The Sound of Surprise − 24 August, 2007
(continued from previous days, starting here).
I like jazz. I think I remember someone saying, once, that it was "the sound of surprise." Musicians working together, creating something new, being in the moment. Improvising.
See, improvising is an endangered art. Especially in teaching.
My school has an excellent principal, and we've been shielded from a lot of this. But there is a movement out there, in education, to make us document everything we do, obsessively, categorically. Last summer, I heard from some other teachers that certain districts were making them submit their lesson plans for anywhere from a week to a month -- and to wait for approval from someone higher up.
There is a certain element to teaching that is art. There is also a certain element that is research based and scientific. However, you cannot crush one with the other and expect the whole to work.
Most of my best ideas have come to me on the morning drive in to work. I would get an idea, throw out my previous plan, and run with the new one, sometimes changing it on the fly to make it run better.
A good example was the highly successful paper rollercoasters from last year. We were studying kinetic and potential energy -- the operating principle for coasters. On the way in to work, I figured out how to fold paper so it made a curved track a marble could roll down. Put a series of these curves together, and what do you have? Bingo. It was total improvisation, but a wild success.
That wouldn't have happened if I'd been strangled by someone's leash.
As I said, I am very fortunate in that we have a principal who really understands teaching on a deep level. I feel I owe a lot of what I've learned over the past two years to her.
But, really, I have learned the most from the students themselves.
Here we go:
My 5th and 6th period classes didn't get latitude and longitude. They were plotting hurricanes, but progress was slow. I had explained it every way I knew how, and I didn't know what to do next. Then suddenly, it hit me:
Give up.
But not in a bad way. Read on, there's a sort of miracle at the end.
See, I'd explained it in my own words, again and again. Maybe 80% of the class had got the basics. There was another 20% that hadn't. What good would saying it all over again do?
And sometimes, the mere fact that you're an adult is a disadvantage. Some kids freeze up when an adult's asking them anything -- they try to cook up any old answer to make it seem like they get it, but some odd sort of fear is keeping them from even thinking the problem through.
Driving in to work, it occurred to me that if a student were explaining it to them, it might work better. Problem was, this had been tried -- they were working in groups. But evidently the students in that group hadn't succeeded either.
So when 5th period began that Friday, I started off class by placing a "bounty" on the ones who hadn't figured it out.
Our school offers a positive reward system for good citizenship, leadership, and behavior -- some tokens called Eagle Talons, that can be traded in for certain things. School supplies, extra privileges during lunch (such as eating in certain reserved areas), books, snacks and drinks at events, and so on. The going rate was about one of these for an instance of good behavior.
Well, starting this off, I didn't have much faith. I'm afraid I thought this would succeed maybe like once or twice per class. So I set the "bounty" at 5 Eagle Talons for teaching someone to plot the storm track. To make things fair, I offered 2 Talons to the person who accepted the help -- the one who "turned in" their teacher.
I'm not such of an optimist that I'd accept everyone at their word. When someone came up to me, I actually gave them some coordinates to plot, to see if they really had learned it.
Mostly I watched, amazed, as they did so. Again and again.
At one point I looked up, and everyone was working so hard, so intense in their discussions, that it was almost like I was standing in the control room from the movie Apollo 13, watching Ken Mattingly and Gene Krantz put together the powerup procedure for Lovell and crew.
OK, all this was amazing enough. But I guess the high point was one kid, who had failed 6th grade last year for a fairly simple reason: he never payed attention, at all, and never did any work. We had tried talking to him, motivating him, tutoring him, a whole line of solutions, but none had worked. Sometimes that happens.
Well, he came up, and wanted his 2 Talon reward. He brought along his teacher, a fairly shy 6th grade girl with a soft voice and easygoing personality. I raised one eyebrow and tried to see it. It didn't look likely.
So we went over to the chart, and I gave him some coordinates to plot -- 17.5 N, 70.9 W. Then I watched, dumbstruck, as his pencil traced straight up 60 W longitude, stopped at about 17.5 latitude, then traced across to 70.9 W and parked there with a final dot. No hesitation, no uncertainty. Plonk, it was done.
I had a brief moment of vertigo.
Didn't we spend most of last year trying strategy after strategy, and...?
I guess at that moment I realized I was seeing something special.
I gave his teacher 8 Talons for performing a miracle.
There were other stories. The girl who had struggled for two days to get it, learned it on Friday, and then went on to teach someone else, and stood there with her arms folded in satisfaction as she watched her student plot three in a row without error. The boy who had difficulty focusing on the task, until he was sandwiched by two other students, who kept at him on track like a pair of super sheepdogs from Krypton.
It was surreal.
And it happened all over again 6th period.
Not bad for the 5th day of school.
I like jazz. I think I remember someone saying, once, that it was "the sound of surprise." Musicians working together, creating something new, being in the moment. Improvising.
See, improvising is an endangered art. Especially in teaching.
My school has an excellent principal, and we've been shielded from a lot of this. But there is a movement out there, in education, to make us document everything we do, obsessively, categorically. Last summer, I heard from some other teachers that certain districts were making them submit their lesson plans for anywhere from a week to a month -- and to wait for approval from someone higher up.
There is a certain element to teaching that is art. There is also a certain element that is research based and scientific. However, you cannot crush one with the other and expect the whole to work.
Most of my best ideas have come to me on the morning drive in to work. I would get an idea, throw out my previous plan, and run with the new one, sometimes changing it on the fly to make it run better.
A good example was the highly successful paper rollercoasters from last year. We were studying kinetic and potential energy -- the operating principle for coasters. On the way in to work, I figured out how to fold paper so it made a curved track a marble could roll down. Put a series of these curves together, and what do you have? Bingo. It was total improvisation, but a wild success.
That wouldn't have happened if I'd been strangled by someone's leash.
As I said, I am very fortunate in that we have a principal who really understands teaching on a deep level. I feel I owe a lot of what I've learned over the past two years to her.
But, really, I have learned the most from the students themselves.
Here we go:
My 5th and 6th period classes didn't get latitude and longitude. They were plotting hurricanes, but progress was slow. I had explained it every way I knew how, and I didn't know what to do next. Then suddenly, it hit me:
Give up.
But not in a bad way. Read on, there's a sort of miracle at the end.
See, I'd explained it in my own words, again and again. Maybe 80% of the class had got the basics. There was another 20% that hadn't. What good would saying it all over again do?
And sometimes, the mere fact that you're an adult is a disadvantage. Some kids freeze up when an adult's asking them anything -- they try to cook up any old answer to make it seem like they get it, but some odd sort of fear is keeping them from even thinking the problem through.
Driving in to work, it occurred to me that if a student were explaining it to them, it might work better. Problem was, this had been tried -- they were working in groups. But evidently the students in that group hadn't succeeded either.
So when 5th period began that Friday, I started off class by placing a "bounty" on the ones who hadn't figured it out.
Our school offers a positive reward system for good citizenship, leadership, and behavior -- some tokens called Eagle Talons, that can be traded in for certain things. School supplies, extra privileges during lunch (such as eating in certain reserved areas), books, snacks and drinks at events, and so on. The going rate was about one of these for an instance of good behavior.
Well, starting this off, I didn't have much faith. I'm afraid I thought this would succeed maybe like once or twice per class. So I set the "bounty" at 5 Eagle Talons for teaching someone to plot the storm track. To make things fair, I offered 2 Talons to the person who accepted the help -- the one who "turned in" their teacher.
I'm not such of an optimist that I'd accept everyone at their word. When someone came up to me, I actually gave them some coordinates to plot, to see if they really had learned it.
Mostly I watched, amazed, as they did so. Again and again.
At one point I looked up, and everyone was working so hard, so intense in their discussions, that it was almost like I was standing in the control room from the movie Apollo 13, watching Ken Mattingly and Gene Krantz put together the powerup procedure for Lovell and crew.
OK, all this was amazing enough. But I guess the high point was one kid, who had failed 6th grade last year for a fairly simple reason: he never payed attention, at all, and never did any work. We had tried talking to him, motivating him, tutoring him, a whole line of solutions, but none had worked. Sometimes that happens.
Well, he came up, and wanted his 2 Talon reward. He brought along his teacher, a fairly shy 6th grade girl with a soft voice and easygoing personality. I raised one eyebrow and tried to see it. It didn't look likely.
So we went over to the chart, and I gave him some coordinates to plot -- 17.5 N, 70.9 W. Then I watched, dumbstruck, as his pencil traced straight up 60 W longitude, stopped at about 17.5 latitude, then traced across to 70.9 W and parked there with a final dot. No hesitation, no uncertainty. Plonk, it was done.
I had a brief moment of vertigo.
Didn't we spend most of last year trying strategy after strategy, and...?
I guess at that moment I realized I was seeing something special.
I gave his teacher 8 Talons for performing a miracle.
There were other stories. The girl who had struggled for two days to get it, learned it on Friday, and then went on to teach someone else, and stood there with her arms folded in satisfaction as she watched her student plot three in a row without error. The boy who had difficulty focusing on the task, until he was sandwiched by two other students, who kept at him on track like a pair of super sheepdogs from Krypton.
It was surreal.
And it happened all over again 6th period.
Not bad for the 5th day of school.
