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.