Author: thedullguy

High School Math teacher, Morton High School, Hammond, IN. Football and wrestling dad. Opinions mine.

You Were On The Hill, Huh?

I’ve always known intuitively that Washington, DC is a company town.

So the reaction from the gate agents at DCA Wednesday evening wasn’t all that surprising. Traffic pushed back the start of dinner at Mi Vida on The Wharf following Day Two of our Teach Plus Teacher Appreciation Week Hill Day. Watching the clock, just past 7:00, while we enjoyed fabulous appetizers and a a gorgeous view of the Potomac, one of my directors looked across the table and said, “Your flight leaves at eight? You should order your Uber.”

An hour till takeoff, a 15-minute ride on a good day, probably I’m OK, right? Not my favorite way to do air travel but hey, we’ll make it work.

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A motorcade delay later (DC, right?) I glance at my watch and see my rideshare is scheduled to pull up to Terminal 2 at 7:38. Yikes. Of course I got held up at TSA. Got wanded and since I gambled on not taking off my Miraculous Medal they had me pull up my tie and pull my chains out of my shirt. Ugh. Oh yeah, and they ran my laptop through twice. My mind is racing. I know they have a moving walkway in the terminal. I hope my gate is close. Nobody’s getting souvenirs. I’m not exactly sprinting but this is more than a brisk walk. I get to the gate with eight minutes to spare to see two agents asking, “Are you Steve? Do you have like 5 missed calls? Because we’ve been calling you.”

Then they look up. I’m still dressed from meetings all day.

“Oh, you were on The Hill, huh? You can still make it. Last one. We’ll hold the door. Go.”

Not gonna lie, I ate that up. I look like somebody important enough to be on The Hill.

I had family in DC growing up and as a young dude we made a couple of summer vacations to the Nation’s Capital and touristed ourselves senseless. Learned how to take the Metro, visited every branch of the Smithsonian, the monuments, Mount Vernon, White House tour, Arlington National Cemetery, sat in the gallery for a session of the House, all of it.

So, there was plenty of nostalgia these couple of days, but no time for sightseeing. We got work to do.

Teach Plus is a non-partisan group of teacher leaders who advocate for issues in the education space. I spent last school year as an Indiana Policy Fellow, then had an opportunity to join the Teach Plus National Policy Advisory Board for the 2024 cohort.

Since January I’ve been studying specific appropriations and pieces of legislation and meeting virtually with staffers for my representative and senators. Teach Plus does a Hill Day every July, and that was the target for us, but with the appropriations window closing and Teacher Appreciation Week near, our directors called for an “emergency Hill Day”the first week of May.

Which is how I ended up in a hotel room in Union Market on a Monday night studying for face-to-face meetings with staffers and planning a course of action.

Our group ened up having almost 60 meetings, including a couple of meetings with our actual senators.

And if you are wondering, yes that was exactly as cool as you think it might be. I’m not a star-struck individual just in general which served me well this week. Oh, that’s Cory Booker walking across the ground floor of the Hart Senate Office Building? Cool. We got work to do.

I joked often in the week leading up to our Hill Day that we were the mop-up crew. The state teachers of the year were in DC last week (way cooler than us), had a White House dinner and ceremony and everything and I’m like “well obviously everyone here is sick of talking to teachers”.

But you’d be surprised. Everyone we spoke with was open to a conversation. It helped that we had already built relationships, and also our director laid out kind of a four-square strategy: Republican/Democrat on the x-axis, House/Senate on the y. The plan for each meeting was based on quadrant. It helped that the Teach Plus NPAB Fellows are a passionate, smart group of teachers who came to do more than tell stories.

We showed up to every sit-down with mastery of the topic, handouts, and report language to influence policy.

We all felt like we got the job done this week. Cool of the evening, and all. There’s seven months left of this fellowship, and there is plenty more work to do, but a meeting late Wednesday afternoon energized us all.

Our group spent an hour with Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona. He thanked us for our work, outlined his vision for education, then turned the floor over to us. He asked two questions, then had us reply one by one around the massive conference table. I gave my remarks some thought as others responded. Here’s what I had to offer:

“I’ll start in the same place Tess and Fran and Perla did, with “how do I feel”. This year has been rough. I teach in an aging Rust Belt city that is losing population, in a district that is losing students and is financially distressed. We are closing three elementary schools at the end of this year and cutting teachers. This has weighed upon all of us, from administrators to teachers to students. Everyone is walking around under a dark cloud and waiting for the next bad news to drop.

But, in keeping with several other teachers’ comments today on the need to reimagine what school looks like and how we assess kids, my school is in the third year of a transition to project-based learning. And being from the Region, I have sharp elbows so I took that bad news and turned it into a project.

I gave my students access to the last 20 years of enrollment data, which is publicly available. One of our math standards is to take a set of data, model it mathematically, and use that model to make projections. Which my students did, and then presented their findings at our project showcase for faculty and community members.

So not only did we cover the math we needed to cover, my students also learned they could use math to help them understand what was happening in the world around them.

What I have found is that when we give students a chance to do real work with real tools to solve real problems that really affect their real world, incredible things happen. 

I glanced up as I mentioned “the standards” and “modeling mathematically” and I saw eyes light up around the table. There might have even been snaps.

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But that was the group that went to DC this week. Acknowledge that it is tough. Then dig in and do the work. Powerhouse group of people right there.

Dilan and Kira and some guy from the Region and Alisa and Emily and Hamilaat and Fran and The US Secretary of Education and Laura and Lorelei and Tess and Ralph and Emma (the fellow Rebel) and Silvia and Perla and (in spirit cuz they were already in the air) Barquita and Melina. Or as Laura called us in the group chat today: “The Dream Team”.

So, Teacher Appreciation Week.

My union came through with breakfast this morning and my admin team provided pizza, salad, chips, and drinks at the faculty meeting. I felt appreciated.

It’s good to be home. But I’m ready to go back in July. Because for 48 hours in DC I felt pretty damn important. Not only because what I did this week matters. But because what I do every damn day matters.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Wednesday broke a lot of people in our building.

Last Tuesday my school board voted to close three elementary schools at the end of the year. It was the worst-kept secret in the Region as the closings had been long-rumored, generating a series of demonstrations by teachers and community members.

At the same meeting the board voted to approve layoffs for 173 employees with support staff, paraprofessionals, and custodial staff taking the brunt of the cuts.

Wednesday about half the teachers in the district woke up with a mysterious illness, causing the district to close for the day.

That afternoon the mayor held a virtual town hall and stated, “I don’t think they’re done cutting. If we don’t fix the funding problem, next year it may be Morton High School.” (46:40 mark of the video).

Morton High School. My school. Well. That’s a lot to process for one day. I have no desire to change schools again, but a year or two from now I may not have a choice.

Most of us just want to put this year out of its misery. Teachers are done with PD, kids want to get to the last week of May and get out of here.

It’s a delicate balancing act, reading the room.

In my district tests and quizzes account for 70% of the overall grade so the last thing I need is to offer my kids an assessment that will bomb their grade. But wait Mr. Dull, isn’t it your kids’ job to prepare for quizzes? I mean, if it’s that big a factor in their grade, shouldn’t they take it more seriously?

Yes, but. It’s also my job to determine the most appropriate way to assess my kids, to select a way for my kids to demonstrate their learning. In the first week of May in Algebra II, wrapping up the rationals unit, that looks like an activity. Choose your own adventure, it says here.

Enter DIY Row Games.

Row Games were a darling in the heyday of the #MTBoS. Students pair up and work a page of problems in two columns, one column for each student. Catch is, the answers for each pair of problems is the same. So the exercise is student-centered and self-checking. There’s a couple of folders of pre-made row games out there.

I grabbed one up (multi-step equations) to use as a bellringer, then set the hook: “Man, the answers to both problems were the same. All the way down? Hunh, that’s a weird coincidence. How’d the teacher that made this page do that?”

So we bounced some ideas around and eventually settled on working the problem backwards, starting with the answer and using inverse operations to work back to the original problem.

Then I introduced the assignment. (Doc here, template here). Students work in pairs to create a page of row games, one each of simplify, multiply, divide, add, and subtract rationals. They turn in a page of problems, a worked-out answer key, and the work they did to go backwards from the “answer” to the original problem.

They were tentative at first, then started to dig in. I made my way around the room to check for stuck students and demonstrate the process for a problem from the bellringer.

The big payoff came late. Students were working diligently on Day Two of the activity and making good progress but starting to sense they wouldn’t finish. The question developed independently from two sides of the room: “Can we keep working on this tomorrow?”

Wait. You guys want to do more math? On a Friday?

I don’t know….. well, maybe. OK. Fine. Due date is tomorrow.

And yes, I totally planned that in advance.

Because I’ve been doing this for a while and you learn to anticipate these things. So instead of all of us being frustrated with a traditional pencil/paper quiz over a really tough topic, bad grades and hurt feelings all over the place, I got kids so invested in an activity they want to keep working on it for a third day.

That’s a good Thursday in Room 130 right there.

Oh, and they’ll see Row Games again. I plan to take one or two of the student-made sets and use them as part of my semester review package coming up a few weeks from now. Because authentic audiences are awesome.

The coalition of state representatives from my Region put together a press release this week blaming the state GOP leadership for my district’s financial woes. (Indiana is super-majority Republican in the Statehouse so one party has great influence on education policy). You can make a case for their position on property tax caps and referendums and vouchers, just like you can question the decision-making at the local level. I spent all of last school year as a Teach Plus Policy Fellow studying the school funding model in Indiana. There’s aspects that need fixing.

But what I do know is that both of those things, state-and local-level policy-making, are outside of my control. I can advocate, but I don’t get to make laws. What I do get to do is make decisions about how I organize my classroom and plan my instruction to suit my students’ needs.

Choose Your Own Adventure. And I’m going to keep doing just that until they take my keys and lanyard away.

Should I Stay Or Should I Go

I’ve been told by teaching colleagues that I am too analytical. It’s a pretty good read. I’ve never been comfortable flying by the seat of my pants. I’d rather have as much information as I can get and have the pieces more or less in place before making a move.

Although that one Teddy Roosevelt quote hangs behind my desk because sometimes you just have to make a decision.

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It’s not always possible to have all the knowledge you need. To be honest, a key moment in my life was when I learned to operate in a grey area, when “black-and-white” is not one of the options.

Did I ever tell you about the time we bought a house sight-unseen? Moving back to the Region from Vegas, we had enough money to fly back for job interviews but not enough to come back a second time for house hunting. We did our research online (on the baby Internet back in 2005), my wife’s stepdad was our agent, we’d find a house, he’d check it out and report back. He eventually did the walkthrough of the house we selected on his flip phone while we stood in the kitchen of our house in Vegas.

Sold. We never saw it in person until we pulled up in the U-Haul.

That’s when I understood the Colin Powell 40-70 rule. General Powell felt if he couldn’t be 40% sure the outcome of a decision, that was a “no”. But he also recognized he would never have 100% of the information, so he set 70% as the threshold. Once he was 70% positive, that was a “go”.

And so it is in so many areas of life. Gather your data, assess the probabilities, move forward. It’s why the probability unit in Algebra II is so rich with opportunities for real-life connections. Yeah, we do do plenty of Fundamental Counting Principle practice, we figure permutations and combinations (“How many ways can three runners finish first, second, and third in the 100-meter dash in a field of eight runners?”)

But the big money payoff is when students see how understanding probabilities and likely outcomes can help them manage an uncertain (at best) world.

We start the prob/stats unit with a deep dive into March Madness, including a bracket challenge with their new-found handicapping knowledge.

Then out of long habit I make the assessment for the unit a pair of activities: First (because Indiana), John Scammell’s “Free Throws For The Win” .

They were like “Mr. Dull can we do something happy tomorrow? Because that was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”

We follow that up with an investigation into the Monty Hall Problem (doc here). Both days they do real math and see the real applications of probability that they can start using really as soon as tomorrow.

The big takeaways are that even what seem like highly improbable things still sometimes happen. And that just because something is statistically your best move doesn’t always guarantee success. You have twice the probability of winning the car on Let’s Make A Deal by switching doors, but in any one play (which is all you get when you are a contestant), there is still a 1-in-3 chance you get the Zonk.

Goat 🙂

Weigh your options, and roll.

A lot of my friends in the building are making exactly these mental calculations these days. At our next school board meeting next week the district is expected to announce its decision on school closures and teacher layoffs. Consensus is we will shutter 4 of our 12 elementary schools, and we were told back in November that the defeat of a funding referendum would require cutting 250 teaching positions.

But as a colleague of mine pointed out, folks aren’t waiting. In his words, they are “RIFfing themselves”, lining up new jobs before the axe can fall. In some cases, making the move before the school year is done. We had four resignations from just my building on the personnel report last month, and I suspect the number will be similar this month. (That’s 10 percent of our teaching staff in eight weeks, if you’re scoring at home). And can you blame them? As the famous economist observation goes, when you lose your job, unemployment in your house is 100%. It doesn’t matter what the “official” statistics say.

I’ve been on the other side. Some time ago I left the district I call “the Family Business” for a green leafy suburban school. Well, the grass isn’t always greener. I came back. For the people and the kids. I took a pay cut to do it. There’s no district out there where the hallways are paved with gold. Few are paying significantly more than we are. There are so many districts (even in relatively affluent areas) in financial distress right now, it’s the living embodiment of “the devil you know”. You could jump districts and land someplace worse.

I feel horrible for the families who will have to make plans for their kids to attend a different school next year. For the kids who will leave their friends. I ache for my teacher friends who are going to be forced out of a job they’ve poured their soul into. For the clerical staff and custodians who won’t even be allowed to finish out the year. I’ve been told that due to the number of vacancies and emergency permit folks in the district, teachers with a degree and a license are probably safe. But even for the folks who are above the cut line, the daily anxiety over the future permeating my building is physically exhausting.

And the concessions that will likely be written into our contract (yeah that’s not even settled yet, five months after the state-mandated deadline to conclude negotiations) are frankly petty and punitive and are chasing teachers away. Folks who stay will get no raise and shoulder the burden of an unsustainable insurance premium increase.

Tuesday of Holy Week, this line from the Gospel of John hit hard:

Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.” So he dipped the morsel and [took it and] handed it to Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot.  After he took the morsel, Satan entered him. So Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.”

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2013:26-28&version=NABRE

That’s all of us right now: whatever the plan is, get on with it. Just tell us. Then we can take that information and make a decision.

Just like they taught us back in Algebra II all those years ago.

Keepin’ It Real

all: To keeping it 100.
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We had our last-ever New Tech Network training this week. The project-based learning model which arrived with great fanfare concurrent with our district’s consolidation from four high schools to two will continue in practice, but our contract with NTN is up and is a luxury in our district’s current financial state.

We spent part of the day with our school coach doing learning walks through our classrooms, looking for evidence for the Thinking indicator on our evaluation rubric. One of the descriptors is that students apply what they have learned to “real-world” situations.

Back in the 2010’s those would have been fightin’ words amongst my online math connects. Like, what even is “real-world”? Especially if the problems don’t match up with our kids’ actual, real-life, real world.

While state standards, evaluation tools, and every textbook ever call for applications of the math, in reality that means students often wrestle with problems that have been rendered unrecognizable by the contortions required to bend them into a word problem.

Our Wednesday Early-Release PD was a session from the New Tech Annual Conference last summer on Problem-based learning, what the NTN people call PrBL. (If you know three-act math, you have a good mental image). Long story short, we created a math fight over the proper way to evaluate exponential expressions, including negative exponents.

The assembled math, science, and special ed teachers were good sports despite well, (gestures broadly) everything. They played the role of freshmen algebra students to a T. It took a nudge to get them to describe their thinking, not just to speak out loud the math they’d put down on poster paper. But they got the spirit right. Student-centered learning, with a competitive twist.

My co-presenter did an outstanding job of pointing out that this wasn’t a “real-world” problem as traditionally understood but it hooked them in in a way no worksheet or MathXL assignment can.

Algebra II taxes a teacher’s ability to make “real-world” connections like maybe no other high school math course. I once described the second semester of Algebra II as “weird” to an administrator, which didn’t win me any points with him but I think at least accurately described a super-theoretical, super-abstract semester of math that relies in large part on a group of kids with terminal junioritis recalling and using their algebraic manipulation skills from long ago.

So we do a lot of projects second semester. This year (in a nod to NTN’s project-based model) I led off the probability and statistics unit with a March Madness investigation and Bracket Challenge. That hooked them in and has served as an anchor as we work our way through the unit. Plus it gives me something other than gambling as a real-world application.

Today, once we had finished notes and guided practice on probability of multiple events, I switched gears again. I had hinted that TV game shows all revolve around math, and several kids copped to watching The Price Is Right at grandma’s house as kids.

So I shared a piece of video with them.

We paused often as we went along. “How many of those baseballs have digits on them? How many strikes? OK, what’s the probability she draws a ball with a digit on it? Five out of eight? Awesome.”

I let Drew Carey fill in the contestant on the rules, and then a quick aside: “OK, so there’s five digits in the price of the car. How many ways can she put 5 digits in order? Five factorial, yeah. So somebody do the math. What is that? 120 ways? Wow.”

Every time she pulled a baseball out of the bag we re-calculated the probabilties of a digit and a strike.

“OK, so if she gets a number and puts it in the right position, then how many ways are there to arrange the other four digits? Just 24? Let’s go.”

We agonized as she struggled to put the digits in order to nail down the price of an Alfa Romeo. (A what now? When we were kids that would have been a pretty nice Chevy, but welcome to 2024). Everybody had a pretty good sense the first digit wasn’t a two but after that? Anybody’s guess. Including the contestant, who wasn’t able to place a single digit before striking out. “This game is impossible! How does anybody ever win?”

It was five quick minutes, but five good minutes. Some rapid-fire, non-Google-able practice on a couple of the topics we’d covered this week.

And it made the math real. Which is all I want with 38 school days left and spring fever here and teacher cuts and school closures looming. When teaching’s all I got left, I’m gonna use every tool I got.

Ten Days Out

“I’m too old to get excited about spring break”.

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.

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 district will present a list of teacher job cuts at its next meeting April 2. Then it is expected to announce multiple elementary school closures at its April 23 meeting.

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?

But wait a week or so to do it.

Adventures In PBL – SCH Enrollment Investigation

Complied from publicly available IDOE Enrollment data

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.

(Planning doc, student doc.)

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.

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.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/03/10/editorial-stacy-davis-gates-chicago-teachers-union/

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.

https://www.nwitimes.com/opinion/columnists/jerry-davich/jerry-davich-whats-the-next-big-thing-in-northwest-indiana-region-visionaries-look-into-the/article_f15bebb6-c924-11ee-af4b-eb5b7981e3a3.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

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.”

https://www.nwitimes.com/opinion/columnists/jerry-davich/jerry-davich-whats-the-next-big-thing-in-northwest-indiana-region-visionaries-look-into-the/article_f15bebb6-c924-11ee-af4b-eb5b7981e3a3.html#tracking-source=home-top-story

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?

Tipping Point

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.

https://sites.google.com/elwood.k12.ny.us/mskarch/natural-helpers

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?”

Source

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!)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2016/03/07/80-20-rule/?sh=675e458e3814

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:

The unroll is here:

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?

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.

Just Chillin’

I’ve known for a while that the day was coming when I’d be too old to battle a raging snowstorm on my drive in to work. I am a safe driver (if somewhat of a leadfoot) and have decades of experience driving in bad weather, including 15 years of commuting to work 185 days a year on the notorious Borman Expressway (the portion of I-80/94 in Lake County).

Until that day arrives I know that in winter I need to be prepared ahead of time for an e-learning day that may be called on short notice. Sometimes that is an assignment from our online math tool provided by our textbook publisher, other times a digital activity that may not necessarily involve computation.

Back in the embryonic days of e-learning in my area I created a Desmos activity for just that purpose, and it came in handy earlier this week when a snow day and a day off for bitterly cold temperatures bookended Martin Luther King weekend.

Rather than virtually teaching a topic I’d have to re-teach the folllowing day in person, on Tuesday I reached for Just Chillin’, a Desmos activity where my students investigate how temperature and wind speed affect the wind chill figure reported by forecasters.

The activity includes mathematical modeling, interpreting graphs, and using a model to make predictions, all kind of evergreen topics in algebra and beyond. After I set the scene with a couple of beach photos (one summer/one winter), students read an article outlining how Antarctic scientists tested their hypothesis that an increase in wind speed increased the rate of heat transfer.

Next I show them three points on a coordinate plane representing wind chill at three different air temperatures with a wind speed of 15 mph and ask them to determine the type of function suggested by the points:

The next screens ask them what temperature would combine with a 15 mph wind to create a minus-30 wind chill, or a minus-25 wind chill.

This is a skill I spiral back to often in activities, because it is a really good life skill in addition to being a state standard and a staple of testing. Also because it is an area where my students have historically struggled.

Then, a twist:

That point isn’t on the graph, which only contained temperature and wind chill data with a 15 mph wind. They have to take into account the relationship they saw from now five points on the graph, and determine how to estimate the conditions with a stronger wind. (Translate? Something else?)

That was a tougher challenge. They were pretty much guessing at this point. Although honestly, closer to correct than their responses to the questions where they were using a graph or equation.

I showed them the actual formula for wind chill, which involves two variables and is more complex that I needed the first part of this activity to be. So, kids, which variable (temperature or wind speed) has a greater effect on the wind chill, just from looking at the equation?

We haven’t quite reached rational exponents yet (next week) so I knew that 0.16 power was going to be about as clear as mud. So let’s look at the data a different way:

I was hoping they would zero in on rate of change given just the one row and column. The change in wind chill at 35 mph is pretty consistent per 5 degree change in temperature while the change slows rapidly as wind speed increases in the 5 degree column. Almost no one picked up on that. It may have been a factor of remote learning, it may be that they transposed the temperature and wind speed axis, but I didn’t get the traction I thought I would from this question.

So we closed with a couple questions putting the students in charge of “school”:

I appreciate that they are upfront and real with their responses. The last slide is the entire wind chill chart I excerpted earlier, with the “dangerous” level wind chills highlighted in a darker shade of blue. Those are the readings below minus-25, which not coincidentally is the traditional cutoff in many districts for calling off school.

That led to a quality conversation, which kind of rescued the day for me. In my experience, “what would you do if you were in charge?” is a winning question in a high school classroom. Probably something there about student voice and agency, if I had to guess.

All told, I was pleased with how the day went. My students stayed engaged on a Google Meet with me for pretty much an hour, which as my veterans of the remote teaching game know, is saying something. We did some math, I learned about their strengths and weaknesses with some foundational algebra skills, and the topic was obviously timely.

This class came to me at the semester from a teacher who left our building, so I also got to slowly introduce them to Desmos activities, problem-based learning, and “how we do math” in Room 130. Which is also a plus. Pretty positive e-learning day as I see it.

As an epilogue to the first graf way up there: parts of northwest Indiana got slammed with lake effect snow overnight. The band set up over communities a little bit to my east and they got literally two feet of snow today. Some roads won’t re-open for 24-36 hours according to reports I saw. I was right on the edge of the plume so right around the time I was starting the shower this morning and system snow moved out, the lake effect flakes started falling. And one by one, my local districts started calling for e-learning today. The roads were terrible. Meanwhile, my district was well outside the band and got about an inch of snow, if that.

Decision time.

A quick look at Google Maps and INDOT’s live web cams, and a swing around my socials told me the road conditions were lousy for most of my commute. What to do? My class was well set up for a sub if needed. I was in touch with a couple of my math colleagues who also drive in from a distance and we could see this was going to be a challenging drive, if not outright dangerous.

So I made the call.

Not gonna lie, the district’s attempt to cap sick days over a career factored into the decision. A sick day is basically Halloween candy under the proposed contract, like a timeout near the end of a half in football. Can’t take it with you. Might as well use it. Especially when weighing a sick day against a possible injury and car repair from an accident on snowy, slick expressways.

Easiest call I’ve made in a while. No regrets.