Category: anecdotes
Total 71 Posts
w/r/t my assertion that many students want to know right away if you like them or hate them, that they want to know so fast they’re willing to provoke a response:
I got one the first day. A kid came in clowning hard, looking to assert real fast what he was about, looking to find out what I was about. He was obviously in the business of rattling teachers.
I’m not saying I know how this is going to end but I know how I wasn’t going to let it begin. Out of twenty-four students in class, his was the only name I knew. Yet when I was running down the roster taking attendance, I asked his name just like any other. I wasn’t going to give him any celebrity. I wasn’t going to let him know his circus-act even registered.
This trained obliviousness doubles as a legitimate instructional strategy. Running through some whiteboard exercises with my students, students tossed answers out impulsively โ looking to keep the effort-gratification cycle spinning quickly. Their answers were often correct, but I felt them reading me, gauging my eyes and mouth for some indication they had scored.
If I hesitated even a moment, they’d reverse themselves or default to their next, on-deck guess. At that point I’d issue a look, one which I’ll issue maybe a hundred million billion times over the course of this school year. It reads like this:
At that point their second-guessing begins in earnest. Problems are re-worked and arguments erupt only to find when the dust settles and the rubble clears that their first answers were correct.
At the end of this first fortnight, I’m realizing how well this affectation works with students, how at the end of the school year they’ll take five or six more seconds on a problem โรย an eternity by the standards of a 14-yo โ reworking even the easy ones, and then when I issue that look, they’ll tell me to cram it, insisting on their first answer because they earned it.
I’m also realizing with this new group of students exactly how tight last year’s class and I became, and something else which is nice to realize and never a guarantee: that the time we spent together wasn’t meaningless.
dy/av : 010 : the season finale from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.
Tags
dyav, autobiographical
iPod Edition
dy/av : 010 : the season finale (640 x 480)
Previous Episodes
dy/av : 009 : don’t be prez
dy/av : 008 : behind the scenes
dy/av : 007 : the motiongraphics episode
dy/av : 006 : carver’s classroom management
dy/av : 005 : how i work
dy/av : 004 : thank you, teaching
dy/av : 003 : on the office
dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer
dy/av : 001 : earn the medium
My Week, More Or Less, In Washington, D.C.
Cable In The Classroom’s Leaders in Learning Awards was an event which saw me initially in my default, slouched, slacker-kid-among-grownups posture. By the end of the week, though, I was dry for snarky Tweets, far too awed by a) my first trip to my country’s capital, b) the people โ CEOs, senators, congresspeople, incredible educators, among them โ I met there, and c) the ceremony itself.
I’ll leave it at that. Plus a Flickr album and two videos if you’re really inclined.
Next Year’s New Job
Which, as it happens, is the old job. What a mess, really. My fiancรฉe and I found little traction for her nursing career in San Francisco while a job opened up, instead, fifteen minutes from the position I had officially resigned months ago (papers and everything), a position which my school had already filled. I told my department head to expect reference checks from the nearby Santa Cruz City School District.
The farewell dinner came and went. My students said goodbye. I signed yearbooks. My principal stopped me on my last prep. He told me they had freed up a math position.
My hesitance precipitated a good discussion of the school’s advantages and disadvantages for a new teacher (each of which I detailed, however elliptically, earlier this year).
Inasmuch as a unionized teacher can negotiate for anything in this job, my principal has graciously accommodated some material and immaterial needs, accommodations for my fifth year teaching which should keep me challenged and push me into my sixth
Good Reading At Home
- TMAO takes a dump on teaching’s couch and flips it the bird on his way out the door. Commenters love this guy but I don’t really get it. (Seriously, though: it’s an overwhelmingly accurate lifestyle piece on a) a certain kind of teacher b) teaching a particular population, and I don’t use that adverb lightly. I was almost too depressed to finish.)
- H. Aychison issues a precise and comprehensive post-mortem of her implementation of skill-based assessment.
- Eric Hoefler examines skill-based assessment within the humanities.
- Glenn Waddell, a second-year teacher in Nevada has pushed skill-based assessment on his department restructuring team and is liveblogging the process.
- Sam Shah post-mortems his math video project, reminding me I have my post-mortem to write.
- And in between drafts, TMAO retires his blog. I’m taking the rest of the day off. I just … need to be alone.
Those middle four citations are emblems of transparent practice which everyone oughtta hold aloft. Or at least comment on.
Worthwhile Math Clip
Here’s a Chris Rock bit from I’m Gonna Git You Sucka which is simultaneously a) hilarious and b) an efficient introduction of rates. I ripped it, cleaned up the language, and re-uploaded it. Are you with me here? Chris Rock! Clean!! Introducing math!!! This is a freaking unicorn I’m serving up here.
Over the next ten weeks this blog will find me a) getting married, b) wrapping up post-production on my longest video to date, c) looking for a place to live, d) looking for a place to work, e) putting in some summer hours with Big Tree Learning, f) getting married, and, as you read this prerecorded post, g) hanging out with some (presumably cool) educators and my pops in Washington, DC, at Cable’s Leaders in Learning Awards. In light of that to-do list, my blogging output here may be a bit light for the summer months.
However, there is one commitment I’d like to make around here: a ten-episode vodcasting season, one episode a week, every Wednesday: dy/av.
I don’t know how you’ll react to any of these but your reaction is almost beside their point. I need video around here like you can’t believe. It has been too long.