Weekend Work Well Spent

When I started at my middle school four years ago, the school had just taken on the challenge of become a Middle Years Program school under the IB program. At the time, just happy with a job, I thought little of it. I set up my classroom and focused on surviving my first year in the school.  I've spent the last three years talking about the program at staff meetings, sharing the stress of authorization, and trying to make sense of all the pieces of such a large program. Still, it didn't feel as though I had figured out what this MYP thing really stood for.
So, when a training made it's way in to town I jumped on it. How could I pass up a chance to get formal training from the IB program, from the people who know it best and understand all the pieces and philosophies? It meant giving up a weekend, but I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
And what a weekend it turned out to be. I really REALLY read the IB mission statement for the first time. Not just a glance as I poured over documents- but a really good look at it:

The International Baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.
To this end, the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.
These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

As our presenter said-- it's unabashedly optimistic. That phrase, "unabashedly optimistic", pretty much sums up my attitude towards public education, and reading the mission statement almost made me feel like I had found a kindred spirit. Suddenly, it hit me. This is not just one teacher I found to talk about how the world can be better through education- this is an entire global connection of educators who not only believe this, but have worked to make it a systematic and implementable thing

So, for three days, I just absorbed. Words I felt like I've just been floating in for the last three years became tangible and real. Ideas that felt unfocused and out of reach in my past MYP work became focused and doable.

I got the energy surge.

The surge. The desire to work, work WORK until I get this right. To go to work early, to stay late, to think, to struggle. The desire that drives me when I know something must be done because I can make things better and brighter for my students. I can make things stronger and learning better- and when I suddenly realize I have the tools and knowledge to do this, I can't rest until I do. How could I?

never ever ever

Today I remembered why I never ever ever ever let 8th graders pick seats. Seating chart ALWAYS. That doesn't mean I don't sometimes sit kids with friends or what have you. I just never ever ever ever let them pick their own. 

Today, because of strange circumstances, I did. 

Now my head hurts. 

Saying the same thing all day...

Parent/teacher conferences are over. Whew. All went well. Really well. Until the last hour... why did the crazy family sign up to be the last family of the day. It makes it all the harder to remember that we had 11 other hours of conferences WITHOUT crazy in it.

spark

The weeks get long through September and October. There are few breaks and by October the honeymoon period passed long ago and we are truly into The Grind. Days end with me sitting in front of a desk covered with stacks of things I just don't want to deal with.
But then, there are these moments. These sparks that keep me going. Right now I'm well into a unit I particularly like. Square roots, Pythagorean Theorem, distance on a coordinate plan... some really wonderful topics that I've come to love teaching. Not only that, I believe I've become really GOOD at teaching this particular unit. I have a groove, a flow, a method to my madness.
So today, as we are working through problems, kids with mini whiteboards and me running around the room offering help, checking in, and having an all around good time, a student says, "It just really seems like you WANT us to learn."
Yeah. That felt good. Suddenly my tired feet were not so tired. Today, I just felt the good vibe in the room- like the students picked up on my desire for them to learn and love math and that vibe moved through them and radiated back to me.
And that's the spark that will get me through these next few dark and rainy weeks. Because, today it was a spark... but tomorrow... who knows?

Relaxing today

Relaxing today, because tomorrow I'm going into "the office" for four hours. But it will be worth it. This week marks year two of my equation stations and it promises to be better than every. Differentiation at its finest, and all invented by me. It just takes a LOT of up front work. I will have to post details of it, maybe even snap some pictures of stations in action.

My Priveledge. NOT my Burden

I am a public educator. I work at a school that has embraced the philosophy that every child can learn and has a right to the highest possible rigor. I am trained in ways to meet the need of each child individually in my classroom. It is my responsibility and my privilege to teach every student in my room regardless of race, gender, socioeconomics, learning needs, sexual orientation, or any thing else under the moon.
You, the parent, have one child to worry about. To take care of. To guide through the crazy world of 8th grade. Leave the other 99 to me. DO NOT make excuses for your child based on the other students who are in my room. DO NOT let your child make excuses for him/herself because of the biases and perceptions he/she has of other students in the room. I guarantee you, those perceptions are wrong.   I WILL NOT justify the number of brown kids in my room or the number of kids with and without learning disabilities.
I WILL talk about your child. I will talk about his or her learning needs and if they are being met. I will work with you and your child to ensure learning is happening and support exists in my room for him to be challenged every day... as long as he is willing to take on those challenges.
Do not assume you know my burden. It is not the kids with the IEPs. It is not the kids on TAG plans. It is not a single one of my students. They are my joy and my reason for showing up each day.


 And guess what, that kid you son thinks is dumb, that kid with the autism that says funny things in class... yeah, she  just kicked his butt on the last test... but I won't tell you that... that information is confidential and it's time for your son to worry about his own learning and his own ability.

A GOOD day. And a quality lesson.

My group of students this year seems game for just about anything. I feel like I have a willing band of mathematicians at my fingertips- or if not yet full fledged mathematicians, they are willing to listen and see where I'm going with all this.
So today I decided to jump into box and whisker plots. I have struggled with the entire statistics unit in the past few years. Stats. Blah. All math books turn it into lists of meaningless numbers or silly "real world" situations. I've struggled to make it mean something ANYTHING to all of us in the room. Which seems crazy, because stats should be the most applicable, the most real world thing I teach them all year.
But slowly, things have been shifting. A few good lessons here, a few "Ah ha!" moments for me, and some extra reading and research has all helped to lend new life to this unit. Lately, my book of choice has been Edward Tufte and I'm suddenly seeing the light as to why we graph anything at all EVER. So anyway, I'm starting to find my own passion for statistics and graphical representations.
Yesterday I did something I don't love to do- I taught something without much context. I threw five number summaries at my students, just wanting to get the vocab, the concept, and the process to the kids. I asked them to take a leap of faith, to trust that this moving around of numbers would lead us somewhere.
So today, we started to connect. We talked about summaries they write in Language Arts, how it is useful to take a large article and summarize it down to the main ideas. We talked about why a five number summary might be more useful than a list of data. We made vocabulary connections.
Then we calculated our age in months. Students wrote it on index cards and we marched outside. At this point, I started to get nervous. I mean, I could do this with a class of maybe 25 students, but how would I keep a line of 35 bodies engaged and listening? But, I decided, what's teaching without some adventure? I refuse to use class size as an excuse not to provide the very best for students.
We lined up from least to greatest. We figured out the student in the middle and he got to hold the "Median" card. Students found the quartiles and the max and min and each person in the five number summary held a card. With students lined up, toes on the edge of the sidewalk, I marked the quartiles and medians with yard sticks. The lower and upper 25% got a piece of yarn to hold (becoming the whisker) The middle quartiles crowded between the yardsticks. Suddenly, we were a box and whisker plot. And for the first time ever, I had students quickly seeing that our data was split into 25% chunks. That the range of the chunks might change, but that each quartile held 25% of the classmates. It was fun, it was visual, it was tactile. And somehow, it worked.
We trouped back inside to get our thoughts on paper. We drew what we had made and talked about what someone could learn about our class from looking at our visuals. Why it might be more useful than a list of numbers. And I think, just maybe, students really understood- not just wrote notes and memorized some vocab- but really understood, in their guts, the what and why of this particular statistical representation.
So tomorrow- how in the WORLD do I top that?