Disappointed; Still Hopeful

I don't know much about this Arne Duncan guy (and there are certain people who I'm very thankful that's not). But when I heard the announcement that the new Secretary of Education is someone other than Linda Darling-Hammond, I felt like someone had punched me in the face. It actually felt like a personal insult. I got that feeling you get when someone breaks up with you. What's wrong with me?

As cheesy as it sounds, this is the first time I've actually believed in and trusted the people (okay, maybe just person so far) in power, so it feels that much worse to be let down. Is every bad decision Obama makes over the next four (eight?) years going to affect me so personally? Is he going to shatter any faith I have in public servants if he's anything less than perfect (which he obviously will be). It's like the fairy tale is coming to life, but now the reality sets in. President-elect Obama, please don't break my heart.

Get Out of My Head

Yesterday my geometry students were whining (again) that I am making them do too much work. Specifically, they're going to be doing a Problem of the Week (POW), which involves not only solving a difficult problem, but doing a fairly extensive write-up about how they solved it. It's a lot of work, but it's not unmanageable, and I'm giving them a week to do it. When we did the last POW, only about a third of the class turned one in, and since they're worth the equivalent of five homeworks, it made a big impact on their grades.

So in all their whining yesterday, they said that I shouldn't assign the new POW because a lot of them just aren't going to do it. I replied that that's their choice, but that it will have the same negative impact on their grade. I reminded them that we're spending the entire 90 minutes on it on Friday, so they'll have a lot of time to get help, etc. T. yelled out, "You're going to make us all fail." Um, no. Me assigning work doesn't make you fail; you not doing the work I assign makes you fail. Then E. somehow knew the exact words to push my buttons: "That's going to make you look bad, to have so many students fail. You're going to be embarrassed. And as a first year teacher too!"

Thanks, E. Thank you for knowing exactly what I'm thinking and voicing it so publicly. My obvious reaction was to lie and say that I didn't feel bad explaining to other people that my students got F's because they didn't turn in major assignments. Lying seems to be an important weapon in my teacher arsenal, especially when kids are being obnoxious. I told my second block yesterday that no, I was not about to cry, I was turning red because I was getting frustrated with them. How do they know the exact things that will drive me craziest?

Mine's Better

Over the break I bought Michigan and Stanford pennants to put up in my classroom. College-going culture, blah, blah, blah, they look cute.

Today in the middle of class when I was giving instructions (when else?), N. pointed to the wall and yelled out, "I'm mad that you have that up there!"
Me (and 1/4 the kids in the class): "Have what? Where?"
N: "That Stanford flag."
Me (and half the kids in the class): "Why?"
[Here I'm expecting him to say that he's a Cal fan or something like that]
N: "Because I have one"
Me (and about 3/4 of the kids in the class): "And?"
N: "I had one first."
Me (and now pretty much the whole class): "And?"
N: "Actually I have two."

N. is totally that six-year old who finds out that his friend has the new G.I. Joe and has to make sure that everyone knows that he has twenty G.I. Joes and the new G.I. Joe dream house and everything's special edition so nobody else can ever get it, ever.

At least the rest of my class has matured beyond age six and is now averaging closer to eleven.

San Franciscans: R Crazy

I'm glad I'm not voting in San Francisco. I would be seriously annoyed if I felt like someone thought I should spend any time even considering Proposal R. On the other hand, it is totally worth your time to read the arguments. One would think that the haiku alone would be enough to convince voters, but I guess they really needed five printed pages worth of "information."

http://www.smartvoter.org/2008/11/04/ca/sf/meas/R/

To quote one of my native-born San Franciscan friends, "I think that if other people knew what goes on here, they'd expel us from the country."

Outside my Window

While I was grading papers today after school, there was a maintenance guy coming in an out of my room trying to get my wireless connection set up. I had my back to the window, so when Maintenance Guy and exclaimed, "What is going on?!" I had no idea what he was talking about. I turned around and there, about 20 feet outside my window was a police officer standing behind a tree, pointing a gun at a car. He wasn't the only one. There were a whole bunch of officers in various places, with at least four pointing guns toward this car. A guy got out of the car with his hands up, and slowly walked backward toward the group of police, where they handcuffed him and put him in the back of one of cop cars. Guns never flinching, this repeated with the other two passengers. Then the police, still pointing their guns, searched the car, but appeared to find nothing of interest. There was a lot of discussion by the police, an ID check of at least one guy, and a lot of car searching (although no dogs involved). After about 30 minutes, the police opened up the cop cars, uncuffed at least two of the guys (I'd gone back to grading by this point, so I'm not sure if the third was released), who got back in their car and drove away.

I don't really know how to feel about all of this. I'm pretty sure that the guys who were driving the car were not our students (they looked too old, and our principal stayed out of it), but there's no reason to think that they're not connected to the school in some way, whether as alumni, through a sibling, etc. Even if they have no direct connection, having guns drawn on campus--at a time when a lot of students were still around--doesn't help the already hostile environment we're feeling on our campus this year (more on that later). All I can really feel right now is unfairness. Unfairness that some students couldn't walk home today because there were guns pointed as they walked out the door. Unfairness that this probably wouldn't be an unfamiliar sight to many of my students. Unfairness that everyone who drove past saw a slew of police cars in front of a school that already has a reputation for being "ghetto" and unsafe. Unfairness that these were three Latino guys being pulled over by 10+ white police. Unfairness that this is something I even have to think about when I'm trying to focus on my students' learning. Even more unfairness that this is something my students have to think about when they're trying to focus on just being teenagers.

Adventures in Phonetics

Right now we're working on big proportional reasoning projects. One option is about figuring out how many pennies a giant cockroach could carry if it were human-sized. (Yes, we do have live cockroaches that we lasso and attach to a cup full of pennies, but that's another story). The project is pretty writing-intensive, which can be a challenge especially for my ELL students. One piece of this is spelling. Although I don't mark students down for spelling mistakes, sometimes they can lead to misunderstandings of what idea the student was trying to convey.

A., who is nothing but a sweetheart, was working on the cockroach problem by making a t-table. We talked about how she should label the columns, and decided that one should say "pennies." But the combination of her poor spelling and her rushing to finish the problem led her to leave out an 'n' and the second 'e'.

Oops.

Disproportionately Awesome

Right now in Algebra we're working on proportional reasoning and the various strategies one can use to solve a proportional reasoning problem. On Friday and Monday, groups wrote their own proportional reasoning problem and then displayed the different ways they could solve it. Here are the highlights:

This group was having trouble coming up with a problem, so I asked them what kinds of things they're interested in. One kid said "shopping." That's easy--there are lots of things you can do with proportions and shopping. "Okay, so what about shopping?" I asked. "Like how much something might cost?" They chose another approach.



In this group, they didn't have much trouble coming up with their problem, but they started out with a given that Yesenia has three boyfriends in one month. I encouraged them to pick more difficult numbers than one. They said three months, so I asked, "So how many boyfriends would she have in three months? Five maybe?" "Oh, no!" one girl responded. "That's definitely not enough boyfriends in three months." My favorite part of this poster is that the points on the graph aren't just points, but hearts. "Because it's about my boyfriends."