Don't Use Red Ink in Your Lab Notebook & Science Is Not Boring

I'm sitting here looking up at my grade level charts of student mastery of what I considered important concepts for this year. On the 6th grade chart I have one out of nineteen 6th graders who mastered calculating speed, time, and distance. An earlier version of me would be worried about this. I would spend the next 2 weeks before their final exam hammering away on this, figuring ways to create small groups to explore their misunderstandings, giving individualized homework, and testing individual mastery several more times before the end of the year. Now I'm trying to plan a few fun activities that will leave them with a nice feeling about science and learning.
There is an 8th grade student I tutor one-on-one for math just about every day. Since Janaury we have been working on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions. Occasionally we do other stuff, but I try to spend a little time every day on these 4 operations with fractions. She wants to be a chef one day. To build relevance we talk about altering recipes for larger or smaller groups and how these operations with fractions will be important for her career choice. I give her some word problems involving changing a recipe designed for 20 people to a recipe for 8 people. She applies herself when she is with me, and she is fairly good about doing her homework. But still after 4 months she can't consistently keep straight when she needs to find a common denominator to add or subtract and when she needs to take the reciprocal of the divisor and multiply numerators and denominators. If I can finally manage to get her clear on these 4 operatins so she can do them correctly on the final exam, I have very little confidence that she will remember them when school starts in August. Most of what we finally manage to stick into the heads of kids during a school year quickly leaks out over the summer break.
Yesterday the 6th grade was having a free recess. The team that has the most points can call a free recess. I have probably explained this reward system somewhere in one of these blogs. The length of the recess depends on how many points the team has. For teams that don't have the full recess I give them something to do, usually finding and writing the definitions of vocabulary related to the topic we are studying. Yesterday I had them write things they have learned this year.
Here are a few of my favorite: We learned not to use red ink in our notebooks. We learned to speak more English. We learned to put our name, date, and page number in the upper right corner of pages in our lab notebook.
But buried in among all these silly class and school rule things are a few gems:
We learned how to make data tables.We learned how to complete an assignment following a rubric.
We learned that science is fun and not boring.
Hopefully the last one will stick.
Big Idea: Spend time building positive attitudes towards learning.

The Magic Power of Effective Classroom Management

As I count down to the end of my teaching career in 37 days, the second big idea I've learned is there is no way to teach in a poorly managed classroom. I've seen loads of teachers who start out the year letting students decide what will be the rules of the classroom. They are always fairly young teachers. I even did it when I was starting out. I evolved into a teacher who knew what were the rules I needed to make my class function properly an that was my job - not the responsibility of 12 year olds. While teaching in Collier County an Asst. Superintendent for instruction gave a mandatory training session to new teachers to the county on classroom management. As part of the session he demonstrated a set of rules (see blog entry Aug. 9 - "The Rules Are Up") that took into account the 2 basic situations in the classroom, direct instruction and students working on assignments, with only 3 simple rules in each situation. With a little modification, I have used those rules for 20 years. Classroom management is, of course, not just about the rules. It involves the consequences and reward structure, the consistency with how they are applied, the method the teacher uses to allow students to make choices about their behoavior and the consequences that result, the respect the teacher shows to the students, ...
Until the management is right, the learning will be controlled by the students. Their hidden curriculum will be what they are learning most.
I had a colleague come in on Monday to watch how I managed a class. He joined a team. They had just formed new teams and were getting ready to play a comprehension game ("Challenge!!" is the name of the game). I gave 2 sentences of instruction: 1) we are going to play Challenge with the carbon cycle study guide,
2)team leaders get your teams ready. This is a class that he has some management trouble with, but they went straight to work, comparing answers, checking anwers in the textbook when 2 students didn't agree. The structure behind the activity was not obvious. The individual accountability of every team member to have an agreed upon answer to each question was not evident. My colleague attended a workshop session I did on cooperative learning, but he was not asking questions about where were the embedded aspects of cooperative learning in the structure of the lesson. He was amazed at how they were all on task as if I had some magic power over them.

Leaving Honduras & the Big Ideas after 35 Years

There are only 38 days left until I leave Honduras, probably for good. My wife and I have talked about coming back here for annual medical check-ups and tests. We figured we could fly Spirit out of Ft Lauderdale, spend a week in an average hotel, have a few procedures done (colonoscopy, mammogram, blood work, ...) and save a couple thousand dollars. Medical care here has been great. I had a colonoscopy (which was as pleasant as could be expected) and received a dvd of my colon for only $100.
I only have 15 teaching days left with my 6th and 7th graders (9 days with 8th grade). Thirty five years in education now down to 15 days.
For the last few blogs (and I'm not saying this blog won't morph into MyFirstYearRetired after June 4th) I'm going to try to have a big idea about education or teaching that I have learned.
Idea #1: Teaching is not about the content. It is about facilitating the student's ability to engage in learning in an enjoyable and meaningful way.

The Home Stretch

Spring Break will officially end tomorrow (Tuesday) when I wake up at 5 am. The 10 days of enjoying friends, beach, windsurfing, frisbee in the gulf, grilling, gardening. planning the post-work phase of our life, reading in the hammock, sleeping in the hammock (which usually quickly followed any attempt to read in the hammock), painting faces on palm fronds, sketching, and a thousand other relaxing activities ended yesterday when we drove to Ft. Lauderdale to catch the midnight Spirit flight to San Pedro.
The Honduras immigration people are very understanding. Our residence visa has lapsed and the school is not spending the money to get us a new one for the little time we have left. Whenever our allotted time is abot up, somebody takes our passports to the airport (I think) to get another 30 days added on. I wasn't quite sure what to put on the piece of paper for reentry. We're coming for business, but we have no visa for that. I left it blank and the immigration agent cheerfully said, "Good evening (in English)" and stamped in 90 days. I only need 40 days more and then Honduras is in the rearview mirror and a new life begins.
Over the holiday I would very occasionally reflect on what should be my final instructional concepts. I have enough grades in the gradebook and have covered the material that will be on the final exam. The 6th grade has some fun experiments with flight and a PowerPoint comparing 2 objects (not a planet or the sun) in our solar system. The 8th grade has EarthWeek activities supporting shoe box sales in their assigned classrooms. They will then be involved in their production of The Tempest and return to science class for only a couple of days of review before their exam. The 7th grade has  a little 2 week window of opportunity to teach anything. I'm leaning toward a week of  theories of cognitive development and psychology. I'll use student debates of environmental issues to look at capacity to see issues from more than one side. The last week I'll introduce Piaget and arrange for them to collect data on pre-kindergarten kids ability to perfrom conservation tasks. I usually do that to begin 8th grade, but I doubt if these 7th graders will get that next year. It's not in the textbook.
For those of you who have followed this blog and might be wondering what will happen in 40 days when Continental hauls me and the few items I'm taking out of Honduras to my new life,  I have applied for a job. In case you might feel betrayed that this blog has been falsely presented as being about my last year teaching, I'll let you know that the job I'm applying for is in education but not teaching. I'm not going to jinx the job possibility yet by saying what it is. Stay tuned for that revelation. If the job falls through, my
 wife and I have planned to start building (after our trip to the rugby world cup in New Zealand) a tiny cottage (480 square foot) on a small lot onPine Island. We are having fun planning the space and trying to make it environmentally friendly and futuristic while still being comfortable for a couple of old folks. After all is said, done, and written, we are definitely on the edge of the BIG home stretch.

The Last Spring Break

It's 10 minutes until the bell rings to start "Sports Day", a half-day of fun sports activities. Kids are dismissed at 10:30 and we can leave at 11. The taxi is scheduled for 11:30. Bags are packed and waiting by the door. By midnight we should be home at our cottage on the beach in Florida. The words "spring break" summon up images of beaches. When I was younger, it was the freedom of partying late at beach bars in places like Isla Mujeres or Pensacola and playing rugby, scuba diving, or hunting other adventures by day. The middle years were family vacations to places like Venezuelan dude ranches or a Caribbean beach. Now I dream of lazy days windsurfing and riding the hammock with a book and a nap.
Bell just rang. My last Spring Break is about to begin!!

Boring PowerPoints Left Behind - Miami Here I Come

Today the 8th grade went to their assigned classrooms and presented PowerPoints on foundations they want supported by the shoe box sale we will have during the school's "Earth Week" when we get back from spring break. They seemed to present well; although, there was still a lot of turning to the whiteboard and reading loads of text . I''m not sure what can be done about this. We discussed it. The 8th graders acknowledged that they hate PowerPoint presentations like that. We practice good ones. We went back into the computer lab to fix the PowerPoints. I was watching an 8th grader present to the 1st grade, and she had one PowerPoint which was just page after page of text that she read word for word. The next PowerPoint was full of colorful pictures with very little text. The first graders audibly sighed in awe and relief when the PowerPoint started. Yet the "read the page of text in front of you" style of PowerPoint presentation remains. Last night the guidance counselors and admin made PowerPoint  presentations to the staff and parent community about testing, budget, sustainability, new personnel, .... They read a lot of pages of text from PowerPoints to those assembled.
But tomorrow is Spring Break!! By this time tomorrow American Airlines will (hopefully) have delivered me safely to Miami airport.

Stranger in a No Longer Strange Land

In 1999 I took a screenwriting class in London while I was waiting for my job at Goldsmiths College to start. The first part of each class we examined a few screenplays and the techniques and themes the author employed. One theme the instructor liked was the ‘stranger in a strange land’ theme.


Saturday I was walking over the bridge to the market in “Old” La Lima. As school buses with colorful curtains and neatly scrawled sayings like “Dios es mi guia” honked their way over the bridge, a cart being pulled by a gently trotting horse passed me. A man with his wife, perched on the bar between the seat and the handlebars and holding a baby, pedaled by. The smell of smoke from burning cane fields filled the air and the haze blocked the view of the mountains surrounding San Pedro. As I looked over the bridge railing, I saw people with fishing line trying to catch lunch and others washing themselves and their clothes in the muddy river water. The thing that struck me was this no longer seemed “strange” or different.

I remember when I got off the plane in Guayaquil in 1979 for my first overseas job. The first thing that struck me was the odor. There was no real earthy odor. Coming from the Deep South and thinking the smell of the earth and bayous of the Deep South was so much richer than the smells of Indiana lakes and cornfields where I had gone to high school, I thought going farther south, actually crossing the equator, would make the earth smell even stronger. I’m not sure why I thought that way. After my surprise that there wasn’t an overpowering earth smell, everything else was different and strange: from the size of the people to the condition of their cars, from people selling little bags of water to beggars with twisted limbs (I later found out their parents would often bind and twist their limbs from birth, so they could have a career as a beggar). When I later wandered the market of Guayaquil , I gawked at everything: from the hunks of animal flesh hanging in the sun and swarming with flies to men with cages full of brightly feathered parrots. All those things are in the La Lima market, but I don’t really notice any more. I guess it is time for me to come home. Miami airport always strikes me as very strange.

The Last Three & Calculating my Contribution

I just finished sending off lesson plans for the 3 days of next week that we have classes. Our spring break starts Thursday. Then there are only three weeks to plan for when we get back from vacation. Wow, my last three weeks of lesson plans. I just had to check again, and yep, there are only 3 weeks left to plan for and then a week of exams. I wounder how many weeks of lesson plans I have made during my 35 years in the business. I have been  a classroom teacher for about 24 years. At 2 schools where I was the director I had to teach some classes, so I had some lesson planning to do. For the 3 years I taught at a university I had at least one lesson plan a day. A conservative estimate would be 25 years x 36 school weeks/year x 4 subjects or grade levels to plan = 3,600 weeks of lesson plans. I wonder how much was learned from those 3,600 weekly plans. Let's say there were an average of 15 kids in each class and they learned only two things during the week of the lesson plan (I'm not sure that is a conservative estimate, but I'll continue with this math problem) that would be 3,600 x 15 x 2 =  108,000 concepts or skills. I suppose that is in a way a measure of my contribution.

The Old Dog Can Learn a New Trick but Not Always When He Should

This week I tried something new with the 7th grade. I made a study guide on the disasters that they have been studying. I, also, made a matching PowerPoint with the answers to questions on the study guide on different pages in the PowerPoint. I have 5 computers in my room, so I loaded the PowerPoint on to all of the computers. The 7th graders are in 5 teams. I arranged a relay race to find the answers to the questions. One person would go to the computer assigned to their team and get an answer and then come back and another student would go to find the answer to the next question. While one student was searching the PowerPoint the other members of the team were copying the answers that had been brought back. One of my sections of 7th graders usually do not handle well any sort of "less structured" acitivity, but after a few kids lost points for running and had to go back and start over walking, they enjoyed it and did it very well. One problem they quickly sorted was when the second person left to get an answer to a question on the PowerPoint, he or she hadn't written down the answer to the question the first person had just brought back, so they would answer the same question.
Eigth graders are visiting classrooms to prepare the classes for the upcoming "Shoe Box Sale" to support an environmental foundation which will happen during the school's Earth Week (April 11-14). The 8th graders are to present a PowerPoint on an environmental problem, a foundation that attempts to solve the problem, and a persuasive statement on why a class should pick this foundation as worthy of the money they raise with their "Shoe Box Sale". It amazes me how shy these usually loud, seemingly confident, 8th graders become once they stand in front of a class with whom they are not familiar, even if it is a class of kindergareners.
I have to present and practice their first trip to the class. What they are to do is introduce themselves to the teacher and class, ask if there are any questions, and get the teacher's email. This takes a visual listing of the 3 things they are to do, modelling, and a guided practice. I still had a teacher today saying, "The kids  were nice, but they didn't seem to have a clue why they were in my room; although, they did ask for my email." I suppose that is something. You would think I would have figured out how much time and practice this would take by now.