A Class of One

IMG_1965Right now I have a class of just one. Well maybe two. I think I’m learning nearly as much as the other person. That one other person is my son with whom I am spending the year. Simon was born in June and once my first year of teaching was over it was time for a whole new set of challenges.
At the end of June, I finished teaching, packed up the apartment and moved back to the Pioneer Valley. We bought a house and I started this adventure of a year at home being a full-time homemaker or househusband (a category not found in the list of jobs on LinkedIn).
And so my days go by. I get up and play with Simon. Take him for walks and naps. (I walk he naps.) Try to make him laugh so hard he poops himself. Let him play with everything he can, while trying to keep much of it out of his mouth. Making dinner and sometimes lunch. And maybe if I can time it all right, doing a small home improvement project – or just trying to clean.
Right now Simon is working on learning to crawl (while I wish to teach him to walk). And we all wait for his first tooth. My puzzles every day are similar to what they were before – what should I be teaching? how should I being teaching it? is this working? But it’s all done without a curriculum and the results are opaque and it’ll be a long time before we see start to see the outcomes. Lord knows I still a work in progress and my trajectory has been starkly adjusted a few times. But still I wonder, should I be talking to him more? Should we read more. If he’s just amusing himself is that okay for a long stretch? How long of a stretch? Is he tired? or does he have a dirty diaper? or is he bored? or hungry? or something else? But we muddle on together – generally quite happily – as days turn into weeks and weeks turn into these nearly 7 months and I wonder, when will we be able to play cribbage together? what about something simpler like checkers? or maybe just a consistent game of rolling the ball back and forth between us?

On Robots

This past Friday, I took the day off to volunteer at a robotics tournament at Oakmont Regional High School. I have been helping at this particular robotics event for 5 years and it’s always a lot of fun. The robotics community has long been close to my heart and it’s always a recharge to invest and immerse in it again. This event is an offseason tournament – held after the World Championships – and everyone is competing just for fun.

The organizers Dave and Greg are tech ed teachers at Oakmont and started doing this particular robotics competition after years of creating their own engineering challenges and competitions. (Highlights include indoor mini-golf playing robots, and rowing machines on the lake in both sun and sometimes rain.) So now they host a tournament, bring back a former student to DJ, bring back former teachers and a retired principal to referee and judge and set out to have a fun day.

The community there is palpable – bonds of friendship, respect, collegiality. They use this community and build on it every year to create an event, staff the event, and gather for beverages afterwards.

They do all this for the students – the first and foremost things in their minds (which is why they are stressed out about it going in and so relieved at the end) – but in creating this event Greg and Dave have built on their existing community and expanded to other schools. It’s always cool to see.

It was a blast and I’m already excited for next year. You should get your students to build a robot and come along, too!

Making the best(?) choice – mathematically speaking

Math can be really useful in solving the problems we have in life. Ms. Valcarce let’s us know that with some simple math we can better divvy up the rent this month. Math can also help us pick the best person to marry. It turns out you should take all of your choices, interview the first 36.8% of them and then choose the first person after that group that is better than the best in that group. Why 36.8%? Well, it turns out that it’s 1/e . And that’s all you need to know. Because once e shows up, we know we’ve got something going on. So dig and use this to choose your next roomates and apartment. Once you’ve made those choices, you also now know how to best divvy up the rent.

On MCAS wall coverings

After seeing Ms. Parker’s great and warm approach to covering anything that might even slightly encourage or help the students while taking the MCAS, I thought about doing something similar. In the end, I forgot to bring anything in, so I took the more traditional, deadening approach to wall coverings… black paper.

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On Quizzes

Today, like most Fridays, was quiz day. Which means many of things. It means a lot of telling students to “shhhh…” and corralling students who have no intention of taking a quiz – irregardless of their ability to do it. It also leads to a favorite exchange in which I get asked how to do a problem or if they got their answer is correct – in the middle of the quiz. And when I refuse to answer, the student indignantly tells me that I am being unreasonable and that their other teachers do this for them. (I have yet to find one that does.)

The, always potentially and, often cool part of quiz day is that we do a small bit of Math Olympiad first. As a team of algebra teachers we decided to do this to help our students build their problem solving skills and to increase their grit. So every week, before the quiz (and as part of their quiz grade) the students solve a problem from the Olympiad. They work by themselves first, then get to talk to a neighbor, and then a randomly selected pair ( random.org is a great tool) who will present their strategy to the class. The students still need to do a second problem for full credit on the quiz, but this gets us off to a good start. And what’s in it for the students you ask? Well, other than building some problem solving and the satisfaction from solving neat little problems, the student who scores the highest on the Olympiad gets a 100% on their quiz that day.

And that’s the cool thing. Because its not always the “smartest” kid in the room who gets the most right. So we get to celebrate some different students and reward them for engaging with the class. Sometimes they’ll get pretty embarassed when they find out that they got the 100. Others will take a bow. But it can certainly add a little bit of interesting to an otherwise dull quiz day.