At long last, Algebra I HSA Day has arrived. We’ve spent the last 2 days doing a Math Field Day, where instead of normal classes, the students competed in teams in math based competitions, designed around the topics they are going to be tested on. Planning for it took 2 solid weeks, and we enlisted the middle school math teachers to pull it off, and on the whole, it was a spectacular success. It was supposed to be a low-stress math review, and I think that mission is accomplished.

Today, my students get to show what they have learned. For some students, this will be the culmination of consistent hard work in class and tens of hours of extra practice at peer tutoring sessions and Saturday school For others, it might be their chance to show how far they have come from beginning the year completely unprepared. And for yet others, frankly, they will reap what they have sown. As much as I hope all of my students pass, I know that some really haven’t put in the effort. But for those who have, I hope it shows. The entire 9th grade team has burnt the candle at both ends to try and rectify the dismal performance on the Mock HSA. Almost every aspect of my class has been redesigned on the fly. I’m banking on a tremendous improvement.

Keep my students in your prayers!

This is an entry I have been meaning to write for about 2 weeks now.

While I was out on break, far away from the daily stress of school, recovering from an absolutely brutal February and March, it really began to dawn on me how much I was dreading another year of potential misery. I had left for break on a bad note, and returning, it got even worse. I really felt like I didn’t have a grip on anything that was going on professionally. After a really rough week back, which had only including 3 days of teaching, I started seriously considering leaving Teach For America at year’s end.

I spent the final two weeks of April fighting respiratory illness and struggling to make the decision of whether to come back or not. Even though next school year is still a long way away, the decision had to be made as early as possible, to give my school the time it would take to replace me, if necessary. Deep down, I wanted to finish my commitment and to apply the lessons I have learned this year, but I just could not shake the incredible feeling of terror I had about repeating the experience of this year. Because the thing is, the end of this year would be the only chance I’d get to get off the ride. The one thing I’ve sworn never to do is to quit during the middle of the year, putting my school in a bad spot, and even worse, abandoning my students. Summer was my chance to walk away and put it all behind me.

On the other hand, when I signed up for TFA, I was serious about the mission and the two-year commitment. I never saw myself as a potential quitter. A big part of me wanted to hang around, although I wasn’t seeing how it could be feasible. And so, I spoke to nearly everyone who would listen, pretty much grasping for someone to say something inspiring or reassuring enough to get me to stay. I talked in depth to probably at least a dozen people over those two weeks, and I can distill the advice down to two main common threads: that A) my 2nd year would undoubtedly be much better than my first, and that B) I had to do what was right for me and my well-being. Well, the former piece of advice was nothing new to me, and the latter piece of advice was really leading me away from returning for year two. By the end of my two weeks, I had pretty much decided I was leaving. And then…

I don’t really know what changed–there wasn’t like a big Hollywood speech that changed my mind. But, I guess it could have been a couple things cumulatively. First off, during those 2 weeks, I feel like my 9th grade team and administration really stepped up to back me up. I got a whole bunch of equipment in my room and a lot of instructional support from our 9th grade English teacher that really helped reduce my stress. Also, our tutoring partnership with University of Maryland at Baltimore County kicked in, and I now usually have a couple tutors in my room at any given time. This has really freed my hands to do a lot more of the overall management of my class. And lastly, I’d started noticing since returning from break that I was was starting to get a lot more respect from that crucial middle demographic of the students that I teach. This contrasts with time periods where I’ve had upwards 80% of my class running rampant.

Any of these things could be a factor, but I think it was more a change in my outlook, internally. I can pinpoint the time it happened during the afternoon of Friday, May 1. All the sudden, mostly out of nowhere, it dawned on me on that if I just focus on the basics and work the kinks out of my routine, maybe I can survive the next year after all. This may seem like a “no duh” kind of revelation, but it really was a paradigm shift for me. It’s tough to overstate foreboding I had been feeling about the next year of my life.

And also, to make my life more livable, I decided I’d drop out of the Hopkins master’s degree program. After all, I’m only one class away from being fully certified, and I’m already on the master’s degree pay scale anyway. So although it would be nice to add some more credentials, it’s not worth it if it’s only to serve my own ego, at the cost of a not-insignificant amount of stress and time.

I took a weekend to think on it, and then I reported to my principal that I would indeed commit to returning for next year, and then spent some time with him discussing new ideas.

I guess, in the end, I joined TFA to make a difference in the lives of kids. I feel like I’ve done a pretty crappy job of it this year. If I leave now, then what have I really accomplished?

So the plan is to survive the remainder of the year, hopefully recover my physical and mental health this summer, and try to make next year a much more tolerable and successful year.

I’ve not done a good job of keeping up on my journal lately, although, there is plenty to write. I am so worn out after pushing these past couple months to get my students ready for the HSA, and it’s right around the corner, on May 20. My inability to keep my journal up to date is in keeping with my inability to keep my room clean, my clothes folded, and my classroom papers organized. I’m just so spent right now, physically and mentally.

There’s plenty I’d love to write about what’s going on in my classroom, some major personal decisions about teaching that I’ve made, and generally how everything is coming together for the test, but it’ll have to wait for another day I guess.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this job is far, far too big for one person. It definitely takes a village to teach math. Or to do it well, at least. I think it can be done by one person eventually maybe, but only building on the work of a whole bunch of other people. One person can’t build it from the ground up though, which has pretty much been my situation for most of the year. But when things have gotten crazy, a lot of people have gotten their hands dirty to help me out.

Thanks is definitely due to:

• the rest of the 9th grade team, who have each stepped in and sacrificed for my class in huge ways,
• my ever-supportive girlfriend, who is, herself, an excellent teacher and provides great advice,
• my Algebra-teaching comrade and Institute roomie, who has been the recipient of many freaked out, late night phone calls from me,
• my fearless Content Learning Team leader, who provided me incredible instructional materials far more useful than what my district provides, and
• the cadre of tutors who make effective instruction sooo much easier, and frankly, less lonely.

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/