mode was a bit difficult (I’ve long since come the the conclusion that “7 pages” is the threshold past which you actually have to know something about the subject of your paper).
As much as I love being a teacher, I found myself on the other side of the equation this weekend, giving me, once again another good perspective about how much my students must love doing my work I assign them (don’t worry, no 15-page math papers).
So I’ve become a new fan of the website movieclips.com, which allows users to search for particular movie clips based in a keyword or film title.
The best part?
I can make connections (albeit, tenuously) to real life math applications. For instance, today’s lesson on simplifying radicals can be applied in a formula for finding the velocity of a tsunami given it’s depth.
Oh yes, you guessed it. :) Simply had to connect it to this clip.
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Cochran, film, math
Harry Nilsson – One
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This Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, life as we know it at Cochran Middle School shuts down for three days of California State testing. All we’ve taught our students is fair game for a series of 3-hour, multiple choice exams that spit out a single number by which we, the school, are judged. There’s a lot of pressure.
The interesting thing is that I still haven’t figured out who is exactly judging us. Our test scores have slowly increased over the last several years, and even plateaued at times. Yet, we still never reach our goal for improvement and as a result we are still labeled a "Program Improvement”, or “PI” school. I think that used to mean something, but the reality is that much of the district is labeled PI 5+ at this point, which means supposedly we are failing our students.
In August, we heavily anticipate receiving the results from this test, and with bated breath, hope for a higher number (API) than last year. If anyone is a harsh critic, it is we ourselves, who will basically give ourselves immense validation for an improvement, yet in the event of a decline, quickly find factors which “explain it away”.
The reality is that we need to find new metrics to measure whether we, as a school, are helping our students. Such measures could be that of, number of kids passing the CAHSEE, number of kids enrolling in 2-year college, number of kids enrolling in 4-year college. While difficult to track, this is the kind of data that would be affirming/critiquing and would hopefully lead to better goal setting. Maybe a single test score can be a part of it, but certainly not the whole picture.
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It’s finally sinking in. California State Tests are next week and it’s “do-or-die” for my kids (well, “die” may be overstating it a bit). At this point, if you they don’t know how to factor, how to find the solution to a system of linear inequalities, or how to calculate the airborne time of a falling projectile, it’s too late.
Radiohead: 2 + 2 = 5
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Last time we had parent conference night here at Cochran Middle School, we had an extremely low turnout. Potentially a part of the cause of this was the fact that March Madness had just started and those Thursday night games were very tempting.
Tonight is our final parent conference night of the year, and although we don’t have the NCAA Tournament to contend with, we do have the NBA playoffs to deal with. Perhaps luckily, the Lakers are not playing tonight, but at this point in the year, the temptation to simply watch some basketball as opposed to talking with your child’s teachers is awfully prominent.
My prediction (pre-conference night): 28 families who sign in to meet me.
CSNY – Teach Your Children Well
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Tonight is one of the six “High Holy Days” that our principal has pronounced here at Cochran Middle School. Parents come from 6pm – 8pm and basically ask the same question over and over: “Why did my child get an ‘F’ in your class?”
Most of the time I’ve not seen a whole lot of behavioral or academic change as a result of these conferences, but I understand that they are necessary to have, if not for any other reason than to appease doting parents who have students earning “A’s” and want to hear their child’s teacher’s tell them how wonderful they are.
To both of these groups I will happily oblige, yet I wonder if there might be more effective ways to tire out both teachers and students as they head rapidly toward spring break.
Kanye West vs. Rolling Stones – Lockdown Shelter
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This was Example #2 today during class, a problem which my 6th period student had up until this point not yet seen, yet most were able to attack it with great precision and success. This was particularly evident when one of my brightest (and most energetic) students completed the second step and, noticing the variable he was about to distribute, mumbled not so subtly under his breath, “Throw some d’s on that…”
I know, I know. There are times when I should be mad, but I just laugh.
Blossom Dearie – Figure Eight
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Our district is infatuated with the idea of “data”, specifically what, in education circles is becoming an emphasis on “data-driven instruction”. For the past year or so, our district higher ups have been pushing down this notion of using “data” to inform instruction in every single way, as well as our school administrators being under a similar pressure.
The problem is, nobody quite knows exactly how to use data to drive instruction in a meaningful way. This year, a co-conspirator colleague and I have been implementing an intervention program, and have literally spent the last month trying to figure out (a) what data is actually useful, (b) how to actually find the data (which was ridiculously difficult and time consuming), and (c) what it actually says about the effectiveness of the intervention.
The mid-year result? A sharp-looking Mid Year Report (feel free to view here and peruse in all your spare time)!
So far, we can definitively say that Kids Mastering Math is a qualified success. While the numbers are certainly not astounding, they are significant, particularly in the advances the lowest performing kids are making.
The purpose of sharing this is not to “toot our own horns” but rather, (a) to show that what we’ve done has helped many of our kids, (b) to gain momentum to help improve the curriculum and support for next year, and (c) to hopefully show how to actually use data in a meaningful way educationally.
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