Under advice, I have decided to make the previous journal entry about my roommate’s school situation private, but suffice it to say that I am humbled by the fact that although my job has been a major personal struggle, at the very least I am blessed to work in an environment where I feel like every single adult has the best interests of the students at heart, first and foremost. It makes a huge difference in how I feel going to work on a daily basis, and on what we are able to do for our students.

Things are going nowhere near perfect with me lately, but one thing that has gone mostly very well for me is the new, altered schedule. As of today, we have now spent about two solid weeks with the new schedule, and I can safely say that although there are issues, it is far and away better than what I (and the students) dealt with before. As I’m sure I have mentioned earlier, there three main differences in the schedule from what it was like up until now:

1. My period length has decreased from 110 minutes to 75 minutes
2. All 4 of my classes meet every day, as opposed to on alternating days
3. The classes were re-rostered to group the kids more homogeneously

Changes 1 and 2 combine to mean a nominal increase in math instructional time from 275 minutes per week to 375. I am seeing a huge difference in the amount of material I can cover. In addition, I notice much less fatigue from my students over the period duration. And when I have a bad class period, 75 minutes of hell is a lot easier to tolerate than 110.

In my top two classes, behavior is much easier to manage. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems, because there definitely are. But when I need to get the class back under control, it takes far less time.

Of my lower two classes, one, Group B, is split in half between me and another teacher. This also makes management much easier. The only major problem is my other lower class, Group D. They have the tendency to fly completely off the hook, like they were on Tuesday. But all in all, I feel like at the very least, Groups A, B, and C are being far more effectively serviced.

Planning for classes and keeping track of what happens from day to day is a much easier task, now that I don’t have to worry about which groups to lead my lessons with, whether a lesson is going to straddle a weekend, or whether a field trip is going to throw the whole thing off. Continuity for me is smoother and I can see that it working better for the students as well.

I have huge appreciation for the people who accepted changes so that this could occur, it makes my teaching task imminently more doable. It might even be possible to finish this curriculum before the HSA after all (in one form or another).

Today, I returned to school from a very much needed spring break. From my jolting return from winter break, I knew to expect things to be bumpy coming back, and the students did not disappoint. However, I think I was better prepared this time around.

I can’t say that we accomplished a whole lot of any of my classes today, besides (hopefully) getting the kids focused on doing work again. I hit them with a quiz that they probably weren’t well prepared for, which generally is not a very good idea. However, I think most students actually took it fairly seriously, and I hope it was a bit of a wake up call to them that I’m not wasting any time getting them back to work.

Twenty-two instructional days remain before the HSA, and things are not looking particularly pretty. During quarter 3, I think I tightened up my routines a lot, but I still wasn’t seeing much, if any, gain in results. This last quarter, I need to try to change up my approach.

Some things are going to have to wait until next year. Speaking of which, my fellow TFA first year algebra teachers and I have started talking about some things we want to iron out over the summer so that hopefully we can avoid the debacle that this year has been for all of us. One of the toughest questions is how to approach the teaching of algebra as a subject, given the students we have and the way they are assessed by the HSA.

The HSA is actually a very rigorous test of students’ abilities to apply the skills of algebra and data analysis to real-world problems. Nowhere on the test do you see problems simply demanding the students to “solve for x”. Most of the questions require the students to analyze a word problem carefully to find out what it’s asking for, then to synthesize skills from different parts of the curriculum to answer that question.

The problem in preparing students to do this is two-fold. First of all, my average student is shaky on basic arithmetic and not at all comfortable with the concepts and skills he/she should have mastered in pre-algebra. Secondly, the curriculum provided by the City teaches the concepts in isolation. Whereas the HSA questions usually require several skill to be applied at once, the assessment questions I’m provided in the curriculum are usually very one-dimensional. Even more problematic is the fact that the materials provided by the curriculum are even more simplistic.

So my dilemma is that in my limited time, with little appropriate material provided, I’m supposed to be teaching the students to the complex process of assembling skills to solve problems, when the students struggle to perform each skill itself.

Faced with this situation, the holy grail is to be able to teach the students the concepts, from which the skills will follow. If a student truly understands equations and the rules of algebra, they don’t need to know the step-by-step process of solving an equation, that follows naturally from their own understanding. Teaching concepts is extremely hard, especially when faced with an extremely diverse set of very frustrated students, who aren’t used to being made to think critically. And so the temptation is to teach the skills one-by-one, because most students can follow a step-by-step process. But the eventual issue is that the students will never truly understand the why behind what they’re doing, and there’s simply no way to teach an algorithm for every single type of problem the student might happen to see on the HSA.

Teaching concepts directly is simply not realistic. I really believe that only the brightest math student have the abstract thinking capabilities to work that way. I think I’m a reasonably sharp mathematician, and even I struggled in high school math when it got too abstract, and I had fantastic math teacher my entire life.

What I’m looking to do is find a happy medium. I’m envisioning a curriculum that focuses on teaching students the “tools” of algebra. By tools, I mean the things we write on paper to solve algebraic problems–the expressions, the graphs, the patterns tables, and so on–and the rules for using them. Instead of focusing on the abstract theory of negative numbers or on specific methods of subtracting them, I want to show the students what a number line is and how to use it to see the difference between two numbers. I want to show them how two number lines form a graph, and how they can use that graph to see the relationships between two numbers. I’m hoping that by knowing the tools inside and out, the concepts will follow as the student sees how the different tools–function tables, graphs, and equations, for example–relate to each other and show the same underlying concept in different ways. And with that understanding of the tools, I’m hoping the students will have an easier time attacking these complex HSA problems and be much better prepared for higher math. We’ll see I guess, but pretty much anything’s better than what I’ve had going this year.

I’m up late trying to get my 3rd quarter grades in order, since they are due tomorrow. I can’t really whine about that, because I put myself in this boat. But part of the reason I’m up so late is because I’m so backlogged on test grading. Besides fatigue and procrastination, part of the reason for this is that grading tests is about as enjoyable as having my teeth drilled (or so I would imagine).

Grading tests is so discouraging. Test and quiz scores in my classes generally average about 30-40%. And this is considering the fact that I let them use all of their notes on the quizzes, and the tests are designed to look exactly like what they did on their homework and classwork papers. On most of my tests, almost all of the answers can be found by looking elsewhere on the test. On some portions, I provide a guided walkthrough of the steps to solve a problem. The students are provided calculators. I work with kids after school. We grade and discuss quizzes in class. We review all the unit concepts the day before the test. I pass all my tests along to the special educator for suggestions on how to modify them so that my IEP students get their required accommodations, and so she can administer the test to her students. She teaches the students who are pulled out for math, and sometimes adds additional work for her IEP students on top of my test.

I just don’t know what my students are learning if they’re stumped by the most basic problems on the test. I’ve received bright students who have transferred in from other schools, and watched their performance decline while they are in my class. My NWEA scores in the winter were lower than my scores for the summer. It is awfully hard to find the motivation to keep planning detailed lessons and synthesize my own lesson materials when my lessons clearly just aren’t reaching my students. I had one of my better students in one of my classes get frustrated when I wouldn’t come over to help her right away and tell me, “That’s okay, I don’t need your help anyway. Everything I learned in Algebra, I learned from my teacher last year.” I get lots of comments like that all the time, 99% of which I pay no mind. But in cases like that, I feel like there’s some truth to it.

I know I’ve figured a lot of things out of the course of the year, and I know plenty of very specific things I still need to improve. I’m working on them, but I just don’t feel like it’s coming together in time for the kids I have now. And I know it’s probably not all just my instruction. I think A-day/B-day was awful for the students. I also think the vastly differing math levels of students in my class made reaching everybody all the time pretty much impossible, when I only have a tiny handful of students who can truly work indpendently. We switched to the new schedule today, and I’m hoping I’ll notice a major difference.

I’m just really worried that despite all the blood, sweat and tears I’m putting in, and despite all the sacrifices everyone on the team is making, we might still have less than 10 students pass this test. I’m still banking on the fact that it’s going to come out better than that, but I don’t have a whole lot of evidence to lead me to think so.

It’s a lot harder to believe people when they tell me I’m doing even a halfway decent job when the data right in front of me says that even my some of my very best students are totally missing the mark. I guess all I can really do at this point is keep fighting, and pray that things start clicking for the students big time before the HSA.

Tomorrow is going to be rough. If I’m lucky, I might be able to catch 3 hours of sleep tonight.

I’ve got a heck of a week coming up. I keep being told there’s only 5 days to go before spring break, but these next 5 days are going to be crazy. Our school finished administering the MSA–the Maryland School Assessment–for our 6th and 8th graders. This is the big high-stakes test by which every school is measured. With that out of the way, all focus is on the Algebra I HSA. Everyone also keeps telling me that the rest of the year is cake after spring break, but with HSA upcoming, I know that’s not going apply to me.

There are 25 instructional days remaining before the HSA, and the idea of covering absolutely all of the material in its intended depth is out the window. A couple weeks ago, I e-mailed a TFA alum, seeking his advice on what topics I should be prioritizing. Yesterday, I spent a couple hours with our special educator, who teaches some of our Algebra I students as well, to come up with a specific game plan. It’s not going to be pretty, but we should hopefully be able to touch on most of the remaining topics.

Coming up this week, we’ve got several major things. The big schedule change goes into effect sometime this week, although there are a couple things that remain unsettled–most importantly, exactly what day the change is happening. Also, the 9th grade is rolling out a major incentive plan to push the students to start giving 110% to prepare for the test by attending after-school and Saturday school sessions, as well as completing extra practice work over spring break. In addition, we want to administer a full-out mock HSA this week to put in the students mind exactly what they’re up against and exactly what it is going to look like, as well as to allow us to collect specific data to provided individualized preparation plans for each student.

Problem is, none of this is quite set in stone yet, and there are still significant differences in opinion on when and how exactly each of these things is going to happen. I just hope it doesn’t turn into a circus…

Looking at the problem of inner city education from the outside, it was easy to point a hypothetical finger of blame at the issue of parental uninvolvement/apathy. But working at the school I work at, I can categorically say that that is probably the least of my concerns. That’s not to say that my students have rosy home lives, because that’s definitely not true for many, if not most of them. But I have yet to speak to a parent who doesn’t, at the very least, care about their child’s success. A couple of my parents have taken their misguided anger out toward me, but the vast majority have put their complete faith in me and my judgment.

My school, like the other “transformation” and charter schools in the city, does not have admissions criteria. Students sign up on a school preference sheet, and then they are selected for us by lottery. The top several schools in the city do select students based on performance, and they take most of the top students out of the pool. Consequently, we get a roughly similar cross-section of student as the zone schools the kids would go to by default. The biggest difference between us and the zone schools, I’m told, is that our parents cared enough to sign their students up for the lottery.

Generally, this better cross-section of parents manifests itself in the fact that I can generally look a student up in the phone directory, and maybe 75% of the time, I can get a hold of a parent right away. And when I get a hold of that parent, 95 times out of 100, that parent tells me I’m going to see a difference in their child come the next day (although whether I typically actually see that difference is a totally different topic).

The sad thing is that despite the fact that so many of my students have parents who are very well put together, some of them still come in to school acting completely misrepresenting their families in their behaviors. As a rookie, I didn’t know where my students were coming from, and therefore, what expectations I should have of their behavior. I have learned over the past year that most of my students truly have been raised to behave themselves appropriately. Some of my parents are completely shocked to hear the words that are coming out of their child’s mouth, or what their kid did in the hallway.

I guess it just goes to show how corrosive the most negative parts of urban culture can be to the morals of even the best-raised children.

On a similar note, I read an article the other day on the topic of charter schools and urban education that struck a chord with the same thoughts I was having when I wrote this entry (I wrote most of this 5 days ago):
http://www.slate.com/id/2214253/

I realize that my Sunday piece was kind of a downer, so I thought I’d write something about my favorite day of the week: Thursday.

I don’t know why Thursdays are so great, considering I still have to prepare for one day of school before the week is out. But Fridays always seem to be easier than any other school day, and so my Thursday evenings are usually pretty relaxed. Plus, Hopkins is on Wednesday night, and I feel relatively liberated when I leave school on Thursday, knowing I won’t have grad class for about another week. Or maybe I’m just so tired by Thursday that I start to get delirious.

Whatever it is, things always seem to be just a little bit brighter on Thursdays

Sunday is invariably the worst day of my week, simply because it precedes Monday.

Fridays are useless. Every Friday, exhausted from fighting the good fight all week, I typically barely have the energy to properly celebrate making through the week. I’m usually on my way to bed by 11, promising myself that I’m going to get a whole bunch of work done on Saturday. This never happens. Saturday is my day to forget about everything (unless I have Hopkins class). In any case, all the work I’m supposed to be doing gets pushed back to Sunday, and Sunday is when I’m hit with the full anxiety of everything I’ve postponed. I typically work a solid 10 hours on Sundays, trying to get all my ducks in order for the week. I always go to bed not quite fully prepared and restless due to the things in the back of my mind I know I still need to do.

Sundays are so bad that my Saturdays are beginning to suffer. I find myself caught in the dilemma of whether I should stay up late to “postpone” Sunday morning, or whether I should go to bed early so that when Sunday morning unavoidably does come, at least I’m not sleepy.

I need a vacation; spring break can’t possibly come soon enough!

This week has been taxing, every single day. My room has been too cold to inhabit for most of the week, so I’ve been squatting in another teacher’s room during periods when she doesn’t need it. This has happened several times this year, because my room is probably the coldest room in the building (I once had my water bottle freeze in my classroom, no joke). Teaching out of another classroom is always stressful, because I don’t have access to all of my supplies, and I’m not that well-organized as it is. Nothing sucks more than needing an office referral form but not having one at your disposal.

I stayed up really late Sunday planning what I hoped would be a monster lesson. All said, I probably put about 7-8 hours of labor into it. How did it go, you ask? Let’s just say it was a learning experience. I typically take notes on everything that went well in a lesson, everything that didn’t go as planned, and what I would do to improve it. When I plan a really ambitious lesson, more usually goes awry, and Monday’s lesson was extremely ambitious. I wouldn’t say it blew up, but one thing I’ve learned is that it’s silly to plan magnum opus lessons up late the night before, without consulting with anyone.

After school Monday, I felt really fatigued. I tried to go to bed early, but did not sleep well at all. By Tuesday afternoon, I knew I was sick. Everyone told me to take a day, but at this point, I am absolutely desperate to keep things on track in the room, and because of this schedule, I simply can’t afford to take days off, unless absolutely necessary.

So, I’ve been working ill all week. At this point it’s not too bad, and I will definitely take time if I feel like I need it medically, but otherwise I need to there. The kids haven’t been making it easy. Not many feel my sense of urgency, and I have failed to effectively convey it to them. I’ve tried to take my classroom management to next level. I’m definitely sweating the small stuff. I’m demanding absolute silence during my instruction. I’m trying hard to cut the turnaround in grading time. But the kids aren’t on board. Tuesday, after having to send about 8 kids out of class at one point or another, I brought the class to a halt while I called parents from the doorway in front of the students. I did the same thing with my nightmare homeroom class yesterday. I’m giving the kids speeches till I’m blue in the face, imploring them to understand what they’re up against. Still, kids still won’t stay in their seats and quiet, and I’m being cursed at on a nearly daily basis. I’m so exhausted by the end of the day that I’m pretty much just coming home and working from my bed.

Why am I so desperate to keep things moving?

Our grade is on an A-Day/B-Day schedule with 110 minute periods. This means that I see 2 of my classes one day, then the other 2 the next day, and it alternates like that, ad infinitum. So let’s say I missed a Thursday. That means that the class I saw the previous Tuesday, I would not see again until the following Monday. By then, everything is forgotten. And let’s do some math–I see each group of kids 5 days out of every 2 weeks. This means that they get an average of 275 minutes of instruction. But we don’t have any passing periods, so you have to subtract the non-zero transition time from that, too. A lot of the schools in the city are giving the kids 90 minutes of math instruction 5 days a week, for a total of 450 instruction minutes of math a week. For this and other reasons, I’m perilously behind on pacing. By my count, I’ve got 25 instructional days with each class left, but by the curriculum pacing guide, I’ve got 44 days of material remaining. Even moving double-time, there’s almost no margin for error, assessment, or the 3 weeks of review also mentioned in the pacing guide.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I spoke with my new assistant principal for almost an hour about this dilemma, and I think she’s up for some pretty radical approaches to the problem. That’s good, because nothing conventional is going to make it happen at this point. Considering where I’m at as it is, I’m not looking forward to how this is likely going to effect me personally. But I’ve got to find the fortitude to make it happen, somehow.