The Mathletes

Let me start out this entry by saying that teaching in a high school classroom is an amazing feeling. I can't, right now, imagine any other job that would fit me the way this fits me. From my students...

Q: What do you think of the theory of malleable intelligence?

AJ: I know plenty of people who are smart and they continually get smarter, probably because they think so much. They are continually working and they are beginning to leave me in the dust.

KB: I think it is true because I do not put my brain to the limit when I do not care about a subject (like Algebra) and my brain didn't grow because I struggle with it.

Q: What advice would you give to people who say "I can't, it's too hard"?

AT: The advice I would give people is to try because you're not a failure until you refuse to get up.
CB: Well, I'm one of those people. I don't think I can do some problems because I am not good at all.

EW: This should show everybody just how powerful your brain is. My advice is to use your brain, don't disrespect it by drinking alcohol or smoking. Use your brain to its full potential.

"The Mathletes" is the self-inflicted name of my collaborative group for the summer. :-) Most collaborative groups consist of four members teaching the same content area, and indeed mine started out this way three weeks ago. We have since lost a member who ended up going home to recover from an illness and will hopefully be giving TFA another try next summer. So I'm now a member of a 3-person collaborative (commonly abbreved in TFA-speak to "collab"...only they pronounce it "co-lab" which is completely incorrect).

Collaborative teaching comes with a whole bunch of complications and a whole bunch of benefits. It basically works like this for the summer...there are four hours of summer school each day, in two 2-hour blocks. Our first block is an 18-student Algebra II class and our second block is a 5-student class, both consisting of rising juniors and seniors. Every day, one of us teaches from 8-9 and one from 9-10 (making up the first block), and the third person teaches the whole second block by his or herself. Then we rotate by week. So far I have been with the 18-student class all along. This coming week I switch to the 10-12 block and teach the 5-student class.

Where do I even start talking about our students? I don't know. So here's a picture of my classroom to distract you. We're teaching Algebra II for the summer, and the curriculum was prepared by TFA teachers based on past student performance and the time constraint. We only have 17 days of instruction to get through it, and that includes days for exams. In any case, the curriculum actually covers Algebra I material (I gave my little sister the diagnostic exam and she scored a 31/35 after 8th grade).

Our students have an enormous range of ability and experience with this material, so our biggest challenge is making sure that everyone makes progress this summer no matter where they are starting. We assessed everyone's starting point and struggled for about a week and a half during which we were going too slow for the students who get it, and far too fast for the students who need to relearn and practice basic skills.

There is simply not enough time. (I know that sounds like an excuse, and it partially is).

The motto of the Philadelphia Institute is "Two Goals: One Mission" - the two goals being student achievement and teacher effectiveness. But it seems that teacher effectiveness takes precedence every time. We have no opportunity to meet with our students outside of the one hour we teach each day, because we are in sessions all day long (unless you can get your student to come in at 7:45 a.m., when we actually have 15 free minutes). We are not allowed to be in the classroom when our collab partner is teaching, so I couldn't sit and work with a group of struggling students while Mr. P pushes the advanced students, or vice versa. If we had a little more freedom, I know that we could better serve these students.

But we do the best we can. All but 2 or 3 of our students improved from the diagnostic exam to the midterm exam that we took this week. Still, it feels like one step forward, two steps back. Now that we're pushing into tougher material (systems of equations and graphing, then quadratics and parabolas) it's so apparent that some students are getting completely left in the dust. They need to relearn concepts like distribution, subtracting negative numbers, combining like terms, dividing things by 1 and 0.

If we firm up our execution so that we actually start independent practice (usually in the form of a worksheet) 40 minutes into the period, then we have a hope. We can create differentiated worksheets for the advanced students, and then sit with the 6-7 most struggling students for a few minutes each day while they work on a more remedial worksheet that eventually covers the same material. We have no choice but to keep pushing through the material...it's just intimidating to see how far some students need to come before we can fairly give them the final exam.

Next entry will be about MLK. Check out some pictures of the (empty) school here: http://picasaweb.google.com/rmiller29/.