Month: April 2020

What Is Normal?

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It’s America’s Favorite Parlor Game: “what is the world gonna look like on the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic?”

Followed closely by: “When can we go back to normal?”

The real question is probably: “What will normal look like?”

A couple weeks ago a handful of my teacher friends started to mentally do the math and have serious wonderings about whether schools could open on time for in-person instruction in August.

Indiana State Superintendent of Public Instruction Dr. Jennifer McCormick laid out some of the possibilities in a media conference last week. Illinois governor JB Pritzker mentioned that school districts should begin planning to open up online in the fall.

I mean, you can’t not plan. The work involved to open online is gonna take all summer. After dropping online learning in teachers’ (and students’) laps with literally a weekend’s notice this spring, we have to show up ready to go with real online classes in August, if it comes to that.

The San Diego County Schools leadership have put together a lengthy document that is being benchmarked by the Clark County School District in Las Vegas.

Of note:

  • SDCOE feels that student enrollment will decline as some parents seek established distance-learning programs which will be seen as “safer and more stable”, while other families hurt by the economic downturn will be priced out of the housing market and forced to leave the county. (Editor’s note: that’s a real concern in my district too – in a town that is widely considered affluent, our marginalized students and families sometimes are hiding in plain sight.)
  • Officials also outlined plans for accommodating 50% of the normal enrollment on a campus down to 20% of normal. They discussed how to make work assignments or accommodations for employees in high-risk groups. And the plan also included an outline to support mental health of students and families.
  • The plan also recommended the board “(c)ollaborate with employee associations when developing plans that impact the work of their members.”

When I shared this plan with some of my Indiana teacher connects that last bullet point was a piece of the planning that stood out to me. One teacher mentioned that she and her spouse are both in education, with three children in different grades. Any kind of staggered work schedule would drown them in child-care costs and probably result in one of them leaving the profession.

I’m sure the district-level and state-level administrators here are working through the possibilities and the appropriate pathways to protect students and staff. As I’ve said throughout my career, “hey, you guys tell me what to teach and who to teach and where, and I’ll handle the rest”. This new school year is gonna stretch the spirit of that motto for sure.

Meanwhile, talking through it with my junior-to-be son, who’s hoping against hope his football team will have an opprtunity to earn their way back to the state champiosnhip game, we pondered what an online start to the school year might look like.

I mentioned that I was concerned about starting a school year with six classes of kids I never met and don’t know, and oh yeah BTW we’re gonna teach exclusively online for maybe nine weeks, maybe longer.

He shook his head and said, “Nope”.

That is a very perceptive 16-year-old. He knows you don’t just sit down and start doing work for someone you don’t even know. For my son, middle school and freshman year was not a great experience. Things turned around this year mostly because every one of his teachers is either a) one he’s had before, b) one of his football or wrestling coaches, c) another sport coach, or d) me. The relationships made all the difference. I shared this with one of my online connects and he pointed out that it would really be critical if we looped kids into the conversation about what all-online school from the jump might look like.

My district sought out feedback from teachers, parents, and students after a few weeks of Emergency Remote Teaching, and acted on that feedback, so it wouldn’t be a big stretch to at least reach out to students for their input: “What would teachers need to do to build relationships with students if the school year begins online?”

Tomorrow my school is doing a socially-distanced student pick-up for graduation materials (the graduation ceremony is obviously canceled, and when and if we do offer some type of in-person celebration many of the students may not be able to return), and we’ve organized a teacher cheer line to greet the kids as they snake through our parking lot. I selected a time near the end of the schedule as I’ve got a lot of end-of-alphabet seniors I taught as juniors last year that I’d like to say “so long” to.

I’ve got a few I would have sought out after the ceremony for a smile and a fist bump. This year it’s just “deuces” from six feet away. That’s not normal.

And one more thing: I think The Shutdown is making everyone a bit nostalgic. Things we used to do, not even thinking twice about. I read somewhere that a side effect of quarantine is that we aren’t getting new experiences so our brains are sifting through and fronting old memories. (That would probably explain a series of really bizarre dreams as of late). Shoot, I was talking with Mrs. Dull about how my kindergarten teacher Ms. Stanek wan’t gonna let us go on to first grade unable to tie our shoes – we practiced with a construction paper cut-out of a shoe with yarn laces until we got it right (the things you remember a million years later, right?)

So I get a notification on my phone last night:

That was cool. I mean, it’s nice to be remembered. Especially by a brilliant member of the Air Force who has been around the world twice and left me in the dust math-wise long ago. But the comments: “GOAT”. “I hated math yet his class was my favorite to go to!”

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It’s been a while since those guys & ladies were my students. They are adults now, out there doing awesome things. And every time I think of them and those classes, I smile.

I could live with that as normal. It’s a good reminder of the relationships I’ve been able to develop together with students. I’m not sure how I’m gonna make that translate to teaching and learning from behind a screen, but it’s one more not-normal thing we’ll all adjust to before school starts back up.

Like Neil Peart wrote long ago: “He knows changes aren’t permanent/But change is.“

Get To The Point

There’s pretty much two types of students right now, as #QuaranTeaching enters its fifth week in my district:

  1. The kids who miss school and their friends so much they pedal down to the school on an unseasonably warm early April day to hang out together and make TikToks in the parking lot. They’d go back tomorrow if the state re-opened the schools.
  2. The kids who wake up every day and think, “I don’t have to see like 100 different ignorant people today, so I’m good”. They knock out their online work in a couple of hours and go back to living their best life.

I’d imagine there are two types of teachers right now too, and I’m one of them.

After some initial apprehension, I’ve found my groove with distance teaching. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to write a book or present on best practices for online teaching, although somebody should. I suspect we will all face a steep learning curve over the summer.

And days like today that involve hours of grading students’ digital submissions are exhausting in a way that I don’t remember paper grading being. It’s a test of endurance some days. But what I think I have done is find a way to meet my district’s requirements for time-on-task and content, while keeping my students interested and engaged with activities that echo our face-to-face classroom philosophy.

I’m asking them to do more, and do less, at the same time. With a mandate to keep activities to a 30-minute time limit, I’m not gonna give them 20 or 25 practice problems, digital or otherwise. Instead, I’m asking them to dig deeper, to explain their process, and to apply what they’ve learned. It’s no different than my approach in the classroom, with the exception of working from behind our screens.

It’s been a minute since I taught geometry. When I got my schedule over the summer, I eagerly anticipated the day in the spring when I could roll out the Spiky Door Project, a production of the great Kate Nowak. It was huge hit when I last assigned it, at another school in another district. A worldwide pandemic meant I would have to make some adjustments to what the project looked like, but it definitely checked all the boxes for a quality e-learning activity.

I rolled it out in stages, first asking students to design the net of their pyramid, draw and label it on paper, and to calculate the surface area. I made this an assignment when we covered surface area in the first half of the module, and let my students know we’d be calculating volume of the pyramid later on, and submitting a formal set of drawings and calculations as a quiz grade.

I embedded a video in Canvas to help them get started, so they could get a visual on my expectations and see what a well-organized presentation of the math work should look like. And the vast majority of my students were able to do some quality work here.

Today I got to see the fruits of my students’ labors. I’ve got 120 or so students across five sections, so as you’d imagine some crushed it like a belt-high fastball and some struggled mightily.

Probably the most common mistake was using the slant height of the face instead of calculating the pyramid height when determining the volume. That’s the kind of thing that, had we done this in-person, in-class, I’d have been able to catch with students individually. Many students took advantage of email or virtual (video) office hours to get help and ask questions, which was nice. I didn’t just drop this on them out of the clear blue sky. We’ve been working on applying what they’ve learned all year long. We talk about “working backwards” – hey, if the volume needs to be between 750 and 2000 cubic centimeters, and you’ve got a base area of, say, 196 square centimeters, what does the height need to be? And can you design the net intentionally to make that happen?

That’s a skill that comes easier to some students than others, for sure. My kids that are photomath-reliant tend to struggle with that kind of question. (Honestly, that’s one of the things I love most about teaching geometry – when you have to write your own equation it’s much tougher to app your way through a class with little to no actual learning taking place).

I took a page from Nowak’s book, and set up a spreadsheet programmed to calculate the surface area and volume of their pyramid when I entered the side length and slant height. That saved a ton of time on what was already a long day of grading – at least I didn’t have to re-do the math on 120 projects. I used the same spreadsheet to record and total their points for each part of the rubric so everything I needed to assess their understanding was all in one place.

All told I was pleased with how this project was adaptable to emergency remote teaching. Broken up into chunks and with appropriate support, it was accessible to all my students. It was authentic enough for me to take a quiz grade on it, which in a very grade-driven environment is enough to motivate many of my students to make an effort.

The part of the project I made optional was the piece that gave the project its name – recognizing that not all my students would have materials on hand to create the 3D model of the pyramid they designed, I did not require it. Some did build a model anyway, which was cool. Maybe they’ll spike their own door at home.

This is my contribution to the #MTBoS2020 blogging initiative started by Jennifer Fairbanks. That makes 3 out of the 4 months so far (Solid C, right?). But take a look at the #MTBoS2020 tag for some great thinking about teaching and math from my online PLN.