dy/dan

The Excuses I Gave

By Dan Meyer • May 25, 2007 • 2 Comments

I only play for cash stakes.
I failed the pee test.
I’m too old to mix it up with you kids.

I may have left readers of a previous post with the impression that I’ve arrived at this place of “total, psychological, and emotional self-control.” Sorry about that. Part of me figured I had. However, as much as I’ve reckoned with my own high schooling and its effect on my classroom posture, I realized on Wednesday that I have never reconciled the stigma of growing up real tall in high school while lettering in varsity tennis.

That was weird.

I’m gonna get over it, though, and play in the student-faculty basketball game next year, if only because all those teachers crashing around out there against most of the senior class, chasing loose balls like greased pigs after headless chickens (or something), looked like too much fun to let decade-old insecurities interfere.

Postscript: Also underscoring the difference between the teacher I want to be and the teacher I am is one of my earlier posts, a post from back when my readership was well contained by the walls of my childhood home. I wish I had waited to post it now, because it was and still is, as the post’s please-kick-me title states, The Truest Stuff I’ve Ever Watched or Written.

Thanks, Rich.

By Dan Meyer • May 24, 2007 • 7 Comments

‘While back, Rich linked a 3D exercise which is pretty well appropriate for any age. You start with a paper circle and at the end, after a fair amount of collaboration, team-building, and discussion, you’ve got this sweet icosahedron. Along the way you review a couple hundred geometry concepts and their properties, tattooing down names, facts, and figures, anything that comes to your class’ collective mind, anything from “isosceles trapezoid” on to “snowcone” and “taco.”

My first period, I got too excited as the icosahedron grew and took too central a role in the connecting/taping process. During the second class, I didn’t touch it. Instead, with ten minutes left in class — just enough time to finish if the class was motivated — I scooped some errant stack of papers off my desk and announced, “I’ve got your homework assignment for Memorial Day Weekend right here. I’m willing to cancel it [reluctant pause] IF you guys can make the icosahedron before the bell rings.” [cue frantic team-forming, leadership-role-assuming, fun-having, and homework-canceling].

So thanks, man.

If you’re dying like I am here, it’s a low-stress and low-impact way to fill a thirty minute bloc without falling prey to the pro forma time wasters: games, movies, and parties. I extracted the relevant bit from a larger pdf.

The Soft Touch

By Dan Meyer • May 23, 2007 • 6 Comments

Several weeks ago, Greg Farr posted some anecdotes from his personal disciplinary files, situations where a sense of humor and a light slap on the wrist made for better discipline than a fit of apoplexy and a suspension would’ve. (Toldja I’d get to this, Greg.)

He concludes with the advice to kinda chill out, loosen up, enjoy the job, and watch as discipline becomes easier. In his own words:

I’m calling on all administrators to remind their teachers:

LIGHTEN UP!! IT’S OK TO HAVE FUN AT SCHOOL…IT’S OK TO LAUGH IN THE CLASSROOM!

To which I reply, yeah, but for most new teachers, it’s easier to shoulder press a Buick.

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Assessment Part Deux Redux

By Dan Meyer • May 22, 2007 • 32 Comments

The blogosphere’s been buzzin’ about assessment. (Not the NCLB kind.)

First, Marie, Rich, and Jackie have been asking some sharp questions on math assessment over in an earlier post.

Second, the Teacher Leaders Network blog is picking through the question, “How do you handle a student with an A on tests and an F on homework?”

My answer there, without even a little equivocation, is to pass her and then figure out why your homework is so totally inessential to class success. If you’re gutsy, you give her an A, but regardless you evaluate what it means to pass a student. Does it mean she did her homework, attended, participated in class discussion, raised her hand x times, wasn’t a discipline issue, brought baked goods on her assigned day, etc. etc., getting increasingly petty here. Basically, which of those behaviors is worth sandbagging a kid for a semester who knows the material, knows how to compute fractions, write persuasive essays, identify continents?

Third, Todd wrote an extraordinary post awhile back called “The Shrinking Educational Middle Class” which I’ve been meaning to pick up.

Todd sez, back in the day, you’d have histograms like this, with a bell-shaped distribution of grades (the graphics are his):