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.

I was at a teacher workshop over the summer and we had a couple of guest presenters who talked to us about "flipping the classroom."  I hadn't heard of this before, but it's apparently a popular classroom approach these days (just google 'flip classroom' for a ton of links), inspired in part by the massive popularity of the Khan Academy.

The basic idea is that instead of using the traditional classroom model of lecturing during class and having the students do practice problems for homework, you have the students watch your lectures at home and use class time to do the practice problems, work on projects, work in groups, etc.  This allows students to use class time to more actively apply their new knowledge while the teacher serves as a facilitator.  In the traditional model, even if the teacher is a great lecturer, the students are still spending a lot of class time passively sitting and listening; or, as many of us know, not listening at all.

The approach that my workshop guest presenters talked about, and the one that I used in my Geometry class, involved using my old Flipcam and some inexpensive DIY whiteboards to create videos of some of my class lectures.  Then I assigned the videos as homework and we did the practice worksheets in class the next day.

It worked out reasonably well, especially as a first attempt.  I seemed to have more classroom time available for working directly with the kids, and they seemed more engaged and actively working, even though they were still just doing worksheet problems.

Here are a few of my thoughts based on my first experience with it:

There's some front-end expense, though it's relatively minor - I had to get my write-on whiteboards from Home Depot, plus some colored dry-erase markers.  I already had a video camera and a tripod, so I didn't have to shell out for that.  I also found out that uploading videos to your Google Docs account will use up your free 1gig of storage pretty quick, so I had to buy more storage.

There's some front-end tech-savvy required as well - You need to feel comfortable (or willing to get comfortable) making and uploading videos, and setting up and maintaining a website.  These are skills that are getting easier and easier to acquire, but they may still be a hurdle for some.  I used a Flipcam to make my videos, Google Docs as my video host, and Google Sites for my website.  (See the end of this post for some great how-to videos on this kind of stuff.)

It takes some time to create the videos - Each of my videos is around 15 minutes long, and it took me about two hours to create my first one.  That included planning the video, getting the whiteboards ready, and doing the actual recording.  After I'd done a couple, I had the total time down to about one hour per video.

It changes the flow of your class - I had originally thought I'd record a few videos of random lessons from different units, but I found that to be too complicated, at least for my first try; going from a video-as-homework on one day to a worksheet-as-homework on the next day just messed up my pacing.  So I decided to try flipping my class for one whole unit.   I picked a unit that only had four sections; the first one didn't really lend itself to video, so I created video lectures for the last three sections.

The students weren't as thrown off by the videos as I thought they would be - I had anticipated that a lot of the students would object that they couldn't do the assignment because they didn't have a computer, didn't have internet access, etc., though I was ready with alternatives for them (they could watch the videos after school in my classroom, in the school library, or in a public library).  For the most part, however, everyone just kind of shrugged and accepted that this was the assignment.  Out of my class of 28 students, I had eight who weren't able to (or just didn't) watch the first video, and five who didn't watch one of the other two; this is about the same number of kids I have on any given day who don't do their homework.

In fact, I was probably more thrown off than they were - Not having to spend class time on lecture really did leave me with a lot more class time to do "other stuff" but I found that I wasn't entirely sure what "other stuff" to do.  I'm as big a critic of lecturing as anyone, but when suddenly faced with 90 minutes of class time and no need to lecture, it was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.  What was I supposed to do now?  I ended up using that time to have students work more problems at the board, do more whole class call-on-individual-students type practice problems, and do more working problems at their seats with partners while I walked around answering questions.

It was this that I found most intriguing.  There was a noticeable increase in the amount of time the *students* spent actively working math problems, and a noticeable decrease in the amount of time *I* spent actively working math problems.  Which makes sense.  There was no lecture time at all, and lecture time is, kind of by definition, time that the teacher is actively involved and the students are passively involved (at best).  So with no lectures, the format of the class almost forces more active engagement by students.  I'm still new at this, but I'm looking forward to seeing how flipping my classroom will provide more opportunities for actively engaging the students.

More info:

You can find some great how-to videos on flipping your classroom here, including instructions on creating your own boards, making the video, uploading the video, creating a simple website, etc.  You can see my current class website here; click over to the "Geometry Assignments" page for more of my class lecture videos.

Image by Photo Extremist via Flickr.

My wife and I have both had Virgin Mobile cell phones and phone plans for several years now, and for the most part have been pretty pleased with them.  There are no contracts involved, phones and plans are both reasonably priced, and they have decent customer service on the rare occasion that one of us needs to call and talk to a human.

They also provide access to your call history data via your online account, and unfortunately, the information Virgin Mobile provides, and the format in which they provide it, is really lousy.

One of the nice things about Virgin Mobile is that they offer different plans for you to choose from depending on how you use your phone.  For example, they have a $35/month plan that gives you 300 anytime talk minutes, a $45/month plan that gives you 1200 anytime talk minutes, and a $55/month plan that gives you unlimited talk minutes.  (All of these plans give you unlimited texting, email, data, and web access.)  If you go over your talk minutes on the $35 or $45 plans, you get charged 10 cents per minute for each minute you're over.

So if you happen to use your phone relatively infrequently, as my wife and I did, the $35 plan is clearly the best choice.  But if you start to use your phone more often, the 10 cents a minute overage charges can start to add up pretty quickly.  If you're on the $35 plan and you regularly talk more than 400 minutes per month for example, you're paying an extra $10 per month, or a total of $45 per month, for just 400 minutes.  It would be a much better deal for you to switch to the $45 plan and get the 1200 minutes.  And of course, if you only occasionally go over the 300 minute limit, or only go over by a few minutes, you'd want to stick with the $35 plan.

So it would be really useful to be able to look at your call history data for the past few months and be able to see the total minutes you talked each month.  If you're regularly over 400 minutes, you'd switch to the $45/month plan, and if you're not, you'd stay with the $35/month plan.  Simple.

Unfortunately, while Virgin Mobile provides easy access to your call history data, the format in which they provide it is not useful for making this simple decision.  This is because a) they only provide a list of the length of each individual call, not total monthly minutes, and b) they only provide data for the previous two months.

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous.  Virgin Mobile actually has all of the data that I need in order to make a decision about the best phone plan for me, and they actually provide it to me via my online account, but they won't give it to me in a format that's useful.

It turns out that I can get this information myself by copying and pasting the individual call data into a spreadsheet and then calculating a simple sum.  I did this once and it took me about 15 minutes, most of the time being needed because I had to do several copy and pastes because they only provide 20 rows of data per screen.  And of course I could only get data on the past two months.

Come on Virgin Mobile.  You already have the data.  Have one of your programmer people add a few lines of code to display the total talk minutes used per month over the past year.  Then your customers can tell at a glance if they need to switch plans or not.

Virgin Mobile logo image from crackberry.com.

If you haven't already, you should definitely read Ellie Herman's recent article in the LA Times called The Myth of the Extraordinary Teacher, which includes this memorable observation:

"We can't demand that teachers be excellent in conditions that preclude excellence."

Like most people, I've read about a million books, articles, and blog posts that offer a million different opinions on how to fix education.  We need more charter schools, we need vouchers, we need to get rid of the bad teachers, we need to pay teachers more, we need to use this or that teaching approach, we need to train teachers differently, we need to make the school day longer, we need to abolish the Department of Education; the list is endless, and everyone seems to have an opinion.

As a classroom teacher I get to be a part of a lot of conversations about how to fix education.  Somebody finds out I'm a teacher and they'll ask what I think about this or that education issue, and often they'll tell me what they think should be done to improve schools or teaching or the education system, and often those thoughts will be expressed very passionately.

I've come to understand that people's views on "how to fix education" are strongly influenced by their personal experience with education.  Almost all of us have had an experience with schooling.  For most of us it started around the age of five with preschool or kindergarten and continued thru the age of eighteen when we graduated from high school, plus maybe some more via college if we happened to go that route.

And every one of us had some very memorable and formative experiences (both good and bad) during that time, and every one of us could tell you how our schooling experience could have been better.  And I suspect every one of us is right.  If I hadn't taken 7th grade science from that lousy science teacher, or if more of my classes had been like my 10th-grade geometry class, or if more of my teachers had taught using that unconventional style that my 12th grade English teacher used, man that would have been GREAT.

Which is to say, it would have been great for me.

Because the fact is, my schooling experience was the experience of a single student: me.  And as much as I may have hated my 7th grade science class, there were probably some kids who loved it; and as much as I loved my 10th-grade geometry class there were undoubtedly some kids who hated it.  And that's not just a statement about how awful or awesome my 7th grade science or 10th grade geometry classes were, its also a statement about what kind of student I was.

I was always good at school, and I had parents who insisted that I take school seriously and who supported me in doing so.  Not only that but I had, and still have, particular learning styles and work habits that made certain classroom environments more or less effective for me.  These weren't things that my school or teachers provided, they were traits that I showed up at school with.  And every one of my classmates showed up with a completely different set of traits, so they all had a different take on how good or bad those classes were for them.

It wasn't until I became a teacher that I got a glimpse of just how varied are those traits that students bring with them into their classrooms.  I have students who come from stable, supportive homes, and I have students who come from horribly chaotic and dysfunctional homes.  I have students who are hard workers and I have students who refuse to do anything but sleep and check their Facebook page.  I have students who have remarkably quick and insightful minds, and I have students who struggle with the most basic concepts.  I have students who are relatively ordinary "kids" and I have students who already have children of their own or who work full time to pay their own rent because their parents kicked them out of the house.

Like all classroom teachers, Ellie Herman realizes that the trick isn't just to improve schools for the kind of student that you were, the trick is to improve schools for all students.  And that's really, really tough.  And it's even tougher when people continue to insist that all we need are for teachers to be extraordinary while they simultaneously go about creating conditions that work against teachers being extraordinary.

Image by Tinker*Tailor loves Lalka via Flickr.

About halfway thru last semester I discovered that there's a relatively simple way to perform an item analysis on the mid-term and final exams in my classes.  An item analysis basically means examining student responses to each of your test questions so that you can improve the quality of your tests.  The most basic type of item analysis involves simply seeing what percentage of your students missed each one of your exam questions, thus allowing you to determine if some of your exam questions are too difficult, or if there are certain topics that maybe your students didn't master as well as you had expected.

It turns out that for the Scantron machine that my school uses, after you scan all the student test forms you can just scan a special Item Analysis Form and the machine will give you a nice printout that shows how many students missed each question.  (Obviously, this only works for multiple-choice tests, and only if you're grading them using the Scantron machine.)  I'm not generally a big fan of multiple-choice tests so all of my other tests are hand-graded, but my mid-term and final are both multiple-choice.

After scanning the item analysis form for each set of final exams, I wrote down all the questions which were missed by over half of the students.  A couple of things immediately jumped out at me:

1. The questions which I had answered incorrectly on my exam key (oops).
2. The questions which I thought were really easy, yet which over half of the class missed.

I thought I had a pretty good idea of which exam questions were easy, medium, and hard, but after looking at the results of the item analysis I had to re-evaluate.  There were at least a couple of questions on the exams for each of my classes that even now have me scratching my head.  How could so many kids have missed those questions?  I was sure everybody was clear on those topics.

As disappointing as it was, however, it was a very valuable experience.  I may have thought those problems were pretty straightforward, but since most of the class missed them on the final I'm going to have to re-work some of the lessons dealing with those topics.  I would also like to do a similar item analysis of each of the other tests in my classes, though since they're not multiple choice I'll have to do that without the Scantron machine.

[BTW, the book Statistics Hacks by Bruce Frey has some good info on item analysis and other related statistical stuff that teachers can use to improve their tests.  I got a used copy for 5 bucks on Amazon.]

Image by COCOEN on Flickr.

I am continually reminded of just how valuable it is for a teacher to remain calm, even when classroom events may be really annoying.  Several times this semester I found myself getting irritated with one or more students, yet each time I managed to keep my cool and was very glad I had.

The most common example this semester seemed to be the standard "student who doesn't want to do anything."  In a typical scenario, I will have just finished explaining some new topic and passed out practice exercises for the students to work on.  We do this regularly and they all know the drill.  They work on the practice problems and I wander around to answer questions or remind students to get back to work, keep any conversations on-task, etc.  Occasionally I'll come across a student who has put their work away before class is over, and I'll ask if they're already finished.  Sometimes they are, to which I say "Good for you," but sometimes they want to try the old, "No, but I'm going to do it at home" ruse, to which I say, "I appreciate that, but we still have plenty of class time left so I want you to take your work out and work on it now."

This happens less and less as the semester goes on, because the students see other students try it and they know it doesn't work, but I guess hope springs eternal.  Almost always the student will sigh, roll their eyes, or make some other gesture indicating how ridiculous Mr. Bledsoe is being, and then get their paper out and reluctantly get to work (or pretend to work).

Occasionally, however, I'll have a student who will go to some pretty dramatic lengths to avoid getting their paper back out.  A couple of students this semester tried simple foot-dragging, hoping Mr. B would forget about it (I don't), and one was not only refusing to get her work out, but was actively socializing with another student at the same time; I asked that one to move to a different seat and then she REALLY got defiant.  (I ended up sending her out of class.)

Each time this happened, I was really annoyed by it.  Maybe because each time it caught me by surprise (I hadn't had trouble from any of these students before) or maybe I was just already annoyed by something else.  At any rate, I remembered Dan Meyer's Important Ratio #2:

DisruptiveStudent'sSatisfaction = MyFrustration / EffortStudentPutIntoFrustratingMe

and the importance of keeping this ratio low, so even though I was irritated on the inside, all my students saw was Mr. B being calmly insistent while continuing to go about his other duties.

It's hard to overestimate the benefits of this.  Not only do the specific kids you're dealing with learn that a) they're not going to get away with that in your classroom, and b) they're not going to make Mr. B lose his cool, but all the other kids in the class learn it as well.  So a kind of self-reinforcing cycle begins: the more kids see how Mr. B always remains calm (even with the really annoying kids), the less incentive they have to try to piss him off.  So most of them don't even try; they just sigh and get back to work.

And the big benefits actually begin the next day, when the disruptive kid shows up in class and I calmly greet them just like it's a brand new day and I've completely forgotten about what happened yesterday.  Of course, I haven't forgotten about it and neither have they, but they and all their classmates get a powerful lesson in not holding a grudge.  They learn that just because they have a bad day, or maybe even act rude or obnoxious in class, Mr. B doesn't label them a troublemaker forevermore.  He treats them just like everybody else; which is to say, he expects them to come in and get to work.

Oh, and that student I (calmly) sent out of class for being disruptive and defiant?  The next week she stayed after class to apologize.  And you can bet that would never have happened if I had lost my cool.

Image by Gloson on Flickr.

Here's a list of things that my students (all high schoolers) have told me are too much work.  I am not making any of these up.

1. Pushing buttons on a calculator
2. Taking off a coat
3. Sharpening a pencil
4. Getting a pencil from a jar
5. Getting a piece of paper from a stack of paper
6. [UPDATED] Adding staples to a stapler

I've actually been told these things are too much work by multiple students.  In the interest of clarity, here's how each of these conversations generally go.

Pushing buttons on a calculator

Student: Mr. B, how do you find the mean of these numbers?

Mr. B: You enter the numbers into a list in your calculator, then you select the "Mean" function from the menu.

Student: That's too much work.

Taking off a coat

S: Mr. B, it's too hot in here, can you turn up the A/C?

B: Why don't you take off that coat you're wearing?

S: That's too much work.

Sharpening a pencil

S: Mr. B, don't you have one of those electric pencil sharpeners?

B: No, just the regular manual one by the door.

S: Oh.

B: [after student makes no move to sharpen their dull pencil] Are you going to sharpen your pencil?

S: That's too much work.

Getting a pencil/piece of paper from a from a jar/stack.

S: Mr. B, I don't have a pencil/paper.

B: Did you check the pencil jar/paper stack?

S: That's too much work.

Readers will notice that for the last example, the student(s) in question do not already have their own pencil/paper.  These are high school students who come to school, many regularly, without pencil or paper.  While there's still a part of me that is insulted that some students would come to class without without these basic tools, in the interest of choosing my battles I reluctantly I keep a jar of pencils and a stack of paper at the front of the room for these students to use.

While these examples are somewhat humorous, they highlight one of the challenges that I face with many of my students, which is simply getting them to do something that requires even a little bit of effort.  Most of the math problems that we do in my classes require that a student work thru multiple steps in order to arrive at an answer.  Even when the students know how to do each of the individual steps, they will often claim that doing all of the steps just to find the answer to one problem is "too much work" and simply refuse to do those problems.  Problems that require one step, okay; problems that require two steps, maybe; problems that require more that that, forget it.

I occasionally point out to my students that work is what they're there for.  School is not intended to be a place where they come to be entertained, its a place where they come to work.  For many of my students, however, this is a tough sell.

Image by Mac63 on Flickr.

Updates

Adding staples to a stapler

S: Mr. B, your stapler is out of staples.

B: There are some more in that box right there; you can refill it.

S: That's too much work.