I have not left the country in almost 18 months.
Life just starts passing you by and all of a sudden there you are, your passport glaringly devoid of stamps. My passport is not even taunting me because it's buried in a drawer somewhere. Drastic times may call for drastic flight itineraries.
I could use a little of this right about now:
I already gave my final exam, so there is now some down time for my kids who don't also take algebra. I had nothing planned for today, so I broke out the pattern blocks. This group decided they wanted to work together to make one giant, cooperative pattern.
Now they are sitting in almost complete silence, completely engrossed. Every once in awhile they discuss what color or shape to place where. Who says that kids today are only interested in constant, passive stimuli?
I love these kids.
There was an interesting letter published recently from members of the Palo Alto High School math department about why they disagree with the proposed change to their graduation requirements that all students pass algebra 2. While I am disturbed by the tone of their letter and some of its implications, I will say that I sympathize with what they're dealing with because lately I have been questioning what some of my students are capable of.
Let me start out with a fundamental belief that I hold: all kids can learn and all kids want to learn. I don't believe that each person possesses a limited quantity of intelligence or potential. In fact, I don't even want to consider the possibility because of how that could impact my interactions with my students. I HAVE to believe that all of my students can learn because if I don't, what's the point? I also do not believe that the students are ambivalent toward learning; all of my students want to learn both because they want to be successful and because they value knowledge. Not every student translates their desire to learn into action that leads to success, but I do believe that they all want it.
The Palo Alto teachers state that for "objective reasons" some kids "can't" pass algebra 2. Coming from the belief that all kids can learn, that's a pretty tough statement to swallow. But I have also been wondering lately about some of my own students and, objectively, whether they can pass my class. I am shocked by the math that I'm seeing this year. I am used to kids coming in with weak math backgrounds, huge misconceptions, and severe lack of exposure to concepts one should know by 9th grade, but there are some really tough cases this year. For example, this weekend's homework asked students to measure the circumference, radius, and diameter of five circular objects at home. Then in class we used the data to explore the relationships between those measurements, blah, blah, oh look it's pi, etc. I knew that kids would measure imprecisely, but I was not prepared for glaring errors in the objects they actuall chose to measure. Below, two students' work:
Yes, I had students who think that a knife and an oven and a cell phone are circular. Honestly, what am I supposed to do with these kids? I have to expect that my students come in with certain prior knowledge, and it seems fair that 14-year olds should be able to identify circles. Like the Palo Alto teachers, I have to wonder, can these kids learn high school geometry, let alone algebra 2?
My answer has less to do with can or can't and more to do with WHO is incapable. What I feel is not that these kids can't learn high school geometry, but rather that I am the one who can't. In the context of their past math experiences, and our current school and its resources, as their teacher I cannot give them what they need for them to learn even basic high school geometry by this June. Call it a failure of their previous schools, a failure of the system, and absolutely a failure of my teaching skills, but I can't call it a failure of these students' predestined potential.
Even then, we're still left with failure. I feel like a failure every day when kids aren't learning the things I intended. I look at the systems that have failed my students over and over again by letting them get to ninth grade not knowing what a circle is, or, more importantly letting them go hungry or without a place to live. I don't know whether the failure of all these people and all these systems means that kids should or should not be required to pass algebra 2 in order to graduate, and I don't want to suggest that failures beyond a teacher or a school's control alleviates anyone's responsibility to educate and care for a child. But I get nervous when words like "can't" get thrown around and assigned to parties with little exploration of what is actually impossible.
This is not all meant to sound hopeless, but instead hopeful. Maybe I "can't" teach some students geometry or maybe some of them "can't" learn it, but only when limited by the time and resources we're all working with. But what if there were more time and resources? What if we as a system poured our energy into the belief that all kids can learn? Just as I believe that all kids are capable of learning, I believe that we are capable of educating them. And it's our responsibility to figure out how to make that happen.
My friend and co-worker Maura once pointed out that it's not very often that we get to see our friends and family actually performing their jobs, so she posted a picture up on her blog of herself in the middle of teaching. I write all about my experiences teaching, but what does it actually look like? Here's a picture:
Phew, it's been a long time since I've posted anything on here. I've had things I want to post, but just haven't done it (obviously).
Since this week has been challenging, I want to post about something positive. Even though school has been stressing me out, there are still a lot of good things happening that can be easily overshadowed by not-so-good things. A nice little pick-me-up that's a common practice at our school is for students to write appreciation letters to teachers (or whoever). A number of the ninth grade mentor groups did it on Wednesday, so it was definitely a much-needed mood booster to get a stack of thank you notes at the end of the day. My favorites this time were the kid who thanked me for teaching him algebra (I am his geometry teacher; his algebra teacher is a tall white guy, so I guess we're easily confused) and a kid who falls asleep in my class everyday who told me, "You make me a smart narwhale [sic]." There was, of course, an accompanying picture of a narwhal.
It's such a nice thing to tell your teachers that you appreciate them, so I started to think about what I would have written if I were back in high school. Well, maybe it's not exactly what I would have written, but these are the things that have stuck with me.
9th Grade
Dear Mrs. Guire,
It gave me a huge confidence boost when you told me, Becky, Paul, and Joel that you save our essays to read last in your stack. I never thought of myself as a good writer until you said this.
10th Grade
Dear Mrs. Kunec,
I really enjoy your AP history class. you make class fun and make history feel like you're just telling us stories. I also appreciate the way you highlight connections between things that happened in different time periods. You always have a positive attitude and a smile on your face, and that makes a big difference.
11th Grade
Dear Mr. Packard,
I look forward to coming to Composition class every day. I love that you teach us how to be better writers by letting us write about ourselves. You've created a strong classroom community where I feel comfortable taking academic risks around people I probably wouldn't even know without this class. You are one of the only teachers who has tried to get to know us as individuals, and also one of the only teachers who lets us into your life.
12th Grade
Dear Mr. Seybold,
Thank you for preparing us so well for the AP calculus test. I walked out of that test feeling more confident than any other standardized test I've ever taken (including the painfully easy MEAP tests) because everything in your class helped us prepare.
It's interesting that when I think back to any of these classes, I remember very little of the content (except for calculus; today I still think back to Mr. Seybold's class when I'm working with calculus students). What stands out for me was pretty much whether teachers were nice and enthusiastic about the class. I think that I learned more from those teachers. On the other hand, my 10th and 11th grade math teacher was one of the meanest, scariest teacher I ever had. She constantly made me feel stupid and confused and I definitely cried because of her class on more than one occasion. I remember noticing when she smiled because it was so rare. But did I learn a lot from her class? Yes. I still picture her classroom when trying to recall certain math topics. Because of her I've never forgotten to add the " + C" on an indefinite integral or how to draw a perfect ellipse. So what does it mean about good teaching that over 10 years later I've retained very specific content details from my least favorite class, but almost nothing from some of the best ones?
I spent the last five days in a professional development with Lee Mun Wah of Stirfry Seminars. The official title of the workshop was "Cross-cultural facilitation skills for diversity trainers," but it was so much more. The biggest thing that I took away (and I think this was true for everyone in the workshop), was what I learned about myself. And there was a lot that I didn't even know that I didn't know about myself. Somehow, Lee Mun Wah worked his magical compassionate listening and communication skills to really hear the intent of what I was saying and the impact of experiences I've had. The word I've been using to describe the past five days is "transformative."
Like I said, there are a lot of things I learned about myself but obviously it doesn't feel appropriate or comfortable to name them all here. But one of the things that helped me during the workshop was relating to other people's stories. Many times they spoke in ways that could have been coming directly from my head, so it feels worthwhile to share some of those insights from other people based on the assumption that I'm not the only one they will speak to.
The first was a revelation for me that came from another woman in the group. Like me, she is mixed race; she has a Chinese American father and a white mother. She was talking about how and why she has gotten involved in social justice work and race relations. Race issues are something very important to me and, as I think is obvious to many people in my life, something I'm deeply passionate about. But I don't know if I've ever thought about why, beyond that visceral reaction. The obvious answer is that I'm a person of color and want to fight the oppression I've faced. Which is true, sort of. When I listen to stories of many other people of color who are involved in this work they can usually identify very personal, very vivid experiences with racism. It's not that I haven't been oppressed by my race (and lord knows I learned a lot more in this workshop about what racism has done to me), but I don't have the kind of stories that people want to hear about racism, about being called a racial slur or being forcibly excluded from somewhere or having my physical safety threatened. I don't have the stories that confirm that racism only comes from individuals rather than a larger system. Also, it seems a little incomplete to say that fighting racism is important to me because I've experienced so much of it. As a woman, I experience sexism and know that it has painful effects on me, but fighting sexism or learning more about gender differences has never spoken to me the way race does.
So this mixed woman in my workshop was talking about what led her to be so passionate about race relations. She said that her hunger for a healthy multicultural community comes directly from her experience as a biracial person: "If there can't be a multicultural community, it literally splits my heart in two. If we can't have a multicultural community, where does that leave me?" She pinpointed the thing I never realized about why multiculturalism is so important to me. Even with racism in play, there's still a black community, a Chinese community, a Mexican community, even a white community, etc. But without a multicultural community, I'm left homeless. Or even if I somehow am accepted into one community or the other, I have to give up a piece of myself to be a part of that. Despite the many ways that racism has touched me, my personal connection is exactly what this woman said: If we can't have a multicultural community, where does that leave me? I need a multicultural community because that may be the only community I'll ever have.
Deep stuff. As a little interlude/segue, one of the things Lee Mun Wah said was that in the end, racism is all about fear. There are so many things to be scared of because what will it mean if you hear the things that are difficult, if you hear a confirmation that your deepest fears may be true, if you hear that your view of the world that has allowed you to live is actually not what you thought it was? So I know this is a long blog post, and for the handful of people who actually still read this blog, I hope you'll keep reading.
The other thing that I want to share (for now) is a reflection Lee Mun Wah made. A white woman who is in a mostly white environment asked how she can use the few people of color to help other whites understand racism, but without exhausting the people of color. This mirrors a sentiment that I have often heard from people of color--and have definitely experienced myself--that it is so tiring to over and over again tell people your experience and "educate" white people. Over and over they don't know, so the burden falls on me to have to tell them. It is truly exhausting. An older black man in our workshop said, "I'm tired. Maybe I just want to finish out these last few years at my job and retire quietly." Lee Mun Wah reframed it, considering that we were all eager to tell our stories in the setting of this workshop: It's not that people of color are tired of telling their stories, it's that they're tired of the reaction they get when they do tell their stories. They're tired of the invalidation, of the defensiveness, of the interrogation, of the not being believed. It's these reactions that are exhausting. But if the reaction were curiosity and affirmation and genuine learning (every teacher will tell you that just because you tell someone something doesn't mean they learned it...), then people would actually be empowered to tell their stories and would gain strength from it. This has obvious familiarity for everyone who has ever been invalidated. If you try to say something and nobody believes you, you'll stop saying it pretty quickly, or become worn out by the energy of saying it over and over again to deaf ears. If you say something and people force you to defend it, you'll eventually give up saying it because the fight is too much. It's not saying it that's exhausting; it's exhausting not to be believed.
So now this begs the question, how do I make sure that when someone tells me their story, I don't make them feel invalidated, I don't exhaust them. What I learned from this workshop is so simple and so obvious that of course no one thinks of it: if you want to someone to feel validated, to know that you heard them, show them. Don't tell them, "I hear you; I'm listening." Tell them, as word-for-word as you can, what you heard them say. It's pretty unbelievable what happens next.
One of the hardest--and best--things about being a teacher is getting to know students beyond the academic content I cover in class. Yes, I know my students as learners of math, but sometimes I forget how much else they have going on outside of school. Thursday felt like one of those days where I was hit pretty hard with some painful reminders of who my students are beyond the classroom: So at the risk of sounding like a Freedom Writers/Dangerous Minds/Dead Poets Society kind of post:
After school today, a couple of students were trying to convince me to let them give me a henna tattoo.
M: "We could write 'I love math' on your arm."
Me: "I'll think about it."
E: "We could write 'M.O.B.'"
Me: "No, you could not write that."
E: "Math over biology!"
My travel style tends to focus more on the experiences I have when out and about and less on the actual place where I sleep. I fall into the category of "budget traveler," which in part means that I favor hostels over hotels and rooms over resorts. I'm above the level of saving money by camping everywhere I go (although I did that for a couple weeks in New Zealand when I had a very stingy travel companion), but in general I don't look for much more than a clean room in a safe location. If I'm doing stuff all day, I really just need a comfortable place to sleep. Besides being inexpensive, hostels are great for their social aspect, especially when I'm traveling alone. At this point in my life I think I'd take a comfy hostel with a good common room over a fancy resort.
Even though accommodations don't play largely into my travel experiences, the place where I stayed during spring break turned out to be one of the best parts of the trip. There is actually a hostel up near where I wanted to go, and it was ranked by Lonely Planet as one of the best hostels in all of California. It was serendipity that the hostel was closed for repairs, which led me to booking a room at the Requa Inn in Klamath. It's an old hotel built in 1914 when the fishing industry was bigger, but now Klamath is a little town of 1,400 people and land belongs to the Yurok Indian Reservation. The Inn is now fully restored and turned into an adorable bed and breakfast.
True, I didn't really have a YOLO of the month in March. I did spend the night in a YMCA with 110 ninth graders which is something you should only live through once, but I can claim that experience twice (thus far) so I guess it doesn't count. Fortunately, I think my April YOLO counted double.
In an ongoing attempt to fulfill my self-promise of actually seeing the sights that California has to offer, I took a road trip to the north coast and spent a couple of days in the redwood forests. I originally started planning this getaway for spring break two years ago, but of course that was when my car chose to die about a week before my intended departure date. So I got to spend that spring break (and that spring break funding) buying a new car. Not as much fun.
Now finally the trip happened and it was well worth it. I'll put pictures in separate blog posts, but short story: everything was amazing.
I make my students work in groups pretty much every day. It's hard work (for me and for them), it can be extremely frustrating (for me and for them) and it's often the most challenging part of my class (for me and for them). But one of my fundamental values as a teacher is that kids learn better when they talk about their ideas. I believe that verbalizing their ideas is the best way for them to make sense of concepts. This means that they have to work in groups and that the groupwork must be structured very carefully. We've all had bad experiences working in teams, so I want my kids to learn now, for lack of a less business-trendy word, what high-performing teams look and feel like. A subset of these goals is that students learn to value each other's ideas and learn to see each other's smarts. Part of being a high-performing team is learning interdependence and finding how each person's unique skills are crucial to the team's success. These teamwork skills will make students better people and I believe happier people down the road.
Without question, my classes this year are the most successful groupworkers I've had. Or, I kind of like to think, this year has been my most successful year of teaching (if I'm teaching kids to do groupwork right, it follows that they're learning the content deeply). I think especially that many of my kids have come to value each other's ideas and that they really listen to each other. Most importantly, I think that a lot of them value everyone's ideas, not just the kids who they deem "smart." Today I felt like I had this confirmed, at least somewhat, when I took a poll on who students want to sit with for their last seat change of the year. Here are some of the highlights:
The past couple of weeks have been rough at school. In particular, we had two racially-fueled incidents in the span of a just a few days. First, a white supremacist page on Facebook "friended" most of our Latino freshmen and spewed frightening hate speech. Second, a white student very directly used a racial slur against a black students, clearly with the intention to hurt him. I'm really proud that our 9th grade faculty decided it was worth our time to address both of these incidents head on, including taking time out of class to help kids process their feelings. Part of this included small discussion groups where kids got to just talk (with guidance from a teacher).
My first group was magical. There were 8 girls and 1 boy of pretty diverse backgrounds racially and socioeconomically. I was really impressed with their self-awareness and empathy. Many of them talked about the anger they felt but also the ways they deal with that anger so it doesn't have repercussions. They also talked about how things like racial slurs hurt an entire community, impacting not just the person who was targeted. I was especially surprised that they recognized that a hateful response to racist speech is likely to make the other party even angrier and will in turn perpetuate a cycle of anger that will just end up hurting everyone more. Woah. Pretty insightful for 15-year olds.
My second group was very different. Again, they were diverse racially and socioeconomically, but this time it was all boys. Instead of talking about compassion, talking through your feelings, etc., the boys basically said they didn't care about what had happened. A number of them pointed out that the Facebook page and the racial slurs hadn't been directed at them specifically, so they weren't bothered by it. I wasn't exactly excited by this reaction, but I do understand that a lot of them haven't developed the same kind of empathy I heard from my first group. Much more disturbing was the prevailing agreement between the boys that nobody should be bothered by these incidents, including the people were targets. One Latino boy talked about the many instances of racism he faces everyday, which led him to conclude that you just have to accept it and not worry about it. A white boy talked about the serious bullying in teasing he'd faced in middle school and almost seemed to see it as a positive thing because it helped him develop a thick skin and not care what anyone else says to him. Many of the boys (both white and Latino) seemed to think that the school shouldn't have intervened and nobody should have gotten in trouble for the racial slur. There was even the idea brought up that the student who used the racial slur was justified in doing so because the other kid was teasing him first. They talked about being taught to stand up for themselves no matter what and saw the racial slur as just a way for that kid to stand up for himself. Wow.
The more I thought about the difference between my two discussion groups, the more it struck me that I know very little about the way boys are raised and how they interact with each other. I also know very little about adolescent development with respect to the ways and rates at which boys and girls mature. It was interesting to me in these discussions the difference in the boys' and girls' abilities to abstract their ideas. The girls seemed quite able to put themselves in someone else's shoes, to think of a community as an entity different from individual people, and to imagine hypothetical situations. The boys focused on concrete examples, and when I asked them things like, "Why might some people feel scared or uncomfortable when they hear that someone has been using racial slurs?" they seemed to have a really hard time thinking outside themselves. Is this a boy thing? Is it a teen development thing? What is going on? Why was there such a push from the boys toward an "every-man-for-himself" mode of existence? Is this just reflective of the gender norms boys were raised with or something more developmental? Is this how boys of my generation were being raised? Most importantly, how can I support these boys in becoming more empathetic, self-aware, and socially-aware? How do I help them think about the importance of community and the value of feeling accepted? Will this all just come in time, or do I need to be thinking more pro-active?
The other night I had a dream that I took a trip back to New Zealand. I don't remember why I was there, but I do remember it was a very short trip (like 3-4 days actually in the country). The main thing I remember from the dream, however, was the pure happiness I felt when I was in New Zealand. I stepped off the plane and was immediately happy. Most of the dream consisted me walking around the streets of Auckland pointing out all the things I love about the country. Granted, one of the things I pointed out as loving so much was a giant slide that commuters could use to make their travel time more entertaining, so the dream wasn't exactly true to life. But the feeling of being so happy definitely was.
Although it's no giant slide in downtown Auckland, here is one of many reasons why I continue to love Kiwis. (Extra props for the Phil Keoghan guest appearance!)
I really do enjoy baking and have even taken my own forays into breadmaking. I don't do it very often because it's so time-consuming, but I can imagine myself getting more into it. I was hoping this workshop might help me out with that. But the more I listened to our instructor, the more I realized I should stick to easy baking. When he told us that a good loaf of bread should take about 24 hours to make, kneading once every half hour or so, that was enough to let me know that artisanal breadmaking is probably not the right-fit hobby for my lifestyle.
I baked my bread the following day--it first had to rise in the fridge and then on the counter. I'm not sure what happened because even following the instructions as precisely as I could the top still burned (the baking instructions weren't written down, so I had to rely on the notes Maura took on her phone). And, as Sarah noted, the inside "looks like real bread." So that's a good sign, right? It tasted like real (slightly-burned, not at all sourdough) bread too, so I guess I did indeed succeed in the goal of the workshop. If it had been amazing (not that they gave us a recipe or anything), I might have reconsidered dropping my breadmaking career. But given that I can get pretty delicious bread for relatively cheap at my local supermarket, I think this was the end.
After a weekend of adventuring in LA, the obvious California destination for the following weekend was Lake Tahoe. Five teachers, one cabin, lots of fun.
Again, the weekend involved a lot of gastronomical delights, most importantly Fred's Steak. Also not too shabby was the sampler of wines from Trevor's uncle's cellar. I'm not gonna say I can tell the difference between a $100 bottle of wine and a $10 bottle, but the expensive bottles tasted pretty good. One of the best quotes of the weekend: "I just drank an eighteen-dollar bill!"
The original plan to go skiing, but napping was a more attractive activity. Still, we did find the energy to YOLO at Squaw Valley.
This picture is just one in an ongoing series of Maura and me at high elevations:
Given that it's almost February, yes, this post is a little behind. But better late than never.
The thing about January is that my school is in "intersession," a time when the students take their electives all day every day and teachers are in meetings. All. Day. Every. Day. I'm not always a huge fan of the meetings and by the end of the month I'm pretty sick of adults and ready to be around kids again. But on the upside, not having to plan for classes everyday means that I have a lot more free time and can live life like an almost normal person. This January I took pretty good advantage of my free weekends with a little YOLO-ing.
Over MLK weekend I went down to LA for quality time with some Umich friends. It was my friend Zach's birthday, so we all went out to some posh Hollywood club to celebrate.
