Day 3: Marshmallows and Drowning Animals

People were congratulating me on a great first day after yesterday's post, but I went home and felt awful.  I was feeling no energy or inspiration for this work and was very disheartened.  Things went smoothly, but I wasn't excited.  I talked about it with some colleagues from Twitter and with my wife, trying to get my head on straight.

My wife very helpfully reminded me that the start of the year is always rough for me.  I went to bed early last night, then got up to work out this morning, put on a clean shirt and came in to school with the hope of turning it around.

My first class went VERY well.  I introduced them to my friend Mr. Stadel and #Estimation180 and we talked about number sense and why it's helpful.  Then, since they didn't get to do it yesterday, they did the Marshmallow Challenge.

I started them with the basic challenge:

Using 20 pieces of spaghetti, 1 yard of string, 1 yard of tape and 1 marshmallow, build the tallest free-standing structure with the marshmallow at the top.

There was a ton of good work coming out of all of the groups, although a casual glance would not have seen that.  A casual glance would have seen kids goofing around and talking about shoes and singing songs.  But under that shell, there were good discussions about stability and utilization of resources.

After 18 minutes, we found that only 2 teams had been able to construct towers and I had them write about their strategies.  I put stickers in their notebooks when they were done and we talked about it as a group.

Then I gave them the chance to do it again with one change.  They could either have 8 mini-marshmallows, or they could use thicker noodles.  Only one group opted for the thicker noodles while the rest wanted the mini-marshmallows.

I won't spoil it by saying which group won, but there were MANY more viable towers the second time around.

This is a chatty group, but very nice and I'm looking forward to getting to know them.  I have almost all of their names memorized already.

Marsha Mallow is proud of these kids!

In geometry and the second class of pre-algebra, we worked on Fawn's Noah's Ark activity.  I started it the way I do with many of my activities: with a story.

I told them how I had made the mistake of watching Noah this summer and what a terrible movie it was.  This lead to a basic explanation of dry docks and why boats dip down into the water rather than being large rafts, like the ark in the movie was. We talked about the importance of the center of balance in a boat and how not to drown the animals.

The geometry kids worked insanely hard for over an hour.  The discussions were excellent and heated.  The groups were eager to get the right answer and got frustrated with my replies.

Them: "Is this right?"
Me: "I have no idea. Tell me how you got it."
Them: **explanation** "Is it right?"
Me: "I'm confused. How did you get this?"
Them: **explanation** "Is it right?"
Me: "Where did this come from?"

etc., etc....

When the period ended, there had yet to be a satisfactory explanation.  Tomorrow, we will talk about the importance of the struggle versus the answer.  I am working on being less helpful.  This is a huge task for me since I love to show off my abilities.


The pre-algebra kids slid in and out of productivity on this task.  A few of the groups spaced out and refused to work, but got back into it with a bit of encouragement.  By the time they got to my room, it was 87 degrees again, so I was much more lenient with my on-task requirements.  As I sort of expected, they, as a group, were much more willing to give their explanations verbally than writing them down.  I will ease them into writing about math, but we will be doing it.  Lots of it.

When I sensed that they were about done, we discussed the problem as a class and I gave them some time to sit and chill (as much as they could in 87 degree heat).  I think I'm going to be much less strict about going bell-to-bell this year.  Down time will need to happen.

It was too hot for Marsha Mallow 

Overall, today was a much better day than yesterday.  I'm going to go home and enjoy that.

Day 2: Here We Go! (For Real)

The 8th graders showed up today.

Or at least those 8th graders who weren't assigned to the bus that never arrived...

We sent the 7th graders to homeroom and the 8th graders to the auditorium where they were given the same speech as yesterday and last year about expectations for the school year, reminding them about dress code, acceptable hallway behavior, etc.

I sat in the auditorium feeling nauseated.  I don't know why the start of this year has felt different to me.  Perhaps it's because I was hoping to be in a different place, both mentally and physically, right now.  I sat there, not feeling the excited and rejuvenation of a new school year, but the drag of repetition.

As I watched, a teacher pulled a student out of the main body and sat her to the side (right in front of me) for disruptive behavior.  The girl sat there, complaining and tapping and generally being a 13-year-old who feels that she's been wronged.

When it was time to separate the kids by homeroom, I called my group with a smile on my face, waiting patiently until they were ready.  The young woman who had been pulled aside was in my group.

I had planned to do the marshmallow challenge with them, but the shortened time and first day homeroom clerical stuff cut that out.  Rather than rush it, I decided to do it tomorrow.  Instead, I welcomed them to my class and started talking about the Zome Tools.

I was nervous and started rambling, but the kids seemed very interested.  We talked about geometric prefixes like tri-, oct-, and hex-, as well as the differences between -gon and -hedron.  I made sure to encourage the exploration and participation of the girl who started the day off poorly and by the end of class, she was my buddy.

I know that most teachers spent their time going over the syllabus, but I didn't want to do that.  I handed it out so that I could talk about Remind, but that was it.  I channeled my friend Sebastian Speer and told them the following:

There are procedures on this paper, and you can read them, but they all boil down to the only two rules I have.
1) You will do your best to learn.
2) You will not make it harder for other people to learn.

If you are sitting at lunch and someone comes up to eat your cookie, how would you feel?  What if they didn't eat it, but just threw it on the floor because they didn't like cookies?

You would be pretty upset.  Don't eat someone else's cookie and don't throw it on the floor.  It works the same way in here.

Seriously, don't be this guy.

The remainder of homeroom was taken up by clerical stuff, getting them into their lockers and figuring out the schedules.

The geometry class went about as I expected.  The students were eager and interested and very high energy.  We had a very long conversation about the hyper-dodecohedron and how it was a 4-dimensional object projected into 3-dimensional space.  We did the first two days of Estimation 180 and talked about number sense.

It's a smaller group than last year and with a VERY different social dynamic.  I look forward to figuring out how to utilize it to get them to push beyond their boundaries.

By the time 8th period rolled around for my second pre-algebra class, it was 86 degrees in my room.  Several of the students already had attitudes from their encounters with teachers earlier in the day and the rest were half asleep.  I need to spend some serious time thinking about my expectations for this class, especially in terms of size, willingness and time of day.  The social make-up scares me quite a bit since there are several students who play off of each other in destructive ways.

With so much going against this group, I know it's going to be a struggle to figure out how to reach them.  They seemed to really be into the Marshmallow Challenge, so (surprise surprise) projects may be the way to their heart.  Now I just need to find a ton of projects.

After creating marshmallow towers, I asked the groups to write a few lines reflecting on their work and strategies.  After we discussed it as a class, I gave them thicker noodles, better tape and another marshmallow and had them try again.

Of the 6 groups, 3 worked hard and quietly, 1 worked hard and loudly.  In the other two groups, half of the students worked while the rest goofed around, throwing pasta at each other.  I need to be reminded that just because 10% of the class is messing around and off task, that the rest of the class is still doing what I need.

My major goal this year is to figure out how to keep that 10% from sabotaging the other 90%.

I know that last year I talked about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in terms of students productivity.  I don't see how anyone can be expected to learn when the room is 87 degrees.  I also know that the room above mine is closer to 90.

I will, as always, do the best I can do with what I have.

Day 1: Here We Go! (Sorta...)

There are students in the building.

Not MY students, but students.  My district brings the 7th grade students into the school on the day before the 8th graders to help them get acquainted and give them a bit of ownership of their new surroundings.  The transition from Elementary to Middle School can be quite scary, so I think this is a great idea.

I also think it's a great idea because it gives me another day to get ready.

Author's Note: The above paragraphs are almost exactly what I typed on Day 1 of last year. I like consistency...

I will probably waste it.


I am not ready for this school year.  My room is not ready, my lessons are not ready and my mind is not ready.

I had an amazing summer of professional and personal development!  I drove to and from Jenks, Oklahoma with some amazing people to attend, and present at, Twitter Math Camp.  I spend a week in Philadelphia with some amazing people as an EnCOMPASS Fellow, working with the Math Forum at Drexel University on student feedback software.  I spent Monday nights moderating #MSMathChat on Twitter.  I spent countless hours having incredible conversations with teachers from around the world on the nature of mathematics, educational philosophy and strategy and how to implement those in a classroom of math-averse teenagers.

I did everything I could do to pump myself up and be excited for this coming year.

I am not ready.

The Beginning Of The Year paperwork is horribly overwhelming and, in addition to the new district initiatives and observational "look-fors," I have been spending the last week with my fingers in my ears, eyes shut and rocking back and forth denying the inevitable passage of time as it counts down to the start of homeroom tomorrow.

I know how terrible of a strategy and coping mechanism this is, but why put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after?


So what HAVE I been doing with my time?

I put up a few posters that deal with fixed and growth mindset.  I hung a few that deal with SBG that I'll be attempting this year as well as the 8 Standards of Mathematical Practice in student-friendly terms.  You should check out @TeacherPaulP and the amazing design work he did on these. I put up a motivational poster that I found that deals with destiny as a choice.  I have left most of my walls blank, telling myself that I want my students to fill them with their work.

The Cupcake one is not mine, but I wish it were...

This is mostly true.  I do want to fill my walls with student work, but I also am super sick of fighting with the walls.  It takes an act of god to get stuff to stick to them.  The posters I hung on Friday are already falling off.  I could plaster everything in duct tape, but that looks awful.  I may end up doing what I did last year: lining the walls with duct tape strips and taping things to that.

I taped dray erase boards to the wall for student use.

I've moved my desks in the groups that we will be using from the start of the year.

I printed my Remind Invite papers and course syllabi.

Then I spent 5 hours putting together various objects using Zome Tools.

I'm doing everything I can to not think about the students showing up tomorrow.  I wandered the building helping 7th graders open their lockers...



I do not like the start of the year.  I don't like re-establishing my expectations for a new group of students.

And I'm scared.

I set the bar so high for myself last year with this blog, and my drawings and my innovative lessons and discussions, I'm terrified that I won't be able to improve, or even keep status quo.  I exhausted myself last year and the prospect of doing it again is daunting.  I've already decided that I won't be doing daily drawings again, but I will be keeping up with the blog.

For the first time in my career, students are excited to be in my class.  One of my students spent the summer harassing another teacher until she was promised that she would be in my class.  I don't know if I can live up to the expectations that I set for myself and still manage to keep my head on straight.  I am deeply worried that my students, the geometry students specifically, will be expecting miracles from me that I won't be able to deliver.

Consciously, I know that I'm not a miracle worker. I know that if I do the best that I can do, everything will be great.  I know that they will give me a certain latitude, imagining that my mistakes are simply clever ruses to get them to do something else.

I am terrified of letting my students down.

My pre-algebra classes are about twice the size they should be in order for me to provide the kind of intimate, individualized instruction that those students require.  I need to find a way to create that environment in a room where students will be shoulder to shoulder.  Since they will already be in groups, I'm thinking that stations will work, if I can get them up and running.

In addition to all of this, I have to stop on my way home to buy some pasta for class tomorrow and some work shirts that aren't horribly stained in the front.  I'm planning to, once again, do the Marshmallow Challenge using the format that Sarah Hagan uses because she rocks.

On a totally unrelated note, does anyone know how to get grease and oil stains out of a shirt?

Dandelions

This was originally at the end of the previous post, but upon reflection, I decided that it needed to be its own post.


I have several friends and family members who are vegetarians or vegans.  Each person has made this choice for their own reasons.  Some of them do it for the health benefit while others have made this very difficult choice because the morality in the way that the food industry treats animals.  There are more reasons than I can list, most of which I completely understand.

My amazing mom is a vegetarian

This amazing lady is a vegan

Because of who I am, I accept the choices that my friends and family have made, but I have trouble letting it go by without making a joke.  My standard joke is that they are only vegans and vegetarians because they can't hear the plants scream.

I have a tendency to send @VeganMathBeagle text messages when I'm eating salad to tell her how much I'm enjoying the death cries of my lettuce.

On the road trip to Twitter Math Camp, the following picture was taken:

The Justins are culling the next generation of carrots by feasting upon their young! #populationcontrol cc: @j_lanier pic.twitter.com/gLQXgEtYJ6
— Justin (@JustinAion) July 27, 2014

As is the wont of my mind, I then often venture down existential paths, asking myself questions such as "What WOULD it be like for inanimate objects to have consciousness?"

As a parent, I often think about the horrendous, prison-like existence in which Thomas the Tank Engine is trapped, unable to move anywhere but back and forth along the path, unable to stop people from climbing inside him, unable to scratch his nose.

Too much over-thinking about a children's show? or WAY too much over-thinking about a children's show?

I started thinking about dandelions and what it would be like to be a dandelion with consciousness.  What would their lives be like?  The best that I can think of that they would lead lives of community.  They would grow up surrounded by their brothers and sisters, cousins and friends.

Then I thought about their children.  They grow their children right out in the open and a casual breeze snatches them away, scattering them to the four corners of the earth.  The dandelions never know what happens to their offspring, assuming that some will find a place of their own, but the majority will end up in the stomachs of bird, or drowned in bodies of water, or crushed under the tires of cars, or landing in spaces where they can never drop roots and start communities of their own.

As soon as I had this thought, I realized "this is what we do every day."

We pour our hearts and souls into developing our seeds for the future and then the end of the year comes and blows those seeds away.  It carries them onto their futures, their lives and we almost never know what happens.  We put our trust in the hope that they will land safely, planting deep roots on stable ground.

But we don't know.  We hope.


Except, sometimes, just sometimes, we know.

A student returns to us to tell us about the impact that we have had on their lives.  They tell us about the casual comment we made that changed how they view the world, how they interact with others.  Sometimes a seed lands in an open field is able to flourish and thrive in ways we never could have expected.


I received the following email to my school account this morning.

Mr. Aion,

 

I just wanted to thank you for your exceptional efforts with our daughter,during her tumultuous eighth grade year. Your support and guidance meant a great deal to her, in the classroom and beyond, and I know you will be a teacher she remembers and cherishes for years to come.

 

Thinking of you as the new school year gets underway and wishing you all the best.  Hope you find some Whovians in this new crop of students.

 

Warm regards,

I cannot even begin to express my gratitude for this note.  I am sitting in a room with amazing educators and education innovators and I'm having tremendous difficulty pretending that my allergies are acting up.


THIS is why I do what I do.

And I suspect that's the same for most teachers.


We don't know where, or even if, most of our seeds land.  We must continue growing them and allowing the wind to take them away, trusting in the strength of the seed and the power that we have put into them.

Starting Anew and Regrets

I have 11 days before I am due to report back to school and 18 days until students arrive.

I am not prepared.

I have spent much of this summer recharging and rejuvenating myself.  I have spent time with my children, watching them play and enjoy the summer heat and experience the beach and the ocean.  I have done weeks of professional development, gaining ideas and support from colleagues from around the world.  I traveled halfway across the country to share my experiences and passions with other math teachers.  I spent a week in a hotel with math teachers working on better ways to provide feedback to our students.

I am not prepared for the new year.

At the start of summer, I made a mental list of the things that I wanted to do to get my class ready for this year.  I wanted to develop my Standards-Based Grading scheme.  I wanted to work on my classroom management to make it a more positive environment for those students who need that the most.

I wanted to start the year with a solid plan.

That's not who I am.

I am a man of the moment.  I live right now, thinking about tomorrow, but planning for today.  It's one of the things that I hate about myself, but have yet to change.



As a student, I always liked the first few days of school.  It was a time when I had nothing that I needed to do except show up with awesome new school supplies.

As a teacher, I dread the first few weeks.  Once the year is underway and the students know what to expect from me, the routines solidified, I am good to go.  Each day leads into the next and my style of teaching carried me through the year with minimal bumps.

But those first few weeks are awful for me.  I am almost constantly anxious and spent much of my energy putting on a good face for the students who are looking to me to impose my own order on the room.


Instead of using this as a motivator to push me to better organization, I find it paralyzing.  I find ways to distract myself, productively or otherwise.  I do the equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears, shutting my eyes and yelling "NAH NAH NAH NAH!" to block out the impending change of reality.

I think my lesson plans are down here!

I don't regret the choices that I made this summer.

I am deeply thankful for the time that I was able to spend with my kids.  I greatly value the people I met and experiences that I had at Twitter Math Camp and the EnCOMPASS Summer Institute.  I am eternally grateful to my wife for finding a way and allowing me to spend 2 solid weeks on the road to make those experiences happen.

I do wish that I could make better choices about preparing for the coming school year.

Make Your #Twordle!

On the drive back from TMC14, Justin Lanier, Jasmine Walker and I were discussing the various types of conversations that we have had since we began our respective journeys on Twitter.  An idea was formed!

Those of us who geek out about data and words, have been familiar for a while with the Wordle.  Wordle is a program that takes a body of text, does a word count and then creates a word cloud where the words vary in size based on the frequency in which they appear in the text.

For example, this is the Wordle for the Constitution of the United States:

This Wordle shows that the most common word in the Constitution is "States" followed by "President."

The idea was batted around that we should make Wordles from our Twitter feeds to see what kinds of things we talk about and value.

This was such a good idea that we drove faster so we could get home and do it!

Here are the step-by-step instructions on how to make your own!

Go to Twitter.com:

Click on the gear in the upper right right hand corner and go down to "Settings":

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on 'Request Archive": (If you've done this before, the button will change to "Resend Email")

Twitter will send you an email with a link to download your archive:

In that download, there will be an Excel file with all of your tweets:

Highlight the column marked "text":

Right click and choose "Copy":

Head on over to Wordle.net:

Click on "Create Your Own":

Paste your text into the top box:

Hit "Go": (This is a Wordle made from the profile descriptions of my Twitter followers.)

You can use the program to play around with layouts, format and colors.

Do this! Make a Twordle from your Twitter feed and see what you talk about.

Here's mine:

So what do I notice? MSMathChat is a huge thing for me! The next biggest being "RT" coupled with almost half of the words on here being the handles of other users, tells me that I greatly value collaboration, sharing and conversation.

Other big ones for me are "think", "like" and "know."

What about you?  What does your say about what you value?



Bonus: Here's the Wordle for this post:

Edit: Because I couldn't stop with what was on here, since I have an addictive personality, I made Wordles for months of my blog posts.  The follow image contains the Wordles for August, September, October and June. Can you tell which is which?  What do they say about my values over time?  What do you notice?

I have my own thoughts, but I'd like to hear yours.

Looking Back

One year ago I was done.

It was the end of my 4th year in my current district and, if I want to be completely honest, (which I try to do in this blog) I had never bought in.  I think from day 1 of year 1, I saw it as a place to work and earn some money until something better came along.  This wasn't fair to my coworkers, my students, my administrators, or to myself, but there it was.

My lack of buy-in over those years built up in ways that manifested VERY poorly.  I was rude to my students, thinking them lazy for not conforming to my teaching style.  I was rude to my coworkers, openly wondering why they cared about the things that they did.  I was rude to my administrators, openly questioning their methods and motives in inappropriate ways.

I honestly don't know how I wasn't fired.

At the end of my second year of teaching in the alternative education program at the high school, I was involuntarily transferred to the junior high school.

I roared my terrible roar and gnashed my terrible teeth and rolled my terrible eyes and showed my terrible claws!  And no one cared.

So I checked out even further.  I saw the junior high school as a prison, a place where I was condemned to teach out my career until I either keeled over at my desk, or my frustration at a system that wouldn't conform to my every whim drove me out of teaching.

I was awful.  I think that somewhere deep down, I knew it.  But like most awful people, I wasn't willing to admit it to myself.  I wanted to come in, have kids sitting in rows, eagerly answering my questions, clambering for my attention, desperate to impress me.  I wanted my students to treat me the way I treated my very favorite teachers.  (But only favorite teachers. I was a jerk as a student too.)

It wasn't happening and I was tired of it.

At the end of year 4, I was done.  I was bitter, angry, frustrated, confused, angry, tired and angry.  (Looking back now, I see that almost all of that was at myself.)  I was ready to leave teaching.  Truth be told, I HAD left teaching.  I just hadn't left my job.  But I couldn't leave yet.  I was up to my ears in student loans and, if I stayed one more year, I could get a large chunk of that forgiven.  But how was I going to make it through another year without losing my mind?

I devised a plan.

I was going to be THAT teacher.

"What? No! I'm almost done with this level of Angry Birds."

"Welcome to class. Today, please work on page 238, numbers...all of them."

I was going to let the year soar past me, phoning it in, "doing my time" until I could apply for my loan forgiveness and get out.  Where was I going to go?  What would I do?  No clue! But I had 6 class periods a day for 180 days to figure it out.


Thankfully for me, my students, my school, my family, my soul, etc. this never happened.

In July of 2013, I attended Twitter Math Camp.  It's hard to say exactly what happened there except that when I returned to school in the fall, I was unrecognizable to my coworkers.  They wanted to know what drugs I was on that had turned me around so completely.

Yes, I was still the sarcastic, malcontent that they knew, but I had a new lease on life and teaching.  The people that I met at Twitter Math Camp and in the subsequent months on Twitter (FAR too numerous to name, I'm so sorry to all of you!) had reminded WHY I wanted to teach in the first place.  Not just why I wanted to, but how I could do it in a situation that wasn't my dream situation.

They showed (and continue to show) me how to make an amazing cake from whatever happens to be in the house, no shopping necessary.  This is a vast oversimplification, but I've written a ton already and I haven't even begun reflecting on this past year.

One of the major ideas that I heard at TMC was the concept of the 180-Blog.  In short, a teacher would post SOMETHING every single day that they taught for an entire year.  Most teachers who do this will post a picture, or perhaps a paragraph.

I am verbose.

I decided that with my blog, I wanted to keep track of what was happening in my class, but more importantly, what was happening in my head.  I needed to know that this change I had undergone was real and not just the results of someone slipping Zoloft into my coffee.

I allowed this blog to be a stream of consciousness.  I wrote about my thoughts, my plans, my hopes.  I only wrote about my students insofar as it related to my interactions with them or how I saw challenges.  At least, I think so.

Instead of a picture and a paragraph each day, I wrote a novela.  I didn't set out to.  I just wrote what was in my head and it just kept falling from my fingers.

During the 2013-2014 school year, I wrote more than 300,000 words of reflection on my teaching practices and philosophies.

According to Amazon, the average novel is 64,000 words meaning that during this school year, in which I was supposed to put my feet up, update my resume, play games on my iPhone and relax, I wrote the equivalent of 5 novels.

Or the length of Game of Thrones.

Or about this many pages...

I don't say this to brag.  It was a completely insane thing that I did and I don't think ANYONE should write that much.

I say it because, as a numbers guy, it clearly illustrates my commitment to becoming a better teacher.  I even titled this blog "Relearning To Teach" because, clearly, I had not done it before, regardless of what I thought.

I didn't have a plan for it beyond allowing my mind to spill onto the pages.  I never dreamed that anyone other than my mom would care about it or read it.  But here it is.  The year is over and I need to think about how it went.


It was better than last year.

What? You want more? Fine!

This was a year of risk-taking for me and I think that it paid off.  I moved much closer to the teacher I want to be, but that has come with unexpected consequences.  My various discussions with other teachers have lead to the conclusion that I don't know what I'm looking for in terms of progress among my students.

I know what I want them to be able to do.  I want them to have better logical and reasoning skills.  I want them to be able to analyze problems and develop solutions.  More than any of this, I want them to be able to create their own problems out of concepts and topics that interest them and be able to pursue those to the end.

But I have no idea how to assess any of this.  I have looked into the idea of standards based grading and think (90%) that I want to move that way.  This is because of the fact that I cannot explain the difference between an 89% and a 90%.  How could I justify giving those two grade to two different kids?  An A, a B, what's the difference and how do you justify that?

I still have much progress to make in terms of my interactions with students and parents.  As I'm sure is true for most teachers, I get along and am liked much more by students who are from backgrounds similar to my own.  I am making strides to broaden that group.  I am taking more time to put myself in the place of my students and ask different questions.

I am listening more.  Not enough yet, but I'm getting there.

I had some pretty amazing lessons and pretty great discussions with students this year.  As the year went on, I found myself slowly falling back into some of my old mental habits and tried very hard to pull myself back out.  Everything between Christmas and Easter was hard.  There were a ton of disruptions and it was tough to get a class rhythm going.  In several cases, student resistance broke me down and I went back to work sheets for my own sanity.  After a few days, I started up again, trying so hard not to quit.

I used to think that phrases like "I discovered 100 ways NOT to build a house" were platitudes from idiots who couldn't be trusted with hammers.  In the past year, I have learned how to embrace my mistakes and even celebrate them.  I want my students to be willing to make mistakes, so how could I expect that of them when I wasn't willing to do it?


After discussions with my mom, my wife and other teachers, I think that my main source of frustration with myself this year was my inability to change the mindsets of many of my students, mostly the students in pre-algebra.

Specifically, getting them to understand the difference between work and productivity.

Because I love analogies, I thought about it this way:

We are digging a ditch.  My goal was to help my students understand why we were digging it, where it was going, the purpose it served and hopefully have them develop efficient ways to get the job done.

A problem that I ran into, however, was that many students would spend the day digging, but not in any specific direction or with any goal in mind.  Many of these students, while digging at full speed, were throwing their dirt on other students, usually by accident.  When I tried to redirect their efforts into the direction we needed, they pointed to all of the work they did and were upset that it was a waste.

This, too, is a vast oversimplification of the purpose of school and the goals of my class, but I couldn't find a way to convey the idea that putting numbers on a page is not the same as solving problems.  This is something I need to work on.


I also need to be easier on myself.  This is a journey.  I can't expect immediate results, no matter how badly I want them.  If I keep my goals in mind and work on them, then maybe in 10 years I will be the teacher that I want to be.

I am deeply thankful to everyone from Twitter and beyond who has helped me to find my path again.  There are, as I said, WAY too many to name, but if I've interacted with you at all in the past 12 months, know that I'm talking about you.

I hope that I will continue this blog next year because I have come to believe that reflection is the best way for me to examine where I was, where I am and where I'm going.  Doing it so publicly has helped to keep my words in the forefront of my mind.  I knew that if I had a bad interaction with a student, I was going to have to write about it later.

This is, I suppose, the reflective practice equivalent of a food journal.

While I have always written this blog for me, I greatly appreciate all of the feedback that I've received from my readers, a list of which turns out to be longer than "my mom."

Thank you.