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."

Sometimes Good Things Happen

On Tuesday, there were two good teaching moments:

1. E., one of my geometry students stopped by after school to get work that she was missing. I can't remember what led to her comment, but out of nowhere she said, "Ms. L., you're my kind of teacher."

2. I., an algebra student, was sick on Friday when we took our first test. She took it on Monday after school and I made her stay until she'd answered every single question. When I gave it back to her on Tuesday, she broke into a huge smile--she got a 74/75. Unfortunately I wouldn't let her take it home, but she took a picture with her phone to send to her dad. So cute. Even better, as she was walking out, another teacher overheard her saying, "That's the highest grade I've ever gotten on a test!"

Of course this all happened on the same day that kids were stuffing each other into a giant backpack and screaming about cockroaches, but I'll take what I can get.

Four-Week Reflection

On Friday, I had my two algebra classes reflect (individually) on how the first month of class has gone. The feedback was interesting and surprisingly different between the two classes.

From my sheltered class (all English language learners):
"I like it when we learn by working as a group because every one knows something what someone might not. It's hard for me when we learn by individual because we don't know everything."
"One new thing Ive learned is 2 be more loud, graph, not to be shy :) Thanx u"
"One new thing I've learned is to work the rest of the people of the group without being shy."
"I like it when we learn by groups because we get more ideas of how to solve something. It's hard for me when we learn by individuals because I can't get ideas from others."
"One new thing I've learned is working with a team"
"One new thing I've learned is that i noe algebra bruh"
"I like it when we learn by presenting things because we get to learn people's ideas."
"One new thing I've learned is how not to be shy to do preseteations"

From my mainstream algebra class (not English Language Learners):
"It's hard for me when we learn by talking in groups about homework because we don't always agree on answers and it creates arguments."
"I like it when we learn by whole class discussions because we all have different ideas and when we hear everyone thought it helps us all in a way."
"One new thing I've learned is nothing! I already knew everything."
"I like it when we learn by ourselfs because it's light weight challenging"
"I like it when we learn by working in groups because it feels like I am not by myself."
"I like it when we learn by presenting projects because it's cool to see different ways to do stuff."
"It's hard for me when we learn by working all together because people are talking very loud and I can't understand some of the stuff."
"I like it when we learn by individual work because I learn my way so I learn faster and better."
"I'm unclear about why we only work at our groups. I need help understanding why you don't give lessons."
"One thing I've learned is that we all have to work as a group. One thing I already knew but I've gotten better at is getting along with others."
"It's hard for me when we learn by group projects because I've always been an independent worker."
On the reflection I put a list of "ways we've learned together" so far and asked students to put smiley faces next to things that helped then and sad faces by things that make it difficult for them. One student put frowns by everything.

Thanks for the feedback. Maybe a good teaching would take this feedback and interpret that I need to be giving more direct instruction to my mainstream students. They want a teacher who lectures with example problems and sends them on their way? I can do that. But I'm not going to. I feel my challenge is not how to adapt to being the kind of teacher they think they need, but how to adapt them to my being the kind of teacher I think they need.

Week 2