Why Am I Awake Right Now?

I knew I had a lot of work to do before the weekend began. Finish a unit plan, write daily lesson plans for submission to my principal, make slideshows for the week, grade quizzes, prepare labs. I did, however, expect to have plenty of time to hang out with friends and even go to the Phillies game on Saturday night. But Saturday afternoon came along, and I hadn't accomplished anything. I felt the stress monster creeping up on me. (What?? It's too early in the year for this!) So I canceled plans to go see Phillies, turned up Pandora (and used at least a quarter of my monthly allotment), and got to work. I made every effort to focus. I was fairly productive. Yet I only achieved one and a half of my goals for the night. I wasn't tired when I turned off my computer at 12:45am, but I figured it was necessary.

I jerked awake at 5:30am. (Seriously? That's a tad earlier than when I wake up during the work week.) After mentally rearranging all the clothes in my closet by color and reading five New York Times articles (Nate Silver is the man), I gave up and shuffled over to my desk. Right now, I am thinking deep thoughts about forensic science as I wait for the sun to come up.

Yes, I love my kids. Yes, I love teaching them. Yes, I wish I could have more fun and get more sleep on the weekends. But I gotta do what I gotta do, I guess.

Another Reason to Push for Post-Secondary Education

I spend a significant amount of time in the classroom waxing poetic about my Brown experiences, in hopes of encouraging more of my students, particularly my sophomores, to think about college. The dilemma I face is not surprising -- While college matriculation was a given where I attended high school, a majority of the students I teach are resistant. This is logical -- Their parents (and most other adults in their lives) are unlikely to have attended college, so it is a giant unknown for them. I grew up accustomed to a certain lifestyle (which I knew was made possibly by my parents' college education), and so have my students. Luckily, many of the students who make it to senior year have adopted a pro-college stance. Still, there is a lot of work to do.

Why? For a lot of reasons, of course. Yet another compelling argument showed up in my Google Reader this morning, from an Economix post entitled "Do You Earn More Than Your Parents Did?" The post discusses a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, in which it was found that men today earn less than equally educated men in 1979, with the exception of the most highly educated men. Women today earn more than equally educated women in 1979, with the exception of the least educated women. This report confirms what we already know -- that, in the past 30 years, the earnings potential for the most educated has risen, while that for the leasat educated has dropped.

The report touches me in two ways:

First, health care is a great example of a booming field in which available jobs require specialized, post-secondary training, if not a college degree. I have SO MANY students who want to work in health care, as physicians, nurses, paramedics, or simply anywhere near a hospital. But very few of them have the drive to pursue their dream after high school. They are, for the most part, bright enough and personable enough to do the job. So what's holding them back? And what can I do to help?

Second, women have definitely benefited more than men in the present economic climate. One reason is that women made significantly less than men in 1979, and the income gap has since narrowed substantially. On the other hand, many fields that have traditionally attracted women, including health care, are still doing well. There are many, many frames for this discussion, but I think it is same to say that women have been more fortunate than men over the past few years. As such, it was especially troubling for me to attend Blueberry High School's graduation ceremony less than a month ago and see that two-thirds of the graduating class was female.

The End

Our last day of school with students was Friday. (I saw a grand total of 4 students. However, I did teach a bunch of kids how to play SET. I also went on a long walk with one of my students and gave a very compelling speech about why she should think seriously about college.)

Tomorrow is the last day of school for faculty and staff.

I'm rather ambivalent about this. My job became my passion this year. While I welcome the break, I am going to miss that which makes me so happy every day.

Walking Companion

I was taking a walk across my neighborhood on Saturday night when I saw a familiar face: a student in one of my coworker's classes. Since she is not my student, I didn't know anything about her, except that I knew her to have a sweet and generous nature. She giggled when she saw me and asked if I lived in the neighborhood. I answered in the affirmative and asked the same of her. She hesitated, giggled some more, and then told me that she had recently been placed in a battered women's shelter two blocks north of the street corner on which we were standing. She said she was out exploring the neighborhood. I invited her to take a walk with me.

As we talked, she confirmed my preconceived impression of her in every way. Finally, I asked her why she was living in the shelter. She said that she had gotten into a fight with her father and stepmother. The fight had gotten physical, and her parents eventually called the police on her. The powers that be immediately pulled her from her parents and placed her in the shelter in which she is currently living. I asked if she wanted to go home after her sojourn in the shelter, and she shook her head vigorously. She didn't know what she was going to do, but she didn't feel safe with her parents.

Throughout our entire walk, I was so impressed by the grace and maturity she exhibited. I am still amazed at what my students go through, and how well some of them handle it. Even after a year of teaching, I can't quite fathom how such young people shoulder such large burdens.

I really hope everything works out for her. With any luck, I'll see her around the neighborhood again, and we'll get to take another walk.

Focus on Positivity

Lately, I have noticed a deluge of news articles, opinion pieces, and blog posts about optimism, forgiveness, and making the most of life (and much of it related to dogs).

Some tidbits of wisdom...

...From Can Pets Improve Your Relationship?

-- Even when pets drive us crazy by wrecking the furniture or soiling the floor, we don't stay angry at them. Similarly, we shouldn't hold grudges with our friends and family.

-- Even on bad days, we greet our pets cheerfully. After all, they probably had nothing to do with why our day went wrong and therefore shouldn't bear the burden of our rotten mood....

...From Patrick Moburg's Lessons from a Dog

-- Always be curious about the world around you, especially when new people come into it.

-- Give and accept affection, freely and often.

...From Nick Kristof's most recent New York Times column, about dealing with a cancer scare

-- Spend more time with family.

-- Appreciate the world around you, despite its imperfection.

And I think so much of this relates to teaching...

Popularity Pays Off

According to a study I've been reading, popularity in high school positively correlates with higher wages later in life. Specifically, one additional friendship nomination in high school is associated with a 2% higher wage 35 years later. This is equivalent to almost half the gain from an extra year of education. Shifting someone from the bottom fifth to the top fifth of the school popularity distribution would be predicted to yield him a 10% wage advantage.

Why? I'm guessing strong leadership skills and persuasive powers, especially developed so early in life, are at play here. Any thoughts?

via Barking Up the Wrong Tree (via Economix)

Research Shows Merit Pay For Teachers Is a Terrible Idea

My good friend just wrote about merit pay for teachers here, inspiring me to muse on the topic as well.

A new report from the nonpartisan Economics Policy Institute (EPI) argues strongly against tying teacher pay to test scores, highlighting two major fallacies championed by the pro-merit pay camp:

1. Merit pay is widespread in the private sector. Well, no, it's not. It's really only prevalent in the sorts of fields, like finance, real estate, and sales, that helped to generate the global economic crisis.

2. Merit pay has positive consequences for workers. Again, this argument is erroneous. Negative consequences are the result in many, many cases where workers are trying to meet quotas -- think about cops trying to meet monthly quotas, or the case in which bus drivers in Santiago, Chile were paid according to how many passengers they picked up. What happened? A spike in bus crashes, as bus drivers sped around the city trying to increase their passenger load.

Esther Wojcicki, a California English teacher and the mother of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, writes on The Huffington Post that teachers do need incentives, but that these incentives are far different from what our policymakers (like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee) are focused on. Citing research by Daniel Pink, she writes that that teachers are far more motivated to work their hardest when they are "aligned with the purpose of the job," enjoy some "autonomy," and receive "support in gaining mastery" of their job."

The teachers I work with are incredibly purpose-driven. If anything, the types of strategies that get us down and drive us to apathy are exactly those our administrators employ in an effort to raise test scores -- stop teaching your content in a creative way and start teaching high-stakes testing strategies in a tedious, often scripted way. I already work pretty hard, but I would love more respect, more autonomy, and more support. I can imagine my classroom culture and students' capacity to learn would only improve. Maybe, in time, test scores would as well.

via GOOD

What Is Life?

I just read a really interesting essay by Carl Zimmer on how to define life, or whether a definition matters. The piece exposes the litany of definitions of life -- life must transform carbon dioxide, or contain membranes, or contain DNA, or it must evolve -- within the scientific community. It also exposes our curious current state of affairs, where we spend so much time arguing over issues, like stem cells and abortion and genetically modified foods, to which the meaning of life is crucial, yet we cannot actually agree on what life is.

Zimmer goes on to explain the platform of Carol Cleland, an astrobiological philosopher who argues a comprehensive definition of life is in fact unnecessary to our study of life. So much of the universe is yet undiscovered that we are limiting ourselves to arbitrary terms until we increase our sample size. In other words, we cannot purport to define life until we confront forms of life radically different from what we know here on Earth. Until then, we risk overlooking that which is life, perhaps bizarrely so, due to our possibly narrow constraints. This view commonly plays out with regard to viruses -- Scientists intensely debate whether or not viruses are living things, yet biologists continue to study viruses in their labs.

My favorite part of the essay discussed the origin of the debate on the meaning of life. It turns out that the instigator was not a biologist, but rather a physicist named Erwin Schrodinger. (Physics students around the world love and hate Schrodinger. At the same time). Schrodinger wondered how life seemed to violate the laws of physics: While everything else in the universe tends toward entropy, life is based on order, from ecosystems down to molecules. ...What a wonderful idea!

read The Meaning of Life

You Know What Really Grinds My Gears?

At a Good Day Teaching, a Philadelphia teacher rants about the epidemic of people who refer to our students as "these kids." She writes,

>>Although many comments can be helpful and germane to the larger conversation on educational reform, there are a depressing number of comments that refer to "these kids". "These kids" the rant goes, are irredeemable, not able to be educated, worthless, beyond saving....<<

This irks me beyond belief. When teachers/policy makers/community members/well-meaning friends and family of mine refer to the students in urban schools as "these kids," I feel like they are abdicating responsibility for them. Let's give up on "these kids"; they are not our problem.

Well, they are your problem. They are certainly my problem. And I wouldn't trade my problem for any other problem in the world, because they are MY kids.

A Good Day Teaching goes to say,

>>Here is what I see: A group of boys and girls who can be, on any given day, funny, engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating, hard-working, insightful, lazy..... In other words, kids who are like almost any other group of twelve and thirteen year-olds in the country!<<

If you talk to me long enough, you might believe I've actually mothered 130 kids. I talk about my kids devotedly, exasperatingly, excitedly, and with an abundance of affection I never knew I had in me. Some of them are more difficult to love than others. And my expectations differ, too. I want only the best from some of my sweetest, smartest, and most mature students, while simply a smile from Bright Kid with World's Biggest Attitude Problem warms my heart.

But don't talk to me about "these kids." I don't know what kids you're talking about. If you mention my kids, however, my heart will flutter a little bit, and I'll be happy to talk to you.

Haves vs. Have Nots

Two interesting things on the GOOD blog this evening:

1. The job market is bad news bears if you're between the ages of 16 to 24. But while circumstances may seem bad for us college graduates, they become positively dire for high school dropouts. Looking at (approximately) June '09 through January '10 on the graph below, note the 4% unemployment rate for those with at least a bachelors degree as opposed to the 16% unemployment rate for those who have not completed high school. I realize that the "less than high school" category also includes current high school students who have been squeezed out of summer and after school jobs by their college-age counterparts. But high school dropouts do make up a large proportion of this bracket.
The even scarier statistic is the year-over-year change. Kids who have not completed high school are looking at a 8% change in unemployment compared to last year. Meanwhile, young people with a bachelors degree are facing a 2% year-over-year change. I wish many of my tenth graders would understand that NOW IS A TERRIBLE TIME TO DROP OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL. And the future for high school dropouts isn't looking any better.

2. Utah State Senator Chris Buttars wants to trim the state budget by making senior year optional for high school students. He claims this would save $70 million for the state of Utah, which is currently undergoing a $700 million budget shortfall. Not bad, right?

While states tend to require only three years worth of high school credits in most subjects (for example, three years of math) for graduation, thereby making it feasible to graduate in three years, I worry that high school students who graduate early would lose out on that final synthesizing year of high school. True, high school seniors catch senioritis in droves. But, at the same time, I think many seniors do use their final year to embark on a community service project, conduct some sort of research, or merely apply the lessons they've learned throughout their secondary education as they begin to seriously consider life after high school.

One of my favorite Brown policies is its insistence that students complete all four years of undergrad. In other words, it's really, really difficult to graduate in three or three and a half years at Brown. I found that this forced undergrads to take classes they wouldn't have otherwise, devote more time to a thesis senior year, and thoroughly enjoy the four-year liberal arts experience. This may be my inner Brunonian speaking, but I truly feel there's a lot to be gained by completing four years of undergrad. By the same token, senior year of high school is of immense importance, budget shortfall or not.

That Pale Blue Dot

Twenty years ago today, this iconic and wonderful photograph was taken from the Voyager 1. Late astronomer Carl Sagan lobbied for a photo from the outskirts of the solar system, just as the Voyager was about to leave the solar system and move onto explorations within the greater Milky Way.

Sagan himself captured the beauty of the photo best:

Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

As I glance outside and see the piles of grayish snow framing Philadelphia, a city located in the Northeast yet not accustomed to handling such an assault from the sky, I can't help but wonder... That pale blue dot seems so fragile within the greater confines (or lack thereof) of the universe. Meanwhile, we humans tend to be intoxicated by our self-imposed importance. In our hubris, we cause so much damage to the planet we call home. We exert a tremendous amount of influence over this place. But we need to yield our power differently in order to maintain those swirling white clouds and blue oceans evocative of another famous journey in space.

Mid-Winter Blues

I think my school's entire staff has been hit by the mid-winter blues. Everyone I see is sick, tired, or just plain grumpy. It's so hard to maintain a cheerful, optimistic attitude in such an environment. Not that I am playing my part as I should.... This week, I am also more irritable, less skippy. And I wonder how I can find the balance between putting my best foot forward and being honest with some people.

Some Notes on a Monday

Several things:

1. I wrote two students up for yelling curses at me when I asked them to stop talking and running out of my class. When I brought their pink slips to the dean of discipline, she told me that both girls were totally uncontrollable -- that not even their parents could control them. The dean told me she had no idea what to do with them -- and that I should continue putting up with them for the remainder of the year. Even at the expense of the education of the rest of the class, I asked? Yes, she said.

2. Faculty meeting blah blah blah

3. I love working in my school. I really do. But it sucks planning labs and realizing I don't have even the most basic chemicals and lab supplies. I'm limited to whatever I can buy at the local grocery store. Yay creativity?

And yes, I realize that soda was probably a poor way to illustrate anaerobic respiration. I promise better labs and demonstrations next year. If you have any suggestions/ideas, please share! I'm open to anything and everything!

Bridges

Well, the teachers' contract was ratified.


I just hope I get to keep my job... I really love my kids.

So, I Was Walking Through the Halls This Morning, And...

One bright young man yelled at me, "Looking sexy, miss. Do you do porn?"

Was he demeaning me or himself or both of us?

*********

Also, I'm trying to propose a new science course for next year. Let's see if I actually have the motivation to go through with it...

Thoughts on Teaching with Powerpoint

Well, dear readers, I'm sorry about the hiatus from blogging. I've done my best to make my first winter break as a teacher not only a physical break from school, but also a mental vacation. And it's worked -- I've had a relaxing and invigorating week and a half. Nevertheless, real life beckons. One of my New Year's resolutions is to blog regularly -- we'll see how that works out.

2009 was a great year, but I'm confident that 2010 will be an improvement in every possible way. In other words, I will make 2010 a better year.

At any rate, I came across this excellent blog post about "Why Learning From Powerpoint Lectures Is Frustrating." The writer, a college junior, explains why Powerpoint instruction irritates her:
1. Instructors tend to teach quickly when they use Powerpoint. The time it takes to write something on the chalkboard or whiteboard is no longer a rate-limiting factor.
2. Instructors tend to leave visuals on the board until they need to free up that board space for something else, which gives students more time to copy notes and comprehend concepts. On the other hand, students cannot glean information from a slide once the instructor has moved on.
3. This results in a tendency among students to frantically copy everything on a slide before the information vanishes, at the expense of listening to the infinite wisdom of the instructor.

I rely heavily on Powerpoint for my instruction, so this post got me thinking...

I agree that lessons involving math are best taught on a board. Solving equations is often key to understanding a given mathematical concept -- and the process of solving equations is more intuitively thought through in stepwise fashion rather than seeing an entire solution on one Powerpoint slide. On the other hand, biology is an inherently visual subject, especially at an introductory level. There is no way my hand drawings on the board in a single color of chalk or Expo marker could do justice to a topic like cell organelles.

Also, for some reason, changing slides appears to be a good way to get my students to snap to attention. (Well, crawl to attention might be a more accurate expression.)

Yet, are they learning? I find that my students are more apt to copy every little thing that's written on the slides rather than pay attention to my explanations. As a result, they lack a key level of comprehension. I suppose I can make the text on my slides more scarce, thus forcing my students to listen to me, but I don't know how well that would work. They are pretty well trained to copy what they see in front of them. Most of them will vigorously deny that they are audial learners (which is totally untrue, given the absurd amount of TV they watch).

Anyway, that's my jumble of thoughts. This is really just what I need -- another reason to be insecure about how I teach.

Whatever, 2010's going to be a better year. I know it.

Via CarolynBlogs (via the AP Bio listserv)