Professional Development, again

I am very grateful today to have found myself in a school which is involved in our board's Literacy Improvement Initiative, and to have been chosen as the lead teacher for junior literacy at my school. There's so much good stuff coming out right now in this field, and I'm in the middle of it. I get access to all the in-services, all the research, all the collective knowledge of my peers across the board. This was not where I wanted to take my career, but since my career seems to be going in this direction, I'm going to get as much as I can out of it and then apply it in the direction I really wanted to go in the first place - French. For now, though, I'm becoming more important to the school, I'm getting credentials that will look good on a resumé for the next time I go job-hunting, and it's interesting. It will improve my teaching immediately and for the future.

I realized something today. The focus of school literacy in recent years has been reading - specifically, modeled, shared, guided, and independent reading. I always felt that I learned more outside of school than I did in it, and many very successful learners I know felt the same. The trick is to take the ways we learned outside of school and apply them so that they will work in the classroom. Anyway, I realized that this applied to writing as well as reading. I always loved to write, but I didn't think too much about anything except writing stories until I was in about grade 8. I remember one event that year that triggered much of my writing ability from that time out. My parents were very upset over something that had happened to my brother in his class. They sat down together at the computer and wrote a letter. This in itself was not unusual; they were both decent writers in their own ways. What was interesting about this event was that they did it together, out loud, and in my presence. They modeled it, exactly the way I'm supposed to model for my students. They debated word choices. They reworked sentences to get rid of passive tenses. They brainstormed possible images to use to express themselves, and they came to an agreement over which ones to use. The result was a well-written, highly literate letter that had a very specific purpose (to make the teacher realize he was in the wrong and they wouldn't put up with it.) When I write letters to the editor or similar opinion pieces, I use exactly the same approach that my parents used that day. I debate word choices with myself; I seek out similes and metaphors that have strength and a wide connotation; I use adjectives, adverbs, summaries, point-example-summary format; in short, I write the way they showed me.

Now I need to figure out how to do the same thing for my students. Most of them will take far more than one good session of modeling to get it that thoroughly. But that is where I have to start.

Math

I hate teaching math.

Actually, I don't hate teaching math. I hate marking math. I hate trying to figure out what's going on in their heads when they do tests and assignments in math, and I hate knowing that being honest with them is going to crush them utterly and destroy their motivation to try.

The problem is about prediction. Whenever I give an assignment, I have to try to predict how they are likely to do on it. I need to predict what they would do given no guidance, and then use that prediction to establish guidelines for the assignment. In English, this often translates to statements like: "I need one sentence per grade, plus one, per question. If you're in grade 5, that means six sentences. Every sentence needs to contain one complete thought. Every question you write needs to be open-ended; if you can answer it with yes or no, you need to change it until you can't." In language, I'm good at this. In French, I'm very good at it. I know exactly what mistakes they're likely to make, and I head them off. The result is assignments where most students achieve a B or better, if they pay attention.

In math, I have trouble predicting how they're going to see the question. Which mistake are they going to make? Because the units go so fast, with only a day or two spent on each sub-topic, I don't have the time to assess their learning for every sub-topic. Some things inevitably get missed. What happens is, I know exactly how they'll do on the two or three sub-topics that were stressed. The remaining three are a mystery to me. I get the tests in, I look at them, and I groan. I can see at a glance that I got the mix wrong; I didn't give enough marks for the things they could do, and I gave too many to the ones it turns out they can't do. It's difficult to predict which ones they won't get. Sometimes my information in class is that they get it, when in fact, they're all making the same mistake that I didn't catch.

So I go through the test, marking them up, taking some questions out of the final count and marking them separately as A-level questions (the kids who couldn't do them don't get penalized, but the kids who could get an A out of it.) I correlate, I adjust, I do my calculation-free version of grading on a curve, and then i have the utterly awful task of trying to explain to them, and their parents, exactly what I did to give them that cozy little C-. It's hell.

And by the time I've done all this, two weeks have passed and they've forgotten half the stuff that was on the test anyway. Taking it up becomes a battle - they're discouraged, they're mad at themselves and at me, and they're not in a mood to learn.

I think that's enough job rants for one day.

Were any of you considering teaching math? :)