My journey through Graduate School to earn a Masters of Art in Education. I was on track to become a teacher, but now everything has changed, and I'm on the job hunt with a Bachelor's in Liberal Arts and a Master's in Education with no teaching certificate.

 

Bad Feelings

I'm feeling bad. But I think I can feel good about it. As the term winds down we have spent the last of our educational time in the tutoring sessions and I have a list of things I didn't do well. During my time as a private tutor I was very reactionary. I meet with a student, got the assignment, and pounded out an ad lib lesson about concepts, connections, procedures, whatever. I did the same thing with A and R and I was the one who was supposed to set the schedule! I acted like a reactionary when there was nothing to react to. I hope I don't do the same thing when I'm in a classroom, but I will have to plan ahead and the proper context to do it in. I didn't realize that this was the proper context for me to do it in.
posted by Josh English at 7/28/2003 09:35:00 PM

 

July 24- Thursday

It's getting harder to keep this going. I've got so much to do and I'm speding about an hour a day when I get home threading through a massive e-mail list that has exploded. I guess the other 300 people on the list aren't as busy as I am...

Seven days left. Five Literacy based lesson plans on Monday (I have three mostly completed), a two page reflection due Tuesday, and a ten page research paper due Thursday. Of course I have a final in Educational Psychology on Wednesday. This weekend I have a lunch appointment, an eight hour game to attend, and a BBQ party for my best friend. O cruel fate.

I am feeling the stress. In our Dimensions of Learning class we are covering Andy Hargreaves "Teaching in the Knowledge Society" and the conversation was great. It was fast, loud, respectful, crammed with ideas... I was taking notes rather frantically on two separate pieces of paper when the instructor, out of the blue, asked a student to leave. It was a misunderstanding and he apologized to her, but not to the class, which was clearly dampened by the outburst. I understand that the prof values the full participation of the class, but I also know why she wasn't participating fully and I can understand how it looked to the professor. I don't think I've recovered, and the massive amount of e-mail I had to go through was about religion, and that gets my dander up as much as anything. I may fall into a theology weekend and be just as bad on myself as I was last weekend when I was in programming mode most of the time.

So where am I? I am going, I think, slightly mad. Deep Breath. Okay. I have two more literacy based lessons to work out. I have a few fallback ideas but they aren't incredibly original, but I think I will fall back on them to call it done. The two page paper will wait until Monday. I did some prewriting in class today but the conflict made me loose my train of thought, and the clarifications about what the paper is supposed to be has made my prewriting less valuable. I have a bunch of note cards on my research subject, which has something to do with Plato's Republic, but I'm not sure exactly where I'm going to take it. It started with a suggested topic of Censorship in Education in the Republic, but I think I can link it to a more applicable and modern structure: Standardized assessment. That's a phrase that gets a lot of teachers very angry because it deprofessionalizes them and denies them the opportunity to be autonomous. Hell, that's one of the things that made me fall in love with the idea of being a teacher. A goal, a bunch of kids, and free reign to get there. I know I can do it, but I also know that I need to learn a lot more about how learning and Education works, which is why I'm in this program. I think I can make the link. I think I'm understanding Plato's theories well enough. I studied part of the Republic in a Western Civ class about ten years ago, and I studied Plato during my attempt at a Philosophy minor, but I forgot a lot of it. I like part of what I'm reading now: There must be a separation between economic power and political power to avoid corruption. I know the President's salary was intended to be low for this very reason. It doesn't apply anymore. I think the President get $400,000 a year, over ten times my highest annual salary ever.

So far I'm not worried about the Education Psych final. I have a list of topics that we will be tested on and we are covering those topics. We did a lot of work with Blooms Taxonomy and that was cool. It was very helpful to see it explained fully with good examples. I wonder why this class caused so much tension last week for the midterm and now it's not stressing us out? Probably a ten page research paper will do that to anyone.

I also had a long talk over lunch with someone who is struggling with the Literacy stuff more than I am: A band teacher. I thought I had it rough. He is understanding all of the concepts, but applying any of this to music is hard. We came up with a few ideas, but I don't know how well he can pull them off. I doubt I could pull it off, and he's the expert. So I have no reason to bitch about my difficulty with this class anymore.
posted by Josh English at 7/24/2003 09:30:00 PM

 
I've been falling behind in schoolwork and this blog. I spent the weekend debugging one function in Python and it works, but it doesn't seem to be working in the larger context. I go into programming mode and everything else falls to the side. I really have to ignore it until Aug 1.

I did spend some time working on a peice of art as as reading response to a second book in Literacy. I did a piece that was mostly typographical about Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I wasn't satisfied with it, but my group liked it. I'm my own worst critic.

We also started a socratic inquiry lesson based on a short story called Gaston. It's a sad story with lots of symbolism embedded in it, but one of the characters is unaware of how symbolic her actions are. Her father was all too aware of the symbolism.

I continued my lesson about arithmetic sequences for A and R. We have some solid tools there and I hope they can remember the work we did when they go back to school.

Educational Psychology was taken up by a Jisgaw pedagogy, and I was able to think of an application in Algebra. There are a few different ways of solving Parabolic equations, and this kind of thing might work well to teach it. At least it will be an interesting diversion for students, since it would fall in the second half of the spring semester of the year. If Jigsaw counts as a literacy technique, I've got one of the five down. We spent the rest of the class learning about learning disabilites and how to spot them and somewhat, how to diagnose them or at least take proper action.

I still have a two page critical review of a book I haven't read to do, a ten page paper on the uses of Plato's Republic that have been detrimental to education, the five lesson plans for Literacy, and the Final in Education Psychology. I'm not worried about that final. I have been behind in the readings, but I can catch up on those faster than I can crank out twenty pages of writing and editing it all again.
posted by Josh English at 7/21/2003 04:30:00 PM

 

More Catching Up

Tuesday was a little better. I was able to get to school on time, which was important because I was presenting the lesson with MC. MC is one the most infuriating people I've met. I have a long list of people who seem to have no social skills but have a strong need for public acceptance and it is just painful to watch them speak, listen to them, or be in a conversation with them. MC is on that list.

I admit that most of what happened was purely my fault. On Thursday we finished hammering out this lesson, and since she had more time, being a part time student, she offered to type it up. She showed it to me and approved it with a cursory glance mainly to get her away from me. I also did not review the lesson as completely as I could, another fault.

So she yammers on for a third of our allotted time in an anecdotal introduction, which wasn't needed, and then just handed the floor to me. I was unprepared for what happened next: I got stage fright. I haven't had stage fright for years, probably the 8th grade or so. Standing in front of those people with the overhead light in my eyes, I just froze up. So what does MC do? She takes over, brushes me aside, and does the damn lesson. My help was not wanted, requested, or required. My participation was dismissed. And I have to be graded on this.

Tutoring kind of sucked. I wasn't on. I am not providing A and R focused lessons in math. I tried to let it go at lunch. I checked for the sixth time that I still had my mid term with me. I have a history of losing assignments for no reason whatsoever and I had emailed them to myself as a backup plan.

I turned the midterm in and got my score on my first reading response. 49 points out or 50! Boy did that brighten me up. There were no fifty's and I suspect that there were a lot of 49's, but that's cool. I was worried about my score on that one. Turning in a second piece of writing without feedback from the first is hard to do.
I took my wife out to pizza to celebrate and to apologize for my rotten mood the night before.
posted by Josh English at 7/16/2003 12:54:00 PM

 
I haven't added anything this week. It's been a tough week already. Monday was my anniversary and I didn't want the day to be bad, but it was. Monday I was late (again) for school. The mini lesson in literacy was about Lynching. It was pretty powerful. I didn't get to hear the song, but the lyrics were very strong. We spent the rest of the time doing the non Midterm midterm writing exam. It was about 45 minutes long. For the life of me I don't remember what I wrote about. I barely remember tutoring. I think it went all right. In Educational Psychology we studied meta theories of human development. There are several theories about human development and they all share some same concepts:
1. Developmental milestones appear in a specific order
2. Rates of development differ between different people
3. Biology and Environment both contribute to development
4. Each person has plateaus with minimal development, and peaks of high development.

That night we celebrated our anniverasy with hot dogs and potato salad, watching the Home Run Derby. It really sucked to see Bret Boone get no home runs. Was Dave Valle sleeping up there while he was pitching? Sheesh. I had to finish tuning a three part mid term for Dimensions of Learning, and Steph and I got into a few heated discussions over some things.

I had to read a chapter from a Lisa Delpit book and I kept reading small snubs towards white people. My heritage is American and British, with a little Irish (11 generations back), so when people talk about multiculturism, I am usually the one that is compared to, and I keep hearing Delpit dismiss my heritage as valueless, arbitrary, and morally inferior to all other cultures. Nobody understand how frustrated this makes me feel. I'm all for equality, but that doesn't mean I get to be society's Piss Boy. We finished the essays and went to bed.
posted by Josh English at 7/16/2003 12:36:00 PM

 

Weekend Update - July 13

Spent most of the weekend working on a trio of midterm essays. They were long and difficult to get out. I also had to see my pseudo sister (I collect kid siblings, even people older than myself) and help her pack her small apartment into her small car so she could drive to Colorado to be with her fiancee. We took her out to dinner and said our goodbyes. I know she'll be back on and off for a while. She still has her apartment here that she needs to take care of.
posted by Josh English at 7/15/2003 08:32:00 PM

 

Day Twelve - July 10

Lessons, mid terms, ups and downs

I managed to get to school on time today. I wasn't feeling well and skipped breakfast. The lesson presented today was from a Spanish class but fortunately we didn't have to learn a word of Spanish. We watched an introduction to the value system of the average Mexican compared to the values of the typical American. It was a very good lesson. It was well crafted and well presented. We will have an in-class mid term that will not be a mid term exam in Literacy on Monday. He gave us a few ideas to mull over or prewrite over the weekend (like there isn't enough of that already).

I worked with M.C. to finish off our presentation. I explained some of my frustration with the way our partnership was working out. She began to understand my perspective that while she is an experienced teacher and had set ways to make lesson plans I am still learning the process, and so far my participation has gotten "that won't work" responses from her. We have a script we like and have agreed with. She's still a tad condesending towards me but I won't have to put up with it for long.

I caught up with the students for the second half of tutoring. They had been interviewing people to collect data for their capstone presentation. I haven't been too involved with that part of the process. We decided to turn the tables on them and had 'A' and 'R' create some problems for us to solve, and J, S, and I planned on doing them wrong, forcing the girls to correct us. 'A' caught on right away and thought we were teasing her, so she showed me how to do the problem. She did the problem well and got the right answer. We went on to discuss why her problem, and the problems created by S yesterday had strange answers like "one egg costs 16.5 cents." My problem didn't have those kind of rounding errors. We did a quick review of factoring and I covered the concept of 'evenly divisible by.' Something must have connected for her. She said "Sheesh, you should be a teacher or something." It made my day, since that is what I am trying to become.

In Dimensions of Learning we talked a bit about how the tutoring was going on for the rest of the cohort. There are various struggles and concerns, but in general things are going well. We began a discussion of our next book, John Kozol's Savage Inequalities. I read part of this book before the term and if I had a heart it would be breaking. We talked about the underlying issues in these schools that are doing so poorly that they are not even structurally safe, but must be used. We watched a video on a similar subject and it was even worse. Some of the things that schools in Ohio have to do to survive is crazy. No businessman or CEO would stay in a place like that for half an hour, but apparently will stop short of giving money to make the schools livable.

We got out of class early and I got an email that the Educational Psychology mid term was graded and ready to be picked up. I got a 96%, which is better than I'd hoped, and if I really wanted to get legalistic about things I could get it up to a 98%, but I think Dr. E likes me and I don't want to jeoparize that by being picky.

The weekend will not slow down either. I have a study group tomorrow for a couple of hours and on Sunday I am helping a friend pack up her small apartment so she can prepare to move to be with her fiancee. It's great that they're engaged, I'm sad to see her go. All this, six pages of mid term to type, another midterm to prepare for, apparently I'll have part of the house to myself while Steph babysits her sister, and Monday is our 2nd wedding anniversary. I can't wait for August.
posted by Josh English at 7/10/2003 04:07:00 PM

 

posted by Josh English at 7/09/2003 03:33:00 PM

 

Day Eleven - July 9

Late Again

The traffic gods really hate us. the construction we had to pass not only tried to push three lanes into one in one small city block, there was some crazy woman in a Golf honking, yelling at people, getting out of her car to yell and people, and finally getting in her car and speeding past two people trying to manage a merger in a gridlock. I was one of those people. Talk about the automotive harassment society.

Today's literacy class had all the potential to be one of the highlights of this course for me, and it was. The guest speaker on literacy in the math class was marvelous. She opened my eyes to the stuff I'd been doing wrong, or more accurately, she opened my eyes to the fact that I have not been as creative as I could be in applying this stuff. Who knew how difficuly Math textbooks are to read? I never noticed until she did a think aloud, which she says that she does on the second day. It was incredible to watch. I walked out of the class humming with delight at the potential I see in all of this.

The tutoring went well today, too. We set up three stations in the classroom and had the students go between them separately to do the work. They had to describe it out loud and on the board what they were going to do. R picked up on it quickly and despite her previous attitude seemed to be ok with all this on the board stuff. A picked up a few things and understood them but she didn't apply them to the next problem like R had. Considering A is two years behind R, I suspect this is normal.

A group of us got together to discuss the Ed. Psych midterm we were going to have in the afternoon. I realized that for the past two weeks this is one of the favorite classes, partially because it will grade our learning with normal tests like we're used to, and when we got the information for the midterm and final paper for another class, no one paniced (yet), but with this run of the mill multiple choice, true/false, and paragraph answers, we developed a lot of anxiety. Go figure.

We started the class with an hour long review. It was a very creative review and calmed us down. Then we took the test. In fact, most of them are still there. I spent an hour on it and answered all of the questions as best I could, turned it in and left. I feel pretty good about it. I feel like I'm around 90% on it, in fact. I'll find out Monday how I did.

Tonight I have to do some prewriting for the essays that are due in our Dimensions class, and work on outlining a few lessons for the final project in Literacy. I may even get to spend some time with Stephanie in front of a ball game on the telly.
posted by Josh English at 7/09/2003 03:33:00 PM

 
The traffic gods were against us this morning. We live about 20 miles from the University and we hit a majority of the red lights that we normally just cruise through, and the alternate route we've picked out because of the lighter traffic was blocked by light rail construction. I was about ten minutes late to class. I caught the last half of a Socials Studies lesson about a river system in the state that has been the subject of a huge fight between the Native American tribes who have water rights, the farmers that have been on the land for a good part of the last century, and the environmentalists who were concerned about the extinction of some species of fish, including a few that were the bread and butter (pardon the pun) of the local tribes.

Good point: An organized debate between three parties is much better than one side against another.
Bad point: If two of those groups have a similar argument you end up with two thirds of the class working against the rest. Either use a 50%/25%/25% mix so the numbers even out, or use three groups that don't have a lot in common so they can't gang up on a minority.

Good tip: Give the instructions to an assignment, then hand out any reading material. Too many people start reading material as soon as it is given to them and stop listening.

The next reading response item we're doing is a piece of art. Most of the art I do is digital using POV-Ray. I have a bunch of art supplies left from my earler attempts at art, so it won't cost a lot, but I instantly started to think about books that are more appropriate for making art on. I think I'll read Verne's "Around the world in 80 days" because I've never read it and it's one of the classics of science fiction that I should be familiar with.

We discussed how literacy works in the classroom. We need to develop environments of the students doing inquiry, not the teacher acting out the inquisition. We finished the class by doing a "write-aloud" and writing marginalia on a piece about the dangers and horrors of genetically modified food. The bias was quite clear, but it sounded a bit paranoid and impatient, and I think the writer suffers from some sort of frankenstein complex.

Tomorrow the math literacy expert will join the class. I can't wait.

Tutoring was more difficult. I decided that we would move on from stats and slip into probability. I introduced them to a game I know as 'Dice' but some people know it as 5000, or 10000. A knew the game, but R didn't, and R didn't want to participate. She said (after we played a round) that she didn't like to play any kind of game, but she seemed to want to talk about Monopoly, so I think she's just being sullen. We talked about probabilities and went back to percentages. They are still struggling with the mechanics. 'A' is very good about participating and always answers questions. 'R' tends to be quieter and just sit. 'R' is way to dependant on her calculator and can't do a lot of multiplication or long division on paper any more. J and S and I agreed that we would step back to cover mechanics.

During the second half of the session all three of us sat with the girls as they went over a worksheet that J and S sent home with them. They didn't do it. They asked their parents for help but it only confused them more. We discovered something about team-teaching. Only one teacher should be talking at one time, and all three teachers should share a common vocabulary.

During the break J took the girls into the campus bookstore to look for a sweater for some reason. The store had a table of books on sale and I just couldn't resist. I found a copy of Benjamin Woolley's "The Queens Conjurer", a biography of Dr. John Dee, who as an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. It was six bucks, and the back cover had raves about another one of his books called "The Bride of Science" about Ada Lovelace. I walked out with one new book under my arm and another book on my reading list. The copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that my mother sent up arrived, so I have more books on my reading list for August when I get a break. O boy.

Lunch was lunch. We discussed some hand outs we had been given. One of them was very pessimistic and the other was Swiss Cheese. Half of the pages were missing. We had pages 28 and 29, 32 and 33, 35 and 37, etc. It was hard to understand exactly what the authors point was. I think Stephanie has a copy of the book and Dr. C told us that he would get us real copies later.

In our Dimensions of Learning class we got the assignment page for the midterm, which is due next week, and the final paper, which is due on July 31. It's going to be a lot of writing this weekend. We wrapped up the Greg Michie book "Holler, if you hear me." The book wasn't bad and more optimistic than I thought it would be at first glance. The last hour of the class was a presentation about the graffitti art scene and how it related to school. I can understand the graffitti culture not wanting to turn mainstream but it's awfully hard not to appreciate their work and ability when you are not part of that culture.

Tomorrow is the midterm in Educational Psychology. I'm not sure I'm ready but I will simply jump in. I think I can survive. I don't really suffer from test anxiety but I don't have a lot of confidence going into this test. Knowing Dr. E. it will be a good test that will actually be very easy for me since I've been to every class, took notes, and completed the readings.
posted by Josh English at 7/08/2003 08:20:00 PM

 
I spent most of the weekend typing two separate reports. One was a first person monologue based on a book that we had read. I had Fred Saberhagen's "An Old Friend of the Family" on my reading pile so I grabbed it, latched onto a character, and read the book. Then I told her story. It was supposed to be only a page or two long, but mine turned out to be about 2200 words long on four pages. It was easy to write but the longest one in the class that I knew about. It felt more like a book report than an essay, but I know if I had been given this kind of assignment in middle school I would have liked "A Separate Peace" and "The Good Earth" a whole lot more than I did.

The other large chunk of typing was on a critical essay for my Dimensions of Learning class. This is a more formal essay with a clear thesis and analytical perspective. I did a prewrite, outline, and rough draft of the paper on Saturday, then Sunday I finished it. I had to sacrifice my weekly dinner at the in-laws to finish writing the second draft, which was like pulling teeth. The other versions came out swiftly but when I tried to put them in a certain order they just didn't want to go. I'm not sure which version of the essay I want to work with. I need to get some feedback from Steph to figure out which way to go.

This morning we had another student led lesson in Literacy. This one was on word problems and right up my alley. It wasn't a hard problem and I realized that when I am demonstrating a procedure I do a Think Aloud first, then I move on to Guided Discussion. We read through our monoloques. Mine took a long time to read. I think it is well written but I covered most of the story from Kate Southerlands point of view. Two people did readings from Harry Potter books, and I know two people did monoloques based on "The Outsiders" which I remember reading and watching the movie in class one year, but I don't remember a whole lot about it, other than it made living with a bunch of friends more appealing than living at home, which is damn silly because I had a great home life and great parents. Of course I was 11 or 12 and probably just wanted to escape.

The tutoring was a little disheartening. Both A and R seemed to forget what we had covered. I know they were quite successful when they left on Thursday. I suspect that my presense is helping them. I am a scaffold for them and I need to learn how to back off and let them work on their own. I think I did better today. I had them work independantly, then together, on a small quiz. They got the answers mostly right. A is a bit younger and few years behind R, so some of her mistakes were just out of the blue. I have no idea what she was doing and neither did she. I think I got her straigtened out.

Lunch was miserable. I had an invite to sit with some folks from the cohort who I get on with well, but I had to sit with M.C., my partner for the Literacy lesson that we'll present on July 15. M.C. is not easy to get along with. She's been teaching in the classroom and is constantly reminding us that she has lots of classroom experience, and she has lots of successful students, and that she is really smart, et cetera. She is not a pleasant person to work with. She was supposed to give me a copy of the lesson plan for our segment, which is going to be about translating simple English phrases into Mathematical sentences to attack word problems. She never sent me the script, so this weekend I updated the rationale for the project that I wrote last week and then I did a treatment for the script. I guess I'm still thinking in theatrical terms, but it works for me. She said that we were going in completely opposite directions, hinting that I was wrong in my approach. I was writing for my eventual class, high school mathematics. M.C. was aiming for an 8th grade level, which is what she's been teaching. She has been very critical of my approach to teaching, telling me (in front of the whole class) that my methods will turn kids off of math because it's too complicated. I don't think it's too complicated, and besides, aren't teachers supposed to raise the standards a bit. Expect them to perform well, encourage them, support them, but don't drop the standards because some kids aren't getting it. I am learning with A and R how much I can put into a 50 minute lesson.

Educational Psychology was another informative session. Dr. E. is very good at keeping us on our toes and I don't think there has been a single misstep in her class that she didn't recover from effortlessly. We discussed how people learn and how they don't learn. It was three hours of metacognition. We started with another attention getting display. She had a student lie on a towel on the floor wearing safety goggles. This is not something you'd expect a teacher to ask. Then she stood on a desk and dumped a box full of mail on top of this poor student. After the laughter died down, Dr. E asked her a few questions about the contents of the mail. The student couldn't answer any question, of course, and was deemed a failure of the educational system. We then looked at what the student was doing wrong, and what was wrong with the entire situation. That demonstration had a lot of concepts about learning. We discussed the mind-brain connection a bit, but we stuck mostly with the mind and how learning actually takes place.

Information comes in through the sensory receptors of the mind, and some of the sensory inputs are handled by short term memory. Some of these items are then put in long term memory. We looked at how this works in greater detail, and of course we were given great practical tips on getting attention, how to help students encode information at a reasonable pace and with good retrieval cues so they could recall the information.

Tonight I have to finish a cirical essay on the philosphies of the purpose of school and how I think it will affect me, and I have a lot more reading to get done.
posted by Josh English at 7/07/2003 07:37:00 PM

 
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Shut up with the damn fireworks! It's eight o'clock in the morning!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
posted by Josh English at 7/04/2003 07:57:00 AM

 
I just lost an entire day's entry. I'm a little pissed at technology right now. I should have seen it coming because I was writing with fluidity and I was really into what I was saying. I knew I'd lose it before I could save it. Anyway, yesterday's frustrations have been addressed to some degree in class. I was satisfied with the changes in the way classes were done.

The second cohort led lesson was about Romeo and Juliet. I really didn't expect to learn anything from these mini lessons. Perhaps I am that egotistical but I really didn't expect to get anything out of them except samples of how teaching works. The lesson was about the balcony scene and one of the prelesson questions was 'How would you feel if someone asked you to change your name?' Now I did change my name in high school but changed it back. I only changed my first name. I did create an alter ego with a new last name but I never took the last name on permanently. My last name was important. Of course in the balcony scene it became clear that Romeo was so much in love that he was willing to give up his name and identity (and possibly his family) for Juliet. That must be a pretty powerful love. We then got some more concrete ideas about an assignment that was vague before and the cause of some complaint. I felt better knowing I had something solid to work with.

The tutoring was amazing. I knew that 'A' disliked percentages. She avoided them. When she found out we were going to focus on them she groaned. We had a frequency table of data in a statistics lesson and we were going to make a relative frequency table, which meant percantages. After a good exploration of what the word means and how percentages, fractions, and decimals are all related she was enthusiastic and said she was going to go home and ask her Dad if he needed any help. From a pedagogical point of view I have no idea what I did to get the lesson across. I hope I discover what happened soon.

For lunch I met with the placement officer about our student teaching. He gave us lots of practical advice and explained our responibilities. He will be going on a month long vacation and so I don't expect to hear anything more about my placement until August. I am supposed to be in the classroom around August 25th or 26th. I won't worry about it. I'll let the placement officer worry about it. That's his job.

Correction. I will worry about it on August 20th.

The last class was tiring. Not for it's subject matter but because it was the end of a long week of classes. We looked at the achievement gap between groups of students. The gap exists either because of race or of socioeconomic status. I don't know which. I don't care either. There is no 'black' way to do math. There is no 'white' way to do math. I see my students as 'Math Lovers,' 'Math Ambivalents,' or 'Math Haters.' I have plans for dealing with all three types.

I'm not saying that the field of Mathematics isn't multicultural. Its history is from all over the world and the story of Math has lots of global roots. I do plan on covering some of that so the students will see math as a bit more personal. I remember wondering 'How does the teacher know that? Who made this stuff up?' as a student. I plan on teaching my kids the answers to those questions. I also plan on using that information to grade them. We discussed ways that as teachers we could help close the acheivement gap. One way is to have a diverse curriculum. Of course, how diverse can the mechanics of math get? I will touch on it's history and the contributors to add diversity and if students need to earn points by writing biographies I'll certainly let them do it. I know that there are benchmarks set by the State, but if a kid hates math and can't relate, I'm not going to get them to a benchmark anytime soon. If I can hook them into the subject, I can teach them.
posted by Josh English at 7/04/2003 07:56:00 AM

 
We heard our first cohort led lession in Literacy. The team was working from a social studies tasks and we looked at media slant in reporting the Isreali-Palenstinian conflict. I offered what I thought was constructive criticism about the order in which they ran the lesson. The instructor stopped me and said "We're keeping this to positive comments." I felt like I was kicked in the teeth. It doesn't help that last week when I was in front of the class and asked about my performance up there I was told "We aren't going to worry about that stuff now." I am worried about it and he couldn't even give me simple feedback about specific questions. It was frustrating.

The frustration continued. Last night I spent an hour or so in Appleworks creating charts for A and R, a pop quiz, and a simple lecture. I e-mailed them from home to my school e-mail account. I could open the e-mail but the files got corrupted in the download. I didn't have time to make up new ones and I didn't have a printout. So much for my reliance on technology.

I did the lecture from memory and while we didn't cover all the topics I think they had fun and I think they got a little more comfortable with numbers. All we did was single variable description using stats and generated some data by rolling pennies across the table and measuring how far they got. We used this data to explore how we organize data. I'll probably spend a few more days on stats but we have to move on to more concrete skills. In fact we left off making a frequency table for the data and tomorrow we will start with a relative frequency table, which means percentages and the kids will not like that. A told me that when she sees percentage signs in a problem she skips it. At least she's aware of the aversion and tomorrow we're going to tackle it head on. Am I mean or what?

In Educational Psychology we reviewd Constructivism. Like all theories of learning and education it has its ups and downs. I think I will end up in the Constructivist camp when teaching the subject matter, but I'll use other methods when dealing with class management. Again, this is something every teacher has to do. Dr. E. ended with the maxim that the best teachers practice "creative, responsible eclecticism." Besides the lexiphilic nature of the phrase I think it sums it all up nicely.
posted by Josh English at 7/02/2003 08:18:00 PM

 
We started the day by looking at how people read difficult texts. I know that if I have a specific set of questions to answer or some goal in the reading I become more effective, and general comprehension of editorial pieces is increased radically if the reader can figure out the bias of the author.

We moved on to metacognition, which is a great word. The dictionary listed 'meta' as meaning 'after' but I've always understood it to indicate the underlying foundation of a subject, such as metaphysics looks for the foundations of physics (at least from Aristotle's point of view), but the questions about metaphysics develop after we understand physics. Metacognition is all about knowing what you know and knowing what you don't know.

As children move from formal thinking to abstract thinking they develop a second voice. It is possible that this second voice allows children to begin to develop empathy on a serious note, and the rush of newly understanding things from other peoples view but still being self centered leaves adolescents with an 'audience complex' where they are convinced that everybody is looking at them and passing judgement.

On to tutoring. We met A, who wasn't in town on Monday, and while I went over the math assessment with R she worked with my cohorts J and S. After a break I worked with A to go over her assessment. These girls are about two years apart in their mathematical development but there were a lot of similar strengths and weaknesses in their mathematical knowledge.

In Dimensions of Learning we finished our discussion of the Perennialist and Essentialist philosophies of the purpose of schools. The presentations were a bit over the top and one sided. The perennialists teach the classics and as a math teacher I will have a whole year to do Geometry, which comes almost entire out of Euclid. I almost have to have a perennialist or essesntialist curriculum. I can use progressive methods in teaching, and that in fact is what most teachers do. Of course, with the No Child Left Behind Act even the methodology is turning towards an essiantialist beat.

We keep discussing the No Child Left Behind Act and I wish we could an all day seminar on it. Take some Friday when we don't have classes and just talk about it. What it means and what it's implications are going to be for us as teachers. It would take off some of the stress and we could move on, but the faculty seem to talk about it for a few minutes then close the discussion. We sink our teeth into it and are told to chew on something else. I don't think it's a good model for teaching.

We were asked to write up our idea about what the purpose of School is. I'll have to think about it.
posted by Josh English at 7/02/2003 08:18:00 PM