Instructional Planning #2

To repeat what I wrote in my blog last week, I only taught basics to my summer school class, and as the weeks have progressed, I am sitting on the sidelines more and more, giving the reigns to my First-Years.

During the time that I was teaching, however, there were some lessons that seemed to work better than others. There are a few different ways of measuring the success of a lesson: 1) How well the students do on the assessment, 2) much their skills have improved during the course of the lesson, etc. I am focusing on just 1 and 2 for this blog. If I were to use the students’ post-assessment as the standard for the most successful class, then I would be talking only about the lesson on Order of Operations. My students mastered this one, no problem. However, I am willing to bet that if they were given a pre-assessment, prior to the lesson, they would have mastered that as well. They came in knowing this stuff. Looking at the second standard of success, Classifying Triangles and Quadrilaterals was the lesson where I saw the most change throughout the period of one class. Of course, I only had one student for this lesson (which may have allowed for more one-on-one time), but she still came in unable to say anything definite about the classification of these shapes, and left having classified everything given to her. I think some key reasons for the success of this lesson were class size, small objective (nothing too dense or lofty), tangibles/manipulatives (she had her own envelope full of shapes that she was asked to match up), and constant questioning. Were I to do this lesson again, I might focus more on the manipulatives: have her make her own, find the missing angles of the triangles, show how two trapezoids can make a parallelogram, etc.

The lesson that the students and I had the least success with was Properties. I attempted to condense associative, commutative, and distributive all in one lesson. What I really should have done, and would do in the normal school year, is spend a period on associative and commutative, and another whole period on just distributive. The reason for this is the type of algebra that is contained in the distributive property is not immediately comprehensible. Regardless of the student’s level, I think it takes a whole period to really grasp and become comfortable with the distributive property. I would also put more manipulatives into this lesson if I had the chance. I used posters with the original lesson, but I think an activity which gets the students to actually distribute something out would help to tighten this idea of distributing numbers.

FAILURE STORY

Failure: I’ve experienced a lot of it. From being inconsistent with rules and procedures, to losing final exams, to sleeping through my alarm clock on the first day of school – I’ve definitely self-titled myself “Miserable Failure” many times throughout my first year of teaching. What’s funny (sort of), is that I expected, and kind of enjoy being a failure – it seems to be the appropriate strife of a public school teacher. If I didn’t feel that I was a failure most days, I think I would be doing something wrong. There are so many policies, politics, and people working against teachers, that, many times, it is impossible not to fail. However, there is a big difference in the failure that I can control, and the failure that is out of my hands. Most days, I don’t bother to try and separate the two. Looking back, though, its much easier for me to distinguish what was my fault, and what was the fault of other circumstances. Being able to recognize this distinction makes teaching and setting goals much easier. After days of sulking over some silly rule that the district administration set in place, or some crazy pacing-guide which changes every hour, or surprise assemblies that interrupt my highly-prepped-for pop-quiz, I realized that being frustrated and complaining was hindering more than helping the situation. Not that I don’t condone the occasional vent-session – but there’s a time and a place for this. I learned that within school walls, or even after school at home, sometimes, was not the appropriate venue.

The failure that I would like to highlight from my past year as a teacher, and a failure that I still am trying to deal with to this very day, is my ability to organize and prioritize. This may seem to be an inconsequential, silly, common failure – but, it actually affected me and my students greatly, and often, quite negatively. By failure to organize, I am referring to me losing papers, forgetting to mark absences, losing tools (staple machine, hole punch), letting papers to be graded pile up in stacks on my floor, never creating a “make-up work” policy, etc. I generally tend to consider myself a fairly neat and systematized individual; however, by the end of every 9 weeks, my entire house was a mess. One day it got so bad that my room mate had to point out the vacuum to me, and then point out the hundreds of little paper dots on our dining room floor from when I had accidentally dropped and busted-open my hole punch a month before. It was horrible.

The mess of my house and classroom just added to the mess in my head. I was so tired and stressed after school, and when I went home I had nothing to greet me except paper dots, assignments to be graded, and lesson plans to be made. This is when I also lost (if ever I had) my ability to prioritize. Coming home to what seemed to look like another sort of classroom, I often just zoned out – I would eat, set a time to start work, lose track of time, and eventually get up to begin work around 10:30-ish. Of course, by this time I was exhausted, and any intention to do work that I began with would be short-lived. Of course, my work ethic changed from day-to-day, but generally I never completed as much as I would set out to do. I don’t believe that I set any expectations that were too high; I just prioritized poorly and did not allow for enough time to meet the reasonable expectations that I had set. As a result a fell further and further behind in work, slept less and less trying to finish work, and became grumpier and grumpier at school the more tired I grew.

If the results of lack of the ability to organize and prioritize do not already strike the reader as serious, consider this: a grumpy, tight edged, confused teacher with poor hygiene from sleeping until the last possible minute. HORRIBLE.

I am still struggling to overcome this failure to prioritize my work. I have already begun to prioritize my time, creating a schedule, making a bed-time (yes, a bed time) and planning to stay after school with work, as opposed to taking it home with me at night – a luxury that my new school in Jackson is providing me with. When I was an undergrad, I tended to pull all-nighters and feel overloaded with work; but, in college, it was always work that I enjoyed. Learning how to make my work something more enjoyable for me is going to be the hardest part of learning to organize and prioritize. This is not to say that everything is boring, but so much of what I do is adult busy-work. Perhaps if I learn to find more importance in this work, or to simply remember the great importance of the other work that I do, my ability to schedule and complete tasks will greatly improve, and along with this, my teaching experience and - most importantly – the education of my students will improve as well.

Instructional Performance

My first lesson plans were aimed at reviewing math class basics. By basics, I am referring to rules and procedures, and very introductory skills: order of operations, reducing fractions, solving word problems, etc. I did not assume that it was the first time my students were seeing any of this information - in fact, I assume that they have gone through many of this many times. My goal while writing many of these lesson plans, therefore, was both to present the information to them in a familiar way, as well as to make it something new and memorable. My reason for wanting to make it familiar was in order to move quickly through it, and into the more difficult grade level benchmarks. However, I also wanted to make the information new and (hopefully) more memorable, because I feel that so much of middle school math – most math probably – is built on top of these concepts, and that to hold a firm grasp on these things helps tremendously in learning higher conceptual math skills.

It was difficult to condense both familiarity and newness into a single lesson. I did this by beginning with a familiar concept, using familiar vocabulary, and showing the more familiar steps, concepts, etc. As we worked through these terms and steps, I tried to incorporate an activity that the students would not have used before to serve as a form of inductive learning, as well as to create a memorable experience that the students might take with them, even if only for a little while. An example of this can be seen in my parallel and transverse lines lesson plan: I began by going through basic vocabulary with my students and asking them to point out a vertex, define a parallel line, show me what it means to intersect, etc. After working through and giving examples of each of the vocabulary terms, the students and I went out into the hallway, armed with masking tape, a marker, and some pieces of construction paper having angle degrees on them. I instructed the students to use the tape to make a pair of parallel lines and a transversal line. They worked together, without any help, and did a beautiful job. They labeled the lines they made with the marker. Next, I posted up the pieces of construction paper at the 8 different angles made by the transverse and the parallels. Six of the angles had a given angle measure, two did not. I asked them to use their understanding of the definitions of complementary and supplementary that we had discussed in class to find the missing angles. It was awesome. I was shocked at how quickly they reasoned it out. Class ended after they filled in their missing angles and posted them up on the wall, but this activity is a great ending for a lesson on parallels, and a great intro into discovering the relationships that different angles have to each other. Without even asking, I had a young girl in my class tell me that she noticed a lot of the angles were equal to each other in similar ways. I can’t wait for her to realize that this self-made discovery is an essential geometrical benchmark that she figured out all on her own.

Sex ED. Part Two

Part One of my Sex Ed blog was a story told at an assembly for my middle school students this past April. My mouth was wide open in utter awe, and by the end of the story I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “This is sexual education in Mississippi,” I thought to myself. “If I were in middle school and being fed this crap, I would think that all the talk about safe sex was bullshit, too.” If we are going to educate children and young adults about safe sex, it needs to be like any other education – truthful. How the hell is anyone going to believe that a young girl had sex, got fluid on her clothes, the fluid remained wet enough for at least 24 hours to transfer to someone’s hand, that it got from a person’s hand into his eye (singular), and then had the power to render both eyes(plural) permanently blind? WHAT?!! Saddened, but not surprised, I did a little bit of minor research into Sex Ed. In Mississippi. Here are a few things I found:


Mandate: Code §37-13-134 (2007) requires 45 minutes of instruction in health education for grades K-8.

State Assessment Requirement: None.



No Sex Ed. Was ever mentioned in the Mississippi Health Framework until Grade Eight, and even then, only in the following contexts:


Eighth grade students should gain an understanding of how health is influenced by the interaction of body systems. Students should become familiar with the interrelationship between mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and physical health during adolescence. Students should also become more competent in developing a fitness plan. Teachers should reinforce how family and peers influence personal health and how appropriate health care can prevent premature death and disability.


Invite a nurse to discuss sexually transmitted diseases, contraceptives, and simple ways(i.e., hand washing) to prevent communicable diseases.



Mandate: Mississippi does not require students to receive instruction in HIV, STD, or pregnancy prevention, although the grade 9-12 portion of the Comprehensive Health Framework (2006) addresses prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases if schools choose to offer sex education. Code §37-13-171 (1998) states, “abstinence education shall be the state standard for any sex-related education taught in the public schools” and ”any course containing sex education offered in the public schools shall include instruction in abstinence education. However, the local school board may authorize, by affirmative vote of a majority of the members, the teaching of sex education without instruction on abstinence. In such event, the curriculum offered in the schools relating to sex education must be approved by a majority of the school board members.”



While wandering around the internet, I found this website which I thought I might share as a potentially useful tool for any students, teens, or teachers interested in the topic of Sex Ed.

http://www.sexetc.org/state/?state_us_id=MS

SEX ED. Part One

Jason is a real boy. I have actually met Jason. This story that I am about to tell you about Jason is a true story. I know that it is a true story, because Jason is a real person, I knew him, and I was there when this event actually happened to him.

Jason was a senior in a Mississippi high school. He was very popular, involved in all sorts of clubs, and dated one of the school’s cheerleaders. Jason loved his girlfriend very much, and as their relationship grew, both Jason and his girlfriend decided that they would practice safe sex by remaining abstinent. They dated, and hugged, and kissed, and held hands, - but, they made the wise decision NOT to have sex.

One weekend in the spring, the high school football team had an away game. Jason said goodbye to his girlfriend as she got on the bus that Friday and promised to be in the same spot to pick her up on Sunday. That weekend, while at the away game, Jason’s girlfriend decided to have unprotected sex with one of the football players. She broke the pact she made with Jason, and even worse, she didn’t use protection.

That Sunday, Jason was there to pick her up, just like he had promised. When he saw her get off the buss, he ran up to her and gave her a large hug – just like any normal and happy boyfriend would do. Now, if you remember, it was springtime, and – as we all know – springtime in Mississippi can get pretty warm some days. So, after running up and hugging her, Jason wiped some of the sweat off of his forehead. He drove his girlfriend home and gave her another hug, before heading home o his own house.

That night, Jason’s eye felt irritated. He asked his mother if she saw anything in it. She didn’t see what was irritating his eye, but was worried enough that she scheduled a doctor’s appointment for the next day. At the doctor’s office, tests were run and the doctor asked to speak to Jason alone. As his mother waited out in the reception area, the doctor asked Jason if he was sexually active. Jason told the doctor, “no,” and explained that both he and his girlfriend were abstinent. The doctor looked unconvinced and asked Jason again if he had engaged in any recent sexual activity. Again, this time with more vigor, Jason said, “no!” The doctor asked Jason to wait in the reception area so that he could speak to Jason’s mother privately.

Eventually, Jason confronted his girlfriend and she confessed that she had cheated on him during the away game, and that she had done so without using protection. It was later concluded that the cheerleading uniform the girlfriend was wearing on the Sunday she arrived home, was the same uniform that she was wearing during her sexual activity the day before. Body fluid was transferred to her uniform during sex, and when Jason went to hug her on Sunday, he got the fluid on his fingers – the same fingers that he then proceeded to wipe the sweat from his brow with. Needless to say, the body fluid got in Jason’s eye and caused the irritation. Jason is now permanently blind.