Here are a few videos that my students made in my classes this year. I really like the level of engagement I get from the students when they're creating videos, not just in the actual recording of the video, but also in the preparation and planning for the video. Preparing a video is like preparing to teach something to someone else, and in order to teach something you have to really understand it yourself. This motivates students to ask questions and discuss their topics with each other in much greater depth than they would otherwise.

Here's a short video a student made to explain the "Pythagorean Theorem":

Here's a longer video a student made to explain the characteristics of the function y = √x:

Here's a video of some of my students actually making their videos:

I finally got around to watching the movie Freedom Writers the other day, and found it both enjoyable and disturbing. It was enjoyable in the way that many movies are, which is to say that it was entertaining, if predictable. Hillary Swank was great as real life high school teacher Erin Gruwell, a tirelessly dedicated first-year English teacher who finds a way to inspire her inner-city high-school students to overcome their numerous obstacles and become great students. And the story made you want to stand up and cheer for the underdog kids, in the same way you cheered for Jaime Escalante's students in Stand and Deliver.

But it was also disturbing in the way that many teacher movies are, which is to say that the teacher and the situation were portrayed in such a simplistic and overly sentimental way that one suspects it may do more harm than good. Similarities between Freedom Writers and other teacher movies like Stand and Deliver have been noted by many people, but the thing I think is interesting is the messages they send about what it takes to be a good teacher. According to these movies, in order to be a good teacher:

1. You must be willing to sacrifice everything else in your life.

Gruwell took on not one but two part-time jobs in order to pay for books and other things for her students, even when her husband made it clear that he thought this was a bad idea. Eventually, Gruwell and her husband divorced, in part because of his frustration at the amount of time and energy she devoted to her job. Escalante took on so many additional teaching responsibilities that he eventually suffered a heart attack from overwork.

I find it troubling that Hollywood is so anxious to present this ideal of the teacher as superhero. I don't think it does anyone any good to push the idea that the best teachers are the ones who devote every ounce of themselves to their students with such single-minded determination that they damage their health or their marriages, or have no time left to relax and recuperate or spend time with their kids. One of the things that everyone has to learn to do is balance the demands of work and home, and this is no less true for teachers than for those in other professions. If you spend so much of yourself on your job that you have no time for anything else, that's not heroic; that's a recipe for burnout. And that's not going to be good for you or for the students you won't be teaching because you left the profession because you were too exhausted to continue. (According to wikipedia, Gruwell left her high school teaching position after 4 years.)

2. You must "really care" about your students.

In this context, "really care" means that you must have particularly sentimental or loving feelings toward your students. While I think it's great for teachers to care about their students (I certainly care about mine), and while I often have students who I particularly like, this idea that the most important thing a teacher can do is to "feel" a certain way about his or her students is ridiculous. I have to teach all of my students, even the ones who I don't like (and if you've spent much time around teenagers, you know there are plenty who are difficult to like). The most important thing a teacher has to do is to teach, as effectively as possible, all of the students entrusted to him or her. If you happen to like some (or most, or all) of your students in addition, that's a bonus, but that's not why you're there.

Dan Meyer writes eloquently about the "teaching vs. caring" dichotomy:

...MTV will never make a movie about really effective phonics instruction, but there is extraordinary, enduring value in effective phonics instruction, in learning, in breaking life's possibilities wide open for students by teaching. There it is: I have been hired to teach. Any inspiring, difference-making, role-modeling, surrogate-fathering, or dance-partying is strictly incidental.

I don't mean to set up this false dichotomy between teaching and caring. Both happen in the same practice; both are essential. But teachers — or rather, Teachers, by which I mean my union proper, the blogosphere in general, and my co-workers in particular — have emphasized caring over teaching. Teachers continuously fail to differentiate us from well-educated au pairs, as evidenced and perpetuated by Freedom Writers' very existence.

Again: teaching and caring (passion, if you want) are inextricably linked.

But: only one of them is difficult.

It is easy for me to greet my students warmly at the door each day, to ask after the trivial travails of their lives, to follow up on that girl who dumped you or the parents who grounded you for missing cheer practice. It is easy for me to bake cookies, cancel class, and dance.

Caring — like the kind bound up in Erin Gruwell's dance party — is the easiest part of my job. Caring — like the laundry service Prezbo gave Duquan in The Wire — should be the least of our obsessions. Caring — sadly — is how the majority of my co-workers and co-bloggers have framed the objectives of our job. Caring — depressingly — is how our taxpaying public sees the extent of our duties and — predictably — determines our pay and esteem.

Caring is easy. Keeping students engaged and operating at full capacity over a two-hour block is difficult. Serving every student the highly specific smoothie of success and failure — just enough success to encourage them, just enough failure to challenge them — is difficult. Making the leap from single-variable equations to two-variables without losing anybody is frighteningly difficult. (Three years and three tries and I still haven't found the right inroad.)

All this talk about caring and the intangibles of our job — cf. Freedom Writers and nine out of ten blog posts on the state of teaching — distracts from and lowers the bar on the matters of teaching truly worth discussing, namely: how to teach.

I actually think the more interesting aspects of Gruwell's and Escalante's stories were the parts that weren't told in the movies, in particular how both of them left teaching in part because their demonstrably successful methods either could not be sustained, or because they didn't fit neatly enough into the "traditional" teaching box required by their respective schools. (Stand and Deliver Revisited is a fascinating exploration of the many parts of Escalante's career that didn't fit into Hollywood's version of events.)

I think teaching is a fascinating profession, but I'm not sure the movie format is the best way to explore its complexities. Or maybe we just need more movies that present teaching in ways that go beyond the simplistic and sentimental treatment that it so often receives.

Like many teachers, I get a little annoyed when my students don't do their homework, since I've always been pretty sure their overall grades would be better if they did. I recently decided to do a little statistical analysis to find out if there was in fact any correlation between my students' homework grades and their overall course grade.

I sat down with my TI-84 calculator and the mid-semester grades for my 3 classes this semester. For each class I entered each student's mid-semester homework grade into one list, and their overall mid-semester grade into another list, and I had the TI-84 calculate the correlation coefficient for these two variables.

[If that sounds super complicated, it's really not. A correlation coefficient is just a number that tells you how strong is the relationship between two variables. If the number is close to zero, the two variables aren't related at all, and if it's close to 1, they're strongly related.]

Here are the numbers I got for my 3 classes:

• Honors Geometry A (23 students): y = .36x + 59.5, r = .84
• Honors Geometry B (21 students): y = .47x + 45.5, r = .61
• Advanced Functions and Modeling (25 students): y = .76x + 8.2, r = .79

The r-values are the correlation coefficients. The equations are the least-squares regression equations (i.e., prediction equations) that allow you to predict (though not with 100% accuracy) a student's overall mid-semester grade (the y-variable) just by knowing their homework grade (the x-variable).

A standard rule of thumb for correlation coefficients is that values between .8 and 1 indicate a very strong correlation between the the variables, and values between .6 and .8 indicate a strong correlation. So the correlation coefficients for my classes indicate fairly strong correlation between homework grades and overall grades, which is to say that the students who have higher homework grades tend to have higher overall grades, and vice versa.

Something else that statisticians are interested in when talking about correlation is statistical significance. If a correlation coefficient is statistically significant, that means that statisticians are sure that the indicated correlation actually exists in the larger population of students, and not just in that particular sample. According to my stats book, all of these correlations are statistically significant.

I also notice that in the prediction equations, the weight associated with the predictor variable (homework) is noticeably higher for my (non-honors) AFM class than for my Honors Geometry classes (.79 vs. .36 and .47). This leads me to think that, to the degree that overall grades can be predicted by homework grades, an AFM student's overall grade is more heavily influenced by their homework grade than an Honors Geometry student.

Have other teachers looked at the correlation between homework grades and overall grades for their classes? I did a quick google search but didn't find anything similar to this posted by individual teachers so if you're out there I'd love to hear from you. Also, I know there's a bunch of research on the value of homework on student achievement, and I also know there are a lot of things to take into account; if any researchers or statisticians out there can provide additional insights on any of these numbers, I'd love to hear from you as well.

Photo Credit: English106 via Compfight cc

Upton Sinclair has a famous quote that goes, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, if his salary depends on his not understanding it." I see a similar principle at work with many of my high school students: It is difficult to get a student to understand something when their self-image depends on them not understanding it.

I have many perfectly intelligent and capable students who struggle in my classes, not because of a lack of intelligence or a learning disability, or even because of that old standby "laziness," but because the image of themselves they are trying to project conflicts with their learning.

Here's an example: A young man dreams of being a rap star and identifies strongly with that perceived lifestyle. Rap stars, however, are not competent at math or quantitative reasoning (at least in his mind), so he is not motivated to become competent in math or quantitative reasoning. In fact, he's actually motivated to not become competent in those areas, because he thinks that would make him less like a rap star.

Here's another example: A young woman wants to feel attractive and desirable to men and identifies strongly with beautiful women on TV and in music videos. These women are very beautiful but they are not particularly intelligent (at least in her mind), so she is not motivated to think of herself as intelligent. In fact, she actively embraces a lack of intelligence, thinking that this makes her better aligned with her idea of the media-fueled sex symbol.

There are many other examples, most of which are similarly stereotyped: kids see themselves as athlete, thug, pothead, cheerleader, drug dealer, cool kid, burnout, or any of a number of standard teenage fantasy roles. And if they happen to be embracing that role strongly, and if they've decided that learning, or being a good student, or being intelligent, doesn't fit with that role, it's tough to convince them otherwise.

Image by Gueorgui via flickr.

The summer after I graduated from high school I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant. It was my first real part-time job and I liked it okay. I loved the money I made and the feeling of being a grown-up and the work itself wasn't so bad, though I really disliked cleaning the oven. The restaurant was known for its roast beef sandwiches and there were these two big industrial ovens we used to cook the roasts and they had to be cleaned every day. By hand. By me.

The oven-cleaning routine basically involved making sure one oven was cooled off enough to clean, getting a small bucket of heavy-duty cleaning solution, and getting down on your hands and knees and scrubbing away with a steel-wool-like cleaning pad. The whole process probably took about 20 minutes per oven, and as I look back on it now I have trouble imagining why I hated it so much, but I did. I had other things that I did as part of my job: washing dishes of course, food prep, emptying garbage, mopping up after closing, etc., but all of those duties weren't so bad. It was cleaning the oven that I really despised.

Of course, I did clean the ovens, and I cleaned them every day. I don't even recall complaining about it that much, since I understood it was a part of the job and I understood why it had to be done every day; those things got used a lot and they got nasty pretty quick if they weren't cleaned. Plus, all the other people who worked there had their work to do and they weren't complaining about it, so I would have been embarrassed to be the only one there whining about how much I hated cleaning the ovens. So while I may have made an occasional comment about how distasteful I found that particular task, I basically sucked it up and got it done.

One thing that never happened, though, in all the time I worked there, was my manager never once tried to make the job of cleaning the oven more fun. He never once asked me if there was something he could do to make the task less onerous, or more engaging, or maybe even do away with it altogether. In fact, he didn't seem to particularly care how I felt about cleaning the oven as long as I got it done, and he and I both understood that if I didn't do a good job cleaning the oven then I'd probably get fired and they'd find someone else to do it.

I don't think it ever would have occurred to me to expect my manager to do something to make cleaning the oven more enjoyable. And yet in the world of schooling, that seems to be the almost universal expectation when students are presented with a task that they find less than enjoyable. The teacher is expected to find some way to make the task more "relevant" or "engaging," or find some way to "motivate" the reluctant student.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm against relevant, engaging tasks in the classroom, or that I think we as teachers should give no thought to ways to motivate our students. I do this all the time, and most of the teachers I work with do as well. We don't want our students thinking the subjects we teach are boring, useless, or have no relation to the real world, and we understand that working with young people often means finding ways of encouraging them to engage in tasks that might be a little out of their comfort zone.

But the fact is that not everything a student does in their classes is going to be as fun as going to a party or watching their favorite TV show, and I think we do a disservice to students (and teachers) when we send the message that if a task is not fun, there must be something wrong with it. Or worse, if it's not fun, you should wait for the teacher to make it fun. Or even worse, if it's not fun you don't need to do it.

I never did learn to enjoy cleaning the oven. What I did learn, however, was that even though I didn't like doing it, I did like the feeling of having completed this important, though mildly distasteful, task. And I also learned some other things: self-discipline, how to work hard without complaining, and that not everything in my life is going to be fun. Those are lessons I'd like my students to learn as well.

Image by LuMag00 via Flickr

One of the things a teacher has to do all the time is decide whether or how to address a particular incident of student behavior. Some behaviors need to be addressed directly (i.e., by directly confronting the student), some need to be addressed indirectly, and some need to be simply ignored. But how do you decide?

One of the types of behaviors I deal with fairly regularly is the student who doesn't want to do any work, and something that was helpful for me in addressing this behavior was answering the question, "What does it look like for a student to do the absolute minimum amount of work in my classroom?" And I needed to be able to answer that question in behavioral terms; that is, what exactly is this hypothetical student doing?

This hypothetical student is "Pretending To Work," which I define as follows:

1. They have their assignment on their desk.
2. They do not have their head down on their desk.
3. They do not have any other books or assignments out on their desk.

(Notice that the Pretending To Work definition isn't intended to deal with students who are genuinely struggling with a particular concept or problem; it's intended solely for the students who simply don't "feel" like doing anything.)

Even though I don't explicitly share the Pretending To Work definition with my students, it's still very useful for me in determining what, if any, behavioral intervention I need to implement for a student who is not getting their work done. A typical Pretending To Work interaction with a student begins when I notice that they have put their assignment away in their bookbag or notebook, but it seems to me that they haven't actually had time to complete the assignment. Then we have an exchange that goes something like this:

Mr. B: Did you already finish the assignment?

Student: Yeah.

B: Can I see it, please?

S: Well, actually I didn't finish it, but I'm going to finish it at home.

B: Well, I appreciate that, but since we still have plenty of time left in class, I want you to take your assignment out and work on it right now.

Usually what happens next is the student sighs heavily, takes their assignment out of their bookbag, and reluctantly gets to work. Sometimes they just Pretend To Work, but that's okay, too; I'll sometimes make a note of it in case I need to explain to a parent or administrator why this student is failing my class, but as long as they're meeting my Pretending To Work criteria, they won't get hassled further by me (at least, not immediately).

Sometimes, of course, a student will refuse to even Pretend To Work, though this doesn't happen that often. When it does, I call for an administrator and they send someone to take the student out of my classroom. While it would be hard to call this a desirable outcome, it does have a number of positive benefits, the most valuable of which is that everyone in the class gets to see what happens if they try to get away with not doing any work in my class. They learn that the rule is: you have to at least Pretend To Work, or you don't get to stay in the class.

The reason this rule is important is that it has a big effect on the tone of my classroom. If my students get the idea that the things we do in class are optional, then they get the message that these things are not important, and then they have no strong incentive to work hard on them. I want my students to learn that in Mr. B's class, we work. If a student doesn't want to do at least the minimum amount of work, they have to go somewhere else.

Image by Unhindered by Talent via Flickr.

In the high school math classes that I teach, my students spend a lot of class time working together in small groups. There are a lot of benefits to having students working in groups, so I've been pretty intentional about designing my classes so that group work is central.

There's a lot more to successful group work, however, than just having the kids scoot their desks closer together. When I first started using groups, I didn't have a lot of rules and I didn't really provide my students with much structure or guidance. I knew that I wanted them to a) work together to complete the assignment,  b) figure out with each other (as much as possible) how to address any questions they had, and c) generally engage in mathematical conversations. I had a few basic rules for keeping them on task, but essentially I just put them into groups and said, "Go."

I quickly learned that they needed more guidance than that, and over time I've developed what I've started to think of as a Four Level approach to conducting group work. That is, I now have a little bit clearer picture of what I want my class as a whole, as well as individual small groups, to look like, and I have a set of rules and strategies for moving my groups toward that picture.

Level 1 - The Behavioral Level

This level represents group work at its most basic level. Getting groups to operate at this level is almost 100% about behavioral issues and 0% about academic issues.

I teach a lot of what could be considered reluctant learners. Many of my students are not strong in math, many have a lot of fears and anxieties about math, and many just plain don't want to do anything that takes any mental effort. This means that many of my students are actively looking for ways to get out of doing their work, and some are actively looking for ways to disrupt the effective functioning of their group, and sometimes of the entire class. I can't allow that to happen, which means I have to be ready to address a lot of disruptive behaviors.

Here's what a group operating at Level 1 looks like:

1. All students have their assignment paper on their desk and are at least pretending to work on it. It may sound odd to say that I'm only requiring my students to pretend to work on their assignment, but this "rule" actually gives me a clear way to address a number of common student misbehaviors by providing a clear minimum behavioral expectation. That is, they have their paper on their desk, they are not sitting with their head down, and they're making at least minimal progress on completing the assignment. I address the pretending part in other ways.
2. If a student has a question about something, they will ask it. Students at this level often don't ask questions about things they don't understand. Sometimes it's because they don't know how to ask, sometimes it's because they're embarrassed to reveal they don't know something, and sometimes it's because formulating and asking a question is too much work. At Level 2, students are able to actually ask questions of each other before they ask me, but at Level 1 I just want them to ask somebody.
3. Conversations are at reasonable volume levels. The rule in my class is "Conversations should be audible but not discernible."
4. Conversations are within groups only. This is a way of keeping off-task or disruptive conversations confined to a single group so that they don't spread to other groups and negatively affect the learning environment of the whole class.
5. Conversations are generally on task. At this level, "generally on task" means around 50% on task, 50% chit-chat.

Level 2 - The Basic Academic Level

This level represents a group that has largely mastered the behavioral challenges of Level 1 group work and are able to operate at what I think of as the basic academic level of group work. Getting groups to operate at this level is roughly 50% about behavioral issues and 50% about academic issues.

Here's what a group operating at Level 2 looks like:

1. The students aren't just pretending to work, they're actually working. Meaning, they're actually working on the assignment.
2. Students are willing and able to ask questions, and they will usually ask their group members before they ask me. I actually establish a rule at the beginning of the semester that before anyone can ask me a question, they must first ask everyone in their group. Some students are actually eager to do this, since they don't want to talk to me anyway. Other students only want to talk to me, and it can be a long hard struggle to get them to have even the most basic conversational exchanges with a group member.
3. Conversations are at reasonable volume levels.
4. Conversations are within groups only.
5. Conversations are mostly on  task. Say 60-40 or better.

Groups at Level 2 still require continued monitoring and occasional prompts to stay on task, but they are generally willing to work together to complete the assignments.

Level 3 - The Advanced Academic Level

This level represents a group that has largely mastered all of the basic behavioral and academic requirements of Levels 1 and 2. In addition, they actively engage in a few other behaviors. In particular:

1. The students are willing, and occasionally even anxious, to help their group members with things they don't understand. They're even willing to help other students/groups.
2. While there is sometimes an element of socializing and playfulness, the students' primary focus is is on the assignment. Their conversations are around 80-90% on task.
3. The students engage in solid mathematical conversations with each other. While they will ask me questions about things they don't understand, they will only ask after they have made one or more legitimate attempts to figure it out within their group.

Level 4 - Doing Math

I don't have a very good description for Level 4 because I rarely (ok, never) have groups that operate at this level. And that's because I think to operate at this level, the students have to have mathematical tasks that allow (or require) them to engage in legitimate mathematical conversations, so-called "higher-level" tasks. Tasks that "require complex and non-algorithmic thinking" or that "require considerable cognitive effort."

Right now, most of the tasks that I give my students are pretty procedural. The students may have just learned about, say, the trigonometric ratios, and they're working on practice problems that will help to solidify the concepts of the trig ratios in their minds and learn how to apply them in different types of situations. That doesn't mean there's not high-level thinking going on; many of the problems require multiple steps, such as translating word problems into a diagram, translating a diagram into an equation, solving the equation and interpreting the answer, etc. But in order to reach Level 4, I think the mathematical tasks need to involve doing "real math."

Which means that if I expect to have groups that are able to operate at Level 4, I need to find, or come up with, some tasks that involve doing real math. Which I think is a pretty good thing to do.

Meanwhile, for the kids who are unable or unwilling to work at Level 1, I've developed a few strategies and tactics to help them. I'll talk about those in another post.

Image by lavannya via Flickr.

[FWIW, in the three classes I'm currently teaching (two Geometry and one AFM, all non-honors), I have a total of 22 groups. Of those, I have one that consistently works at Level 3, eight that consistently work at Level 2, and 13 that are at Level 1. I also have a total of 4 students (out of about 80) that struggle to remain at Level 1.]

I was becoming a little frustrated with my attempts to use GeoGebra in my Geometry classes. I had found or created a bunch of GeoGebra apps that fit with different parts of the course, and had created some worksheets/instructions to guide my students thru some exploration-type activities where they could discover, for example, properties of different geometric figures, but none of the activities ever seemed to really work like I wanted.

I tried a few as in-class demos, but since all of my students were just watching me play with the app instead of playing with it themselves, they lacked an actual hands-on component. I tried a few as homework assignments, but even though I was sure that I had given them a set of instructions that were clear and easy-to-follow, the students still seemed confused by them. I eventually realized that most of my students were just clicking on the app and then sitting there looking at it, as though it were a video that wouldn't play. They didn't seem to understand that they were supposed to play with the app and, based on the patterns they saw, make some guesses about what might be true about, for example, the opposite angles of a parallelogram.

I finally decided I needed to give them an activity (in this case, a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet) that they would need the GeoGebra apps to complete, and take the whole class to the school computer lab during a class period so that a) everyone would have their own computer and thus would get hands-on time with the apps, and b) I could see what they were doing and provide help if needed.

I was generally pretty pleased with how it went. I still feel like GeoGebra has a lot of potential that I'm not yet making use of, but this was definitely a step in the right direction.

One of the things I learned was that a lot of my students are very resistant to the whole idea of "playing" with the app to try to discover something about the shapes involved; they clearly just wanted me to tell them what words to write in the blanks. (I even caught a few students trying to use Google to figure out what words to write in the blanks.) This baffles me. To me, having someone tell me what to write in a blank (and then calling that learning) is not only less effective than me discovering it myself, but it's also extremely boring. I'd much rather have the opportunity to play around with something and see what patterns or properties jump out at me.

The thing is, in order for this whole "playing" thing to be effective, the students have too be willing to play. And that means making a little bit of effort (e.g., you have to grab the mouse and drag some of the points around). For many of my students, that's too much work. They'd rather have me just give them the answers; sure, it's boring, but at least it's not work.

This is the big hurdle that I face with many of my students: they have a remarkable unwillingness to do anything that requires any effort whatsoever. Even something that might be "fun". They're willing to watch a video, or sit while I talk at them, but to actually do something? "No, thanks," they seem to say, "I'll just sit here."

I'm still working on it, but it's a tough one.

Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr.

These are the materials from a presentation I put together for the North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCCTM) conference in October 2012, on my experiences flipping my Geometry and Advanced Functions and Modeling (AFM) classes. Feel free to download and use anything you find here.

Intro video, class website, powerpoint slides

• My 5-minute introductory video
• www.misterbledsoe.com - This is my current class website, which contains a bunch of class lecture videos, guided notes, worksheets, and more.
• Powerpoint slides

Handouts from the presentation

• A sample set of guided notes and worksheet (Geometry) that go with this lecture video.
• A sample set of guided notes and worksheet (AFM) that go with this lecture video.
• Video Lecture Planning doc

Other videos/resources of mine that I highlighted in the presentation

• A video using the TI84 graphing calculator
• An Excel screencast (created with Screencast-O-Matic, a free online screencasting tool)
• A sample GeoGebra applet

Discussion questions, blog posts, etc.

• My first blog post on flipping my classroom.
• My second blog post on flipping my classroom.
• The Flip: End of a Love Affair - one teacher's blog post on why she tried flipping her classroom, then gave it up in favor of PBL.
• What about students who don't have internet access?
• Group work is the norm in my class.
• Don't worry about being awesome.
• When it comes to videos, shorter is better.

Creating your own class lecture videos

• Some great videos from the Friday Institute, with details on how to create your own lecture videos (buying the whiteboards, creating the slides, etc.)

The recent uproar over Virgin Mobile's less-than-adequate password security came at a particularly good time for me, as I was teaching about permutations in my Advanced Functions and Modeling class. I definitely recommend that you read the details of Kevin Burke's discovery of Virgin's massive security hole(s), but the short version is that he discovered that it was ridiculously easy for someone, even someone who wasn't a major tech-savvy blackhat, to hack into a Virgin Mobile online account.

Just before this story hit the internet, a student in my AFM class was asking me about real-world situations that would involve calculating permutations and combinations, and I actually mentioned data and password security in my response. I happened to see the story online the next day and I printed it off and passed it out to my class, mentioning that I happen to have a Virgin Mobile phone, and that if any of them were able to hack into my account I hoped they would let me know since they could probably pick up some extra credit for it.

But within a couple of days Virgin had closed the most gaping of the security holes, so I suppose my account is safe for now. (Though they still haven't addressed the problems with their call history data.)