Giving thanks

I've always said that my kids (students) are naturally brilliant. I don't think they understand what I mean. Maybe they think I'm just joking.
I mean what I said: my kids are naturally brilliant.
On Friday the 20th my Group D students had a serious talk with me. The conversation was an example of what I want from my students: led by the students themselves. I just facilitated the conversation by trying to figure out who should speak next. Eventually, the kids took that over by writing and crossing off names on the overhead themselves. I think they got a good idea of why it is important to take turns and how difficult it can be to be fair in deciding who gets to speak next.
The students displayed courage and trust by telling me how they feel based on what teachers say and do. They also gave me some insight into how their families feel about their education.
I'm not going into detail because the kids shared some very personal stories with me. All I feel comfortable blogging about is that I now have some very difficult questions to guide me when I teach. First, what is success? Second, how much should parents be involved in their kids' educations? I think educators everywhere have struggled with these questions forever--or at least, I hope so! These questions are examples of what makes teaching an art form. There are no pat answers; we have to figure out what our students need. It's different for each kid, so if teachers somehow figure it out for one kid or one class, replicating it with others isn't really likely to work.
To all my students, please know that I am thankful for and proud of you. You guys are wiser than you think.

It's about time...

...and I have none! I'm spending a few quick minutes in the computer lab with Group B and thought it would be a good opportunity to update my blog.

There are so many things I wish I had time for. I want to take dance lessons again, or at least get to the gym a few times a week! I also would like some divine intervention to provide me with the time and energy to coach cheerleading.

And with that, I'm out of time!

Life, Death, and Grammar

Now who would've thought I'd be blogging so much? Given how much I love to talk, I bet everyone but me!

I have been doing some volunteer work for the Texas Defender's Service, which helps lawyers representing people on death row in many different ways. I would not usually talk about my work with the death penalty, because I think it is of paramount importance that you (my students, my colleagues...anyone who doesn't solicit my opinion) make up your own mind. However, this is in the context of my belief in the Constitution and the rights it guarantees Americans. One is that in death penalty cases (and many others), the person who is accused--the defendant--has the right to a lawyer and to "due process," which pretty much means that the courts will follow the rules. The word "due" in this context means "your guarantee just because you're human" so you can think of due process as the process that you deserve because you're a human. So in that spirit, I'll tell you about one of the many quirky things about the criminal justice system.

If you think about it, the Constitution's guarantee of fair "process" doesn't sound like what we usually think makes justice. I grew up thinking "justice" means that you figure out the truth and then figure out what consequences everybody should get. But the Constitution doesn't say that kind of justice is what we are guaranteed. Instead, it says that the "process" will be just. "Process" means all the different steps you have to do to finish. So the Constitution says we all get the right to have all those little steps done without cheating.

In the case I was researching, I was trying to figure out whether the court that convicted the defendant got one of those steps wrong. To figure out the rule the court had to followed, I had to read a lot of rules, called statutes. And here is where the craziness started: to figure out whether a really important statute was broken, I had to analyze the statute's grammar. Really. Is the letter that accuses the defendant of all the crimes (the "indictment") written in the conjunctive or the disjunctive (does it have lots of "ands" or is it full of "ors"?). Then I had to figure out if there were transitive verbs, and if so, what the nouns they were paired up with meant. And that was only half of the work!

Who would have thought that a person's right to justice sometimes means that the only thing between life and death for a criminal is grammar?

Cheers if you actually stuck along for the ride. This was a complicated post!

Change is Scary!

As the new school year approaches, I am using the few work-free days of summer I have left to prepare. I am so excited about teaching the amazing students of the EACPA. I have a tendency to get so enthusiastic about what all innovations I want to implement that I forget to figure out how to implement them! Procedures, it turns out, are humongously important!

Change, even good change, is stressful for me. I'm glad that I've figured that out about myself. I've noticed that when I'm stressed, I get disorganized and forget about my normal routines. So I'm going to use this space to write a couple high-priority items on my to-answer list. Students, I hope you take time to nail out the ways you're going to actually accomplish all of your dreams.

So...
1. Decide on class- and homework expectations and decide on procedures for students to follow. Where will the warm-up be in the classroom? Where will students turn in their homework? How will students make up classwork from days when they're absent? What do I expect out of an A+ assignment? What is passing?

2. Brainstorm skills practice if FastMath is not ready on day one of school. How will I track students' progress without the software? Perhaps I should give students internet-search assignments until the software comes in.

3. Post "This is important..." poster

4. Gradesheets? Homework? Individual math plans?

5. Homework for first few weeks from The Organized Student

6. How to keep parents involved? Are signed weekly progress reports sufficient?

Lots to ponder with this change, but knowing that can be empowering. Students, by the time you read this, I will (I better!) have implementation procedures that we can mold together to pave the way to your success! (procedures that we mold and pave...what kind of mixed up analogy is that?)

Gifted and Talented

Idit left me a message: Wow! I am so impressed: Duke TIP is so hard. At 6th grade. My god... I wonder - was it hard to be gifted as a child? and as an adult?

My guess is that she would like answers, and she would like them on my wiki. This forum is so cool!

To answer, sort of. I don't think I was identified as gifted and talented (GT); I don't even know if my high school had a GT program. I went to Johnston High School's Liberal Arts Academy back when both existed. Johnston, next door to TEACPA, is now Eastside Memorial High School and the Johnston Campus. The Liberal Arts Academy moved to LBJ High School to be combined with the Science Academy. It's crushing that my alma mater no longer exists, but that's a whole 'nother topic. Perhaps I'll get to it at some point.

Anyway, I started my education in private school, which gave me a solid foundation. We took Latin in third grade and Spanish from first grade on. My math classes were especially rigorous.

I was known as a smart kid who always finished work early, effortlessly, and sloppily, then roamed around the room (with my teachers' permission, of course) to help other students. Unfortunately, this wasn't the best route to being popular, and the private school kids were cruel, as kids can be.

When I got to public school, I was determined not to let anyone know I was smart. I kept up the charade all the way until my freshman year of college, which ran concurrent with my senior year of high school (which made it hard to claim less-than-brilliance). I played up my natural ditziness and bleached my hair blond.

I finally got over it when the bulk of my friends realized that the high schooler taking upper-level classes (and one graduate seminar: The Literature of Afro-Cuban Slavery) in college must be smarter than the average bear. Today, I try to stifle my tendency to blurt out answers (with very limited success). It's difficult to hold my tongue when I've been rewarded by authority figures for having good, insightful answers over the entire course of my academic life.

However, I am a firm believer that anyone who has at least one advocate supporting his/her education can be "gifted and talented." If you look at the tests that the Austin Independent School District administers to select students for their GT programs, you can tell that what they test is quite learnable--anyone could pass given proper preparation. The GT test is just another way to reward kids who have been exposed to the material in and outside of school and to segregate them from the equally smart but less-experiences peers.

Moreover, a core belief of mine is that everyone is naturally brilliant (secret's out, kids: I say I teach only naturally brilliant students...do you see the trick?). In other words, if you plucked any baby out of their environment and gave them the blessings I was given--two Ph.D. for parents who made my education a giant priority, enough money to afford tools like computers and fancy calculators, and lots of stability at home--that baby would grow up to be "gifted and talented." In the nature versus nurture debate, I am way over on the spectrum.

So yes, being smart was difficult to accept and is today difficult to control, but I don't think my experience is necessarily unique.

Thanks for the question, Idit. It's clear I had a lot to say--another failure to avoid blurtatiousness!

I Graphed the Sine!

Really, the most powerful learning experiences I've had have come from my personal life rather than from academics. However, those are (as you might guess) rather personal, so I'll have to fudge a little on the assignment!

Academically, the most powerful experience I can think of is going to Duke University the summer of my 6th grade year for the Duke Talent Identification Program, or TIP. For three weeks, I was immersed in college life. I lived in a dorm with two roommates, took classes taught by Duke students, and learned to reach out and ask for help. I took a pre-calculus course that focused on trigonometry. It was a ton of work, but we had tons of fun, too.

I remember two songs my class wrote when we were overwhelmed by everything we were learning and just needed a break!

(To the tune of "America the Beautiful")

Oh functions class
For spacious graphs
For amber waves of sine
For purple tangent majesty
Above the x-axes!
Oh functions class
Oh functions class
Elisa [my instructor] shed her grace on thee
And crown your graphs with labels
For Jill [the TA] will be grading these!

And the other one, to the tune of "I Saw the Sign" (one of the true jewels of the late '80s):

We graphed the sine
And it opened up our minds
We graphed the sine
Trig is demanding
But we've got understanding
We graphed the sine
And it opened up our minds
We graphed the sign
No one's gonna pull it down
Put it back on the graph where it belongs
But where does it belong?

This is a graph of the sine function:



It all comes from the Unit Circle!

Thanks for stopping by!

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A skit from one of my all-time favorite shows, Square One TV