Month: September 2019

Goodbye Yellow 107

I’m on the move again, classroom-wise.

Three times in four years, if you are keeping track. I was on a cart my first year at my current school, and the last two years I’ve made mid-year switches.

And, not just here. It’s pretty much become my brand. For a variety of big-picture reasons I was asked to make moves at my former school (yes, mid-year, even once on a work day between trimesters). It’s an occupational hazard. As a result, I travel light. Handful of stuff on the wall, mostly worried about seating arrangements for my students. I’m never gonna be an influencer with an IG-ready classroom all full of cuteness.

Reality is: I’m not special. Due to construction in my building we’ve been playing Whack-a-Mole with teachers for three years. Move a group to renovate a hallway, move them back in. Move another group, reno another hall. Rinse, repeat.

But honestly, sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to tell me something. I feel a little Mark Prior-ish sometimes.

I’m just an employee. The goal now is to go down and help that team win and try to make the AAA All-Star team. Maybe I can get invited to the Futures game or something. I’m still 26. It’s part of the business. That’s the way I look at it. There’s not much I can say. I’m a controlled player. I do what I am told.

It’s worth taking time for discernment – yes, it’s important to know if it’s time to go. But, maybe it’s not about me.

Am I making stuff up in my head? Maybe I just feel picked on.

Like the saying goes, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me”. Just say you never met me.

But to borrow another idiom: Maybe a cigar is just a cigar. We’re moving, I’ll keep teaching, they’ll keep learning, done.

I spent some time this morning de-escalating the thoughts in my head. Part of it is the fruits of praying the Litany of Humility. It makes me de-center myself. Part of it was the prompting of the Spirit to go to confession.

The parish named for my Patroness offers Saturday morning confession, which was perfect as I had JV football on tap before going in to make my new classroom look lived-in by Monday.

And sometimes a thing just randomly shows up on a Saturday morning to bless my whole day, and it’s hard to break the joy that comes from that.

Rod Dreher and I share a kind of optimistic pessimism so I am a faithful reader of his blog. One of the things I gain from that is a knowledge that while we work towards eternal life and battle the forces in this world it’s important to stop and be very aware of the small beautiful things in this life.

It prevents overreaction to small inconveniences. It was actually a pretty cool afternoon. I bribed my youngest with lunch (his favorite hot wings and a pretty good Italian Beef) to help me out after his football game. We got to laugh together and groove to some ancient tunes.

Plus, PK 102 is gonna be a beautiful room.

 

 

 

 

 

It almost kinda makes me anxious for Monday. Let’s go teach.

 

Barbie Zipline – Valpo Edition

It started so innocently:

When the Classroom Chef  people are so far inside your head that your first thought upon such a questions is: “yes, we definitely should send dolls hurtling down a wire suspended from the top of the football bleachers”…

The teachers I follow online talk quite a bit about risk-taking – teachers stepping out of their comfort zone, doing something besides “Here, you guys, do page 282, #1-30 all. Show your work”.

It sounds great. and honestly, it’s been transformational in my classroom. But “risk” implies the possibility of failure. I’ve had activities fall flat, had them blow up in my face. But it’s been a while.

Planning well, and picking my spots, has helped me pick the right activity at the right time for my students, most of the time. I was confident enough in Barbie Zipline that I started hyping it to my students.

Me: “When you graduate, you’re gonna look back on this day and know it was the greatest math class you ever had.”

Student: “I don’t know, my math teacher last year was pretty epic.”

I’d been bookmarking John Stevens’ blog posts about his adventures in Barbie Zipline design to get the basic idea down, and recognized I’d need to make a trip to see the helpful hardware folks at Ace. Like $55 later, I was ready.

 

Weather-wise the day was fantastic. I’ve got my beach bag in my car so I knew I had sunscreen packed away for the oppressive late-morning/afternoon sun (always amplified by standing on metal bleachers).

Sunscreen
Because you never know when you might have to drop everything and go to the beach. Or take six classes of high school kids outside.

Students were ready. They had planned out their zipline design by selecting a starting height and horizontal distance, pondered the concept of “safe but fun”, brought their Barbie or other figure from home, and hey, class outside on Friday? Let’s Go.

 

And then…

bummed Cap GIF
Source

I struggled to get the harness right the first two classes. We experimented with several different configurations (including one where I threaded the line through the wrong side of the pulley. Dur. Did I mention I used to teach engineering?). Maybe one of ten groups got a successful trial before my plan period.

Later in the day one of my student helpers, in his haste to reel in the line, managed to create a rat’s nest of tangles that I eventually had to cut.

Tangle
Hopeless. I bought a 500′ reel of landscape twine, so I had room for error. Good thing.

A couple of classes had a group of kids that proved to me I can’t let them roam on the ground while i’m 40 feet up at the top of the bleachers. I’ll remember that for next time. But we got a couple of worthwhile trials, enough to call the day a partial success. Although that’s a very rough landing for tandem Spidey/Barbie:

So what now? We had fun, yeah, but there has to be more to the activity, to tie it back to the math we had been doing (distance formula/pythagorean theorem). Back to Stevens:

Let’s say this company in Las Vegas approached you and said they wanted a 3,000 foot zipline. You can’t hand them a cute drawing and expect a contract, so based on your data, what would be a good starting and ending height? Why?

So I made a Desmos graph my students could use to set the dimensions for a 3000′ zipline and set their creative juices flowing. Open up a GDoc or GSlide. Tell me why you selected those dimensions, explain why your design is “safe but fun” and select the building in Vegas that will host your zipline. Insert your video.

Responses ranged from minimal to pedestrian to stunning. They did the math I asked them to do on paper, but even better, they used math talk to tell me about their design. Several compared the slope of their Barbie Zipline mock-up to the slope of their proposed Vegas Zipline. It was a beautiful thing.

 

So the Friday outside didn’t live up to the hype. They probably won’t tell their friends all about it. Several were a bit confused when I asked them to take what they learned from their “proof of concept” to write up an imaginary Vegas Zipline proposal. (“Mr. Dull, our zipline didn’t work. We didn’t learn anything”).

But I learned enough to make some changes for next year. And the write-ups were worth the frustration. We did real math, wrapped up in an activity. There was enough reward to justify the risk.

Also, this kind of encounter with your assistant superintendent and your director of secondary curriculum never hurts:

If you’ve been thinking about making the leap: go for it. It’ll be messy. But it’ll be worth it.