Learning to Teach

During this last week I’ve had several opportunities to work with high school-aged students who fall outside the range of what one might call “typical.”  In the context of the mathematics classrooms I have been working in, this includes both students who have a long history of failing but who continue to try anyway (in part because passing math is required to graduate), and those who actively resist learning in general for a variety of reasons.

Working with students who have always struggled with math but who keep at it has always been rewarding for me.  What has been less obvious to me is why I like working with students who are actively resisting schooling.  They can often be incredibly rude.  Sometimes they are violent.  Working with them is usually enormously frustrating, because it can seem to take a huge amount of energy to make a tiny amount of progress.  This weekend I attended a conference on teaching for social justice.  The first session I attended was run by a second-year teacher.  Her students were all victims of some kind of abuse or another.  Their test scores are the lowest in the state.  What she was explaining to us was a way she had found to help her students have success in mathematics, and at the same time start to take positive control of their lives.  This sounded very powerful and important to me.

When I began my first day at my alternate placement, I began working with students who, while perhaps not as troubled as those I heard about in the seminar, still had some major issues in their lives.  What I realized in working with them was that they represent for me the greatest opportunity to really make a positive difference.  The teacher I met this weekend consciously chose to work with these damaged students.  Although I had not realized it, I have been unconsciously making the same choice.  I realized, too, that this is part of why I feel so much more at home in a high school than a junior high, something I discussed on Wednesday.  Sure. there are some junior high students who have some pretty big issues, but there seem to be so many more of them in the high school.

This seems like a very important thing for me to have come to understand.  I have often told myself that I felt driven to teach because I am so passionate about learning myself.  That’s true, but it isn’t the whole story.  I am passionate about learning because of what it enables people to do.  And in my view, there are some people who desperately need this, much more than others.

a.       What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

Mary and I had a great time working together to put the parts of our digital story together.  I’d only played with iMovie briefly before tonight, and found the software extremely easy to use.  When we talked about digital stories as a class I thought they had a lot of interesting potential, but now I really want to use them in my class, both as a teaching tool (by making and showing videos), and as a project for my students.  I think it would be a good way to change the pace of class and give students something that seems more like fun to do.

b.      What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

We ran into some technical issues, as I was using iMovie on my mac and Mary was using Windows Movie Maker on her PC.  I am curious about getting these two to work better together.

c.       What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

As I said above, I can see using a digital story as both a teaching tool and a project for students.  I think it would be a great way to approach some of the content in a different way, and help overcome the idea that math is a boring subject where people just do problems all day.

a.       What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

The most significant thing I learned this week occurred outside of class.  I am interested in teaching in a very rural area.  When speaking recently with Jon Howeiler about my interest, and that I was disappointed that the program has no options to student teach in a rural school, he explained that they would just place me in Monroe, because there are farms there and so it’s pretty much like a rural school.

Having never spent time in a rural school, I couldn’t contradict him with any authority.  But I was suspicious of his answer.  What’s significant about all this to me is that my assessment was correct.  Although I’d never spent time in a rural high school, I have spent considerable time in small towns and rural areas.  My experience is that people who live in rural areas tend to have different values and attitudes than those that live in suburban and urban ones, and that these differences are significant.  It just didn’t make sense to me that Monroe High School, population 2000, and Greybull High School, population 160, would be virtually the same.

I need to learn to trust my instincts better.

b.      What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

I don’t have any questions that relate to technology right now.  I am thinking about other things.

c.       What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

I realized that I’ve been making the assumption that my class size would always be about 30 or so students, and so I had been thinking about technology mainly as tools to make managing such a class easier.  For example, something like Google Wave could be used to monitor and record how small groups are working together.  Because it has a playback feature, you can see how the students are interacting over time, without having to see it at the time it’s happening.  In a class of thirty kids, this might be useful.  In a class of ten, it might be more trouble than it’s worth.  This means I need to rethink some things.

Given the view of schooling in the readings for this week, which technologies do you think are most likely to be taken up in schools? Why? Which technologies push your thinking about teaching and learning? Why? Do these two lists necessarily line up?

There are two arguments that really stuck out at me from the readings for this week.  On the positive side, I really liked the idea of just-in-time learning.  This seems to me to be another way of saying learning how to learn.  I don’t know that this skill has anything in particular to do with technology, except that people often use technology for just-in-time learning.

On the negative side, I think the cost of implementing a lot of technology is a serious issue.  Although many schools have good access to computers and the internet, there are still a large number that don’t.  Cost isn’t just a matter of dollars, either.  There is a time cost involved in learning to use a new technology, then redesigning lessons to work with the new technology.  In the event the technology isn’t really helpful, which is always a possibility, the invested resources are essentially lost.   I think this is a major limiting factor for implementing technologies.

Given the above, I think the technologies most likely to be used in schools are those that are free and fit well into the already-existing structure.  This would include things like the Data and Story Library or the free resources offered by the federal Dept. of Education.  I could also see teachers using something like wordle to make interesting posters for their classroom, or as an exercise in an English class.

The technologies that really get me thinking are things like animoto, VoiceThread, and Betty’s Brain.  All three of these would require at least some degree of retooling how I approached teaching, as using them would mean getting away from the math text and exploring the subject in different ways.

There isn’t much overlap between these two lists.  It seems like unless we start putting more real value on education, and follow this revaluation with better funding, most teachers are not likely to have either the time or resources necessary to make major changes in the way they use technology.

a.       What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

I am not quite sure how to explain what’s been going on in my head, so please bear with me if this doesn’t quite make sense.  During the course of Thursday night’s discussion, a lot of little thoughts and ideas I’d had floating about my head began to coalesce into something like a perspective.  On Tuesday, in Adolescent Development, Karen made a comment about our readings for the week having been “radical.”  In my reading, the passages were basically arguing that rather than dismiss adolescents as young stupid people whose behavior isn’t supposed to make sense, we take them seriously as people and work with them to help make schools the kinds of places students want to be, so that they don’t feel like seeking deep and meaningful experiences elsewhere.  To me this is something we ought to be doing, not some radical fringe theory.  In our Thursday class I was surprised to hear so many people seemed to have such a negative view of video games in general.  Even games like GTA: San Andreas must be fulfilling some sort of need that young people feel they have, or they wouldn’t bother spending so much time playing them.  Of course, many adults also play these games.  Why dismiss them in such an out-of-hand manner?

What Robin said about banned books also got me thinking.  I suspect that it’s the same urge behind the drive to ban certain types of video games.  I remember my first encounter with this kind of thinking: my junior year of high school two of my classmates refused to read Siddhartha because they were god Christians and believed that to read such a book was to tempt the Devil.

I was also reminded of why it was the Athenians sentenced Socrates to die: by walking around asking young people to question why it was the held the beliefs they did, the state felt threatened and accused him of corrupting the youth.  Not because he was convincing them to drink or party or anything.  Because he was showing them how to think (at least, that’s how Plato tells it).

To me this is evidence pointing toward the conservatism of our public schooling, and apparently of many of our future teachers.  This is probably something that’s already been well documented.  It does make me wonder how we can expect to really reform our educational system.  In my experience people who are conservative tend not to like change.  Yet its difficult to solve problems if you can’t change any of the factors.

I usually think of myself as an explorer.  I like trying new things.  I like to experiment.  But in the discussions we’ve been having this quarter, both in this class and in adolescent development, I am beginning to see myself as more of a subversive.  I don’t believe it’s a good idea to do something, just because it’s something we’ve always done.  There needs to be a better reason for me than that.

I am glad that next quarter is the class about learning to understand oneself as a teacher, because this first quarter is really giving me a lot to think about.  I hope that class will help provide me with some space to sort some of these things out.

b.      What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

Mary and I talked with Carrie a bit on Thursday about the Betty’s Brain article.  We both thought it was very good, and were excited about the ideas presented.  I’d really like to know where this research is currently and whether it’s being used regularly in a class or classes.  I am also curious about what sort of similar efforts are being made by other researchers.

c.       What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

I don’t know how to answer this question briefly.  I will need to think about it more.

a.       What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

I am excited about all of the online resources we were exposed to in class this week.  It’s gotten me thinking a little more broadly about what might be available and how I might use it in my classroom.  I also learned that the UWB campus is a Microsoft Word school.  As I am a Mac/UNIX person, this was initially disappointing to hear, but got me thinking.

b.      What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

One of the things that seems to make online resources so useful is that they are, by necessity, cross-platform applications.  One never knows what kind of system the end-user will have, so the software must be developed to work in any browser on any operating system (or at least the most common possible combinations).  Microsoft products are, in my experience, less ubiquitous than they once were, and also represent a significant financial investment for large institutions.  With options like Ubuntu, that are stable, easy to install and use, and at least as powerful as the Microsoft options, why are schools not taking advantage of the cost savings on license fees?

c.       What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

It is actually possible to run operating systems like Ubuntu from live CDs.  Ubuntu has free and easy access to lots of programs that would be very expensive in a Microsoft world, including a lot of math software and logic-based programming languages.  I also think that exposing students to different operating environments and providing them with an opportunity to learn to move across the different “thought paradigms” that underlie each operating system’s design would be a good way to begin to get them comfortable with different kinds of technology.  I have not owned or much used any Microsoft products since switching to FreeBSD in 2001.  After 8 years, I am finally noticing enough difference in their products that I think it would be useful for me to try them again, in order to learn what their new features are (like track changes, which is at least new to me), and then find or develop workarounds that can be used on other platforms.  I realize that one could simply buy Office for a Mac, but in my experience young people interested in computers don’t have the finances to invest in a Mac – instead they are turning to free options like Linux and the BSDs.  I want to be able to support this investigation, as I think it will help keep my math classroom a place relevant to this group of people.

a.       What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

There were two things that came out of last week’s class that I found very interesting.  The first is the idea of using digital stries to set context and even write story problems in a math classroom.  It also seems like the production of digital stories might serve as a platform for building inter-disciplinary relationships between teachers of different subjects.  For example, I might work with a history teacher to develop a digital story project that runs between our two classes involving learning about certain mathematicians and the times in which they lived.

The second idea I found intriguing was something that came out of our small group discussion about observing youth and technology.  One of my classmates (a science guy) pointed out that when doing frog dissection in person, as many as five of the senses can be engaged at once.  But online dissection (one of the applets he shared) only really involved one: sight.  He wondered if this lack of sensual engagement was one of the reasons why kids seemed to want to multi-task so much more often when using technology.

b.      What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

Something else that came out of our small group discussion was the observation that while I perceive a real division between the “real” and “virtual” worlds, some of the young people I know appear not to.  I am curious of this is something that has been documented.  If it is, this seems like something that could have pretty major implications for the classroom.

c.       What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

I am still working on this one.

a.       What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

The most significant concept I came across in class was “math as a gatekeeper.”  Although I have thought before that math was important, especially as a means for teaching general problem solving skills, I never really thought about the larger role it plays in academia, in terms of allowing or disallowing certain choices for a person.  I am still thinking about this.  It seems like a good idea to make mathematics a central pillar of public education, but it does concern me that it doesn’t yet appear to be a central pillar of becoming a teacher.  It would seem to me that if we wanted to increase the mathematics skills of our students, we would have to begin by increasing the mathematics skills of our teachers, and yet this doesn’t seem to be happening at all.

b.      What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

One thing I’d really like to learn more about are programs designed to help support teachers in getting access to technology and resources for learning to use those technologies.  It seems like over time the demands being put on teachers increase.  I’d like to know if this is really the case, and if so, whether or not there is any likelihood that this extra responsibilities will be supported in the near future.  I am not sure if these are things we can cover in class or if this is something I need to investigate on my own, but through this class I am beginning to think of a teacher as someone who has to be semi-expert in half a dozen fields, all of which pay better than teaching.  Is it a good thing to perpetuate a system where people go into teaching for supposed altruistic reasons?  Or does this same system really wind up attracting “those who can’t,” as the adage goes?  I have had more than one person ask why I would bother teaching when I could make so much more money as, say, an electrical engineer.  I never have a very good answer for that one.

c.       What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

I am not sure.  I haven’t quite worked that out yet.  GSP is cool, and I could see using that.  But I don’t know what sort of implications there are for what I’ve been talking about here, outside of trying to overcome the general apathy my students will likely have developed after eight or so years under teachers who probably hate math.  Hmm.  Maybe programs like GSP and Fathom are the key.  If we teachers had free access to cool stuff like that, it might both help make up for the discrepancy between our level of responsibility and our pay, and help overcome student dislike of all things numerical.

(Yes I know this is late.  Sorry!)

a.       What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

There were really two significant things.  First, although many of my classmates live in a large metropolitan area, they seem to be in some ways more parochial in their views than people I’ve met who live in much more rural areas.  It as if living in a place that can provide everything you need in one spot discourages people from exploring much of the rest of the world.  For some reason I haven’t yet identified, this really bothers me.  Second, I’ve never used Geometer’s Sketchpad or something like that, so working with Fathom was a bit of a mind-blowing experience.  Obviously there are some very powerful tools I need to become more aware of.  Being able to so easily manipulate data seems like it would enable a whole set of higher order questions that would be difficult to ask a class without such a tool.

b.      What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?

I want to learn more about programs like Fathom.  I think I also need to explore this view I am developing about “city kids.”  In relation to our food supply I have often read about people being so disconnected from the source of our food that they don’t realize chicken comes from actual chickens or that beef comes from cows.  I find myself wondering if the same phenomenon is at work here.  If it is, I am not sure if it’s a bad thing, but I have the feeling it might be.

c.       What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

As I mentioned above, I could definitely see using programs like Fathom.