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By Kyle, October 5, 2010 12:39 pm

I can’t really consider myself a child of the 80s (i was barely 9 when the decade ended, and hardly remember much at all), but I am familiar with Tony Danza, who was made famous on Taxi and Who’s the Boss. Apparently, Danza is back doing something he originally aspired to, before he was side-tracked by Hollywood, and that is become a teacher.

Last year, Danza stepped into the role of 10th grade English teacher at a Philadelphia school and this fall, A&E is broadcasting his experience taking on what, for him, seems like an amazingly difficult role. In what could perhaps be the most relevant piece of education media since season 4 of The Wire, Danza’s new show, entitled Teach, will seek to show what a first year teacher’s experience may often be like.

Personally, I’ll give Teach at least 4 full episodes before I either write it off as absolute propagandist garbage, or embrace it as what reality television really should aspire to. I have a hard time seeing it fall anywhere in between.

Teach will also be streamed free on Hulu.

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By Kyle, September 7, 2010 6:30 pm

The Beach Boys – Be True To Your School

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So with one final week to go before students show up to Cochran Middle School on September 13, I’m realizing that I can definitely find things to prepare for, one of which is attempting to decorate my room in a much more visually compelling way than the traditional “dentist’s office” motif I’ve historically gone for.

One of the things I’ll be doing is lining the walls with college pennants. I’ve seen several very successful teachers at Cochran do this in previous years so, thank you, I’ll be stealing that idea for my own classroom this year (actually, I’m a proponent of the theory that good teaching is essentially stealing from master teachers you’ve already seen in action, or, put less crassly, learning from and reappropriating for yourself effective strategies you’ve seen in other classrooms).

So far, I’ll be hanging pennants from a few of the Ivy Leagues, a few of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, USC, UCLA, and yep, Wheaton.

And so with that, I offer my readers the opportunity of a lifetime (well, perhaps it merely falls within the Top 112 opportunities of a lifetime) to influence the class of 2016. Pretty much everyone who reads this blog is a college graduate who had an excellent experience during those four (or more) years of their life, and would recommend others do the same.

So here’s the deal. You order the pennant of your college, have it shipped to Cochran Middle School (c/o Kyle Hunsberger, of course, or I’ll never get it; or better yet, my home address) and it will be used in my classroom to influence the current generation of middle school students (of whom many will be the first college attendees in their family). I will:

• Display the pennant it permanently in my classroom.
• Give my students a brief primer on basic information about your college.
• Share with my students your personal perspective on why your experience there was great, and why they should consider working hard to be in a position to be able to attend in just 6 short years (this year I’ll be teaching 7th graders).
• I’ll even see if I can take a picture of a student with the pennant and send it to you.

If you’re in, just say the word. Maybe you can share alumni-hood someday with one of my students.

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By Kyle, May 31, 2010 8:43 pm

Passion Pit – Dreams

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…screen shot courtesy of Wolfram Alpha, with a few subtle Photoshop edits.

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By Kyle, May 20, 2010 4:50 pm

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.

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By Kyle, May 17, 2010 3:45 pm

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).

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By Kyle, May 14, 2010 4:41 pm

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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By Kyle, May 10, 2010 10:41 am

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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By Kyle, May 4, 2010 5:10 pm

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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.

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By Kyle, April 29, 2010 4:30 pm

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.

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By Kyle, March 25, 2010 2:38 pm

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.