Day -30: Don't Assume

Today I introduced a unit on probability by having students do experiments with spinners. As you can see, half of a circular spinner was labeled "1," and then the remaining half was divided into two equal sections, which we labeled "2" and "3." Students did experiments to see which number the spinner would land on most frequently.


You would think this would be so obvious that it would be no fun at all. But you are not 9 years old. They were so into this activity. A fair number of students were really surprised at how many more times their spinners landed on 1 than on the other numbers. And when some of them came up with the idea that the spinner landed on 1 more frequently because the area of the space labeled 1 was bigger, they were so excited! Seeing that not everyone's spinners landed on 1 most often was useful, too. We had talked about probability plenty of times before, but always abstractly. To really understand that the spinner landed on 1 most frequently not just because of luck but because of the design of the spinner is so important! It's a useful reminder for me that when kids actually investigate a problem for themselves, their understanding is so much deeper and long-lasting.

(Note: Only last year did I discover that spinning a paper clip around the point of a pencil works great for the spinning part of spinners. There are people like Marilyn Burns who try to convince you that you need to do much fancier things to have adequate spinners, but they're just wrong. Also, what would I do without cardstock for math manipulatives like these spinners. Why do schools not all have reams of cardstock? Construction paper is OK, but it's not the same.)

Later we made tissue paper flowers for Mother's Day (which is celebrated May 10 every year in Mexico and by lots of Latino families living in the U.S.). The only reason I had time for this little project is because our school was doing make-up standardized testing and I suddenly had an extra 45-minute block of time with my students that I don't normally have.



It's also important not to assume that students can envision how to draw half of a flower's petals on their folded pieces of tissue paper! You would not believe how hard this is for some of them. Next time, I need little stencils at each table, not just drawings on the board. Primary grade teachers, I really do have sympathy for you considering how much prep time this little activity took - and my students know how to use scissors!

Day -31: Overheard

On the playground today one second grader said to another, "Which would you rather kiss, your right eye or your left eye?"

"But I can't reach," the other kid answered indignantly.

"Yeah, it's a trick question," the first replied.

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The last day of April I pulled a kid aside for a little talk. Eddie really struggles academically. I'm almost sure he has undiagnosed learning disabilities (and yes, I have tried to get him tested; it's supposed to happen next fall). There's almost no way you can be a fourth grader born in the US yet have an English Proficiency Level of 2 (Early Intermediate) on the yearly English test without having learning disabilities. He is very socially adept and in addition to being popular in my class, he is friends with more kids outside my class than any other student. We have some sort of bond. He knows I push him and he respects me for it, I think. Anyway, I told him how I'd noticed that he had been paying less and less attention in class, goofing off more and more, turning in less of his work. I told him that I knew some of the other students at his table distracted him sometimes. Since students change tables every month, I told him that he would get to make a fresh start the very next day. "It's a new month, and I know I will see a new Eddie," I said.

He sat there with a blank look most of the time. This is not the first time he has heard one of these talks. Eventually he started crying and told me about some problems going on for him at home and how he doesn't like to see his mom cry. I listened and talked about how I knew his mom wanted him to learn as much as he could in school, that that would probably make her happier than most other things he could do for her. And then I sent him off to science class with a note explaining why he was late.

The next day, May 1st, when we were walking into our classroom, students were talking about the fact that it was a new month so we would be changing tables.

Eddie was near the front of our line with a smile on his face. "Yep, a new Eddie," he said cheerfully, not really to anyone, just to himself - but I was close enough to hear. Who knew he would remember my little line?

And he was a new Eddie. For that whole day. It didn't quite hold for today. But it's better than nothing.

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For those of you a little starved for Juan stories, here's one. It wasn't exactly just overheard, but still ...

He was wearing a long-sleeved gray t-shirt today and the cuffs of both sleeves each had two small holes in them. Near the end of the day, he put a pencil through the two holes on one cuff and hid his hand inside. "Look, I've been harpooned!" he cried out to me and anyone else whose attention he could grab.

Day -32: "Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge"

I'd never heard that quote until this weekend, but apparently it's from Albert Einstein. Imagination is so the opposite of what our educational system is setting me up to encourage in my students. I think if I were teaching next year I would put "Imagination is more important than knowledge" up in huge letters at the front of my classroom and make it the theme of my year - just to push myself to foster it, despite all the countervailing forces of standardized testing and memorization and carving even knowledge up into little tiny pieces that can be assessed by multiple-choice items.

I mentioned a few days ago that my students were making collages to launch the new oh-so-inspiring theme in our Houghton-Mifflin language arts series, "Nature: Friend and Foe." I gave them a bunch of calendars and magazines and told them to make fantasy scenes which somehow showed friends and/or foes in nature. Students are in the process of writing paragraphs to go with their collages. Here are a few samples of what they've come up with so far (in my words, based on students' comments to me):


I don't remember who made this or what the friend/foe story is, but I like the beaver(?) presiding over the coral reef.




A polar bear plopped into the Kentucky woods.




One elephant jumping over another on the Great Wall of China as a two-headed sea monster looks on.




A baby harp seal says "Yummy!" as he sips Coca-Cola and dreams of a tropical paradise. (I'll try to transcribe the actual story Alex wrote to go with this eventually.)




An egret(?) makes huevos rancheros for everyone as a bug squashes the people below. (Really, that's what Ramiro told me was happening.) And, yep, that's a bird smoking in the corner.


Vote for your favorite in the comments!

Day -33: On Language

I realized I've been counting my days wrong. I don't know how I got confused, but anyway, there were really only 33 days left of school today. It's close enough to the end that I've started to use fifth grade as a motivator and threat for my fourth grade students - i.e., "You should pay especially close attention to X because you'll definitely need to know X in fifth grade."

One thing I especially love about teaching my students is getting to observe their language development. Roughly half of my students in any given year were born in the U.S., a fourth came to the U.S. before they started kindgergarten, and another fourth came after kindergarten started. Usually two or three have parents who are extremely bilingual and speak both English and Spanish at home, and about half have parents who can understand a little bit of English - usually what is required for their jobs. Even if they were born here, most of my students started learning English when they started school here, though a few also learn from their parents and many learn from older brothers and sisters and from television. I have all levels of English proficiency in my classroom and a considerable range of Spanish proficiency, too. Though all my students understand Spanish perfectly and can read and write in Spanish, as they get older, some become more and more reluctant to speak Spanish - maybe because they perceive that English is the language of power.

Anyway, I love hearing my students play with their two languages. Occasionally, I will call individual students "dude" in jest, usually when I am with a small group of students outside of regular class time, usually when I'm trying to goad someone into doing something. "Dude, what's up with your biography project?" I asked Ramiro today when he was inside at lunch for detention. Biography projects were due last Friday and Ramiro has yet to turn in a rough draft. That got a laugh from the small group of students nearby.

A few months ago after a similar comment by me, Manuel started calling me "duda" - his invented Spanish-ified feminine version of dude. ("Duda" actually is a word in Spanish; it means doubt.) "Hi, duda," he'll sometimes say to me, knowing it will make me crack up. As Manuel, Ramiro, and Wilfredo were leaving detention, Manuel called out, "Bye, dudes and dudas."

Wilfredo, one of my more recent newcomers, added on, "Bye, dudos."

I laughed. "Did you just make up 'dudos' right now?" I asked.

He nodded.

More on language in future posts. I need to go to sleep. I think there is a direct correlation between the amount of sleep I get and my patience as a teacher. One exception is if I get almost no sleep, like less than 4 hours (which hardly ever happens!), I am so loopy and running on adrenaline and relaxed in a strange way, that those days actually usually turn out to be pretty good teaching days. I don't know if this holds for parenting and for other jobs.

Day -35: What We Already Know

I saw a new report yesterday that's trying to document why teachers leave teaching. Guess what? You already know the answers, I bet.

Here's an excerpt:
"Dissatisfied teachers who left the profession cited serious problems with their working environment. More than half
expressed concerns over inadequate supports, such as a lack of time for planning or professional development, and
bureaucratic impediments such as classroom interruptions, unnecessary meetings, and too little say over the way
their schools are run. Teachers pointed frequently to a lack of collegiality as a key reason for leaving the classroom."

So what should we do about this? The report's number two recommendation is to "increase school funding to (at least) adequate levels." What a crazy idea! We might actually be able to make schools better by giving them more money to work with. I don't want the money for myself, and in the report, most teachers agreed with me. Low salaries were not the main reason people were leaving. But if my school had money for counselors, for after-school tutoring, for fixing my ceiling so it doesn't leak, for a real librarian, for a psychogist and a nurse who would be on campus more than half a day per week, for giving me more time to plan lessons. Now that would make a difference.

It reminds me of another report that came out this week about the reasons for the high rates of breast cancer in certain communities in the US. The main answer: poverty. What should we do? Provide everyone with adequate health insurance, the report's authors say.

Yes.

In other news, today, after yet another little lecture from me about the importance of knowing appropriate times for silliness, Juan turned to me and said, on the verge of tears, "But I don't know what people would think of me if I weren't funny." That's another reason I love teaching fourth grade. My students often tell me totally honestly why they are doing what they're doing.

Day -36: More Juan Stories + Colonization

Juan was wearing my favorite shirt today. It's a long-sleeve kelly green t-shirt with a picture of a stick of butter being sliced and in loopy 70s script the phrase "Smooth Like Butta" printed below. It's such a hipster shirt; it cracks me up to see it on a 9-year old in my classroom. Plus, thinking of Juan as smooth as butta cracks me up. I covet the shirt. I asked him where he got it and, not surprisingly, he had no idea.

Today Juan had his once a week session with our school's "counseling intern" (translation: we don't have funding for real counselors, so we get a person studying counseling to come see a handful of the 800+ students at our school one day a week for free). He walked in the door and said gleefully, "It's 220 steps from the cafeteria to here."

Then we were making collages to introduce the next theme in our Houghton-Mifflin language arts series "Nature: Friend and Foe." (One of the only ways I can fit any art into my schedule now is to try to make some oblique connection to Houghton-Mifflin themes.) Juan decided to add a person's face, wheels from a car, and the trunk of a car to the body of an elephant seal. It looked awesome.

I got to teach about colonization today, too. I love teaching about colonization. Fourth graders have more righteous indignation than anybody, so teaching any group of fourth graders about colonization would be powerful. But to get to teach a roomful of Latino students, most of whose families are from Mexico, about how Spain colonized Mexico and parts of the United States, is a particularly amazing experience. Usually, they can't believe that people in Mexico didn't always speak Spanish. And they also usually can't believe that California used to be part of Spain and then part of Mexico. It feels so powerful to help my students feel connected to the history of this place where they live. We acted out sixth graders from the middle school next door trying to colonize our classroom and then acted out conquistadors trying to claim our classroom for Spain. They just could not believe that people would try to do that. Which I guess is the really hard part - helping students come to understand why colonization happens and what could be going through the minds of the colonizers. Fourth graders don't really get that. But maybe that's part of why I like teaching fourth grade - injustice is so clear to them.

Day -37: More Testing

Our day of testing started of with Juan in tears, crouched on the floor trying to excavate the mess that is his desk to find the first four paragraphs of his biography of Jane Goodall. They were nowhere to be found, and the thought of redoing them (not that I had said anything to him about redoing them) made him despondent. Having one of my star students start out the testing session bawling was not the best beginning. I showed him an article about Jane Goodall in the Science Times that I had brought in, and that managed to cheer him up in the nick of time.

Yesterday, I noticed that Ramiro, a super-bright, inquistive kid with the longest eyelashes ever and an obsession with World War II, was on #6 while everyone else was already on #30 or so. He's always like that, though, so I didn't worry too much; his first grade teacher called him her tortuga. Then I noticed him at the sink a few minutes later, rubbing his hand vigorously with soap. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm washing my hands."

Umm, yeah. "Why is there black ink all over them?"

"I was tracing the veins on the back of my hands with Sharpie."

Yep, state standardized testing is the perfect time to do that. He did eventually focus and I bet did pretty well. I was actually proud of my students for their effort overall.

Maria update: She's not moving to Mexico yet, at least not this week. The latest word is that her family is going to save up money to buy the house next to their relatives' house in Mexico, plus they're going to let her sister finish high school here. That means they might move at the end of the 2007-2008 school year. We'll see if that version of the plan holds.