Month: February 2024

Energy Crisis

I’m not sure I can remember a year when I’ve talked to so many teachers who are so tired at this time of the year. Myself included.

Part of it is physical. The school year is a grind, and I’m not as young as I used to be. A lot of it is mental. January and February are cold and dark, money is tight after the holidays, snow days and testing season wreak havoc with planning.

And in the case of my district, everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop. We are in dire financial straits and are widely expected to close schools and lay off teachers at the end of the year. Like, hundreds of teachers. So the joy and relief of the close of the school year will be replaced with anxiety and job searches.

It’s hard to get motivated for the last three months of the school year when there is nothing but bad news on the horizon. I mean, I can do pretty much any miserable thing for 90 days if I know there is a reward (or at least relief) at the end of the journey.

We’re all professionals but the events of this current school year have me looking at a lot of things through the lens of human nature. If you found out on May 1 you were gonna be out of a job at the end of the year, at least part of you is moving on to the next thing.

I hope I’m wrong. I really do.

A few years ago I riffed off a Mary Schmich column on concrete tactics to make it through February (sanity intact) in the Chicago area. I’ve built my coping mechanisms. I’m still a sucker for puppies and sunshine on a cold day and the smell of a charcoal fire. The dogs don’t live behind me anymore but I still stop to let the sun shine on my face before going inside to teach, and grilling feeds my soul.

Today I stumbed across a listicle from the University of Nebraska on the same general topic, “10 tips to beat the winter blues”:

  1. Spend time outside each day to get fresh air, even if only for a few minutes.
  2. Open your blinds or window shades to let in more sun.
  3. Plan activities with friends or family to stay socially connected.
  4. Get good sleep at night, but try not to oversleep, which can make symptoms worse.
  5. Eat a healthy diet full of fresh produce, lean protein and complex carbohydrates.
  6. Identify a hobby or activity you enjoy and make time on your calendar each week to do it.
  7. Try a new winter activity, like skiing, ice skating or sledding.
  8. Practice mindfulness through meditation, journaling or breathing exercises.
  9. Continue or establish an exercise routine.
  10. Try light therapy with a light lamp, which can be purchased online.

We’re a dog household so combining #1 and #9 is a regular feature. My schedule change last month moved me to a classroom with windows so I get my daily dose of midday Vitamin D (along with a good look at McDonald’s, Dollar General, Zante’s, and the All-Star gas station across 169th).

Important thing about this type of list is: that doctor in Nebraska is an expert in her field, but she doesn’t know you the way you know you. You don’t have to do every last thing on this list, or even half of them. Find the couple two tree that work for you and leverage them.

I’d rather stab my introverted self in the eyeballs with raw spaghetti noodles than stay socially connected with, you know, people, but you bet your ass I make a couple of minutes every morning to sit in the dark with my coffee before anyone else wakes up and just breathe and clear the mechanism.

Source

And we’re on a nutrition journey as a family which is also paying dividends. We’re long-time “control what you can control” people and although the clouds on the horizon are real, I’ve got a job to do every day and I’m gonna do what I can to be there.

(Don’t rule out an occasional mental health day as needed as well).

The summer learning conference my district has hosted since forever is moving this year. We’re still a co-sponsor but somebody else can pick up the cost of putting the thing on. The list of keynote speakers was released this weekend and it includes Kim Strobel who speaks on the science of happiness (amongst other topics). Somewhat ironic this year, I know, but there it is. Here’s a clip of her guesting with George Couros talking about the effects of stress and goal-seeking on productivity:

Easy for her to say, I know, “just be more positive and you’ll be more productive and happier” while we watch everything crumble around us. But an investment in mental health is exactly that, an investment, and if that two minutes of darkness and coffee and breathing, or that moment in the sun before I walk in the door gets me through, it’s worth it.

Oh and did I mention that next Friday it’s March? Or that we’re like 3.5 weeks away from our first 7:00 pm sunset?

We’ll get there people. Swear.

Lemons. And Project-based Lemonade

Source

Being a teacher in my district in 2024 is a daily mental struggle. A protracted contract battle, threats of school closures, an upcoming reduction in teacher force, all things contributing to a morale problem the size of a volcanic crater. It’s hard to see a moment on the horizon where things turn around and get better.

Declining enrollment is the root of the problem. Fewer kids means less state money. And eventually it means you have too many employees and too many buildings.

So being a math guy and a pessimistic optimist, of course I decided to give my students access to the enrollment numbers over the last 20 years and start doing some math with it. Project-based learning and all, right?

Introducing the SCH Enrollment Investigation. (here’s my planning doc including the basic format ChatGPT spit out when I asked it to write the project for me).

I’ve got a Desmos activty examining school district enrollment I’ve been doing with my kids forever (so long that when I first rolled it out it was a pencil/paper activity). I show them a coordinate plane with five (linear-ish) data points. I ask them to create a line of best fit and write equations for the line, then use that model to predict future enrollment. Hook is, I give them five years of data that were the tail end of decades of linear growth, that leveled off a year or so later when the global financial crisis hit. Takeaway: The model is good until it isn’t. Sometimes the model is bad to start, sometimes the world changes. (Foreshadowing alert!)

In that Desmos activity I asked them to model the enrollment of a district (Clark County, NV, home to the Las Vegas schools) that was experiencing rapid growth. Now I want them to think about whether we could use a similar tactic to model enrollment in a district in decline. Pointed them to a couple of recent newspaper articles on the issues in the district and aked them to write some facts.

Then I set up a table in a spreadsheet for them and linked them to the IDOE’s giant mega sheet of enrollment by district since 2006. OK kids, go grab the figures you need for our district, complete the table and insert a scatter plot and trendline.

My motivation for this project is to get a look at exponential and logarithmic functions before we study them in the upcoming unit. So I encouraged the kids to try out different functions for their trend line and see which one modeled the twenty or so data points best.

At 30,000 feet (the Google Sheet chart) the four types of functions don’t look all that different, so Tuesday when we get back together I’m going to give them a quick look at a Desmos graph of the 20 or so data points, and the trend lines for exponential, logarithmic, and polynomial functions.

One of these things is definitely not like the others. Those last four data points are the post-pandemic, post-consolidation years. There are a couple of other contributing factors, but what I’m hoping my students will see is the model is broken, and then I’m hoping that will get them asking questions.

I also linked them to a demographic study our district commissioned after two elementary closings but before we consolidated from four high schools to two. I’m asking them to compare the real-life numbers to the projections of a paid professional.

My hope is this underlines that such reports are built around a specific set of assumptions, and sometimes the world changes. That doesn’t mean the researcher didn’t know what he was doing, or that the numbers were bad.

The culminating event of the project is a student presentation sharing their findings and including their recommendations for the district.

As part of their work I asked them to think about why they thought the enrollment was shrinking in our district. They gave it some serious thought:

Others mentioned increasing housing costs in our city and families seeking new districts due to school closures or seeking in-person school during the shutdown.

They are on this, folks.

I suspected they would connect with this activity because it is 100% real to them right now, and that connection has played out. The last thing I want (or need) to put a bow on the project is a community partner, someone who could come to the classroom and answer questions from students (why close that school? what if we kept more kids/families from leaving the district? is there a way to keep more teachers and still cut costs? why doesn’t the state provide more funding? can the city do anything?)

Real data is messy. Which is why I love it. Giving kids a chance to math with real numbers that really matter to them is absolute gold. Can’t wait to see their presentations this week.