Month: August 2022

Something Old, Something Borrowed

Somebody on Twitter recently pointed out the In-N-Out Burger 100 x 100 activity is ten years old this year? In a related story, I’m old.

Sometimes I feel like rolling this one out non-ironically is like the sweet grandmother who posted an earnest restaurant review of Olive Garden. But the thing is, it stands up. It’s still engaging (do yourself a favor and read the Shauna Hedgepeth post on presenting 100×100 to administrators in her district), it involves real math, and hey, anytime I can bring a little SoCal vibe to my Region classroom, I’m down.

Plus the reaction to the 20×20 photo never gets old.

We’re in the process of transitioning our district high schools to the New Tech model. Long story short, that means building in problem-based activities in math class. Our trainer recommended going deep into the problem set in a textbook and pulling out a word problem we could modify to fit the format. Which, OK, but I think we can do better. Or 10-ish years of hanging around the fringes of the #MTBoS will have been wasted. I’ve been slowly dishing out links to Three-Act Math tasks to my geometry colleagues, hinting that there’s no need to re-invent the wheel when awesomeness is there for the taking.

And part of that process is getting students acclimated to a different way of doing math. Focusing on one problem for an entire class period or two, working collaboratively in small groups, showing work in multiple ways, kids doing the heavy lifting, cognitively speaking.

So on Day Two of my two-block algebra review, I felt like 100×100 would accomplish all those things for me.

Method to the madness, right?

I haven’t presented 100×100 in-person since the Before Times. Maybe 2018? (Now that I think back on it I think my then-district’s Comms person came out to do a photo shoot of the 100×100 activity and put it on the district social as an example of the cool stuff happening in classrooms there.) Anyway, it’s been a minute. I did use it as a hook when I presented on building an online PLN at a summer conference a few years ago.

And I did try it out during remote learning my first year back at Gavit. Kind of a dud, tbh. Wish I would have known then that somebody had taken 100×100 and Desmosified it. Godsend.

This year I presented the activity 6 times over two days of 80-minute blocks. I used an Estimation180 task as my bellringer to acclimate my students to “too high/too low/game show guess” which cost me some (well worth it) minutes. But I was a little rusty on the pacing, and I found myself trying too hard for too long to help them discover the pattern.

Which meant that the “actual math” part of the activity got kind of squeezed in at the end. I had to give away too much of the process of building the equation, which kind of defeats the purpose. I feel like I was able to make the proper adjustments (alternating between “talk at your table about what you notice” and having students just type their answer into Desmos without a discussion, rather than both) for Day Two and we were back on track.

So much so that in two of my classes students were able to come up with, if not an actual equation, at least the words for the pattern and then use that to calculate the price correctly. There was much celebrating of their efforts.

So yes, do 100×100 with your Algebra class or your Geometry class or your Math 8 class or whatever. Always good times. Plus, the possiblity of a story you can use down the line. As I related to my kids today:

This is probably 2015 or 2016, Algebra 1 at Gavit, we’d done 100×100 and a few weeks later one of my students tells me she’s going to visit family over winter break, they are going to be in Vegas and she wants to go to In-N-Out and order a 20×20.

Be still my heart, right? I aksed her to tell me all about it when they got back. Which she did. Even brought a picture. But the way she told the story was so perfect. She said she got to the counter, ordered the 20×20, and the girl working the register said, “We don’t really do that anymore. You order a Double-Double, then order 18 extra patties and cheese.”

So very very perfect. I give my kids the first part of that story with the 20×20 picture so they know it’s a real thing, and the second half after they’ve built the pattern for the cost of a NxN burger. Now my geometry kids are in the club.

Math In Real Life, baby.

Year 20

Source

Twenty years of teaching. I feel like there should be a commemorative bobblehead giveaway or something tomorrow when we all walk in to class to open the 22-23 school year. Or at least a cool logo.

Source

And I’m most definitely at peace. I committed to rest and self-care all summer, made my checkbox list (my next-door teacher neighbor and geometry team member has taken to calling it a “quick start” guide), and got everything set up for my kids’ first day on Wednesday morning.

The two teacher work days had their usual assortment of glitches (learning how to dump my workflow into a new Promethean board that didn’t quite want to do what I wanted it to do how I wanted to do it), a lack of paper stocked up in the copy room (had to go down into the basement with another teacher to retreive a couple cases to bring up. Funny story: the basement was at one time intended for use as a bomb shelter for neighborhood families in case of nuclear attack. There’s a separate outside entrance and everything).

The Promethean board thing was stressful, not gonna lie. Spent the entire first Work Day afternoon trying to work the bugs out. To no avail. But all that was water off my back and everything that needed to get done to welcome kids on Day One got done.

If you’re at all interested in the plans, I’m using One Word (H/T Tom Rademacher) for our intro activity on Day One. They’ll take their block day on Thursday or Friday to make their signs and I’ll get them put up on the walls of the classroom. Between the week of remote and the week of hybrid to start last year (not to mention getting used to seeing my kids 5 times in every two weeks on the block schedule), I sucked at getting to know names and faces and making connections in the first few weeks last year. I think this will help.

We’ve been encouraged to present our best lesson to our kids on Wednesday, and I’m down with the concept, but the 25-ish minutes I’ll have after attendance and schedule-change reminders in not nearly enough time to do In-N-Out Burger 100×100. Keeping that for the week we do Algebra “review” especially because it will be an awesome transition to New Tech-style Problem-based Learning. And a great call-back throughout the year (“Hey remember when we did the 100 patty cheeseburger thing back at the beginning of the year? This is like that. Group up”.)

I think partially the peace comes with a widespread belief that we might get a somewhat normal school year after three years of pandemic-related disruptions. That obviously remains to be seen. Cases are declining rapidly in the county where my school is located, but my wife’s office (well south of my school) has been under a mask mandate for a month after a surge in the company.

But there is something else that’s been rolling around my head for a minute too. Our admin team returns intact from last year. Don’t underestimate how important that consistency is to a staff and student body. In keeping with our shift to the New Tech model, our admins shared their “whys” with us at the opening faculty meeting.

Now hold up. I know what you’re thinking. Bear with me here. I knew some of the backstory, but not all of it. I’ve mentioned in this space how my current district is basically the family business, how my mom was a school nurse here for 28 of her 30 years in the business. And in a large district like mine, there’s plenty of folks with family connections. I’m not that unusual.

So our principal and one of our APs not only went to the same (nearby) high school, not only graduated the same year, they were in the same homeroom. And before you start thinking “oh, cool, old boys club”, she was here before he was. It’s not like he came in as principal and started hiring his friends.

Then: another of our APs was our principal’s wrestling coach in high school. Yet another assistant graduated the school where he now works and isn’t shy about sharing that he was a bit of a knucklehead in school.

Yeah, I know there are plenty of districts like that, where students come back to eventually teach. They feel comfortable there, like family. It’s a homecoming.

But this hit me like a two-by-four between the eyes as I sat at this faculty meeting, not caring the least that my admins were spending the morning talking about themselves to a bunch of teachers who had work to do.

There was a method to the madness.

I’ve heard it said that if you have a job where your boss insists “we’re like family here”, run away quickly. Family can’t be claimed like that. It has to be earned.

And from what I saw last year, and what I heard Monday, it’s been earned.

I sat there at that meeting re-energized to do the work our kids and my colleagues need done. Because that’s what family does.

Especially around here. Pick up your hard hat and lunch box, punch the clock and go to work. Make something.

We were not close to being ready to open our consolidated school last year at this time. No locks for the lockers, no student IDs, no student chromebooks. Not the admins’ fault, we were fighting the same supply chain issues as everybody else in August 2021. This time around we are still tweaking some things but the basics of a functioning school are all there. We even have water fountains instead of the pandemic-era cases of bottled water.

So my Promethean board won’t play nice with Spotify or let me download Chrome instead of its proprietary browser. So I’ve got 36 minutes to make a first impression with all my students tomorrow (except my 7th hour which is wrapped around our four lunches, so we get to hang for like two hours). So my schedule was still evolving as late as 2:00 pm today, 17 hours or so before students enter the building.

I’m gonna sleep like shit tonight, as I always do on the night before the first day with kids (Is it 4:30 yet? No? OK good, like another two hours to sleep”). My neck already has a little tension in it like I get in February every year and honestly my back is killing me tonight and we haven’t even started. Nothing three Advil and a nice Chardonnay can’t fix. I blame the dining room chair where I’m writing this, but let’s be honest: I’m old.

But:

Twenty years in, and surrounded with my people, we got this. The anticipation of meeting students on the first day never gets old.

August

Photo cred: Indiana Dunes State Park FB

One of the side benefits of doing literally nothing school-related (after summer school was done anyway) is a distinct lack of free-floating anxiety in the weeks leading up to the start of school. I do have a new LMS to learn but my schedule is unchanged so I can use last year’s plans as a starting point.

At some point tho I needed to open my school Chromebook and check email. My district is transitioning to the New Tech model one grade level at a time and this year it is the sophomores’ turn. So a few dozen of us met at the Admin Building for three days of training to kick off the month.

I think a lot of us are already down with the theory behind New Tech (college and career-ready outcomes, supportive and inclusive culture, meaningful and equitable instruction, purposeful assessment), and our freshmen teachers piloted New Tech in the building last year so they are our resident experts. Once we got the basics on project-based and problem-based learning (our trainer wasn’t a math teacher but she spoke the language. Even dropped a Dan Meyer blog post on us and made a Three-Act Math reference) on Day One, we spent some time on Day Two thinking about teachers we have had. And the Region kid in a lot of us bubbled to the surface.

We took a few moments to look over this chart from Zaretta Hammond’s book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (coincidentally that was the selection for a district-wide book club last school year):

I probably have a tendency to waver between Technocrat and Sentimentalist with occasional stopovers in Warm Demander. So, I could be better.

We were challenged first to think about teachers who did not fit the description of “warm demander”. The purpose was to introduce us to the concept of using a rubric and its associated feedback to become a warm demander. So the question to us was, “what’s the worst feedback you ever received?”

And the floodgates opened. From an administrator condescendingly saying “at least you tried” in an evaluation post-conference to a middle school teacher who told a student “you’ll never amount to anything”, everybody had a story.

Region folks are used to being treated like the red-headed stepchild. We’re in Chicago’s sphere of influence but as far as Chicago people are concerned we’re all hayseeds, because Indiana, meanwhile the rest of Indiana doesn’t claim us. It smells weird up here. So we are perpetual underdogs with the attitude to match. We remember the dis far more than the compliment. It’s fuel.

That’s a hell of a PD plan right there. Our facilitators couldn’t have set us up to understand intuitively the kind of detailed, actionable feedback delivered by a warm demander any better if they tried.

So because my mind is wired to make connections, I sat at the table in the midst of this group discussion with anecdotes from a book bouncing around my head.

My suspicions were correct: definite teacher connections in that Dodgers book. One of the theories of the Dodgers’ minor league development people is: baseball is a game built around failure. Famously it’s been pointed out that the best players in the game are unsuccessful 7 out of every 10 times at the plate. So coaches can’t nit-pick and micromanage players’ faults and expect results. Instead they focus on one or two specific, measurable areas of improvement and coach up those things. It’s a little like math in that regard. My kids already think they are bad at math. It does neither of us any good for me to harp on their areas of weakness, unless it’s something specific they can do to get better.

From all accounts it seems like a successful strategy.

They are 75-33, by far the most loaded team in baseball, and are on pace for 112 wins. Andrew Friedman knew he didn’t need to make any drastic moves this trade deadline — so he didn’t. He knew the team in place was good enough to win a World Series. And he knew they were only going to get better as their guys returned from the IL over the next few weeks.

The MLB record for most wins in a season is 116, accomplished by the 1906 Cubs and 2001 Mariners. We may have to start talking about the 2022 Dodgers potentially setting a new one.

https://deadspin.com/dodgers-remind-the-loaded-padres-that-they-re-still-the-1849385391

I’m a Cub fan for life but I definitely have some kindred spirits among this Dodger group.

Reference here

But back to teaching: we had an opportunity to begin working in small content-area groups on using the New Tech format for lessons and rubrics. I took the Spiky Door Project and tweaked it a bit to fit the format. Truth be told I feel like that project falls midway between PBL and PrBL but what I really wanted was practice (with feedback) on the paperwork side. From spending the last 10-12 years hanging around the fringes of the MTBoS I know how to make and/or find project- or problem-based activities. There is quite a bit of crossover (culture of collaboration, non-curricular thinking tasks) with Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, which a couple of us in the department have read. The three-day workshop was mostly there to help us develop a common language and common focus as a staff. Which is a great way to start a new year.

One last takeaway: Day Two of the training the math teachers broke out with a facilitator who had been a math teacher. And that part was great but she delivered a line that will stay with me for a while. Might even end up on the wall behind my desk:

“Your kids’ collaboration and culture is never gonna be better than yours as a staff.”

Brette Woessner

Before we left out teachers and instructional coaches from both high schools in my district were hashing out plans to build a bank of shareable project- and problem-based activities for us to add to and draw from. And we are encouraged to develop plans in our PLCs and spread out the burden of making the formal plans. This also forces us to collaborate on which sub-categories of the learning outcomes (agency, collaboration, written communication, oral communication, and knowledge and thinking) we intend to measure.

That, plus having a year as a consolidated school under our belts, I can feel the early-August weight coming off my shoulders already. Yesterday was the last care-free Sunday evening I’ll have for a while. Still got this week to myself tho. Gonna help out with freshman orientation in my building on Wednesday. And be ready for a Teacher Work Day on Monday.

Some of my teacher friends are already back to work today. This is the vibe I wish for them today and every day this year: