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

choose your own function...

As a final project for our Algebra II class, one of our teachers came up with the idea of "Little shop of Functions" which I have been calling "Choose your own function." The idea is that we present our students with various scenarios and they are to choose and develop the appropriate linear, quadratic, cubic, or exponential function to model the scenario and use that equation to help solve a "real-life" problem.

I've been writing up the scenarios and have found the process to be difficult. It is very hard to think of and find scenarios that are interesting and don't require math skills beyond what is acquired in high school.

Anyways, here is a sampling of a few of the scenarios I have come up with so far.*

I remember being very good at Math when I was in high school, but never really saw the value of what I was learning until I took higher level math courses in college and studied physics and electronics. I hope that we are helping our students see the value of functions, graphing, solving equations, etc... by giving them these types of contexualized problems.

*NOTE: The "I" number in the scenario is an individualized integer that each student is assigned to make each problem unique.

-MF EDOOMCATOR

Inspiration

A bit off the topic of critical literacy, but inspiration is an amazing thing. As I sit inside on a miserable rainy spring day, I'm dreaming of a trip that I'll be taking this August. A group of my friends and I will be hitting up trails at Whistler, Pemberton, Squamish, The North Shore, and whatever we find on our way to Kelowna on a 2-week trip to Canada.

For inspiration, I frequently watch two of my favorite videos showcasing the thrill, desire, and challenges of the type of riding I enjoy. There's just something about the visually stunning imagery and the beats and rhythms that captures the mood and experience. Videos can really evoke such powerful feelings.

I only wish I could capture and bottle up the feelings I get from watching these videos to inspire my students, my colleagues, and myself for those days when things are just not the way they should be...

For your entertainment, here are a few clips for inspiration:


Favorite segment of Roam:


Roam Trailer:


Amazing trail with Wade Simmons riding:


The Collective Trailer:


I guess I'll be transitioning this blog into more of a journal of my teaching now that our Critical Literacy course is coming to an end this semester. I look forward to keeping track of my progress, frustrations, and inspirations in the world of education.

-MF EDOOMCATOR

What Critical Literacy Means to Me

Here is the next installment of my podcast...

What Critical Literacy Means to Me

The script for it can be found here.

-MF EDOOMCATOR

How is this relevant to me?

On our first day of class, Dr. Vasquez asked us to define critical literacy... I wish I could recall exactly what I wrote to see how it contrasts with my ideas as I've journeyed through this class through reading, blogging, and podcasting (listening to and creating). It certainly hasn't been a traditional class, but I think the format has allowed our class to explore and define critical literacy in our own way since we all teach different subjects, grade levels, students, classes, and schools.

I remember the first time a teacher ever used the word "critical" in refering to how we should learn and think in school. It was my senior year in high school in AP English. My teacher had us focus on reading text as "critical thinkers" and we were supposed to read between the lines and develop meaning from the Grapes of Wrath, 1984, Bonfire of the Vanities, etc... It was all about finding symbolism and metaphors in literature.

I remember when we had to present in front of the class that some of us did it as a forum, some used drawings, some did traditional book reports and essays, and then there was a student who did an interpretive dance. I really thought this teacher was absolutely crazy because we hardly ever just sat in class and read and wrote papers like my other previous English classes. After reading many assigned books, we were finally given the chance to pick a book on our own and read it. I couldn't remember the last time I was given a choice on a book to read for school since elementary school when I would pick Hardy boy mysteries in 5th grade to do reports on.

Reading wasn't one of my favorite things to do and I hadn't read a book on my own since the 5th grade. I was lost in what to pick and we had to pick a novel to compare and contrast to 1984. I stayed after school one day to ask my teacher for help in choosing. Without hesitation, my teacher told me to go the local bookstore (because I wouldn't find it at the school library) and to see if I would like A Clockwork Orange.

I won't get into details about the book, but what amazes me to this day was how my teacher had analyzed the way I processed what we read in class, how she was able to understand what I would be interested in reading, and how she could suggest a book that most public school teachers wouldn't even dare to mention around students! I can't say that I didn't still think she was crazy after suggesting this book to me, but I did respect that she was living the ideas of thinking critically by doing so with her students. She knew that I would find the book relevant to some of the ideas that I had expressed in class and that I would find the book interesting.

I hope that I can think more critically about my students and make connections and impacts on them the way that my crazy AP English teacher did for me.

-MF EDOOMCATOR

Teaching to the 4th Power

(T)(T)(T)(T) = T to the 4th power

So, in reading through the article on Teaching to the 4th power it made me think back to my post and podcast on "Where's the critical literacy in y = mx + b?". It's been almost 8 weeks since my class first did this assignment and now we are about to take our Mid-terms. I wonder how well my students will do with questions on linear equations? I think we were able to achieve 3 of the Ts: Transmission, Transaction, and Transmediation. Will they be able to go back to transmitting their knowledge on a test that assesses their mastery learning?

I'm going to reflect on my teaching process on the linear equations mini-project and contrast it to the model presented in the article.

Transmission:
Through transmission, students consume knowledge that is fed to them by the teacher. This is really all about direct instruction. I presented the 4 views of linear functions to my students in the form of telling a story, modeling with an equation, creating an input-output table, and graphing by using various instructor-led examples to get them used to the idea. This perspective was quite new to the students and new for me to teach, but I found that it captured the essence of creating context with Algebra I material and putting multiple perspectives into one picture. I was transmitting my knowledge of linear functions in these 4 views to directly instruct my students.

Transaction
Transaction requires students to use the knowledge. After having gone through several examples as a class, I gave the students a set of 4 problems. I divided the class up into groups of 4 and assigned each group 2 of the problems to work on with some guidance from me. After giving the students a chance to work through the 2 assigned problems, I partnered them up with another corresponding group that worked on the opposite 2 problems and had them share out and explain their solutions together. Students were transacting their knowledge to each other through sharing out solutions and by explaining out the process they had previously learned.

Transmediation
Transmediation asks students to interpret knowledge. For this, I had the students create their own contextualized problems and present them to the class. This was a way for the students to create a metaphor of something they experience or have had experience with and apply it to algebra concepts. I found this part of the process to be the most exciting way of assessing my students. My students quickly explored how algebra can have an impact on things in their lives. Although some of the students just recreated the scenarios that were presented to them, they put their own names in place which gave the problems a bit more self-worth.

Transformation
I've been thinking about how my students could have taken action on their mini-project and in what ways could they have taken their learning to the level of producing knowledge. As a culminating event, I had the students present their problems to the class and explain it. In retrospect, I could have assigned the students to investigate some examples where data on social issues could be modeled linearly. They could have then taken their findings to other classes in the school and presented the issues and show how they could make predictions on the trends based on the linear models. This would be giving my students the chance to produce knowledge and show the value and use of linear equations to other students.

All in all, I'm happy with the way the unit turned out because my students got more of chance to see learning conceptually versus direct instruction. But, since that time 8 weeks ago... our school and curriculum has been under stress for reviewing for and preparation of the standardized testing and unfortunately, my class has been stuck revolving around the first two Ts. I guess the measure of the real value of my teaching to (almost) the 4 Ts will be in how well they do on Tuesday on the Mid-term when they are asked to model a scenario with linear equations and answer some critical thinking questions about it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

-MF EDOOMCATOR

First podcast

I just created my first podcast as a reflection on:
Where's the Critical Literacy in y = mx + b?.

The audio clip is available here and the script of the audio is available here.

Enjoy.
-MF EDOOMCATOR

In the heat of DCCAS testing...

We are now in the heat of DCCAS testing and I'm looking for ways to get students to do well on the testing. One of the main problems I believe students have is with interpreting and reading into the word problems. There are effective strategies in attacking word problems and I'm always looking for ways to help students get over the phobia of doing word problems.

So, as a follow up to my last post... here is a reading guide that I plan to use in my class later this week to help students attack some word problems on the DCCAS.

Click here for the document. Many thanks to the head of our math department for providing this great reading/study guide.

I believe this will get students to critically think about word problems that they encounter on standardized testing and I'll see how the lesson goes later this week...

-MF EDOOMCATOR

Where's the Critical Literacy in y = mx + b?

As I read through our assigned book Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children, I keep wondering how can I use critical literacy in my classroom? How can I use critical literacy in the context of a math problem? I took a class that touched on critical literacy early on in my graduate work at AU, but it feels like an eternity ago...

So, it's nice to realize that there are many opportunities in my own classroom investigating into "texts". For instance, my students are always asking me why we don't use the textbooks very often in my class? Hmmmm... why is that? Earlier this year, one of the teachers at our school created a set of word problems for the students to practice with. I was astonished that most of our students couldn't even begin to understand the problem relating to golf because they have either never seen it before or have NO IDEA how it is played or scored. I had to step back and spend some time explaining the game to them. Once they realized, it was just like mini-golf... some of them started to get it! Just like many instances in our provided textbooks, the golf word problem was lacking context for the students understanding.

To create context in my own classroom, I recently assigned a mini-project where students had to create their own word problems related to their interests and there is a sampling of pictures below. Our focus was to critically view linear functions (y = mx + b) in 4 different views: as a story, an equation, an input-output table, and a graph.

(I typed up a few samples of the created word problems below the pictures since they are hard to read.)



"There are 20,000 soldiers in Iraq. 5,000 were killed. An average of 8 soldiers are killed each day. Write a model representing the number of soldiers left in Iraq depending on the number of days."





"The owners of Club Mandingo are trying to bring "TCB" to a concert at the cost of $500 and the tickets are $5 each. How can you model the owner's profit depending on the number or tickets sold?"

-MF EDOOMCATOR

Critical literacy through Comedy?

So, as I read about the four resources model on literacy, I was struck by the statement "Effective literacy draws on a repertoire of practices that allow learners, as they engage in reading and writing activities, to critically analyze and transform texts by acting on knowledge that texts are not ideologically natural or neutral -- that they represent particular points of views while silencing others and influence people's ideas -- and that their designs and discourses can be critiqued and redesigned in novel and hybrid ways."

It made me think and wonder about how often students simply "cut and paste" information from websites to use as references in research. I've seen students using the computers in my class to do research on-line and I wonder if they ever question the validity of the resource. A part of critical literacy is reading through and analyzing the text for what it is... Who wrote it? Do they have an agenda? Is their view slanted?

Since I used Wikipedia as a resource in my profile to reference MF DOOM, I figured I would pass on this piece of concern dealing with how reliable is Wikipedia? Should I trust Wikipedia?

To continue with the YouTube and multi-modal text tone of this blog, here is an example of a text that is not "ideologically neutral". This Yahoo article titled "Colbert, O'Reilly face off on both shows" indicates that O'reilly mutters "This was a huge mistake, me coming on here," during the interview on the Colbert Report.

Does he mutter that statement? Why does the article choose to use the word "mutter"? I certainly believe that there is a tone to this article in their views of O'reilly vs. Colbert which might determine their choice for the word mutter.

Anyways, here is a clip of the interview... enjoy.



-MF EDOOMCATOR

Welcome to MF EDOOMCATOR

As a first reflection on the course so far, we were presented with the idea of social discourses which can limit students exposure to a way of speaking, thinking, living, etc... I immediately thought of an instance just a few days ago in my class where a student (let's call him Alex) was a portfolio panelist for another student's presentation (let's call him Ricky). While Alex was providing feedback and questioning Ricky, several other students nearby were commenting about how "professional" Alex was sounding and about how Ricky kept calling Alex his "dog" or "son" and how inappropriate that was. I was really struck by the way that Alex changed his normal discourse from being Ricky's "son" or "dog" and became a very serious minded professional in a formal setting. It really amazed me to see how Alex was emulating the way he has seen my (and I'm sure other teachers) discourse in the class during our portfolio presentations.

Speaking of things social... A lot of my students have been endlessly talking about myspace this year. Here's is a humorous clip from Dimitri Martin's segment on "trendspotting" from the Daily Show poking a little fun at the world of online social networking. Enjoy.



-MF EDOOMCATOR