Month: January 2022

Snow Day Math

Weekend snow led to an e-day yesterday. Time for some noticing and wondering in Rm 247. This image is from a year ago, but it’s good enough for a hook. Photo cred: me.

System snow with some lake effect on top over the weekend led my district to call for an e-learning day on Monday. It was the right call but it definitely led to some planning challenges. Losing an in-person Red Day meant we were left with a Grey Day singleton on our A/B block schedule. What to do? Ahhh yes. Been waiting for just the right moment to drop three-act math on my geometry students. Today’s the day.

I made a snow day activity in Desmos last year during remote learning based on the “That’s a Ton Of Snow” activity by Denis Sheeran and using a template created by Suzie Craig.

I’m trying to make sure I walk my talk. I’ve been telling my students there is more to math than worksheets, that I want them wrestling with problems that don’t have an obvious answer, that are not google-able or photomath-able. We think in here. So let’s go.

I tried this as a remote activity last year and honestly it was kind of a dud. We did synchronous learning Monday through Thursday with e-learning Fridays, and as the year wore on our kids started to see the e-work as “optional”. This activity probably didn’t get the engagement it deserved. But I resurrected this year for an in-person day, and I’m glad I did.

I used a photo of my driveway after a snowstorm last year, piles of snow on either side, as my hook. Craig’s template starts with a Notice and Wonder, then students developing a mathematical question. Just that one word generated a mountain of how many/how much/how deep/how long questions. Bullseye!

I guided them to “How much did all that snow weigh? Did Mr. Dull shovel a ton of snow?”

So then it’s time to set guardrails. Students made their Too Low/Too High estimates followed by a “Game Show Guess” (“if you were on a game show with a suitcase full of cash sitting there, and you’d walk away with the money if you could guess the number within, say, 10 on either side, what would you say?”)

Weight is not our usual method of measuring snowfall, and a lot of my kids were definitely hung up on inches. They needed a little nudge.

But when I asked “What other information do you need to figure it out?”, they nailed it. Dimensions of the driveway, depth of snow.

Here you go kids, have at it. Also: conversions are a killer. Eight inches of snow when the driveway dimensions came in feet tripped up almost everyone.

We had a little time for a side conversation on geometry vs algebra. My mentor teacher back in the day pointed out that for high school kids usually one or the other makes sense but probably not both. Meaning: Kids are linear thinkers or spatial thinkers. I didn’t really understand that then. But now, after teaching for a million years and after teaching both, it was like he was looking into my future with that statement.

And my kids definitely got that – when I asked them the biggest difference between the two classes they said “we talk way more about shapes in here.”

Eventually we worked to an answer and they were stunned to find out I moved about 2.5 tons of snow off my driveway. My kids kind of limped to the finish. There was a lot of verbal engagement, which was good. They were into it. But not all of them crunched the numbers to get the math payoff. Ideal perfect world, I want them to be able to do both.

The extension was pure gold though – When this storm hit last year my son’s football coach cancelled their weight workout and asked them to shovel out neighbors instead.

Yeah I know the Pittsburgh guy went viral last week for sending his kids into their neighborhoods to shovel instead of lifting, but let the record show Bill Marshall was on it too.

Denis Sheeran talks about bringing your students’ interests in to class as a hook. And when we started talking getting paid to shovel, they were right back in the game. Almost all of them have shoveled snow, and through the years a lot of my Gavit kids would go door-to-door in the neighborhood on a snow day offering to shovel out neighbors. Made some good pocket cash for a morning’s work. This is the beauty of a good three-act task: you don’t need any special math knowledge to engage with it. Common sense your way in. Low barrier to entry. Then when the kids are invested we can lay the math over the top of it.

So how much is my driveway and two and half tons of snow worth?

The bidding war was on. I’d pay $40 for sure. At least. And make hot chocolate after. I felt this weekend’s shoveling effort in my arms and shoulders Sunday. But also, I am an old.

All told it was a good day in Rm 247. Today was a gentle reminder to me that there’s still room for Three-Act Math and “ripped-from-their-world” stuff in my classroom. And there always will be.

I just got to make sure it doesn’t take another snow day for me to roll it out.

Rage Against The Dying Of The Snow Day

Unlike many districts, the district where I have taught the majority of my career does not schedule in snow makeup days. We’ve always just tacked those on to the end of the school year.

That year we had so many snow days we not only added like a week to the end of the year, we extended the school day by an hour a day for a month to make up the time. They’re gonna bury me with that travel mug.

I used to tell my kids that after Winter Break you really don’t want a snow day. All that means is that you go to school on Presidents Day or on some day in June when I’d rather be at the beach.

But…

The mental “Snow Day vs. trudge to the building in a snowstorm” battle is kind of a moot point in the era of e-learning days. We’ve got off kind of easy, weather-wise, this winter. Less than average amount of snow, just a smattering of bone-chilling cold snaps. But you can’t hold off Actual Winter forever around here. This week it’s back-to-back Winter Weather Advisories followed by a sub-zero morning wakeup. All the pieces are in place for an e-learning day on Monday. And every teacher I knew was secretly (or not-so-secretly) hoping for a day off. Because it’s been that kind of a year.

It’s basically the teacher equivalent of a payday loan. The punitive interest rate means the long-term payback is not good but I need this (cash/day off) today. Also the roads suck and kids don’t need to be standing in the dark in the driving snow next to unplowed streets waiting for a bus at 6:15 am. So: e-learning day it is.

The downside is, we already had an e-learning day scheduled for Wednesday to accomodate family conferences. And our Fridays rotate between Red and Grey days (1st-4th hours Red and 5th-8th Grey). This week, you guessed it, a Grey Friday. Meaning my only two in-person meetings this week with four of my classes are canceled. I get the theoretical attraction of e-learning days, but in practice I just don’t get near the same level of engagement from my kids. It’s somewhat similar to the decision-making process several of my teacher connects have faced when half their class is out for health reasons. Do I move on as planned, knowing I’ll have to re-teach this material next week? Or build in activities and review, falling behind the curriculum map?

The geometry team hashed this out on our group text Sunday night when the e-day news hit. We pondered moving forward with the schedule as planned, making a “remote” version of our regular plans for Monday (pretty much ensuring that a large segment of our kids would miss out on today’s lesson altogther). We talked about pushing everything back until Friday when we could get back on our Red-Grey rotation (basically surrendering a week of instructional time).

Decisions, decisions. Betwen two bad options, to be honest.

In the end we split the difference. We’ll be back in our building Tuesday when we can put together a proper remote lesson package with video. That will be Wednesday’s e-day. Thursday’s Grey Day gets the in-person version. Friday we move forward. That leaves Tuesday, which is a decsion for later tonight. (Maybe tweak this Snow Day Desmos activity I made last year based of an idea borrowed from Denis Sheeran).

As for Monday?

The old-school kind. Where you be a kid for a minute. Go outside and sled or throw snowballs, stay inside and game and eat Flamin’ Hots all day, shovel out your neighbors and make some pocket cash. Take a ridiculously long nap. You pick. Because to be honest my kids are at max cap with remote learning.

Kinda borrowed a plan from one of my online-turned IRL connects, an administrator at a south suburban school. Great minds think alike, right?

(Full disclosure: I did give them a brief GForm that one of my geometry colleagues built that includes some content as well as a check-in. That’s my attendance and some quick daily work points for today. I’m a rebel, but a pragmatic rebel who loves my job.)

Wasn’t as tough a decision as you might think though. I felt like, if I needed this break, then my kids did too. Like, x10.

It’s a small but growing movement, this Raging Against The Dying of the Snow Day. I’m seeing quite a bit of this sort of thing in my feed these days:

After digging out yesterday I had the dogs out for a walk in the neighborhood. Our newest pup came to us from Arizona where she occasionally saw a dusting of snow but generally frolicked in the backyard of a small house on an army base. She was fascinated with the whole world turning into one giant snow cone. Stopped every couple of houses to gobble up a mouthful of white frosty happiness. Our big lab mix tolerated her bounciness, because he’s chill like that. But there were dads and kids out playing in the snow, sledding down sloping front yards and building snowmen and such and I was reminded that kids and dogs playing in fresh snow on a no-school day is about the most beautiful and pure thing ever. Like that sweet form on a jumper.

Snow Day announcements come via robocall or text or a check of the school district website these days, so kids look to their screens instead of hovering by the radio or TV set waiting to see or hear their school’s name called. (I used to work at one of those radio stations, BTW).

Either way, an unexpected day off is a rush that I can still feel a million years later. Who am I to rob my kids of that singular joy?

Geometry is still gonna be there later this week. I guarantee it. Today, go play.

Teacher Report Card: Return to (Pseudo) Normalcy Edition

Thursday we completed the first fully in-person semester of school since December 2019. Not that it was “normal” by anyone’s definition: we consolidated from four high schools to two in my district to start the year (combining staffs and student bodies), had a change of principal in October, a week of remote learning and then a week of hybrid (one grade level at a time) after a shooting outside another school in my district, a series of online and phone threats that led to a mid-week e-learning day (called the morning of), a soft lockdown, another week of remote due to staffing issues related to Omicron, and of course multiple students with long-term absences due to quarantine or isolation.

So: not “normal” in any real sense, but at least I could see faces. The part of the face above a mask anyway.

As I told many of my students who I taught remotely all last year when we started up this year in person, “nice to finally meet you”.

Although I did have a handful of my summer school students in class so I had a bit of a head start.

It was pretty clear to me that the only way we were going to make it this year was putting relationship-building first, or at least to bundle it into everything we did. And no lie, it was hard. We used an A/B block schedule during remote last year and carried that model over to in-person this year. So I see my students 5 times in any two-week period. Learning names and faces (especially out-of-context) felt like it took twice as long.

Learning loss aside, that to me was Fall 2021 in a nutshell : learning to do in-person school again after 18 months of remote. For my kids, re-introducing dress codes and bathroom passes and bell schedules (actual tardies) and how not to be a jerk to the person sitting next to you. And from a teacher POV, all the subtle teacher moves, checking work by walking around, looking for hints of confusion or a glimmer of understanding, making little jokes, stopping by a desk to talk about the football game or the wrestling meet or NHS or the latest HAPA production.

So I don’t know if there is a real apples-to-apples comparison between this year and any other, but I’ll give it a shot.

Enter: the Teacher Report Card, as pioneered by Matt Vaudrey.

(Last year’s write-ups here and here).

Students in all seven of my classes had a chance to evaluate me (anonymously), giving a ranking from 1 to 5 on a variety of statements about my practices and our class.

All told 116 of my 216 students replied, a 53.7 percent return rate. Good news first?

Academically speaking:

  • 4.60 Provides time for review of material
  • 4.53 Speaks clearly (critical with a mask mandate in my district)
  • 4.46 Grades fairly
  • 4.45 Gives tests that reflect the material in the unit
  • 4.39 Encourages me to be responsible
  • 4.38 Tells us our learning goals
  • 4.32 Gives good, fair assignments
  • 4.32 Answers questions completely

And in terms of classroom atmosphere:

  • 4.83 Respects each student
  • 4.74 Seems to enjoy teaching
  • 4.74 Dresses professionally
  • 4.71 Treats all students the same
  • 4.70 Keeps control of the class without being too tough

But:

  • 3.88 Has interesting lessons
  • 3.93 Has a good pace (not too fast or too slow)
  • 4.04 Tries new teaching methods
  • 4.12 Has a great sense of humor

Not horrible, but all down slightly from first semester last year. If there’s any consolation, my weaknesses are pretty consistent.

So, how can the class be improved?

  • “More through explanations and a little more practice on each lesson.”
  • “We can spend more time on examples for each type of problem.”
  • “More extra credit opportunities?”
  • “I’d say more group work- it might then also encourage more vocal student participation”
  • “I feel like you should try more to make the subject more fun”
  • “maybe going a little slower”
  • “Giving us more chances to answer questions and interact with him when he is giving his lessons.”
  • “More better music”

Fair enough. With the A/B we’re always playing from behind the sticks. I know I’m rushing a little bit. And I found out early that 80 minutes might sound like an eternity but it always flies by in a blink. As a geometry team we’ve made peace with the fact there are some topics we’re just not going to get to.

So what’s good in Room 247? Here’s a sampling of the replies to “What do you like best about this class?”:

  • “It´s not an annoying class that I´m used to where the teacher has no control”
  • “I like how the work doesn’t feel punishing. I feel that I can focus more so on the subject than whether or not I can finish an assignment on time or if I’m getting absolutely perfect marks on homework.”
  • “I specifically liked the DDR assignment with the different types of dots. It gave us a chance to get out of our seat and just be annoying to the class who has to listen to our pounding feet below us. I also like how to assignment didn’t involve me talking to anyone in class. It gave me an easy 5 points extra credit too.”
  • “I liked how we did a lot of virtual work and we utilized the Chromebooks.”
  • “I like that we get many opportunities to make up late work and quizzes.”
  • “I like the conversations we have outside of geometry and math.”
  • “the freedom to be myself.”
  • “I like the teaching style that is used in class, we go over a lot of material and problems together as a class, rather than individually.”
  • “I like that he gives us time to retake the quizzes so that our grades improve.”
  • “That he play good music”
Source

Honestly, in my ideal perfect world, if you asked me what I would want my class to look like every day, that list is pretty much it. Just that I’m hitting the mark some of the days with some of my students, well, yeah, that’s good.

The relationship piece? I asked “How does the teacher make you feel?” And I heard:

Welcomed. Educated. Comfortable. Excited to learn. Glad to be in class. Oh Man, let’s go.

Source

And as for my areas of improvement, we’ll continue our never-ending quest for interesting lessons and new teaching methods. I know one of the things I’m most down on myself about first semester is there just never seemed to be enough time to cut videos for my notes. That would have helped both my absent/quarantining students but also my kids who wanted another look at the explanation at their own pace. I linked to my Quizizz slide decks which had notes and guided practice problems, but the explainer video would have been about 50% better. There’s also only 30 hours in a day.

One last thing: Vaudrey added a new question this version of the Teacher Report Card: “What BIAS do you see me showing?”

Not a single student who replied felt I displayed any bias whatsoever. That’s huge. I’m not sure they would use this forum to tell me if they did see bias (or even if they would bring it up to me at all), but I am thankful that my students see that in me.

The Teacher Report Card is worth your time. You’ll learn things about yourself and your teaching, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m thankful that my relationship with my students is such that not only do they compliment me on things that are going well for them, they feel comfortable telling me how I can make this class better for them. If you are any kind of reflective teacher at all, it’s worth more than any formal evaluation you could ask for or design.

One last thing. The final question is “Anything else you want to tell me?”

This is the first time in about 3 years that I have held a grade higher than a D in a math class and felt confident in the course at Morton, I understand *mostly* all the material and feel comfortable to ask questions if I don’t. I really appreciate having a good teacher who seems to actually care about their job and the students they teach. Thank you.

I want that on my damn tombstone.

Watch Out. I’m Doing Science.

It’s a longtime family motto: “If you want better answers, ask better questions.” Things don’t just happen. What you do influences the outcome.

A variation is out there in the health care improvement world :”Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” (Origin here).

Pow. That hit home with the group of brilliant teachers I hang with in the IDOE’s Teacher Leader Bootcamp Cohort 3. We met (virtually) this week to consider the concept of Improvement Science. Like, could we do the same thing with education? Make intentional specific changes in our practice to benefit teaching and learning?

As a group we’re on a year-long journey for improvement in our classrooms, our buildings, and our communities. (Previous session recaps here, here, and here). So we come pre-installed with a desire to be better. TLB3 gives us a vehicle to catalyze change.

Each of us has undertaken an action research project of our own choosing as part of the program. So we’re not only trying to create change, we are taking concrete steps to bring it about. But how does change happen?

There are theories. We spent Thursday evening together with our mentor teachers and our presenter from UChicagoImpact learning about Improvement Science.

Source

Long story short, there are three steps:

  • What specifically are we trying to accomplish?
  • What change might we introduce and why?
  • How will we know that a change is actually an improvement?

So that gets operationalized as the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. In our group that involved surveying our students, gathering data, selecting an area for improvement, designing a set of concrete steps to work towards that improvement, continuing to gather data/feedback from our students, adjusting our practice. Rinse, repeat.

One example from our session was how to get your car to go faster. You can’t just tell it to go faster, or threaten to put a bad review in its file and scare it into going faster. The only way you can get the car to go faster is to get under the hood and make changes to the system.

So here we are, trying to build a faster car.

The DEI director in my district is hosting a book study this semester on Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond. Now here’s where we start synthesizing my professional learning. In discussing structural racialization, Hammond points out that in the era of No Child Left Behind efforts to close the achievement gap focused on increasing standardized test scores. So in many districts we ended up teaching our kids to be test-takers instead of taking on the systems that hindered our students’ opportunities to build their intellectual capacity and ability to do higher-order analytical work. Which of course are among the skills required to excel on standardized tests.

Put in the language of Thursday night’s session, they were focusing on the wrong outcome. On the positive, there are districts that recognize that, and are willing to “see the system” – to identify specific changes to practice that will produce a desired (positive) outcome. Plan-Do-Study-Act.

This was a super-fruitful session. Like, the next step and the landing zone for this action research project are starting to come into focus. I’m getting positive feedback from my kids on my area of focus, and the numbers bear that observation out.

“Mr. Dull knows my strengths and weaknesses”, scale of 1-5

I’ve got a longtime End Of Year motto: Keep what works and throw out the rest. The PDSA cycle suggests I’m on the right track there, with a slight twist.

Adopt/Adapt/Discard. Some things are worth keeping, with adjustments.

So much of this information matches my priors I’m not sure if I should be satisfied or terrified. Like, I’m on the right track, but there are others out there?

Maybe we should meet up and compare notes. And then go forth to make change. Our presenter gave us a gentle nudge to keep working towards being agents of change in this profession. Scary path to walk alone. But fortunately there is strength in numbers.

The Carnegie Foundation For The Advancement of Teaching proposes six principles for improvement. Number Six is “Accelerate improvements through networked communities“.

All of us working toward change together will find best practices faster than any one of us working alone. It’s not a new concept, but it is time-tested. We used to share this ancient Nightline episode with my Introduction to Engineering Design students when we first learned the design process:

“Enightened trial and error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius”.

Yep. Because science is messy.

Out of Practice

Sunrise over Hessville. Photo cred: me.

Chicago had its lastest “first measurable snowfall” on record in 2021. But 2022 threatened to arrive with a blizzard. Forecasters were calling for up to 10 inches of snow on New Years Day followed by single-digit wind chills on Sunday. Turned out to be a dud with around four inches of snow, but that Sunday cold meant the road salt was pretty much ornamental. Not good for my drive in on the first day of school back from break. The Borman was a mess with ice randomly spotting the lanes and slideoffs and spinouts littering the shoulders. One car after a crash and spin ended up straddling the two left lanes, facing oncoming traffic. Seriously that was probably the most accidents I had seen on a single day in 14 years of making that commute. To the point where I made the decision to get off before my exit. After four years teaching in the ‘burbs, and then a year of remote school, I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a little out of practice driving 70 miles an hour on an ice rink. That day, I’ll take my chances on the surface streets in Gary, plowed or no.

Also: we returned to remote teaching this week. The district made the call Sunday afternoon as Lake County was inundated with Covid cases.

Ooof. I had forgotten. Live remote teaching is exhausting in a totally different way than regular teaching. Little out of practice in that regard too, apparently.

I felt it snap right back into place today tho. Lessons learned under pressure tend to stick I guess.

I’m not an expert in remote teaching by any stretch but I did my share of thinking and reflecting during pandemic teaching and I feel like I earned my stripes. Thoughts here, here, here’s all of April 2020, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Compounding the decision to go virtual is: we’ve got finals coming up next week. Planned on a week of review this week, on pencil/paper. That will never do when we’re remote. So Desmos and my online connects to the rescue. The great Cathy Yenca put together a very cool shell for in-class review. I gave it a trial run the Wednesday before break, so my students at least were familiar with the format. I dumped all 40 review questions (split into two parts) into the Desmos shell, and away we go. Remote learners didn’t need to copy problems onto their own paper. I could see their work (mostly), make snapshots, compare responses and thinking, try to start discussions (with varying degrees of success). It’ll do.

Made time for the Ed Campos Jr. Three Little Birds Brain Break too.

Now as for next week, the actual Finals Week? Who knows. Although my kids, who know things, today were like “If we come back” next week. Hehehe. Like I said, they know things.

I’m ready either way as one of my colleagues took the pencil/paper district final and converted it to MathXL. If we have to give a remote final, that will be the one we use.

Like I told my kids today, remote is far from ideal for review. I wish I could see their work in their own writing, I wish they could ask a quick question as I make my rounds in the room. I wish we could crack jokes and talk hoops and complain about the temperature in the classroom. But I’m way more interested in keeping everybody safe and healthy. There were something like 875 cases a day reported in my county last week. Yikes. I’m cool with remote this week. Even being a little out of practice. It could have been the classroom equivalent of standing on the shoulder of the expressway looking at my mangled car facing speeding oncoming traffic.

Instead we stayed warm and healthy and got done what needed done. And I can live with that.