Kids blew me away today.

My classroom has 6 tables in it. Typically there are 4 students per table and each group of six forms a "research team" for a given unit. At the end of a unit, I shuffle them around. 

At the beginning of the last unit, I sorted them by taking my top two students (grade-wise) and pairing them with the bottom two. Then for the next table, I took the next two best students and paired them with the next two lowest, and so on. The idea was that the better students would more drastically raise the game of those who struggled. 

Today my students were working together on finishing up several things and the #1 table assigned one of the lower-performing students to explain their project to me after prepping him for the job. He gladly obliged. Later, when I came back around to check on them, I found that the two better students had created a couple of practice problems for the other two, who gladly did them, and corrected the problems later. 

And they're freshmen. 

Huge day for me...

Never Assume

I made a potentially devastating mistake in the classroom the other day: I assumed that a student knew my intentions when I said/did some things in order to make a point. I think our relationship has survived, but only time will tell.

Cell phones are a huge problem these days. The kids all have them, and they're classroom distractions of the first order. At some point, I got sick of explicitly asking students to put their cell phones away so I established a blanket rule: if I see your cell phone after class has started, I'm taking it. And when I take it, I have to give it to security who will only release the phone to the student's parent. That means that a parent has to visit the school to get the student's phone back. Ouch.

It's been a pretty good deterrent, but students are highly adept at rationalizing illegal behavior. For example:

"Ok, give me your phone."
"But I was just using the calculator on it."
"Did I say, 'never use your phone in class,' or 'never use your phone in class unless you think is ok'?"
"Ok, ok. I'll put it away."
"Actually, your option to put it away expired when the bell rang. Now I'll take it."
"What??? That's not fair!!!"

Etc, etc, etc.

Surprisingly, that can happen more than once in the same class period with different students. It's really amazing how slowly they learn when they don't want to, but I digress.

One day a really good, conscientious kid took his phone out near the end of class to take a picture of the notes I had written on the board. If ever there were an honest mistake and a reason to use one's phone in class of which I would approve, this was it. But the rule was broken, and had to be enforced. (There's no quicker path to irrelevance than not enforcing your own rules.) He was really upset, and I was sorry to take his phone. So I took him to his dean's office and explained the situation. I gave the phone to the dean who handed it back to the kid with the agreement that if anyone asked, he was to say that his parents had to come pick up the phone and the whole thing was just very painful for him. We had to coach him a little because he's honest to a fault and wouldn't dream of saying something that wasn't true, even if it were for good reason. In retrospect, I should have taken more note of that, but... A wink and a nod, and justice was done.

The very next day in that same class, one of my challenging students decided to flout the phone rule. I took his phone and he asked (because I apparently hadn't quite said it ten thousand times) what he had to do to get it back. I couldn't have asked for a better setup for the kid from the previous day to talk all about how painful this whole experience was and how he learned a valuable lesson. So I said, "let's ask so-and-so: how did things go yesterday?" At that point, the kid from the previous day got really excited, pulled his phone out, held it high above his head and proclaimed, "I got my phone back yesterday!!"

Well that certainly backfired.

So I had to take his phone away. Again. The look of disbelief on my face was quite real as I walked across the room to take his phone, and the other kids picked up on it and started to laugh. When I collected his phone, he was pleading with me not to take it. A-ha! Now he's back in character, I thought. He's playing the role we agreed on, so let's lay it on a little bit... "So-and-so, I can't believe it! You of all people..." And so on. He appeared to be upset and the class was having a bit of a field day. At some point it became obvious that he was actually upset, rather than just playing along, so I shut the whole thing down and moved on. After class, very upset, he came up to me and said, "Mr. Cain, you just let them laugh at me, man..."

I was gutted. I felt sick to my stomach for the rest of the day. I had made a bad assumption and now this poor kid felt like the whole class was ganging up on him and the teacher just it happen. He felt betrayed.

I called his home immediately to let his parents know what had happened - that I screwed up and he might be upset about and they should talk to him about it if he wanted to do so. I also talked to him later that day, acknowledged my mistake, made my original intent clear, and also tried to get him to believe that I would never do anything intentional to belittle him or any other student. I also asked his forgiveness and told him that I would do what I could to regain his trust, knowing that might never happen. Frankly, it's disturbing even to write about it now. It was a huge, huge mistake on my part.

Lessons learned: When necessary, enforce rules mechanically and without fanfare. Never do anything (even if just acting) to indicate that you tolerate derision or belittlement in the classroom. And never assume you know what a kid is thinking.

Bad movie, worse implication.

I saw a bad movie last week. A really profoundly bad movie, all the way around. It's called "2012", and it's an end-of-times kind of movie about a massive solar flare that threatens to end life on earth: scientists determine that neutrinos released during the flare have "mutated into microwaves" which are heating the earth's molten core, which in turn destabilizes the earth's crust and (through gratuitously applied CGI) cause all kinds of mayhem for mankind, including huge sinkholes, big earthquakes and massive tsunamis that threaten to engulf our land masses for extended periods.

The movie begins with our scientist heros making the discovery and reporting it dutifully to some bigshots in Washington DC who immediately escalate the news to the President. At this point, a kind of alert goes out to the world's rich and powerful who all immediately begin vying for seats on one of a handful of "arcs" that have been built for just such an occasion. The expected struggles regarding the morality of such a system, as well as the desperate dealings of those trying to get onto the arcs, play out against the over-the-top CGI renditions of the end of the world.

At the beginning of the movie, I found it hard to suspend disbelief because the science was so ridiculous. I won't bother going over it all, but like many movies predicated on something sciency-sounding, it was painful to listen to.

In the end though, I found it even more unbelievable that politicians would not only listen to scientists about urgent issues facing humanity, but that they would actually act on the information.

Is that cynical? Or perhaps a reflection of reality?

Live your nightmare

"I'm forty years old, and I'm just beginning. I'm starting over, in the wake of men who are so much better at this than me, and it feels so good to be that guy again, looking up. God, it feels like such a blessing to be off balance, to be uncertain. I'm so happy."

I read an article written by a guy who did stand-up comedy for the first time at 40 years old - part of his midlife crisis. A lot of it really hit home for someone who started a new career around the same time. And it's funny how much overlap there is between the experience of a stand-up comic and a classroom teacher. The teachers out there will understand...

Live your nightmare!

Discipline: Fear and Loathing in the Classroom.

A followup to my post about classroom management of almost exactly one year ago. I said in that post that I would try to get comfortable with my role as classroom cop by establishing a non-negotiable rule and then not missing a chance to enforce it. That was ok from the standpoint of being consistent about my expectations of the students, and also from the perspective of getting used to the process of being the classroom cop. But it didn't do much to make me comfortable with the role. It also didn't do anything to address the myriad ways some students find to be disruptive.

I have said on numerous occasions that the only thing I hate about the classroom experience is discipline. I really do hate being a cop.

I've been struggling with the reasons for it. I have no problem talking to parents about their kids' behavior. And it's not like I care if a disruptive kid doesn't like me because I took action against him/her. So why the aversion?

What I've discovered is that I don't really have an aversion to discipline, but rather I have a strong aversion to failure - or at least the admission of failure. When things have gotten to the point where I'm writing a referral (basically a formal notice that a student needs to be dealt with by the dean's office), it's like an admission on my part that the student simply can't control his/her behavior, nor can I do anything to control the student. It's an admission of failure all the way around.

It's also a request for backup. It's almost like I'm saying, "I can't control this kid by myself and I need help." That's also something I almost never say or admit to myself, because of the way it makes me feel about my own command of a situation.

Realizing that my problem with discipline was my own ego, I looked at my relationship to my students differently. I saw myself (or more accurately, my ego) as an impediment to a healthy classroom environment. My ego was cheating those kids who actually were able to control themselves and who were there to learn. My reluctance to admit failure and call for backup allowed the disruptive kids more influence over the classroom environment.

It's now a lot easier to see what I have to do and why. I'm not sure I like disciplinary action any better now, but at least I understand my own aversion to it and also that I'm duty-bound to carry it out.

So what does that action look like now in my classroom? Instead of one non-negotiable rule, I have a system that will work better with some groups than others, but seems to work well for my students: If your behavior gets to the point where I tell you that "you're disrupting my class", the very next time I have to correct you for anything, you're getting a referral and a phone call home. The nice thing about this system is it's flexible enough to cover almost any kind of disruptive behavior without my having to delineate every single possible infraction in my list of rules. One big potential drawback is lack of consistency. I have to be conscious of my own consistency and fairness at all times. But that responsibility comes with the job anyway, and I'm much happier with the flexibility to deal with problems as they arise than I am worried about any lack of fairness, real or perceived.

I've written about four referrals in the past month (a lot for me) and students seem to get it. As long as they're not blindsided with a referral (and they're not, since I warn them with same phrase every time), they don't think it's unfair. I've also had some productive talks with parents and deans that I wouldn't have had otherwise. Finally, the students who can control themselves seem to like the environment better as well.

I would still much prefer not to have to be a cop, but it's simply part of the job. And having a clear and consistent system to warn students when you're getting into cop mode as well as what happens when you get there is a big help.

The power of expectations

Bit of a dissertation, but well worth it in my opinion...

I don't know how the brain chooses the things that it focuses on, but at the end of the last school year my brain chose the following three observations as those that were among the most important to my teaching:

First, my students didn't seem to be doing any real learning. They were memorizing things from practice tests, but couldn't effectively apply the concepts on real tests. I confirmed this by analyzing their results on a few tests, relative to practice tests that they had been given before hand. I broke the questions from the real tests down into three categories:

1. Questions that were the same as those on the practice test, verbatim.
2. Questions that were the same as those on the practice test, with the exception that I had changed some value which would change the answer they got when they performed the calculation (I would change 10kg to 20kg, for example).
3. Questions that covered the same concepts as those on the practice test, but didn't explicitly appear on the practice test at all.

Not surprisingly, they did very well on type-1 questions (those that were taken verbatim from their practice tests). They did worse on type-2 questions (that were the same except for using different values), and worst of all on type-3 questions (those they hadn't seen before). The surprise came when I looked at the standard deviation of the number of students who answered each type of question correctly: statistically, there was a big difference in their performance on type 1 questions: they clearly performed better on the questions that they had been given before when nothing was changed. However, there was no statistical difference in their performance on type-2 and type-3 questions! In other words, if I simply changed a number in the problem from the practice test and put it on the real test, they may as well have never seen that problem before. My conclusion: they were simply memorizing, and not learning.

Second, they didn't really care about their own results. They seemed to have only a superficial interest in what they did wrong on any given assignment, quiz, lab or test. I had a box of graded assignments in my room so that students could help themselves when they wished, as opposed to me taking valuable class time to return graded assignments. The result was an overstuffed and completely ignored box of graded assignments that I would empty on the day of a test as I walked around passing them back. They would then proceed to dump all of those papers in the trash on their way out. And why not? At that point, anything I said in the corrections was useless since they had already taken the test. To me, this indicated a real lack of connection in the minds of the students between all the things we do in class and their own success on the tests.

Third, I was doing most of the work in my classroom. I was doing all the intellectual heavy lifting - bringing the subject to my students, as opposed to making them come to the subject. I would give answers, rather than provide Socratic guidance. I would lecture, rather than inquire. I would provide a practice test rather than remind them what to study on their own. 

I wondered if these observations weren't related in some way, and so my colleague and I set out to change the way we taught the course to address all of these issues. The solution we came up with was pretty simple:

1. We'll hand the students a packet at the beginning of every unit. It will have all the material in it for that unit including homeworks, labs, worksheets and notes.
2. They will be responsible for bringing this to class every day and keeping it up to date.
3. We will not collect/grade anything. We'll give points only for on-time completion and then go over the material so the students can correct their own errors if they choose.
4. We'll let them use their packets for all quizzes and tests.
5. Since the students could use their packets on tests and quizzes, the questions on the tests and quizzes would be harder than they were last year. Instead of asking students to simply retrieve information from their packets, many questions would be designed to require the students to form their answers using two or more bits of information from the packets. In other words, there would be no type-1 questions. There would be some type-2's but mostly type-3's.

We did this to encourage personal responsibility in the students - we made it very clear by doing this that the responsibility for their success or failure lay squarely on their shoulders. But we did this also to impress upon them the value of keeping good records and referring back to them often. The business of taking their own notes, having confidence in them, and building the habit of referring back to them often would (we hoped) reinforce the connections between the various things we learn in class. But it would also help build the soft skill of developing a store of information and then actually using it later. And that skill is something badly needed by these kids. It will serve them well whatever they choose to do in life.

Early results: We assumed that the first few quizzes would be extremely difficult for the students and that we would have a fairly high failure rate as they learned to take and then rely upon good notes. We've had 3 quizzes so far and the average across all three sections have been 78%, 74% and 76%. Obviously, I would love for those grades to be higher, but since I was expecting averages in the 50's, I'm delighted at the results. Several students even have a 100% average to date.

The results are so encouraging because the quizzes are so different from last year. None of the questions that we're asking appear explicitly in the packets and many of them require the students to use more than one bit of information to develop an answer to the problem. It's early in the year yet, but so far they seem to have responded to heightened expectations with a jump in performance.

Vacation

I was talking to a neighbor the other day when it occurred to me: I've never really had a vacation before in my professional life. Sure, I've taken time off of work, but there was always the cell phone, emails, the occasional meeting to dial into (it'll just take a half-hour). And if those things weren't there, there was the dread of returning to face problems that had simply festered in my absence.

But summer break is a clean and complete break. No calls. No emails. No endless stream of issues, growing more explosive over time, waiting for me to return. It's a real (and needed) break from the job.

Funny thing happens when you don't dread the imminent return to your work: you find yourself voluntarily reflecting on the work that you do, and thinking about how to do things better. I've been thinking a lot about the way I teach and how to do it better since school let our and we've barely been out two weeks. This week I'm taking a class (voluntarily) on how to teach science a different way, and I'm excited to begin applying it in the fall.

A job that I want to return to. It's a really good feeling!