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!

Classroom Management

We're on spring break now, and it didn't come a moment too soon! I've been sleeping 9+ hours per night for the past 3 nights and I still feel sluggish in the morning. Lots of catching up going on.

I can see now where I made some fundamental mistakes this year and (although it's hard for me to believe I'm saying this right now) I can't wait to start next year and correct them.

During the summer course I took, we were repeatedly told of the importance of "classroom management". But what exactly is classroom management? I had no real context, so I didn't really have a plan. The problem was that I thought I had some context, so I thought I had a plan. And I was wrong.

We were tasked with developing a classroom management plan (which in retrospect was ridiculous). Having taught in college classrooms in the past, and knowing that people don't read long, detailed plans, I reasoned that a short list of bullets covering very simple and universal behavior expectations would suffice. Here is my plan:

Welcome to Physics!

• Huskies are: 
• Respectful
• Responsible 
• Safe

Class Policies

• The following will apply at all times:
• General Behavior and Conduct Guidelines
• Academic Honesty Policy

• Please review the syllabus regarding: 
• Attendance
• Tardiness
• Late work
• Grading scale

Expectations

• During class (students)
• Arrive on time and prepared
• Seek help when needed

• After class (students)
• Complete any assignments
• Prepare for exams and quizzes

• Any time (parents)
• Don't hesitate to contact me

Obviously, this isn't a plan. This is a set of guidelines and expectations. Of course, a plan consists of actions and contingencies with a stated outcome. My reasoning for not offering a complete plan was that I could think of so many management contingencies in a classroom that it would be impractical to write them all down. 

This "plan" was appealing to me for many reasons. First, it's easily digestible. No one wants to wade through pages and pages of planning - and no one will. A long plan covering all classroom contingencies would simply go unread. Second, I could derive all my rules and regulations from this set of bullets - especially the first set. In the classes that I had taught (college), people knew what was respectful and responsible so there was no point in elaborating. If someone acts disrespectfully or irresponsibly, you call them on it and they acknowledge it and you all move on. So that, I reasoned, was that.

Not so.

In a classic example of the lesson I've learned again and again this year: they are not like me. Simply put, I overestimated the maturity level of my students. Or I've just forgotten what it's like to be an upperclassman in high school. When called on their (obviously) bad behavior, they have an almost infinite capacity to argue, reject what they're being told, and repeat the bad behavior. This is simply part of their stage of development, when kids are exploring all the ways they can assert themselves.

In many ways, I've been a pushover this year. I think that's been due to a combination of my thinking that they'll grow out of their need to assert, combined with my being "gun shy" about punishment. From my perspective now, the former simply isn't going to happen. Assertion, simply for the sake of assertion, comes with the territory at this age. So let's focus on the latter, which is the real driver for the need of a management plan.

Punishment. Consequences. I didn't want to be a disciplinarian, and thought that the kids would just like me enough that I wouldn't have to be. And, to be fair, in the majority of cases, this is absolutely true. But there will be those who you can't count on to behave. Whether it be through peer pressure, the power of your personality, or whatever, there will be those who are impervious to anything except consequences. And since  a few unruly students can have a profound effect on classroom dynamics, you have to have a plan. And you have to be ready to execute.

I still think that a comprehensive list of infractions and punishments is useless. But I strongly suggest that a new teacher start by picking one law that shall be iron-clad in the classroom. If you don't know where you'll be working yet, just choose something reasonable (no gum, no dress-code infractions, no cell phones, whatever). You can change it when you get a job if you wish. If you do know where you'll be working, talk to someone else in the department and get an idea of what school rules kids tend to take liberties with and choose one of those. It really doesn't matter which, just pick one. Next determine consequences. Are you a three-strikes kind of person? That's fine, but what happens at the third strike? Is it a referral? Detention? Call home? You should also seek the advice of colleagues here - understand what punishments you can administer for your chosen infraction, and find out how to do it. Make your plan and tell everyone the rule and the consequence on day 1. Then do not miss a chance to enforce it.

This is still obviously not a complete classroom management plan. I'm still not even sure I know what a classroom management plan is since you have to make so many decisions every single day, and it's impractical to attempt to account for them all with a "plan". No, the point of this is really twofold: to get you comfortable with being the police in your new job, and to impress upon the students that when you say that a certain law applies in your classroom, that it's pointless and even self-defeating to experiment with boundaries. Regardless of what a classroom management plan really is, I believe that this is a first, essential step towards managing a classroom. And  it may sound callous, but there should be a few students of whom you can make an example in the first week or two of school. There will be those who push you simply to see if you'll punish them. You can either punish them or not, but not punishing them is an invitation for them to push harder. And they will. It's a mindless game that I didn't want to acknowledge that I'd have to play, but I have to remind myself where they are in their development: they're learning to assert themselves and they look for opportunities to practice.

Since the point is to practice your new role and get your students accustomed to it as well, it's easy to see that it doesn't matter much what rule you choose to enforce, as long as it's reasonable. And you'll be able to add/subtract rules later as you understand what factors affect your classroom the most. But if you start with no precedent or expectation of consequences, it's very difficult to establish these things later on. What if you fear that you might be too harsh out of the gate? To make a potentially offensive analogy: it's far easier to start with a tight leash and loosen it than it is to start with a long leash and then tighten it. And I believe you'll have greater respect from a lot of your students if you demonstrate firm consistency when challenged on your rules.

So choose a rule and a consequence, and practice. Good classroom management will come with experience, and I hope this helps you accelerate the process.

Dead of Winter

I've been taken over by this malaise. I feel like I'm still adrift in many ways - I haven't all my lessons planned out; I'm kind of "feeling" my way from one unit to the next; I feel connected to the students one day and completely foreign to them the next; inspired this week, despairing the next. 

Maybe it's the season, or maybe this is just the way teaching is with cyclic highs and lows. But to find the motivation to get back to a high... Ugh. I had all weekend (a 4-day weekend no less!) to catch up/plan/get ready to kick ass. And I didn't. I knocked a bunch stuff off my to-do list, but I found myriad excuses to avoid doing school-related work. Why? Am I not cut out for this? Am I just not into it? I don't believe that - I spent quite a long time talking to my mom this weekend about how to motivate students, so It's not that I'm not into it. Whatever it is, I could use a dose of motivation.

Job satisfaction

I was paid perhaps the biggest compliment of my professional career two days ago: a good* student of mine said that I should teach engineering. When I asked him why, he replied that he would be taking engineering next year and he wanted me as his teacher.

Best feeling ever.

* He is not a good student because of his comment - he was good on his own merit before he said anything!

Self-improvement

As I sit here on the eve of my second semester, it occurs to me that I have two big problems: understanding what I need to work on most, and how to work on those things.

I need to improve my own teaching, I'm sure. But which things do I target? How do I prioritize the list? How do I go about improving?

I feel like I should work on improving the class itself. But what to work on, how to prioritize, and what course of action to take are the big issues.

It's not that I can't think of a single thing to work on, it's that there are so many candidates I'm not sure where to start. My focus over the next month will be to get a clear vision on what/how to improve. I suppose that'll be the purpose of this blog too: to track both the plan and the progress against it.

Keep calm and carry on

Teaching is like doing 5 hours of improv theater every day. And when you do that, you'll have good days and bad. You'll have days when you really connect with your audience, and those when you don't connect at all. You'll sometimes be brilliant, sometimes disappointing, and sometimes you'll just embarrass yourself.

The other day, in the middle of writing something on the board, I turned abruptly to the class to make some deeply meaningful but slightly tangential point and saw what appeared to be three kids texting and one sleeping - and that was just the front row!

My response was to pause and say, with as much shock and indignation as I could muster, "What the heck is going on here???" Before I even finished the question I realized two things:

1. Due to the unfortunate body positioning of the girl who appeared to be sleeping (her head was down on the table very near the boy to her right, as she rummaged around in her backpack which was on the floor and out of my sight), every row of students behind her would assume that my question was *ahem* suggestive, and 
2. There was absolutely no way out of it. Like quicksand, struggling was just going to make it worse. 

So after some stunned but raucous laughter from the students behind the first row, I decided it was best to just move on with the lesson and not draw any more unnecessary attention to myself. 

When you're on stage doing improv theater for 5 hours a day, every day, you're bound to put your foot in it once in a while. Chances are, you'll take it a lot more seriously than your students, though. So just keep calm and carry on.

Essential learning

I've been having a lot of conversations lately about learning standards and targets. These are the things that are essential for a student to learn as determined by various groups with a stake in education. Those groups can be federal, state or local governments, regional offices of education, etc. And they serve as a laundry list of specific things that a student should know when they leave a classroom.

As I look at the list of things that a physics student should know, it occurs to me that although it would be great if students knew how to solve for the velocity of a cart that rolls without friction down an incline of a certain height, that particular skill will likely never be of use to them, even if they go on to moderately technical careers.

So what would be useful?

I'll think about this some more, but when I think of the skills that were most valuable in any of the techs or entry-level engineers with whom I've worked, three things immediately come to mind:

1. Vocabulary. When someone is already familiar with basic science terms and doesn't use words like "whatchamacallit", "thingy" and "whatever", not only do I have confidence in that person's intelligence, it makes communication much more efficient. 
2. Basic familiarity with science. I don't care if someone can recite the relationship between electrical power, current and voltage, nearly as much as I care that she has a sense that there is a relationship and can look up the specifics if necessary. 
3. Logic and critical thinking. It's hard to overstate the importance of the ability to think in terms of "if this, then that." It's the difference between being a valuable employee/teammate/asset and a helpless robot. This could be the biggest indictment of science education in America, but there's an alarming lack of people in industry with the ability to stand back, and ask themselves if what they're seeing makes logical sense. So many people just go through the motions of what they're doing without thinking about it. What's worse, when prompted, they can't think about it.

I'll see if I can refine this list, but I have the feeling that it's my duty to use these as "standards" at least as much as the standards I'm given by the state/ROE/etc.

Practice makes perfect

I read an article from a recent Time magazine about holding kids back in the 3rd grade because of substandard reading skills. The article made the point that it's difficult to discern the risk:reward ratio of holding kids back (the reward of building/reinforcing the necessary skills vs. the emotional/psychological risk to the kid), but it did make the case rather strongly, based on a Brooking's Institution study of public schools in Florida, that extra reading instruction every day helped those kids who lagged behind their peers.

Reminds me of a quote from one of my students over the last few weeks who discovered that she understood friction problems a lot better after going through several examples: "So... if you do more problems, this stuff seems to get a lot easier..."

There just might be something to that idea.

Baby's first parent-teacher conferences!

I just had my first round of parent-teacher conferences, and I saw the above cartoon just prior to it. Coincidence? *gulp*

Oak Park and River Forest High School is a place where there's lots of parental involvement in general, so I expected some pretty intense discussions during the conferences. But the conferences were actually quite nice and constructive. Two of the things that I noticed right away is that the parents seemed very reasonable (quite unlike those in the cartoon panel on the right above) and understood their kids' strengths, weaknesses and tendencies in school. In most cases, the only point on which we ever really differed in our views was on how vocal their kids tend to be: I would say something like, "my only concern is that Xxxxx speak up for herself more in class and not be so shy about contributing," and the parent reaction would be something along the lines of, "wow! I can't get Xxxxx to be quiet for anything at home!"

Also helping to avoid any surprises (which tend to put people on the defensive) is the online system we use to record grades. All parents have viewing access to their students' grades at all times via a web interface. So for the most part, nothing I said was news to them.

Maybe it's because I have mostly Jr's and Sr's: their parents had probably heard the same things many times over the years, and they seemed to know their kids situations well and there weren't many surprises.

One last observation - the conferences aren't compulsory for anyone. So parents can skip them altogether if they like. Looking at the list of parents that signed up, it seemed the kids that I felt most needed a parent-teacher conference were the kids whose parents didn't sign up. There were some of course, but the general trend over two days was that I talked to parents whose kids were doing pretty well already. Conclusions are left to the reader as an exercise. :)

...like a broken record.

I have been so completely consumed by this job - not that I mind. On the contrary - I love it. But my neighbors say things like, "man, we haven't seen you guys in forever!". To the outside observer, I've become pretty hermitic. And that's pretty ironic for someone who spends all day every day in a room teeming with people.

We've now got one full week left until Thanksgiving (with its 3-day week), then we've got three full weeks of school after which is final exams and then a 2 week break for Christmas. And that's it for the semester. My god, where has the time gone? I was speaking to my principal the other day and saying that at this rate, I'm scared that I'll wake up one day and suddenly realize that I'm 80 years old...

On that same topic, I was speaking with a colleague about another person who made the jump from industry to the classroom and that person's comment was: "I never watch the clock any more that's for sure - well, except to wish I had 10 more minutes in class..."

Damn right.

Week 5... already???

I can't believe that mid-quarter reports are due out this week. We're already 0.125 of the way through our first year. Time has gone so fast, it's difficult for me to get my head around.

I've gotten into a bit of a rhythm in my new life and for me, that means I have been able to organize my time so I'm not completely overwhelmed all the time with the task of preparing for, teaching, or following up on a class. But just barely. There's so much work to do that even one little time-demand in your private life can overwhelm you. I get up at 5:30 which isn't quite early enough and leave my house just before 6:30am to drop the kids off at before-school care (can't drop them off any earlier than that), then I have about an hour commute. I spend the day teaching my classes (for which I've already prepared or I'm doomed), then from 3:30 I'm usually engaged with students who want to talk about their grade or something we did in class. Then from 3:30 to about 5 I'm preparing for classes the next day (making sure lab materials are present and organized, everything works, handouts are prepared etc) then one more hour in the car and I'm home where we get to eat, help the kids with homework and get them cleaned up and into bed. By that time (usually 8:30 or so), I have a little time to take care of whatever needs doing around the house (last week it was fixing the washing machine and meeting with a guy from the title company to sign refinance papers), and then it's ME TIME, baby! Yup - by 9:30 I get to sit down and (usually) grade papers until 10:30 when I go to bed. If I'm not in bed by 10:30 I'm pretty tired the next day so I try to stick to a strict 10:30 bed time.

That's my life now. Honestly, I haven't any idea what's going outside of my home/school bubble. I don't read the paper any more or watch TV because I just don't have time. And I have almost no time during the day for socializing. I love teaching, but I would encourage anyone thinking about teaching to think long and hard about the commitment. Professionally, I've never experienced anything like the sustained effort required to teach, and judging by the conversations I've had with veteran teachers, my experience is par for the course. So if you're thinking about doing it, know that the workload is huge. But also know that that's perfectly fine if you love what you do.  :)

Anybody see the truck that ran me over?

Holy. Cow. I'm. Tired.

Some quick observations: I'm tired. I forgot how exhausting it is being "on" for hours on end. The activity level at my other job went in bursts: sometimes there would be really intense action and a lot of demand, and then there would be relatively long lulls. Now, the last three periods of my day are one right after the other for me and it's action, action, action. Leaves me feeling a little ragged.

And those last three periods are what's called "project physics", or physics for students who need a physics/science credit but who probably aren't going on in science. Those students need a little extra help in terms of motivation, since they might not be very interested in being there in the first place.

Some of my classes are very small and some are large and the difference in managing them is pretty significant. Time management is a really big issue in the larger classes, and after only one day on the job I can clearly see the argument for smaller class sizes. Maybe my perception will change as I become better at classroom management.

What a whirlwind. I think I'm going to go to bed now.

First day!

Today is our first day in front of students. A big career decision, few years of planning, a big move, saving up and taking the required classes, and it's finally here.

I'm a little overwhelmed, but in a good way.

Deep breath and...

Union guy

Today, we were going through teacher orientation at OPRF, and as a part of that we had an opportunity to join the teachers union. It's not compulsory, but if we elect not to join we pay a "Fair Share" fee since the contract we signed had already been negotiated by the union. At least this is how I understand it.

The fair share fee is close enough to the annual union dues that it doesn't make much sense not to join, so here I am.

I never saw myself joining a union. I'm in a really alien world, and I guess it will take me a while to come to grips with it. It continues to be an interesting journey for sure.