I recently upgraded my two Ubuntu computers from 11.10 to 12.04.  Everything worked fine on my Toshiba netbook, but on my old Dell Dimension E520 the upgrade caused a problem that took me a while to fix.

The machine booted up just fine and presented me with the standard login screen, but immediately upon logging in my screen became a flickering unreadable jumble.  It looked like an old TV with the horizontal hold out of whack.  Even weirder was the fact that both of my sons' accounts on the same computer seemed to work just fine.  I couldn't find a fix for my problem online, and even after posting to a couple of help forums I couldn't get any answers.

I finally found this post which explains how to remove, reinstall, and reconfigure xorg (Ubuntu's graphical environment), and after a little experimenting I was able to make it work.  I still don't know exactly what the problem was/is, and there's still a lot that I don't understand about xorg, but this at least allowed me to login and get a functional GUI.

1. From the login screen, instead of logging in normally, type Crtl-Alt-F1.  This will give you a terminal screen from which you can login with your regular username and password.

2. Once you're logged in, enter "sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg" (without the quotes).  This will remove your existing xorg.

3. Type Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot the computer.

4. During the boot process, before your login screen is displayed, your computer will display a purple "Ubuntu" screen with five dots on it.  At some point while this screen is up, type Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get the terminal screen (It's important to do this before the login screen appears, otherwise the next commands won't work right.)  Wait for the login prompt, then login again as before.

5. Enter "sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg".  This will reinstall xorg.

6. Enter "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg".  This will reconfigure xorg.

7. Finally, type the command "startx".  This will start the Ubuntu GUI and you will find yourself logged in to your Ubuntu account with your GUI and the flickering unreadable screen will be fixed.

The bad news is that this doesn't permanently fix the problem.  (In fact, I'm still not entirely sure what the problem is.)  So if you log out of your account you'll have to do this same thing all over the next time you want to get your GUI running again.  As soon as I figure out the long-term fix I'll update this post, and if anyone with more Ubuntu smarts than me wants to add their insights or suggestions in the comments, please feel free.

A few weeks ago my 11-year-old son brought home a form for me to sign so he could participate in his school's "Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day."  It's supposed to be a chance for kids to job shadow one of their parents, "learn first hand the expectations of the 21st  Century workplace and the connections between school subjects and their relevance on the job," and basically get a free day off from school.

My son told me he wanted to go to work with me for a day, and I thought this was kind of odd since I'm a schoolteacher and I figure most people (even 11-year-old people) already feel like they know what schoolteachers do.  But his mom works at home on a computer all day, and he said that didn't sound very interesting so he picked me.  At first I wasn't sure what I'd do with him ("Just sit over there and watch me teach"?) but then I figured I'd put him in with some of my student groups while they did their work; he's in 6th grade and I teach high school, but I thought he'd do okay.

So I told him okay, but I said I'd need to check with my school first since I wasn't entirely sure what the rules might be for having a middle-school student on our campus for a day.  Turns out the rule is: that's not allowed.

That's right.  The school system thinks it would be a great idea for you to take your son or daughter to work with you for a day, but not if you work for the school system.

Oh well.  I'm sure there's a good reason for the policy but the irony is just too rich.  I'm going to suggest that they rename the program "Please Take Your Daughters and Sons To Work Somewhere Else Day."

Image by B Tal via Flickr.

This is the video of a (very) brief talk I gave at an event called Ignite Raleigh.  I was one of several people selected by an online voting process to put together a slideshow and talk about a topic of their choosing.  We each got 5 minutes and 20 slides and the slides auto-advance every 15 seconds.

It was a lot of fun, but 5 minutes is not a lot of time. You gotta say what you got to say and get out.

Several years ago I got called in for jury duty and I ended up being selected.  It was my first, and so far only, experience being on a jury and what I remember most strongly about the whole thing was how sad I felt afterward.

The case involved a young woman accusing her ex-boyfriend of threatening the safety of her and their young son.  I don't remember all the details, but apparently the two of them had an argument one afternoon and later that evening he came to her apartment, presumably to continue the argument.  She said he made verbal threats to her, their young son, and the woman's girlfriend, who was also present.  She also said he threatened them with a handgun, and fled when she called the police.  He said he came to her apartment to talk with her, but denied threatening her or having a handgun.  The handgun issue was particularly important since the boyfriend was on parole at the time, and for him to be in possession of a handgun would have meant a violation of his parole and thus would have sent him back to prison.

The court case lasted a couple of days, with another day or so of jury deliberation, and I remember when it started how I was kind of excited to be participating in something that I'd only previously ever seen on TV.  I was thinking how cool it was to be listening to testimony, and weighing evidence, and evaluating arguments, and basically just participating in this wonderful thing called the American Criminal Justice System.

By the end of the trial, however, I was just overcome with sadness and despair.  This couple presumably used to love each other and were the parents of a young boy, yet they were now separated, the father was an ex-convict, the mother was on welfare and living in public housing, and their relationship was so broken that they fought with each other so violently that the woman felt compelled to call the police for protection.  I had begun to realize that regardless of what our verdict was, these people's lives were just terribly sad and nothing that happened in that courtroom was going to substantially change that.  I also remember thinking that I did not want to have a job as a judge or lawyer, since I imagined that they would have to deal with these kinds of depressing problems all the time, and how hard it would be to have to deal with all that sadness on a regular basis.

Having worked as a high school teacher for a few years now, I realize that I now actually do have a job like the judge and the lawyers.  I work with teenagers on a daily basis, and many of them have lives which can only be described as sad.  Many are poor and live in single-parent homes, and often the one parent they have is too overwhelmed to provide the kind of parenting that the young person needs.  Not only that, but I see them making really bad decisions on a regular basis: choosing to skip class, or not do any work, or get pregnant, or drop out of school.  And I'm aware that regardless of what happens in my classroom, I'm not likely to have much of an impact on the lives of a lot of these students.  What's more, I work in what's probably a pretty average American high school, where the number of students like this is relatively low; it's hard for me to imagine the difficulty of working in a high-poverty school, one in which almost all of the students have sad lives.

I've decided that one of the traits that a successful teacher has to develop is a capacity for sadness, and I say "develop" because I don't think you're likely to have this trait when you start, any more than I had it when I started my stint on jury duty.  If you're not able to develop the ability to be appropriately sad about the lives of some of your students, you're not going to be able to last as a teacher because the sadness is going to overwhelm you.  You're going to want to make your sadness go away by trying to make your students' lives better, and often you're not going to be able to do that so you're just going to be stuck with the sadness.  So you have to be able carry that sadness with you and not let it keep you from doing your job well.  Because the fact is that you are going to be able to make the lives of many of your students better, just not all of them; and if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by the sadness of some of your students' lives, you won't be there for the rest of them.  And that's not going to be good for them or for you.

Image by Pink Sherbet Photography via Flickr.

The new Netgear N600 router I just bought for my home wireless network works great.  It even has a USB port on the back to which you can attach an external USB hard drive, which every computer on the network can then use as a kind of shared storage space.  And it's really simple to use, too; you just plug in your external hard drive to the router, type a couple of commands into your computer, and presto!

Actually, it turns out the external drive feature is really simple to use as long as you're using either a Windows PC or a Mac, because Netgear was kind enough to provide the commands for you to type in for those two systems.  If, however, you'd like to be able to access your new external network drive using your Ubuntu computer, you have to do a little bit of extra googling to figure out the magic commands to type in.  So once you have your hard drive connected to your router, open up a terminal window on your Ubuntu machine and do the following:

1. Install the smbfs package - smbfs is part of a suite of programs called Samba which handles networking type stuff between Unix and Windows systems.  Install it on your Ubuntu machine by entering "sudo aptitude install smbfs" (without the quotes).

2. Create a directory in which to "mount" your external hard drive - I created a directory called public under my media directory, by entering "sudo mkdir /media/public" (without the quotes).

3. Edit the file /etc/fstab - This is a config file your computer reads each time you start it up, and you need to add some lines in it to tell it how to mount your external drive.  Enter "gksudo gedit /etc/fstab" (without the quotes) and at the end of the file add the following lines:

# Mount my Netgear network drive using these parameters
//192.168.1.1/USB_Storage /media/public smbfs guest 0 0

The # line is just a comment line.  The second line is the important one (and note that there's a space after "USB_Storage").  It tells your computer that when it starts mounting all the different things that need to be mounted, there's something at //192.168.1.1/USB_Storage (i.e., your external hard drive) that you want to be able to access by going to the directory /media/public (which you created in step #2 above).  The rest is just some parameters used by the mount command.

Apparently "USB_Storage" is some kind of hard-wired name that Netgear gives to whatever USB drive you plug in to your router; it would have been nice if Netgear had mentioned this somewhere in the documentation, but I guess they didn't think it was necessary.

4. Re-mount your drives - Save your newly updated fstab file, then type "sudo mount -a" (without the quotes) and your computer will mount all your drives again, including your external drive according to the new line you added to your fstab file.

And you should now be able to see your new external drive at /media/public.  Note that there are probably other ways to make this work as well, and if folks more fluent in Ubuntu than I am want to offer additional tips in the comments, please feel free.

Also, many thanks to the authors of these two posts, who provided a lot of the information for this one:

http://www.automaticable.com/2008-01-18/how-to-mount-a-network-drive-in-ubuntu/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1651160

A few weeks ago, an "Out of Order" sign appeared on the faculty women's restroom door in the teacher workroom at the high school where I teach.  I didn't think much of it at the time; it was a bummer for the female faculty members, but it didn't really affect me directly.

Or so I thought.

A day or so later a sign appeared on the door of the faculty men's restroom, announcing that it was now the faculty men's AND women's restroom.  Great idea, I thought.  It's just a one person bathroom, it doesn't get a ton of use, and why shouldn't we share it, especially while the ladies are waiting to have theirs repaired.

A day or so after that, however, I began to understand what it really means for a restroom to go from being a men's room to a men's and women's room.  Prior to The Great Sharing, the faculty men's room was pretty spartan.  A toilet, a sink, soap, paper towels, and a trash can.  Nothing fancy, but we men were perfectly happy with just the basics.

The new coed restroom, however, is really nice.  Decorations on the walls and mirror, hand lotion on the sink, and a little table with some "suggested" reading material.  If you can't read it from the picture, the titles are "The Little Book of Totally Stupid Men," "Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives," and "Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause Edition."  The next day, a few new magazines had been added to the table: "Motor Trend," "North Carolina Game and Fish," and "Combat Handguns."  Until the ladies came in to show us how it should be done, we didn't know what we were missing.

A few days ago I noticed a woman coming out of the previously out-of-order women's restroom, which suggested that whatever was broken is now fixed.  Sure enough, within a few days, they ladies had taken all their stuff  back to their restroom, leaving ours as it was before.  I'm thinking I may bring in some things of my own, though.  I really started to like that scented hand lotion.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit one of Ms. B's classes.  I had been feeling frustrated with a couple of my classes, so I did what I often do when feeling frustrated: I find another teacher and go watch what they do.

Ms. B is another math teacher at my high school, and I picked her class because a) I'd heard that she was a good teacher, b) she had a class during my planning period, and c) the class she taught during that period was Pre-Calculus.  This was important because the two classes I was feeling frustrated with were two of my Advanced Functions and Modeling classes.  AFM is often described as "pre-calculus for kids who aren't going to be taking calculus" or "a fourth math credit for kids who are going to college but probably aren't going to be majoring in a math-intensive field."  The classes are both intended for juniors and seniors, and cover much of the same material, but Pre-Calc is an honors class and AFM is a regular class, so the main difference between her classes and my classes is that she has the "honors" kids and I have the "regular" kids.

During the 25 minutes or so that I was there, Ms. B was doing a fairly standard whole-class problem review activity.  The kids had completed on their own a set of five or six problems on the properties of logarithms, and Ms. B was up at the front asking different students to walk her thru the solutions, pretending like she didn't already know how to do the problems so that the students would be forced to explain their reasoning.

Here are the main things that I noticed:

The whole class appeared to be (mostly) engaged.  While I'm sure there were students who weren't focusing on every problem with laserlike intensity, for the most part the kids were paying attention and even participating in the class conversation coordinated by Ms. B.  This is just another way of saying that the students were working.

Ms. B would occasionally make a joke.  In fact, she made lots of jokes.  This seems like a fairly insignificant thing, except that Ms. B could make a joke, or respond to one of the students' jokes, without completely disrupting the lesson.  She, or a student, would make some harmless comment, everyone would chuckle or groan, then they'd all get right back to the problem on logarithms.  Her students, in other words, were able to play and work at the same time.

My students have a hard time with this.  I often conduct similar whole-class activities with my AFM classes, and more often than not, if a joke is made it opens the door for someone to make another joke, then another joke, and pretty soon the class is off and running in the wrong direction.  They seem to want so desperately to NOT have to work that they're constantly on the lookout for anything that might get the class off-task, and jokes provide great opportunities for that.

The students were willing to take turns.  While Ms. B would call on a particular student to work a problem or answer a question, other students often had comments or questions, and they would ask them.  It was truly a whole-class conversation, with the students taking turns, not interrupting each other, etc.

Again, my students have a hard time with this.  Even when they are (mostly) engaged with the whole-class activity, the simple act of taking turns and being willing to speak one-at-a-time is a challenge for them.  I often have students who are interested and want to engage in the conversation, but they are so unwilling to take turns (or speak in a normal tone of voice) that they are constantly interrupting me or other students; they essentially dominate the discussion and refuse to allow anyone else to participate.  I have found that requiring my students to raise their hands before speaking sometimes helps, though again the students have trouble with this and so must constantly be reminded.

The students were willing to let Ms. B run the class.  It's hard to overstate just how important this is.  While there may in fact have been a number of students who were not "actively engaged" in Ms. B's lesson (thinking about lunch, for example, instead of concentrating on the math problem), there weren't any who were trying to take over the class.  Her students seemed to understand that while they might prefer to be socializing with their classmates, or playing Angry Birds on their iPhones, this was math class and they were supposed to be doing math; so they rolled their eyes and got to work.

While it might seem hyperbolic to say that I often have students who want to "take over my class," that's essentially the case.  They don't run up to the front of the classroom and grab the whiteboard marker out of my hand, but they frequently call out comments or questions that have nothing at all to do with what I'm talking about, initiate off-task conversations with their classmates, or otherwise try to focus the class's attention on themselves; and, there are plenty of other students happy to play along.  Of course, I have class rules that address these situations, and I address them individually as needed, but the point is that in my classes I address them a lot, and Ms. B didn't have to.

I actually saw a couple of exchanges in Ms. B's class that fell into this category.  One was a standard off-task conversation between two students while she was talking about the current logarithm problem with another student, which Ms. B addressed by saying, "Oh excuse me, I didn't mean to interrupt your friendship with my conversation about math."  The students stopped talking, sheepishly indicated that they were sorry, and the lesson continued.  Another time a young man got out of his seat and for no apparent reason walked across the room, then turned around and walked back.  Again Ms. B said, "Excuse me J, I didn't mean to interrupt your random walk across the room with my conversation about math."  There was some good-natured chuckling and again, the student apologized, sat back down and the lesson continued.  In my classes these kinds of interruptions happen much more frequently, and they often require much more effort on my part to resolve them.

I caught up with Ms. B at some point later to ask her some questions about that class in particular and her Pre-Calc classes in general.  She confirmed that yes, that particular class was a really good group of kids who were generally well-behaved and hard-working, and she genuinely enjoyed teaching them.  She also noted that her other Pre-Calc class was not as well-behaved and hard-working, so there was a lot less joking around and "having fun" during that class.  "If you'd visited my other Pre-Calc class, you'd have seen me be a lot stricter and less jokey," she said.  "In my other class I have to spend a lot more time getting them to pay attention, stop talking, get to work, etc."  I asked her how many of her Pre-Calc classes were like the one I visited and how many were like the other class, and she said it was about 50-50.  About half of her Pre-Calc classes are ones where the students need a lot of "classroom management" and the other half are more like the one I visited.

For my AFM classes I'd say the proportion is more like 80-20.  In general, my AFM students are either unable or unwilling to do the following things on their own:

• engage with the assignment (i.e., do the work)
• not talk while I'm talking
• take turns asking questions
• joke around without completely derailing the class activity
• let me run the classroom

Which ends up having the effect that I spend more time and energy on classroom management and less time on instruction.  Which is essentially the difference between honors students and regular students.

Image by jeremy.wilburn via Flickr.

This semester I've had the opportunity to try out group work in my math classes in a slightly more formal way than my standard "here's a worksheet, feel free to work with a partner" approach.  I was able to complete video lectures of two complete units, so a basic class routine looks like this:

1. The students watch the video and complete their notes for homework;
2. The next day in class (after the warm-up activity), we review the notes a little and answer any questions;
3. They get in groups of 3 or 4 and complete 8-10 problems like the ones they learned about in the video;
4. They put up their solutions on the board and we review any questions.

I basically had two rules for the students while they were working in groups:  They all had to get the same answer for every problem; and if they had questions about something, they had to ask everyone in their group before they asked me.

Since this is really the first time I've tried this, I was a little anxious about how well it would work, and I've been generally very pleased.  Here are a few things I learned:

Some students have a really hard time asking questions of other students - When the students started working in their groups, almost immediately someone raised their hand and said, "Mr. B, how do you do this problem?", to which I replied incredulously, "Wait a minute, you already asked everybody in your group and nobody knew how to do that problem?"  The student sighed and said "Aw, Mr. B" about the same time one of their group members said "I know how to do that one" and then they were talking among themselves and I backed out of the conversation.  Variations of this exchange played out several times in the first 10 minutes or so until everyone finally realized that I really wasn't going to answer their questions until they had talked about them within their group.

Using groups, the students do a LOT more cognitive work during class - When I'm up in front of the class lecturing, I'm doing a lot of cognitive work, and the students are just sitting passively taking notes (and sometimes they're not even doing that).  They might be actively using their brains but they're just as likely to be zoned out or daydreaming.  Having the students working in groups means all or almost all of them are asking and answering questions; the amount of brain work taking place skyrockets and I'm not the only one doing the work.

The physical organization of the groups is really important - Not only is it important to get the right mix of kids in each group (sometimes best friends in a group will spend more time socializing than working), but it's also important to physically move the desks so that group members are facing each other.  If you don't do this, a lot of students won't really work with the other students in their group, but will just work alone or kind of gravitate toward a best friend in another group.

Some students will complain strongly about working in groups - "This is stupid", "I can't learn this way", and "We should go back to the regular way" are all comments I heard.  I ignored them.  These students were irritated because when I'm lecturing at them I'm doing most of the work and they're doing very little.  In groups, they're doing most of the work, which is just how I want it.

There are still things I need to do to improve my group work, mostly stuff regarding differentiation; I need to figure out how I want to group the students, how to handle the kids who get finished really quickly, etc.  I also need to figure out when and how to have students re-watch the lecture video if necessary (need a class set of headphones? more class computers?).  But I'll work that out eventually.  For now I'm pretty pleased with how well the groups are working.

Image by shizhao via Flickr.

I often have my students work together when doing practice problems (i.e., worksheets) in class, but it's a fairly informal arrangement.  They choose a partner to work with, they compare answers and ask and answer questions, and I roam around making sure they're on task.  It goes okay, but I've been aware that it could go better and I've been wanting to see how some other teachers do it.

The other day I got the chance to observe another teacher in my school, Ms. H, and at one point during her class she had her students doing an activity in stations.  The basic idea was pretty straightforward.  Her desks are arranged so that students are sitting in pairs.  When it came time for the stations activity (basically ten practice problems on compound inequalities), she first gave everyone a blank Stations Sheet already divided into ten numbered sections.  Then she assigned each student to their first station so that each station had two students.  While the students swapped seats to go to their first station, she distributed ten index-card size inequalities problems to the stations (one problem per station), and when everyone was set, she put a timer up on the screen in front of the class, set it for 2 minutes and said, "Go."

She was available to answer questions but mostly the kids didn't need much help, and when they did they got it from their partner.  (She'd already reminded them that both people had to complete the problem at each station.)  When the timer beeped, everyone moved to the next station, she reset the timer, and they started on the next problem.

I'm sure lots of teachers have used some variation of this approach many times, but for me this was really eye-opening.  I learned several things:

It's nice to have flexible seating arrangements - The desks I have in my classroom look like the picture on the left.  They're fine, but you can't set them up in side-by-side pairs because one person wouldn't be able to get in and out.  I'm working on swapping my desks out for some that look like the picture on the right.

A little advance preparation goes a long way - Ms. H's stations activity may have looked simple, and in many ways it was, but there was a lot of prep that went into it.  Before she did the activity she had created a Stations Sheet, paired up all her students like she wanted them, put her ten practice problems on index cards, and created Station Number tent cards to label the stations with.  Plus, she had clearly done stations with her class before, since all of the kids already knew what to do.

Using a timer can prompt the kids to get more done - Ms. H said she often uses stations on Test Review day (i.e., the day before a test), and I immediately saw how it would be valuable.  When we're doing test review in my classes, many of my kids will work on their problems but they're clearly not working as fast as they could, and Ms. H said she sees the same thing with her students.  Having a timer adds a bit of urgency to each problem.

I'm looking forward to trying this in my classes.

Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr.

Dr. Lodge McCammon of NC State University has suggested that the well-known Bloom's Taxonomy of learning objectives (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create) needs another layer: publish.  Specifically he's a proponent of teachers encouraging their students to create short, one-take videos and post them to the internet.  I heard him speak about this at a workshop I attended, and I decided to try it out in my Geometry class.

I have a project that I do in which I have the students make a short "Geometry Scrapbook" using some of the standard geometry terms that we learn about early in the class (acute angle, vertical angles, segment, etc.).  I'd have them pick 20 of the terms, find pictures from magazines or the internet to illustrate their terms, and then create a 20-page scrapbook with their pictures.  It wasn't a bad project, but when I decided to have the students create a paper-slide video of their scrapbook, I immediately felt like it would be an improvement.

So my students just finished making their videos (I cut the number of terms to ten so the videos wouldn't be too long), and I'm pretty pleased with how it went.  I'm specifically pleased with the following:

The students were doing almost all of the work - Except for the actual filming and posting of the videos (I ran the Flipcam, uploaded the videos and added them to the website, etc.) and some basic review of the students' paper slides to catch any obvious errors, the kids did everything else.

The students' understanding of their terms was noticeably better than the non-video project - I think this is for two reasons: 1) They knew they were going to be making a video and that I was going to be posting them to my class website.  Not like a public showing at an art gallery, but still, they knew their work was going to be public; and 2) in order to create their video they had to be able to talk intelligently about each of their pictures and tell why it represented the chosen geometry term.  One of the things I noticed about the pre-video project was that I would often have students turn in a scrapbook where one of their photos had, say, a picture of a building, and the picture was illustrating the term "acute angle."  But there would be no markings or other indication on the picture to indicate that the student actually understood where (or if) there was an acute angle in the picture.  With the videos, the students are actually narrating each of their terms/pictures, so they have to explain why each picture illustrates the selected term.

It allowed for differentiation - this is just a fancy term for assignments that allow students to maximize their learning regardless of differences in ability level.  I was especially pleased with how this project worked for my ESL kids, who often struggle with all of the new vocabulary terms in Geometry.

Project Specifics

You can download my project info sheet here (Word doc) and you can view my actual project videos here.  I assigned the project on a Friday, and made the deadline for video creation the following Friday.  I used two class days for workdays; on the first day (Wednesday) the kids were supposed to have all ten of their their pictures and on the second day (Thursday) the kids were supposed to have created all their pages/slides and be ready to record their video.  Each of these 2 milestones counted as a homework grade, and the completed video counted as a quiz grade.

At the end of class Wednesday, I only had 5 videos recorded, but by the end of class Friday, I had 26 (of 28) recorded.  On Wednesday, almost everyone spent the class time working on or completing their paper slides.  On Thursday, as each kid finished recording their video, I sent them to the computer lab to watch the lecture video for the next set of class notes.  Friday was more of a normal day, with most of the class working on the practice problems for the next section, and a few kids finishing their videos.  I also had one student who created her video at home.

Overall, I give this project a solid B, which is excellent for a first try.  I plan to do this one again.

Image by Phil Roeder via Flickr.