no longer "teaching"

it's been a few years since i've posted here. i guess teaching has taken over my life so much that i haven't found the time to write about it? oooopppsss, not really.

like so many of my fellow brethren, i am no longer fully employed in the profession of day-care, i mean teaching. i can't even begin to describe what has happened since i last posted, left teaching, etc...

i could write volumes about my experiences and my views on the state of education in our country, but don't have the time, energy, or desire to do so. i am sickened by the thought of expressing my feelings about how things have gone in the field of education.

once upon a time, there were:


































nowadays, i spend a lot more time with my kids and care less about the world:

a letter to the chancellor of DCPS

After a recent weather event, I finally felt the need to speak up to someone who might listen. Of course honestly, I would really love to have a few unscheduled days off like the counties around us... but this is more about the injustice felt in a classroom full of students (and myself) that recently made a dangerous walk to school on sidewalks completely covered in ice.

Hello,

I'm in my 3rd year of teaching in the DC Public School system and I just wanted to express my concern and interest in regards to who it is that is responsible for making the DCPS inclement weather closing/delay decisions?

We recently had about 2 inches of snow on a weekday that left many of the secondary roads and MOST IMPORTANTLY the sidewalks all around my neighborhood covered in snow and ice. I only live a few blocks from my school and had to make a dangerous walk on ice to school only to discover that none of the sidewalks or pavement leading up to my school had been cleared away.

Luckily, our principal, a few teachers, and some students took it upon themselves to shovel the walkways to alleviate the situation. On that particular day, many of the neighboring counties had 2 hour delays and I believe that same decision for the district would have given our local neighbors, businesses, and the weather conditions a chance to clear away some of the snow and ice that covered the sidewalks.

In my 3 years of teaching within DCPS, I have noticed a pattern of consistent inclement weather cancellations and delays in ALL of the neighboring counties around the district (Alexandria, Arlington, Montgomery, etc...) and yet DCPS remains under a normal operating schedule. Within my own classroom on these days, I get a SIGNIFICANT drop in my attendance and resentment amongst my students who come to school about the fact that they are in school while everyone else gets the day off or has a delay.

Who makes the decisions and what are the determining factors in considering cancellations and delays? Does DCPS consider the sociological impact on students/parents/staff of having all neighboring counties make different decisions than their own? Some of my fellow teachers live outside of the district and have kids attending schools in other counties which is an additional concern. My main concern though is the seeming disregard to those of us that have to walk on the sidewalks that are often the last concern for clean-up since the streets are priority number one.

I do think that at times some of the counties around the district call for cancellations a little too liberally and I realize they often cancel due to the use of buses that have to travel through secondary roads to pick up children. Most of our kids use the Metro system or walk significant distances to school and having everyone else around them not have school seems to lower morale in my school and create more resentment towards school.

I would hope that the decision makers consider the plight of the students/parents/staff in what we have to go through to make it to school during inclement weather... whether walking on ice, driving across state lines, finding sitters for our children, and having half full classes of frustrated students.

Thanks for listening to my concerns and I look forward to your response.

mounting frustrations...

well, i haven't really kept up with this thing as i intended to, but i feel the need to vent.

i'm growing increasingly frustrated by the amount of talk that is going on in my school without the backbone for responsible action. time after time again, there is an article read and distributed here and there about the latest and greatest new innovative strategy that will change the way our students learn and succeed. an idea brews in the conscious of how we should be doing things and it's never systematically and logistically thought out and executed.

i'm also tired of giving my students as many chances as possible which inevitably is leading to a norm in the school that our students can procrastinate and ignore deadlines. this in turn leads to work that is turned in (if, at all) weeks and weeks late where all the learning has gone down the drain. i've changed my due date policy in my own classroom, but i'm feeling the effects of the philosophy of the majority of the school giving flexible deadlines (are they deadlines if things aren't even ever really due?).

what is wrong with our education system? what happened to student accountability? what happened to deadlines? is this only a symptom of schools in urban settings or is this really a way that is spreading across our nation?

i really try to be optimistic about being an educator, but it becomes increasingly frustrating and difficult when there is so much pressure with so little support. i become increasingly frustrated when my administration is pushing me to push my students to higher levels of learning and challenges, yet have no idea how often i am confronted by blank spares and uncomfortable silence when i ask a student what is "12 divided by 3" or "8 times 4".

i'm afraid that we might one day (sooner than later) live in an idiocratic world.

3rd year off to a good start

well, i haven't written in a while. i spent the last 2 weeks of summer vacation riding (DH/FR) in british columbia. what an amazing way to end my summer! here are a few shots (one of the shuttle truck and one sort of action photo):




as far as my 3rd year of teaching, things have gotten off to a great start. as usual, there are things that i have improved on, things i continue to do, and things that have changed.

new things for this year so far:

• i'm teaching geometry for the first time ever
  
• i am focusing on implementing vocabulary strategies in class
  
• as a math team, we are focusing on student transfer of math skills to contextualized problems
  
• i have my students on an email distribution list as another form of communication

Audacity Sound Editor

This post is to fulfill a requirement for my EDU 519 class at American University. The assignment asked me to learn a new program and reflect on it. So, here it goes...

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In the past, I've used sound editing programs to mix CDs using products from Roxio and SoundForge. For my class on Critical Literacy, I used a Roxio sound editor to create podcasts. For my EDU519 class, we were required to use Audacity as a sound editor.

Audacity is a FREE audio and sound editor with open source software for people who want to further develop and customize the application. It's easy to use and has a lot of the same features that the other products I have used (but it's FREE). I haven't done a whole lot of exploring with it, but it has a lot of great utilities for creating effects, mixing audio, and noise filtering.

Since it is freeware in development, there are some risks in using it since there may be bugs. In the limited amount of time I have used it, I haven't run into any problems yet.

I used Audacity to create a podcast for my EDU519 class. Check it out here.

Using Technology in Classroom

This post is to fulfill a requirement for my EDU 519 class at American University. The assignment asked me to interview or observe someone at my school who uses technology effectively and reflect on it. So, here it goes...

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I've had the pleasure of interviewing and observing Mr. D throughout this year who is very effective in using technology in his classroom. He teaches an Engineering class at our school that uses an AUTOCAD program to teach students how to design and create various objects.

The class is structured to teach students the phases of developing a product from conceptual drawing all that way to actually forming a model of it using a 3-D printer. I took a particular interest in this process since I had to take a technical drawing class in my undergraduate studies, but it was all only done on paper. The only time we ever saw a design formed was when we were to use play-doh to create some of the shapes.

What really struck me was how active the students were in the learning process and how effective the software was in producing visualizations for what the students were creating. I realize that this is the purpose of AUTOCAD, but this was the biggest issue I had with the technical drawing class when I took it. We didn't use AUTOCAD and only did things by hand. I think technology might have been the saving grace for me. I have a hard time visualizing things in 3-D and I learned this about myself in taking this class. I actually asked my professor if I could use play-doh during tests to help me create and visualize the objects.

Observing Mr. D and seeing his students design a puzzle box on paper, produce a drawing of it in AUTOCAD, and then use the 3-D printer to create it has really shown me that I need to focus on getting my students to create products in the classroom. It is easier to do in a hands-on class like the one Mr. D teaches, but I need to create contextualized ways that my students can put their math skills to use and create an individualized product. How can I get my students to create a puzzle box of their own that they can plan, design, and physically create to produce an end product?

Less than 4 weeks to go in my 2nd year...

It's hard to believe how quickly this second year has passed and how much easier it was than last year. I feel like I've been much more effective with instruction and just as ineffective with classroom management. That will be my focus for next year. I had the pleasure of watching one of my lessons recently that was video-taped and it was not only horrifying to see myself, but very eye opening to see my posture and (sometimes lack of) presence in the classroom. I know I'm pretty hard on myself, but I really need to focus on getting some better routines and expectations going.

It really is a struggle at times to make math interesting. It's the subject I teach and I believe it is very valuable for students, but sometimes... I lose sight of that myself. I've got to keep pushing the context aspect of it. I've got to keep finding the things that peak my students interests.

I was reminded of this today as my ESL math class was working on posters to present bar graphs they created from collecting data about the class ("What country are you from?", "What is your favorite color?", "How many people live with you?", etc...). I had a few students look up pictures online to enhance their posters. This led to a full on search of pictures and maps of other countries and finally landed us on maps.google.com so that I could show them overhead satellite images of our school and neighborhood. They were enthralled. It was one of those great teaching moments that can make your day, week, or even month feel worthwhile as a teacher.

Anyways, enough with the babble... I started playing with pages.google.com the other night to figure out how I could quickly create a website for my classes for next year and this is what briefly threw together:
Mr. Hale - Bell Multicultural High School

Oh and regarding my last post, I put the final finishing touches on the project I was working on called "Choose a Function". It will get it's first test run this advisory in a few weeks as an extra credit project for some of my students:
Choose a Function Project for Algebra II


-MF EDOOMCATOR