Month: December 2022

My Crystal Ball Is A Little Foggy

From the Time Marches On department:

As of a couple of days ago, Denzel Washington is 68 years old. Sixty-eight. How did that happen?

(Video extremely NSFW obvi)

For years now we’ve been marking time by our kids’ progression thru school. Now our youngest is graduated and I’m a little adrift, time-wise. Like a late December sunset when it’s hard to tell exactly when the sun has gone down, this feels like one of those years when December just melts into January and if there weren’t fireworks and a champagne toast you’d never really know that anything had changed.

Sometimes I’m positive I know what Adam Duritz felt when he sang “grey is my favorite color“.

I’m in the long habit taking some time on New Year’s Eve to reflect back on the year gone by, and to anticipate the milestones (large or small or in-between) of the year to come. As the last few hours of 2022 spin away, there’s one big event on next year’s calendar but other than that I’m kind of drawing a blank on the highlights-to-be of 2023.

(The math nerd in me had to check if 2023 is prime. It is not a prime number, by the way. Divides by 7, 17, 119, and 289. Turns out 2027 is the next “prime number” year. Fun party fact, if you’re headed out tonight.)

So what’s coming up? My oldest is going to wrap up his hitch in the Army and move on to the next thing. He’s planted his flag in the southwest and I don’t imagine that will change. He’ll be a Region Guy in temperament if not in physical location. My youngest is working on a personal training certification and should have that wrapped up early in the year. He’s got some bodybuilding goals he’s working towards as well, and he’s learning how to pay his bills with a blue-collar gig. Mrs. Dull will continue to scout out potential Michigan beachtown houses for us to fantasize about buying. Big Story: We’ve got a big round-number anniversary this year, and we’re already plotting a way to sneak away for a weekend or so to celebrate. Michigan? Vegas? Chicago? We got options.

Me? I’m gonna keep trying to get better at teaching, keep sharing the classroom stuff I make with my geometry team, keep working on nutrition plans (got good feedback from my GP last visit so that’s good, right?), keep reading, keep building in time to move (those dogs aren’t going to walk themselves) and time to reflect. Oh, and drink more water.

And continue to test the far edges of my comfort zone with Teach Plus and Teacher Leader Bootcamp. Both have been an amazing experiences so far. I’m learning a ton about how the sausage gets made. And as one state rep told me: Advocacy matters. Your voice matters. Write the email, make the phone call, go to the town hall meeting, bring a friend/co-worker.

(And an aside for my Indiana teacher friends: yes, most definitely fill out the application for TLB or Teach Plus in 2023. You will not regret it.)

Denzel won an Oscar for that performance in the clip up at the top of this post, by the way. Folks pointed out that 99% of the time Denzel pretty much plays himself in movies, but in Training Day he stepped out of type to play a crude, amoral, manipulative, backstabbing, corrupt cop. 

If Denzel can grow as an actor, I can grow as a teacher, and as a teacher leader. Introvert me was terrified the first time I got on a Zoom call with a legislator. But I did it. And it wasn’t horrible. Gotta keep working on that elevator speech for when I get a chance to meet policymakers face-to-face later this winter.

And oh, yeah: The 2023 playlist is here. Been making a “New Year’s Playlist” each year ever since stumbling across this Allyson Apsey blog post lo those many chilly Decembers ago.

(Prior years here: 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022)

Actually made it live in like May so I did defeat the purpose of a “New Year’s Playlist” a little bit. But it made for a good soundtrack to a drive back from a September weekend trip to Nashville, so there’s that.

As always it’s a mix of new stuff I was digging this year and some old favorites, obscure things that fell into my lap during the year, and tunes that kind of summed up the vibe. And I’ve already opened up the planning doc for what will become Teacherlife #2024Playlist sometime in the next 12 months.

As intensely online a person as I am, I feel like I do make time on a regular basis to unplug and reflect in solitude. One of the guys I’ve been benchmarking in that regard is Bugsy Sailor, who has photographed every Lake Superior sunrise for the last four years.

He sums up the payoff for him:

It’s worth sitting for a moment with the entire thread. The task of teaching and fulfilling my roles as husband and father aren’t likely to get easier in 2023. Like Bugsy says, the things we give our lives to simultaneously drain us and energize us. It’s that tension of day-to-day life that fuels some of the anticipation we have on New Year’s Eve, even when tomorrow feels a little like Just Another Day.

To a new year filled with surprises and blessings and sunsets.

Na zdrowie, and Happy 2023.

Source

The Feast of Stephen

I had an opportunity to drive through Hammond during the pre-dawn hours of early Christmas morning. As happens often, memories came flooding back, things that I recall from childhood: now-closed school buildings where my mom worked, an overpass that used to be a uniquely-shaped green steel bridge, a bar that has held down the corner of a working-class intersection since before I was born. So many of my memories of the holiday are wrapped up in the city (and its Region cousin, East Chicago). I belong to a blended family, and the holiday had a familiar routine: Christmas Eve on my mom’s side at an aunt and uncle’s home in Hammond or my grandmother’s two-flat in East Chicago, then Christmas Day we hosted my dad’s side of the family at home. 

My youngest sister’s birthday is December 26 (she missed being a Christmas baby by a scant 30 minutes or so), meaning each year she opened gifts for three straight days. My wise mother (God rest her soul) had a plan to tamp down any potential issues with jealousy. December 26 is the feast day of St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr. In many Eastern European cultures, a child’s saint day is a much bigger deal than their birthday. Problem solved. My mom would hold back one of my Christmas presents for me to open on my saint’s feast day.

I don’t recall my sister getting the same opportunity on her feast day, and I never really had any issues with jealousy. But my mom was less concerned with what was “fair”, rather what was needed in a given situation.

That is the currently popular definition of equity. Not everybody getting the same, everybody getting what they need. Which seems to me to be, well, fair.

It’s the focus of my work with Teach Plus this year, equitable school funding, in particular how my state provides appropriate financial support to schools with a high concentration of students with specific needs. It’s known as the complexity formula. There is a “foundation grant” which is the funding that each district receives, then the complexity grant which is determined by the number of students experiencing poverty, English language learners, and students in the special education program.

And it also confirms my longtime classroom philosophy. I don’t think we used the term “equity” when I started, but that is the word that fits.

My district is combining some roles at the Board of Ed. They have posted the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion position, but have also rolled the MTSS coordinator role and the director of High Ability programs. I don’t know the exact rationale for combining the positions, although I have my suspicions. But in my ideal perfect world, I have a vision for how that might have happened. So the DEI position establishes that Culturally Responsive Teaching is the umbrella concept that informs everything we do in our buildings. Then MTSS and High Ability funnel the needed resources to the students who need them. The way I see it, this is an opportunity to not look at individual stovepiped programs, but as an integrated whole of how we serve the students of the city of Hammond.

That would be pretty damn baller. And equitable.

A district of 16 schools, 12 thousand students and a thousand or so teachers is an organization with a lot of needs to be met. But I think most of the folks who teach here, are here because they believe that this is not a “one size fits all” business. Like my wise mom, we are open to creative solutions to take care of our kids.

I Have Questions

Source

My student teaching semester was a valuable experience thanks to two outstanding mentor teachers. One was very old-school, kept a paper gradebook, wore a shirt and tie to teach in. He’d have me plan out my lessons in outline form in a spiral notebook, down to which problems from the text I woud use as in-class examples. He knew that for a brand-new teacher planning intentionally was critical – I wouldn’t know enough to wing it if things went sideways. The other was a 21st-century guy who firmly believed a brand-new teacher could benefit greatly from practice reps. He’d meet with me after school, go over my formal lesson plan, then have me teach the lesson to an empty room. Just like if I had kids there – wait time after questions, managing transitions, the whole schmeer. The part of that exercise I remember most vividly is we used popsicle sticks for cold-calling students. When I wanted to ask a question, I’d have to pull a stick, look at the seat where that student sat, and ask the question out loud.

Of course there would be no answer, and that wait (pretend) time seemed like an eternity.

There’s days even now I still feel lke I’m teaching to an empty room. Even three years on, the habits of solitude that students built during pandemic-era remote teaching and learning are hard to undo. So many are reluctant even to this day to answer out loud.

Questioning and Student Engagment are two of the domains in our evaluation rubric. Even though I routinely score reasonably well in those columns, I know they are areas of growth for me.

I can ask all the right questions, but I need to find a way to encourage answers. As an accomodation to my reticent students I use a lot of forms for bellringers and summaries, and Desmos activities for lessons where students can answer in a text box. But that still needs to be the springboard for actual human out-loud conversations.

I had a singleton Red Day Friday and used it to try to start some conversations. I dug out my CCSD Enrollment investigation and decided to pair students up for conversation before they entered answers or adjusted sliders to create a line of best fit. I first learned of this tactic from Matt Vaudrey who calls it 2:1, in a nod to the 1:1 environment of each student using a device.

I tweaked the activity a little to update with some recent numbers (up to the 20-21 school year) and oh I think I might be on to something.

They made all kinds of connections which is cool. Students pointed out that reality disconnected from their model so that even though they had done the math correctly their numbers would still be way off, and several looked at their line of best fit and questioned how well they had modeled the data in the first place. Exactly the learning I’m looking for in this activity by the way.

Just on background, the activity uses a 5-year window of enrollment data from the Las Vegas schools, when the district (and the city) were undergoing dizzying growth. It also represents the last handful of years before the economic crash of 2008, when that record of growth leveled out. Mathematically it’s a super-rich activity.

I added a slide near the end of the activity with data from the 2020-21 school year, when the enrollment dipped again after a brief rebound.

We were a little thin on time so the last few slides we just answered out loud and presto! Instant classroom convo. When I asked my classes what they thought happened in 2020 they were right there with Covid/remote learning as a possible cause. They knew all about it because they lived it.

(Gentle reminder to myself that when I can work any topic into class where my students have personal experience they will fall all over themselves to talk about it).

I think the turn and talk to each other first helped ease them back in to comfort with answering classroom questions out loud.

Which is another takeaway for me. Even big swings in important areas of pedagogy don’t require huge changes or a shiny new tech tool. Sometimes little tweaks to the way I already have set up my class can pay off grandly.

Looks like I’m still living the Gavit High School vision statement:

“Success through lifelong learning in a spirit of teamwork and high expectations.”

Heard each morning during Gavit announcements

My long-time Gavit friends still smile when we hear or see it. Lots of learning happened in Room 247 Friday. Some of it by my students. Definite teamwork. And my kids stretched themselves to meet a new expectation.

Success.