Category Archives: Uncategorized

My Favorite Place to go in my City!

Leave a reply

My favorite place to go are these hills on the northeast side of my city. The hills have a lot of trails and you can easily get up high enough to see our whole rural city. I love sunsets and sunrises from up here and I also love the mathematical conversations about nature, distance, relative size, and population that I have with my wife and son.

Do we really need 4-6 weeks of review at the beginning of the year?

1 Reply

The short answer is NO!!! Kids know way more math than we give them credit for as we catastrophize about learning loss, the summer dip, and the few kids that hesitate trying to remember something they were once taught.

Throughout my career I have witnessed and helped create those 4-6 week units on basic facts in middle school for the beginning of the year. These seem like a wise path to take but there is a better way. Before we get to these and other questions, I think it is important to recognize two things. First, these 4-6 units have a negative affect on many of our students math identity and their perception of what math is. If you want to or are teaching these types of units that are below grade level, you also must acknowledge the impact your decision is having on many of your students. Second, these units are not solving the problem of student procedural and conceptual understanding of math and our standardized test scores are not improving (if you are worried about that measure).

Additionally, we should acknowledge that these review units give us, as teachers, the warm fuzzies. They potentially make us feel like we are setting kids up for success, and filling in gaps. In a worse case scenario they unconsciously allow us to feel as if “WE” have taught it. Thus implying that if the kids don’t get it then it is now on them.

The bottom line is we are making huge assumptions about what our students do and do not know. Also, just because the students you have in front of you did poorly on SBAC last year doesn’t mean they don’t know these basic skills. Many just need to be reminded. They need a quick refresher, NOT 4 weeks of reteaching.

So here is what to do instead:

  1. Start your year with low floor, high ceiling tasks such as those you can find on Youcubed.org under Week of Inspirational Math. This will help build positive math identity in students, positive classroom culture and help you get to know the strengths and areas of growth among your students.
  2. Spend a few days reminding students of a few truly important procedural skills they will need and then give them a quick check for understanding on those skills. This will give you a more accurate understanding of what your students need.
  3. Start with grade level content.
  4. Use just in time mini lessons to shore up misconceptions on grade level ideas and prior grade level skills.

These units need to go by the wayside. We need to recognize that 4-6 weeks spent on skills that can be done by Alexa and other computers more accurately and efficiently, is a waste of our time. It is contributing to our time issues, our students disengagement, and many other problems.

I truly believe that we cannot change each other’s minds. We can only dislodge current thinking through conversation and curiosity. I hope this has helped to dislodge or disrupt your current thinking on this topic.

@mathhiker76

Are we cultivating Safety or Control?

Leave a reply

The short answer is that many of our classroom expectations are truly to maintain control rather than promote curiosity, freedom, and healthy child development.

With the start of the school year upon us or shortly behind or ahead of us, I have been reading tweets and posts and blogs about classrooms expectations, rules, and procedures. Recently I read a post by @CarlaShalaby regarding 8 questions we should ask ourselves when we are creating our rules and polices. She makes a great point that “how we manage a space can be a chance to practice freedom instead of modeling control”.

The 8 questions come from various sources including Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators (AK Press, 2021).

Questions to consider:

  1. Are my actions grounded in cultivating safety or control?
  2. Am I defining safety in a way that requires control or freedom?
    • Freedom means that we keep us safe, we protect everyone’s bodies and feelings.
  3. Does enforcing the rules require me to behave like a police officer or an educator?
  4. If a student asks “why?” will your reason for having the policy stand up to the uniquely smart and relentless scrutiny of 30+ young people collectively seeking freedom?
  5. Does this rule exist only because I have a personal pet peeve?
  6. Am I serving kids by having a comprehensive set of rules that eliminates all potential conflict, harm, and drama?
  7. Do I want to model how to use power to manage people in a space, or how to use it to hold and make space for everyone?
  8. Why do I teach?

This artwork by Molly Costello is a great visual for the ideas represented in these questions.

These questions also align with a few questions recently proposed on the same topic by Dr. Kristopher Childs, Chief Academic, Social Justice, and Equity officer at Open Up Resources. He argues we should consider:

  1. Have I created an environment where all students can achieve success?
  2. Do all students have windows, mirrors, and doors to see themselves, learn, and experience other cultures?
  3. Do I truly believe that all students can be successful?
  4. What pieces of themselves are students forced to leave at the door when they enter my classroom?

These ideas remind me of some of the common practices we see in our schools such as clip charts in elementary grades, rewards in a PBIS model, and the variety of expectations from classroom to classroom on middle and high school campuses. If we want to truly create environments that are safe and welcoming spaces for our students then we have to take a serious reflective look at the normal practices we believe to be necessary in school.

To be clear:

  • Clip charts are a form of bullying. No adult would allow an employer to use these in a group setting. Stop doing it to children.
  • Rewards in most situations only work when people want the reward and when their are observers present to see the desired behavior. Rewards kill intrinsic motivation.
  • Students in middle and high school settings typically have 6-8 sets of rules and expectations about pencil sharpening, bathrooms breaks, water, etc. This creates mental chaos as they move from one space to another. Work to create common expectations and free up mental space for students to learn.

Thank you to @CarlaShalaby for inspiring this writing and to @DrKChilds for his thought provoking questions. I love number 4.

What do you have to leave at the door when you enter a space? Work? Home? With friends? With family?