One of the teachers I hang with during passing time dropped this knowledge on me this week. I’m sure he’s far from the only one who’s kind of numb as we enter the last big break of the school year. Students are baked, teachers have long since been over this year. Just give me ten days when I can shut off my alarm and my teacher brain and try to recover, and re-charge for the stretch run.
It’s Saturday, friends. Dinner hits the Weber, a book and a cold drink, a grilling buddy and the setting sun. Let’s go. pic.twitter.com/5C4tXO3Ebz
A couple of my activities that historically have ramped up student engagement fell kinda flat these last couple of weeks. Both of them involve connecting some dots and applying the math we’ve learned to the world outside our walls: a compound interest investigation involving comparing the price of a new and a year-old car to test the “15% depreciation” figure used in many textbook/worksheet word problems (and the Dave Ramsey recommendation to let someone else take the steep loss in the value of a new car the first couple of years).
And the March Madness investigation I use to intro the probability unit. (Doc here). Remarkably, of the two, the NCAA brackets did the best job of drawing my kids into the math. Even the students (maybe especially the students) who had to ask me what “upset” means in terms of a tournament were able to nail down theoretical vs. experimental probability and use data to make some informed guesses on their brackets.
If nothing else it kept math happening in Room 130 during the countdown to spring break. Which isn’t nothing.
Shutting down teacher thoughts is a survival mechanism for many of us this year. When we get back, instead of looking forward to summer break, we’ll face a parade of unpleasant news. Like, bad news followed by worse news followed by career crisis. My district is crumbling financially and has been asked by the state to prepare a corrective action plan. In addition, our contract negotiations have been at impasse since November and will also likely require state intervention.
The most recent personnel report featured four resignations from my building alone. I suspect next month’s will be similar. Folks are getting out before they get let go, or looking ahead, seeing that raises are unlikely in a financially distressed district, trying to pad their high-five (average of the five highest salaries that figures into the formula for our pension). Our once-robust insurance plan has been gutted and will be prohibitively expensive. Morale is at an all-time low and will get worse – the written notification of cuts will begin May 2, just in time for Teacher Appreciation Week.
It would probably be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Source
Don’t check your mailbox, friends.
Is it any wonder folks burned rubber (metaphorically speaking) leaving the parking lot Friday?
For me, self-care looks like diving into hour after hour of televised hoops. Reveling in first-round upsets, rooting against rivals, and dealing with the cognitive dissonance that my favorite coach on the planet is likely to lead my alma mater’s top rival to the Final Four.
The dude was spitting bars after Purdue’s second round win today.
Painter’s definitely onto something here: “I just think everybody should take a test on their knowledge of what they’re doing. Like I think all coaches should take a test, so they understand refereeing. I think all referees should take a test, so they understand coaching. And I think all journalists should have to take a basketball quiz or test.”
Just show me you know what you’re talking about. OK?
Last month I gave my students access to almost two decades’ worth of enrollment data for our district and asked them to model it mathematically. And then to analyze the data and think deeply about the challenges facing our district, which has around 40% the enrollment it did 60 years ago.
They did some quality work, and when asked to summarize their learning in a slide deck, they produced some solid documents.
Their conclusions were based on their research, both into the enrollment trend and also reading contemporary news stories, and from classroom discussions as well as their own experience. In addition, many of the business and government teachers in my building have been showing segments of the school board meetings in class as a learning opportunity, so my students are up-to-date on issues as well as the opinions of various groups regarding a way forward.
Hammond school board trustee Carlotta Blake-King joined my @MortonHighGovs Alg II class to answer student questions and share knowledge for the SCH Enrollment project we are working on.
But what turbocharged this project experience was a visit from Trustee Carlotta Blake-King, who was generous enough with her time to join us as a community partner the day after a board meeting, and shared the benefits of her life and board experience with my students.
I primed the pump by asking as part of our bellringer: “If you could ask an expert one question you still have after studying the enrollment data, what would it be??”
I displayed the questions for Trustee Blake-King and that’s all the start she needed. She had my kids enthralled, and maybe never moreso than when she introduced them to the concept of the school-to-prison pipeline.
She told them that when government organizations are scouting locations for prisons, they seek out areas where third grade reading test scores are poor. (More on that claim here.)
My students instantly understood how data is used outside of the classroom, including in ways that are to their detriment, and how valuable the ability to use math to frame the world around them could be. It was like cracking a secret code.
The next highlight came after a student question – “What would we need to do to reverse the declining enrollment trend?”
The trustee’s response: “We don’t promote ourselves. Driving around the city or on the Borman you see billboards for other districts and for charter schools – why aren’t there billbards for Hammond schools? Why don’t we tell people about the great things happening here?” She went on to explain that she had a long career as a real estage agent and the number one concern parents of children had when thinking about buying in a particular neighborhood or town was the perceived quality of the schools.
So we talked about the success stories – from the Hammond Arts and Performance Academy and its graduates to four-time world champion robotics Team 71 to our accomplished Mock Trial and dance teams to service projects sponsored by National Honor Society, Black Student Union, Bible Club, and other student groups.
This piece hit home with me as I’m a fellow on the Teach Plus National Policy Advisory Board this year tasked with advocating for education issues and shaping policy at the federal level. During coaching sessions for our virtual meetings with congressional staffers we are reminded to tell the stories of our schools, the bad and the good. It’s good advice.
Rather than asking them to make recommendations to the board on the way forward (kind of an unfair ask given the number of variables involved in the decision and the relative lack of information my kids had, even after the research) instead I asked them to develop three pros and cons of the district’s proposed action plan, specifically closing two elementary schools and laying off a quarter of the teaching staff.
I synthesized this experience while reading a couple of news articles this morning. The Chicago Tribune editorial board examined the Chicago Teachers Union president ask for a pay increase in light of the city’s ongoing financial troubles. Increased property taxes have a tendency to incentivize families to move out of the city to lower-tax environment suburbs.
So, in our view, this eventually will lead CPS and CTU to the inevitable discussion about how to reshape a school district that now is serving far fewer students than it has in decades. There’s an influx of migrant children whose likely addition to CPS needs to be appropriately accounted for. But the elephant in the room for CPS is dozens of schools that are serving 30% or fewer of the students they were built to instruct.
Under state law, CPS can’t close any schools until next January. But after that there’s no legal impediment. The savings from making some tough decisions could well yield more resources for the schools, and the teachers, that truly need the investment. Indeed, there are parts of the city where schools are over capacity.
Closures, of course, are anathema to CTU and to Johnson. Emanuel’s 50 school closures following the 2012 strike are referenced repeatedly in debates around CPS and its future today. But school closures aren’t unusual outside of Chicago. In the suburbs for decades, districts wisely have consolidated schools in response to reduced school-age populations.
Hammond’s much larger urban schools neighbor is facing the same fiscal cliff and may have to make similarly difficult decisions.
Then an article from Jerry Davich hit the Times of Northwest Indiana (formerly the Hammond Times, which is a long story but part of the larger and long-term flight to the suburbs that has Hammond and other urban school districts hemorraging students and dollars).
Davich spoke with business and civic leaders to get a sense of how the Region can redefine and reinvent itself in the years and decades to come. A shift away from traditional manufacturing to a tech-oriented base is at the top of the list for the mayor of Hammond:
Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. is convinced that Northwest Indiana — and his city in particular — will see major advances in technology and investment in the near future.
“Technology advances that will draw large amounts of capital to Hammond’s downtown area,” he said.
A Region product who is now owner of a company funding some of that tech development downtown caught my attention:
“The theme for the Next Big Thing is the integration of Northwest Indiana into the Chicago tech hub experience and the whole technology ecosystem that exists in Chicago,” said Tom Dakich, a principal owner at YAB Development Partners.
“Mayor McDermott is brilliant in that he recognized that the downtown concept on the double-tracking is the easiest way for somebody to live in Indiana and work in downtown Chicago. He’s building a downtown living learning area in Hammond and I’m going to put technology people there,” Dakich said.
“When kids graduate from Big Ten universities, more of them go to Chicago than any other city in the country. That is for all Big Ten schools, not just Indiana, Illinois, Northwestern, etc. We have to get some of those people to come over to Northwest Indiana. The only way to do it is by technology jobs.”
Dakich is right, of course, in his assertion that Chicago is the number-one destination for B1G graduates. But Mrs. Dull wisely noted that although kids from Michigan or Iowa may be lured here by a low cost of living, easy access to Chicago via the South Shore Line, and lakefront amenities, eventually they will start families, have kids, and start to think about quality of schools.
“If he thinks they’re going to draw people to Hammond long-term, they’re gonna have to get the schools right.”
(This is why you always marry smarter and prettier, guys. You’ll never regret it.)
I was pleased with the arc and the outcome of my first full-on project-based learning experience. Part of my intent was to introduce my students to exponential and logarithmic functions before we studied them. Part of my plan was to give my students an opportunity to see how math shapes the world they live in right now. As a wise person once stated, we can’t pretend that “the real world” for our students is some far-off abstraction.
They learned about how schools are funded and how school boards make decisions. They had the opportunity to discuss their learning and get expert input on the issue from Trustee Blake-King.
And the optimistic teacher in me, the one who gets irrationally happy on Cap & Gown photo day when our seniors are walking the hallways in their graduation regalia and taking enthusiastic group selfies, that teacher holds out hope that when my students get their hands on the big problems facing our world that they will be the ones to hammer out a solution.
Otherwise what is problem-based learning even for?
Sure. Freshman year, we don't expect you to know anything. Soph: know your job, and do your job. Junior: Know your job, do your job, and know everyone else's job, too. Senior: Know your job, do your job, know everyone else's job, and help them do their jobs better. https://t.co/aP8qhLnLCM
This tweet popped into my feed the morning after I returned from a weekend retreat with a few dozen of our juniors, and it served as a bit of a framework for some thoughts that had been floating around unformed in my head over the course of the two and a half days.
John Bacon is a prolific writer and a lecturer at Michigan and Northwestern. This tweet refers back to his tenure as hockey coach at his alma mater in Ann Arbor which was the focus of the book Let Them Lead. (I wrote about it and its relevance to my classroom here). Simply stated, Bacon’s philosophy is: set the tone early by establishing high expectations, then hand over the responsibility for leadership to the players themselves, who have bought in to the program.
A classroom isn’t a hockey team but there are definite parallels to the way we do things in Room 130.
And I think that is one of the things that has attracted me to the Natural Helpers program. This weekend was my fourth retreat with a group of juniors from our school, a group of student leaders, and a group of teacher facilitators. (Previous recaps here and here). The Natural Helpers program originated in Washington state in 1979.
School leaders were concerned about teenage suicides and other problems, and searched for a way to disseminate as much accurate information as possible to all the students. They recognized that students listened to their friends before anyone else, and fashioned a system by which students from all the different subgroups in the school could act as sources of accurate information. This was the forerunner of the Natural Helpers selection process. In 1982 the original Natural Helpers Leader’s Guide was written by Roberts, Fitzmahan & Associates, a health education consulting firm in Seattle, Washington. Between then and 1989, when the program underwent a major revision, over 900 schools throughout the United States and Canada implemented the Natural Helpers Program.
Natural Helpers bore fruit at the four high schools in the city of Hammond, then went on hiatus during the pandemic. A couple of the instructional coaches at our school led the charge to re-establish the program in the two consolidated high schools. (Video link to NWI Times package here).
And I think we are moving the needle. Just before we boarded the busses to leave our retreat center last fall, one student asked me “could Morton be like this all the time?”
Bingo. That’s exactly the point. Go back on Monday and let the awesomeness spread organically.
Since I’m a numbers guy, I started doing the math in my head. With two retreats per year, on an ongoing basis there are about 150 students in the building at any one time who have experienced the retreat, roughly 10 percent of our student body.
But, is that enough to start changing the culture? What’s the tipping point?
It sounds like an application of the Pareto Principle a/k/a The 80/20 Rule. Eighty percent of the outputs come from 20 percent of the inputs.
This “universal truth” about the imbalance of inputs and outputs is what became known as the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. While it doesn’t always come to be an exact 80/20 ratio, this imbalance is often seen in various business cases:
20% of the sales reps generate 80% of total sales.
• 20% of customers account for 80% of total profits.
• 20% of the most reported software bugs cause 80% of software crashes.
• 20% of patients account for 80% of healthcare spending (and 5% of patients account for a full 50% of all expenditures!)
I’m banking that’s enough kids who default to helping their classmates that it makes a real difference in the day-to-day experience for our students. I hope I’m right.
Part of the discussion amongst the adults during one break this weekend was “what if there was a Natural Helpers retreat for teachers?”
Hmmm. I’ve been at schools where we’ve done team-building outings to kick off the school year. I think that was valuable. So….
What is the critical mass of Natural Helper adults in a building to make real change? Twenty percent of our staff is about 16 teachers. There’s probably close to that many right now who have facilitated the retreat, or at least have been invited by students as facilitators. I think that’s a good sign. In our current atmosphere we’re never gonna get 100 percent of our teachers on board with a school-wide initiative, or even half, but maybe we don’t need that many. Maybe it’s just the core group that make this school an awesome place to be just because they are who they are, daily.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to an off-site safety meeting to discuss the possibility. I seriously think that we can create the culture our kids need to thrive and survive.
But it is an uphill battle. Morale in my building (and my district) is way down. And we’re not alone for what it’s worth. This thread from a western Canadian teacher hit my TL this morning and snapped my head back:
I think the reason a lot of teachers are struggling, myself included, has nothing to do with the actual act of teaching.
It’s emotional energy.
The days have become so demanding. Kids need so much, much more than pre-pandemic. The supports are so thin, we have to be…/🧵
I think the reason a lot of teachers are struggling, myself included, has nothing to do with the actual act of teaching.
It’s emotional energy.
The days have become so demanding. Kids need so much, much more than pre-pandemic. The supports are so thin, we have to be…/🧵
Everything to everyone. But we also have to be always on our game. Always positive, eager, constructive, professional, engaged, and more. So what happens to me, and every other teacher I know, is that you wind up with nothing left.
You spend all of your emotional energy at ….
Work instead of on your life. Teachers wind up with no energy to play with the kids in their own life. To spend with their partners and loved ones. Weekends become a frantic sprint to recharge. You wind up just trying to hold on until holidays…
You’re so exhausted that you defer all of the joy in your life. You tell yourself you’ll do all the things that give you life on holidays, or in the summer. But you don’t, because you’re too tired to move, and spend the whole time recovering. Every teacher I speak to feels…
This way, and it’s why so many are looking to leave. I personally don’t know how much longer I have left. My friends, family, my wife, and I, all deserve more of me. This round of contract negotiations will decide the course of my career. If I don’t see a path for things…
To get better, I’ll find another path. And I know a lot of other teachers feel the same way. The stakes are high. Thousands of teachers are working in a job that is hurting them and their loved ones and they’ve had enough. Because when we try to advocate for better….
We get told we’re lazy, entitled, and spoiled by a bunch of armchair quarterbacks who have neither the skills nor the courage to walk into a classroom and teach. People teach because of a deep sense of responsibility. It’s an act of tremendous hope and faith. An act that seeks…
To leave a better world than we found. All we want is to be able to do our job, work with kids, and to not be hated for it. We want a job that we can sustain, and that sustains us. One where we don’t have to watch kids struggle with unmet needs that we are trying our best to…
Meet. One where we don’t feel the constant contempt of our government and a large section of the public. There’s a lot riding on this round of negotiations for a lot of teachers. And if Scott Moe and Jeremy Cockrill don’t step up, I’d suspect they’ll find themselves in the…
Midst of a profound teacher shortage. Because every single teacher I know who has left is glad that they did.
They never come back. Ever. And that tells you a lot.
If we want teachers, we need to make teaching a sustainable job. They are not disposable things to be used up…
And thrown away. People aren’t signing up. People are leaving. And it’s going to get worse without serious action. So I’ll be picketing the legislature and sitting in on QP on Monday. To look the government in the eye. Hope to see you there.
“This round of contract negotiations will decide the course of my career.”
“They never come back. Ever”
Woah. That’s a “win or die trying” if I ever heard one.
Our kids and our adults are facing a legit existential crisis.
This is it. This is the battle. It’s real. For the kids and for the adults. So do we have enough Natural Helpers in this building to win it?
Tweaking For No Reason 