Category: edtech

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.

Source

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.

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 â€” and his city in particular â€” 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?

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.

Just Your Garden Variety Five-Day Weekend

I live where we get winter. The kind of winter that has a tendency to wreak havoc on school schedules. As I write, I’m waiting on my district leadership to make the call and join the growing number of Region districts that are going to an e-day (or cancelling outright) due to frigid temperatures and brutal wind chills.

Sunday morning in the Region.

Five-day weekends are exceedingly rare but that’s what’s on tap after a snow day Friday and Martin Luther King Day today. And that great cheer you heard from a distance is school kids everywhere (and let’s not kid ourselves, teachers, too) rejoicing over a mid-January break. And yes, I know we just had legit two weeks off between Christmas and Epiphany. But still.

That probably tells up something about where we’re all at from the neck up when it comes to school and life in general in the coldest, darkest month of the year.

Want your own? Amazon link here and no I don’t get a commission but I just ordered one.

A favorite parlor game (in my house anyway) is watching which districts resist any kind of closure, and how districts phrase their closing announcements. One local district is kind of famous for a superiority complex (“Town X Community Schools are open in-person and on-time today” or “We live in northwest Indiana where we have winter, be sure to leave early and drive safely on your way to school today”.)

Which, fine, you’ve got a brand to maintain, do you, but sometimes it’s OK to just take the day and keep everybody safe. You can make it up next month and the kids are still gonna learn. You go all-out, 90 mph all day every day and something’s going to break.

Even marathon runners build in cut-back weeks to their schedule to avoid injury.

With that in mind, this weekend I tapped out of an online course I’ve been working on since October.

My district is backing a couple of very large shifts in practice right now, The New Tech Network for problem-based learning, and Modern Classroom Project (self-paced learning similar to an in-class flip model.)

We have an instructional coach over PBL and another of our coaches is trained in MCP. I felt strongly that in order to best support the math and science teachers I work with as an IC that I needed to be personally familiar with all the systems we’re asking them to put in place.

So the first big project in my class rolled out in December. And one of our ICs convinced me to take the plunge and do the online MCP training with her (strength in numbers, right?)

I want to walk my talk. Which is good. And hey, my dad worked 40 years in a steel mill so blue-collar work ethic is literally in my DNA.

The online course consists of five modules, each with a soft due date, then there is a hard due date for the entire course. That due date passed this weekend. I had planned everything out to wrap up the final two modules after Winter Break, but I got hung up on module 4. After a couple of rounds of revision, I was running out of time to work on the final module. Then the I got a change of class schedule which required an afternoon of work to prepare for, and the winter storm descended on us (cancelling a day of school and keeping me out of the building where some of the video tools I would need are located), and I couldn’t make the time work.

The training is not required to do my job (although I obviously see the value in it), and I already know how to run a flipped classroom. In previous rounds of training my district had offered a stipend to teachers who completed the MCP course but things being the way they are these days that was off the table, so it cost me zero dollars to decide against finishing. Self-image aside, there was not a single factor that argued strongly enough in favor of finishing the course.

There’s other aspects of my job to do though, and this seemed like a good time to take something off my plate.

There was a time not that long ago that I would have powered through and finished the course, even if cost me sleep or family time or came at the expense of other duties. But I’m a little older these days, and hopefully a little wiser. If load management is a thing in the NBA, it for sure is OK for a teacher to exercise a little self-care for a long-term benefit.

And of course, as a reflective teacher, I thought a little bit about my students in similar situations. They make decisions daily about when “good enough” is good enough, and we’ve got to respect that. Maybe they’re on to something. Following the lead of Kim Strobel and applying the Minimum Effective Dose:

And sometimes you find out that by pulling your foot off the gas just a hair, you can still get what you want. (The “try easier” philosophy). Jim Bouton in his book Ball Four addressed this concept. Paraphrasing, he said baseball players can’t try to psyche themselves up like football players do. If they did, they’d go out swinging the bat hard, and miss the pitch by a mile.

Swing and a miss. Source

In a related story, this email hit my inbox this morning:

Only thing I don’t get is the support of a dedicated mentor but other than that I can still turn in my final submissions and get the certification. I can live with that.

Oh and if you were wondering, late this afternoon my district leadership announced the e-learning day for tomorrow. A five-day weekend it is. Gonna make an instant pot full of soup, and make some e-day plans for tomorrow, and live plans for Wednesday, and watch some football, leave the faucets running a little, and sleep like a baby.

Plane As Paste

It started (as most things did in the naughts/early teens) with an xkcd comic. (The actual title is NSFW).

Source. Used under CC BY-NC 2.5 DEED

Then the internet’s most brilliant math-teacher-minds got ahold of it and Pomegraphit was born.

There was definitely a minute where coordinate plane things were all the rage amongst my online PLN.

Spend enough time with algebra teachers and the conversation turns deficit model: “They can’t even plot a point?” Which might be followed by “But with Desmos they don’t have to.” Maybe that makes this type of exercise even more valuable than it was when it originally rolled out. Here’s Dan Meyer when he wrote about the process of developing the Pomegraphit activity:

A gridded plane is the formal sibling of the gridless plane. The gridded plane allows for more power and precision, but a student’s earliest experience plotting two dimensions simultaneously shouldn’t involve precision or even numerical measurement. That can come later. Students should first ask themselves what it means when a point moves up, down, left, right, and, especially, diagonally.

https://blog.mrmeyer.com/2017/pomegraphit-how-desmos-designs-activities/

Then: I somehow stumbled upon Lucas Kwan Peterson, the food writer for the LA Times. I think this might have been the tweet that sent me on the quest:

His shtick is ranking categories of things on a coordinate plane – spicy snacks, Halloween candy, fast-food french fries, Girl Scout cookies. And I saw an opening:

What does it mean to be further right on the x-axis in this image? Higher up on the y-axis? And now it was plain as paste. Or, plane as paste, pardon the pun.

And in the days of teaching Algebra II from my dining room table, the Spicy Snack Desmos activity was a hit with my remote learning kids.

But since then, I’ve wondered: could we do more with it? Could my kids create their own Peterson-style coordinate plane ranking, of a subject of their own choosing? Then I switched to geometry and the question kind of went on the back burner. Until this year when Algebra II was back on the menu and I needed a next-to-last-day-of-the-quarter activity.

Got it. Went and dug up the 1.0 version of this activity I made for an e-day a couple of years ago. Made some edits and refined the questioning (one of my ongoing areas of emphasis for myself, especially post-pandemic).

And I rolled out The Coordinate Plane Power Rankings activity. I wanted students to come up with their own characteristics for the x- and y-axis labels, and to be able to insert photos and text of their items, so Google Slides was the right home for this activity.

I showed them Peterson’s Spicy Snacks graphic and asked the FH Doritos vs. FH Cheetos question, got some positive feedback on their understanding of positioning, and challenged them to create their own Coordinate Plane Rankings, using a topic of their own interest:

They jumped in and as I made my way from table group to table group I was able to peek over shoulders, encourage, ask clarifying questions, and just in general enjoy watching my kids create.

We had about an even split between kids who identified two strong and somewhat unique characteristics for the rankings, and those who just kind of stated the same idea twice. But they had strong feelings when they wrote their justifications for the rankings and I knew I had a good hook. We can always go back in and tweak the math understanding part after the fact, right? Even in a 45-minute class.

I had one more question to ask, as an extension. We looked at Peterson’s Fast Food French Fries graphic and write-ups, noted the shape of the grouping of points and:

We ran out of time to give this one the attention that it deserved. The categories were “texture” and “taste” and I was hoping they’d see how closely related the two descriptors were – like, it’s really hard to have a good-tasting fry with bad texture. That’s either a chip, or mashed potatoes. A location deep in the second or fourth quadrant doesn’t really make sense here.

But a couple of the kids who focused on music got the basics. Did you rank a song that had great lyrics but you didn’t like the beat? And the world is full of bangers that one day you look up and say “Wait, what did they just sing? Uhhhhh…. yikes”. In some categories that’s possible in a way that the fries relationship isn’t.

Also: everything he said about Del Taco is gospel truth:

Last time I had them I was sitting in the front seat of my car in a grocery store parking lot just off the 95 in Vegas and I’m not sure but I thought I faintly heard angel choirs singing.

One last thing: we’re in our third year of a conversion to a project-based learning school so we’re always seeking out community partners and/or an authentic audience, and even tho I haven’t made a #teach180 post in years I still love bragging on my kids on social. So I shared some of the day’s work and tagged Peterson in the tweet.

And this happened:

I agree. And thanks.

One other teaching/coaching-related thought: our evaluation rubric language has changed in the last couple of years, leaning heavily towards student-centered/student-focused classrooms as our exemplar. I definitely saw my kids taking control of their learning during this activity, creating a document that relied on understanding of concepts and then interpreting the graphs they made (evergreen algebra state standard). And we used a real-world example of the type of work I was asking them to do so they had an idea of what the final product could look like.

Those are good days in the classroom. Fun days. Fun with a purpose. I’ve got a few more things in the tank that will keep moving me in the direction we want to be as a staff and as a building, and hopefully keep my kids curious about math.

And if this post made you hungry, go check out Peterson’s take (inspired by the success of The Bear) on why it’s hard to get real Italian Beef outside of Chicago. And don’t skip on the gravy or the giardiniera.

Goals

Back in the early days of my quest to learn how to be better at teaching, I stumbled across Shawn Cornally, an ambitious and thoughtful science and math teacher in The Middle Of Nowhere, Iowa. His brilliant blog no longer exists (RIP ThinkThankThunk) but he is best known now as the co-founder of Iowa BIG, a project-based school in Cedar Rapids.

Now that we’re on our own PBL journey in my district, I encountered Cornally’s thinking again on a podcast he produced with BIG co-founder Trace Pickering. One episode the two chopped it up on project-based learning especially as it relates to math and science. It was a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation (one student proposed a project to learn the best way to smoke bacon, and not only designed and fabricated his own smoker, he won a ribbon at the county fair). Cornally closed with the following thought, which was so powerful I want to quote it verbatim:

I’m proud of the experience we’ve given every single student, even the students who don’t succeed, or leave partway through their experience here. I think that we always represent to them a reality where adults respect teenagers, where the community’s problems are the school’s problems, we’ve modeled for students that learning is something you do, not because “when am I gonna use this?” or “exactly how much money will this make me?”, but because it makes you smarter, and it makes you more pliable, and it makes you more useful, in any situation. The question shouldn’t be “when am I ever gonna use this?”, the question should be “am I smart enough to extend this into any part of my life?” That should always be the question you’re asking.

The Iowa BIG Podcast Season 2 Episode 11 https://open.spotify.com/episode/2phrhncf8TcPiu41htKEVY?si=6VtuRCn6TU2GMJ2Og9IVBg

That sounds a lot like the goals we have for our building (in an aging Rust Belt city) in our third year of a consolidation and our third year of a conversion to a project-based learning school.

Trying to duplicate Iowa BIG in our traditional high school setting would be like trying to build a modern-day seating bowl in a historic stadium.

Soldier Field, Chicago. Photo cred: By Sea Cow – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=120032773

It might not quite fit.

But our journey can definitely benefit from benchmarking some of the thought processes that went into the Iowa BIG launch.

The founders’ vision came into focus as a result of the Billy Madison Project – more than 60 community members were invited to experience school as students do. What did they learn?

  • Everything kids do in school is fake. Students do work for one person. The teacher. There is no authentic audience who has a reason to care about what they have produced.
  • There are no interactions with people outside of their narrow age band, so students don’t really learn how to work with people older or younger than them.
  • School hasn’t really changed much in 60 years.
  • Every teacher’s class is The Most Important Thing In The World. No one recognizes that the kid who has the lead role in the play that premieres tonight could give a shit about finding the zeros of a polynomial function in Algebra II this morning.
  • The whole point seems to be grade-chasing rather than actual functional learning.

Cornally has pointed out (especially in the STEM fields) that we have designed the curriculum and the standards around the 0.05 percent of people who are going on to be Ph. Ds in math. But then we miss the rest of the students badly.

And they know it.

So what do we do with that?

I’ll note that the idea of community partnerships in the city of Hammond is nothing new. The district’s FIRST Robotics team, Team Hammond 71, is a four-time world champion. That is the natural product of a partnership between industry mentors in the city, and the students of the city of Hammond.

There’s tons of problems that need solving in Hammond, and no shortage of people who can articulate those problems to our kids. Boom. Instant community partners. If we know where to look and who to ask.

And it dovetails beautifully with our district’s vision. We spent our district-wide PD afternoon this week breaking apart the pillars of our Strategic Plan. The stated priorities are:

  • Student success
  • Retain students and staff
  • Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  • Improved communication at all levels
  • Fiscal responsibility
  • United district community

We know, from district office to the building level, that we need to make our instruction meaningful and equitable for all of our students. We know we need to leverage our community’s assets to better serve our students. We know we need to make school relevant to our students’ lives, to tap their passions to ignite their learning. We know we need to prepare them for “life after Morton”. That’s what project-based learning, properly executed, does.

They are good goals. Compelling goals. And: Our goals for our students are similar to Iowa BIG’s even though we might be approaching them from a slightly different trajectory.

It’s an ongoing process. Three weeks in to my new role as an instructional coach it’s been fascinating to see the movement behind the curtain to make project-based learning a reality in my building. As a teacher I’ve sat in on the PDs from the other side of the table, I’ve shared problem-based learning activities with my PLC. Now I’m in a position to share more widely, and to push the ball forward in this effort.

And for me, it’s comforting to know that there are people out there who have carved out the path we are trying to follow.

One last thing: the new principal at the other high school in my district is a former colleague of my mother-in-law, at a neaby district which has been on the project-based learning journey for a decade.

On a call with our New Tech building coaches this week, she pointed out that her daughter graduated from a New Tech school and all this time later she still raves about the experience. We have cheerleaders for the movement leading our schools. The pieces are in place to make the vision a reality.

“Am I smart enough to extend this into any part of my life?”

I might hang that as a sign over my classroom door.

The T-Shirt Shop

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Plenty of things have changed about my day-to-day with my shift to instructional coach in my building, but one constant is my attitude about creating and sharing materials. I’ve been sharing everything I make with my geometry colleagues the last two years, and I’ve continued to push resources out to my fellow algebra II teachers this year.

It might even be more imperative this time around. Our district shifted from an A/B block schedule to a traditional seven-period schedule this year, meaning everyone’s plan time has been cut in half and they’re seeing twice the amount of student work per day. Creating problem-based activities is probably pretty far down the list of priorities. Sound like they could use a partner in that effort.

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Someone to set the table.

Julie Reulbach’s linear inequalities discovery lesson has been floating around in my head for a while. Meanwhile, our Algebra II team is beginning the year with Unit 3 (Linear Systems). We recognize the need to support our students with review in graphing and solving equations if we’re gonna jump right in to systems first thing. And we are in Year 3 of an ongoing conversion to a project-based learning school.

Taking all those points into account, my solution was to build a problem-based activity (think Three-Act Math) around Reulbach’s work. Thus “The T-Shirt Shop” was born. (Documents here, here, and here).

The scenario was students reseraching costs for t-shirts and hoodies to be sold as a fundraiser for a student group. In our set-up, a community organzation in Hammond had donated $2000 to cover the costs. My kids dove right in, brainstorming “knows” and “need to knows” and posting them, so that the group could share the collected knowledge. Then it was off to Google “t-shirt printers” and spend some imaginary money.

It was about this time that one of my students (returning to me from geometry last year) asked, “Hey Mr. Dull, this is cool and all, but when are we gonna do real math?”

My two big takeaways:

  • Real Data, chosen well and used well, hooks students in like no textbook or worksheet problem can
  • Real Data is messy, and sometimes that serves as a hurdle to doing the math we’re focusing on in class

Once they had prices in hand, their job was to determine combinations of t-shirts and hoodies that would cost exactly $2000, combinations that would be less than $2000, and combinations that they could not afford because the cost was more than $2000. They recorded these on paper and then entered them to a Desmos graph I had set up in advance and shared to them through Schoology.

And here’s where things kind of went off the rails. The “real math” they were asking for a minute ago? I had to provide plenty of support when it came to writing an equation of their “exactly $2000” line. Which cost us time, and kind of took away some of the power of the reveal when I changed the equals sign to “less than or equals”. And they had trouble articulating the significance of the dots in the shaded region.

Once I helped them see what they were seeing I asked them a series of reflection questions to close out the day, so they could put in words what it meant that the dots were above the line or below the line, and set the table for next time when we’d use this process on paper to solve systems of linear inequalities.

Part of the New Tech model is grading using a rubric of some of the NTN Learning Outcomes. I selected Knowledge and Thinking, and Collaboration. I was looking specifically for them to use multiple representations of the data (table, graph, equation), to understand and express the significance of the points in the shaded region or outside the shaded region, and that they participated in the brainstorming and research.

I’ll count the two days as a partial success as we introduced the problem-based learning model we’ll use throughout the year, and used one of our go-to sites in Desmos to meet the state standard of graphing with technology. I’ll keep building in supports for the “actual math”.

And now that I’ve taken a test drive I’ll keep my eyes out for one of my Algebra II colleagues who might want to roll it out in their class. With my full support, of course.

Building Community

When I was a kid there was a common thread that ran through my circle of friends and teammates. It seemed like everybody I knew had East Chicago roots. Either their dad grew up there, or used to work at one of the mills. Starting in the 60s there was a migration south from the lakefront cities of East Chicago, Hammond, Gary, and Whiting to Highland, Munster, Merrillville, and points beyond. It felt like we went back to the old neighborhood often enough (family holiday gatherings, banking, lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall taco or sandwich stand) to keep it familiar, but it was also cool having a common bond with people in a “new” place.

So this moment in the social media landscape rings true. I’ve been on Twitter since 2010 and it’s been an invaluable source of connection amongst teachers, a place to commiserate with fellow Cubs/Bears/Bulls/Hawks fans, my go-to for breaking news and reactions.

Some of the coolest moments with the people I met during my just-completed year as an Indiana Teach Plus Policy Fellow started with some variation of the phrase “I knew you from Twitter before I ever met you in person”.

But a lot of the folks who made Twitter such a beneficial learning and sharing space are limiting their usage or leaving the platform altogether. I’m intertwined enough (and let’s be honest, a total creature of habit) that I probably won’t leave altogether, but I also want to be where the people I learn from and with are gonna be.

But in a moment when there are a gaggle of new social media platforms vying to be the landing spot for the Twitter diaspora, where is that?

“Feels like having to know how a computer worked in 1998”. Ooooh, I felt that.

Wherever we all end up, community is going to take time and intentionality to build. Some of my brilliant math teacher connects are working hard to do just that on Mastadon (or more precisely, mathstadon, as their instance is known).

But no lie, building community from the ground up in a new place is hard work. And although I recognize the value in my online community, I’ve got be be very aware of my capacity for that kind of heavy lift.

Is it possible to move the best parts of my Twitter experience to a new platform pretty much intact? It would almost have to be an extension or offshoot of an existing platform, right? Someplace with the reach and bankroll to claim a headstart?

Enter Threads, Meta Corportation’s rival to Twitter. It took over my social media world on Wednesday night, as the first five million or so folks signed up, including more than a handful of my follows on Twitter. Many of the early posts (threads? strings?) had that “walking into a party where you know a few people so you grab a drink and make your way around the room and smile and nod a lot” feel.

Of course Meta gives you the option at signup to follow all your Instagram connects on Threads, and it was interesting to see how many folks had some variation of “Oh man, I’m not the same guy on Twitter that you see on IG, bro”.

I was super-curious to see who the early-early adopters were. For me I checked Chicago sports teams (Blackhawks, Bulls, White Sox, Cubs jumped right in) and my news sources (Tribune yes, Hammond Times not yet, WaPo and the NYT of course), a hanfdul of colleges (oh man were IU, ND, and UNLV all over it), some weather people (Ginger Zee and Matthew Cappucci right at the front of the line). Then… teachers and assorted edu-humans. I had a sense of who I might find right away and I was mostly right. Either folks who tweeted their Threads handle, or who I knew were looking for new community, or who have been part of the online Edu-conversation and want to stay active in that space, they were all there.

I also knew that my IRL teacher people who I’m connected with on Twitter might take a little longer to make the move. Honestly, I’m a little too online for my own good and my teacher friends who have actual lives are probably blissfully unaware of the great Social Media Platform Shakeout of 2023.

Which is fine. Maybe we’re all overreacting and Twitter just keeps being what it (mostly) has always been and we keep sharing and learning together there. Or maybe we are pulling on the thread that unravels the entire tapestry.

Either way, I’m committed to staying connected and learning online. If that’s on Twitter, awesome. If Threads turns out to be the social media platform of our dreams, cool. You’ll find me there as @thedullguy. Let’s connect.

“Learning Is Iterative”

Late May, early June every school year I have flashbacks to college. Hanging on by my fingertips to make it through the end of the semester, knowing that an intense week of finals stood between me and a break for summer.

It felt like that this year for real. Hoo. I committed to presenting two sessions at the South Shore Summer of Learning Conference, plus my Equitable Funding working group from Teach Plus needed to put together a presentation (from a distance: two of us in the Region, two in Evansville) to summarize our learning during the course of the year for the year-end Showcase. That’s a lot of learning, and Displays of Learning, all packed in to a two-week or so span.

So, the South Shore Conference. My first time in person since 2019. I intentionally took last summer off, just to recover. I was pretty psyched to see teacher friends in person, and to sit in on sessions from folks who had something to teach me.

My Day Two morning was spent in the keynote and the breakout from Cornelius Minor, a middle school teacher from Brooklyn.

His breakout was titled “The Game Has Changed”, so we started on the same page. His philosophy is “Teaching is the inverse of learning.” Put another way, You taught, but how do you know that they learned?

He hooked in the hoops junkies right from jump.

For my youngbloods, that’s Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan in about 1991 or so. Magic was the bridge from the early 80s Bird-Dr. J era to Jordan’s dominance of the 90s. That’s a hell of a line: “These new kids are messing things up.” It wasn’t a old man shaking a fist at the clouds. It was one of the greatest players of all time recognizing he needed to match his game to the times. Adapt or die.

As Minor put it, “Don’t be that guy who’s like ‘man I was killin’ it in 2014′”.

The teaching game has changed. In a lot of ways. Now more than ever we need to ask ourselves, “You taught, but how do you know that they learned?” And maybe more important, how do we keep our kids from shutting down before learning can happen? Minor walks his talk: he challenged us to find a partner and teach them to put on and tie a shoe. Then he called out the quality teaching practices he saw, and used the experience to make his point.

Here’s how I paraphrased Minor’s message in my notes:

Teaching is iterative. We can’t tell, we need to show & demonstrate. Iterative? There is a 100% chance the first time a student tries a new thing its gonna go real bad. If they get it the first time, then you didn’t teach them. They already knew it before they got to you. 🙂

Second try goes less bad. The third try? Decent. Then we keep going until we get to proficient. But school often demands that kids “get it” on the first attempt and we penalize those who don’t. And on top of that, that’s when we assign a grade. (Sam & geometry).

So kids either refuse to engage at all (because they get scolded when they do bad the first time so they just don’t try) or, they get the bad grade after the first try and never make the second try.

Pushing through past the second try is “engagement”. Staying committed to the task when the task is not going well. (Need the social, emotional, and academic tools to stay committed tho).

All that goes for teachers too. There were 1000 of us signed up for the South Shore Conference (which were the first two days of summer break in my district). My cohort of 12 in Teach Plus, the 50 teachers who took part in the IDOE’s Teacher Leader Bootcamp, PLC time in my building, a year of PD and collaboration supporting our transition to a project-based learning school. Reading. Learning continuously, and applying what we learned to improve teaching and learning.

We’re all trying to keep learning, pushing past that “second try” in whatever challenge we face. For me this week, that looked like signing up for a Desmos webinar on their scripting language, Computation Layer.

The Desmos people have published a treasure trove of resources and I’ve been trying to teach myself CL since about forever, with marginal success. I needed a teacher. Or in the case of this webinar, two.

It helped, for real. I feel like I can bring some of my existing activities up to modern-day standards, and create some new, visually engaging activities to help my kids learn.

It’s been a good June personally and professionally. Got a week left of summer school and kids are piling up the credits.

And then we can exhale. But we snuck in a little Friday evening chill time this week. Because the body and soul need refreshing too.

Never happier than when we’re by water. That sunset was so perfect I didn’t want it to end. Quality payoff for a pretty intense last month or so of work.

Can I Treat This Like A Triangle?

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My Algebra 1A freshmen were very freshman-y today. Retaking a class they hate, last day before a four-day weekend, quiz day. Recipe for disaster. OK maybe “disaster” is a strong word but nobody’s packaging up today’s sixth hour and sending it to the Teaching Hall of Fame. The bell rang to end class and I took a minute to walk the room and straighten desks and pick up left-behind review pages and pencils and snack wrappers, feeling like a not-good teacher.

We’ll try again Tuesday.

But take your minute to sulk (a good playlist helps) and then get your head straight because geometry is coming in like four minutes. I had a singleton Grey Day ahead of the long weekend. We just started our Right Triangles & Trigonometry unit, two sections in, so we had done the Pythagorean Theorem and Special Right Triangles. We had our ups and downs, in about equal measure. What I need for this day is a Three-Act. Taco Cart has been a go-to for years, with the added benefit of being an application of the Pythagorean Theorem. Perfect for my Never-Ending Quest to fill in my students’ pandemic-related foundational holes.

We started off with a Would You Rather rates bellringer since we’re going to be thinking about distance and time.

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Then rolled right into the Desmosified version of the Taco Cart activity.

We did our noticing and wondering, made predictions, asked for more information, then I turned them loose in pairs to math this out. And in my last class of the day, it happened: “Mr. Dull, can I treat this like a triangle? And do that a-2 plus b-2 is c-2 thing?”

Hell yes you can. A right triangle even. Let’s go.

We’ve been kind of hammering away at using the principles of a right triangle to solve problems when we have a vertical and horizontal distance. And she connected the dots. It was epic. It’s super-important to me that we can take the training wheels off and let my kids ride on their own. (Pro-tip that was passed on to me by a wise older dad: take the pedals off your kids’ bike when they are learning to ride without training wheels. They’ll learn balance first, and the next thing you know, we ride at dawn!)

With some nudging many of the students produced solid work. Some quality questions in there too. “Were the tacos worth it?” “Do they really walk slower in sand?” “Don’t they have a car?”

Meet them where they’re at , walk with them to get started, and magic will happen.

So that’s how you recover from a disaster of a sixth-hour class. And how you roll into a long weekend. With singing, obvi.

Oh, and I’m not giving up on the freshmen. Gonna tweak my Algebra II survey/data project a little bit and turn them loose on that this week. Bribe them with a quiz grade. Do some math and give some hope. But that sounds like a whole ‘nother post.