For completion, let's do "A Day in the Life" for today. Odd periods, starting with third period (since "first" is really zero period) meet on Tuesdays:
10:00 -- Third period is the first co-teaching class, senior English. The resident teacher continues introducing Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and even reads part of it.
10:50 -- Third period ends for snack.
11:10 -- Fifth period is the second co-teaching class, sophomore English. The resident teacher continues introducing Noah Sweat's Whiskey Speech and gives the students some ideas for their own Whiskey writing assignment.
12:00 -- Fifth period ends and seventh period -- my only real class for today -- begins. This is one of the two US History classes. I read from the history book and then the students answer questions about Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin and how its development led to the expansion of slavery.
Because it's the proper time of the year for it, I sing "Meet Me in Pomona, Mona" -- even though the LA County Fair has obviously been cancelled. Once again, I won't add the "music" label since this song is a parody of an established tune. But I will add the "traditionalists" label, since today is my regularly scheduled traditionalists' post. Our main traditionalists have been quiet lately, and Darren Miller -- whose blog we've been following ever since he's made strong comments about whether schools should reopen -- hasn't written much about the pandemic in the last few weeks.
But something happens during history that I want to look at from a traditionalist perspective. The last question asks the students to discuss other bad inventions that ended up causing more problems than it solved, just like the cotton gin leading to the expansion of slavery. As I mentioned in my last post, I bring my whiteboard markers today, so I can write down the students' responses on the board.
Unfortunately, this doesn't work out. When I announce the final question, a mass exodus begins where almost every student logs out of Zoom, even though it's only approaching 12:45 -- fifteen minutes before the official end of the period. And the students who don't log out all have their video turned off. The aide and I figure that they're ignoring us. So I end up writing nothing on the board with the markers I brought.
Thus what happened in this period is, the students are doing the work as long as I'm spoon feeding them the answers, but as soon as I ask them to discuss and answer, they log out. I can't truly say that any student actually learns anything today in this class. (By the way, I sang "Meet Me in Pomona" before asking the final question
Let's compare this to the fifth period class that I co-taught. The resident teacher is very strict with Zoom -- she insists the students' cameras must be turned on. And one of the assignments -- coming up with their own topic for their "if by whiskey" speech -- is considered an Exit Pass. The students must submit their Exit Pass before the end of the period, or they're marked "absent" (or non-participating -- there are special attendance codes just for distance learning). This happens with one student -- he refuses to turn his camera on and doesn't respond when she speaks to him, so he's marked absent.
If students repeatedly fail to turn on their cameras when asked, it's a parent phone call home. If a student's grade drops to a low C or worse, the student must attend academic support after lunch -- and if that student fails to appear, it's a parent phone call home.
Yes, after observing this teacher in fifth period, I could have tried her management technique in seventh period. But there are several differences between her class and mine. First of all, I'm just a sub -- if I said "turn the camera on," the student can just say, "The regular teacher lets us keep our cameras off," even though that regular teacher is out indefinitely and her rules are irrelevant now. Of course, I don't have the students' phone numbers to make a parent phone call -- even if I did, I worry that the parents might complain about privacy issues if I tried to enforce a camera rule. That resident teacher probably knows what to say to such parents, but I don't.
The second problem is that this is a special ed class. (In co-teaching classes, the resident teacher is usually gen ed while the co-teacher is special ed.) The students have been placed here for a reason -- many of them struggle when they must come up with their own answers. I've observed this during in-person special ed classes, including the last three days before the virus shutdown. I want to avoid a class where all I do is spoon feed, but many students' skill level is so low. It would be cruel to have such strict rules for Exit Passes and parent phone calls when the students aren't capable of doing the work on their own. The regular teacher probably knew how to engage such students, but I don't.
And the third problem is that this class no longer has a regular teacher. Last year, I subbed in another special ed class that was also without a teacher -- I was covering the last day before the long-term sub was set to begin. I knew in advance that if the students misbehaved, I couldn't just write their names on the bad list for the regular teacher because that teacher was already gone. Instead, that day I brought lots of rewards to school, including pencils and candy. But of course, that doesn't work for distance learning -- and even when the students come in for hybrid, passing out tactile rewards may be considered unhygienic due to the virus.
Is there anything I could have done with this class? Here's something that might have worked -- instead of an Exit Pass, make it a Warm-Up. I open the class with something like "Name some very important inventions." The students might answer anything from the wheel to the smartphone -- praise the students for coming up with them and write them on the whiteboard. Then I ask them to name some bad inventions -- ones that caused harm to many people. This will be tough, so I might give one myself (the atomic bomb) before asking them. I write these inventions down, then finally I the cotton gin as one that caused harm. Then this leads to the main history lesson.
This is a traditionalists' post -- but my suggestion is the opposite of traditionalism. Of course, I definitely believe that traditionalism doesn't work with special ed students. When we ask them traditional questions (whether in math or history) that they don't enjoy answering, they leave those questions blank (or keep their Zoom cameras off or even log out fifteen minutes early -- the equivalent in distance learning to leaving stuff blank). When we ask them questions that they enjoy answering, then they're less likely to leave them blank. As usual, "engaging" the students means "asking them questions that they won't leave blank."
There is one girl in this class who seems quite nice and willing to learn. But -- and I've seen this before in special ed classes -- she's unwilling to communicate with anyone other than the aide or regular teacher. Indeed, her first question to the aide is, where's the regular teacher? She participates a little in the class when the aide asks her a question, but not when I ask it. She turns off her camera during the final question but turns it back on just before the end of class. I notice that she's wearing an Angels baseball shirt -- this is Orange County after all -- and so I try to engage her by talking about the team.
Perhaps I could have tried to talk to her about the Angels at the start of class instead. This has worked for me in special ed classes before -- I see someone wearing, say, a UCLA shirt. And I start talking about the Bruins with that student, who becomes more willing to communicate with me and at least attempt the work.
Let me end the traditionalists' section of the post with my own whiskey speech on traditionalism:
If by traditionalism you mean providing young students with the basic skills they need to be successful, when they are still young enough to enjoy learning, then certainly I am for it. But if by traditionalism you mean asking older students questions that they would rather leave blank, when they are at the age where they start questioning authority, then certainly I am against it.
1:00 -- Seventh period officially ends for lunch -- though in reality it ended much earlier.
2:05 -- After lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday is academic support, which I also mentioned earlier in this post. In some ways, it's like the old tutorial -- students come in if they need help, or if the teacher requires them to come.
As a co-teacher, I'm not responsible for academic support, so I only need to be there for the last fifteen minutes, which are assigned to seventh period. But let's be honest -- these students didn't stay the last fifteen minutes of seventh period proper, so we really expect them to show up for fifteen minutes of academic support? Still, I stay because students might theoretically me ask for help.
During this time, I play around on the attendance website and make a discovery -- even though hybrid is two weeks away, the classes have already been divided into cohorts:
- Cohort A Hybrid
- Cohort B Hybrid
- Cohort A Online (that is, the parents opted the students out of hybrid)
- Cohort B Online
As expected, the cohorts are alphabetical, with last names A-L in Cohort A. It was mentioned that the dividing line is actually past the start of the M's, but no M's (not even names starting with "Ma" such as Martinez) are listed in Cohort A. So as far as I'm concerned, the first cohort is A-L.
It's interesting to see how many students have opted out of hybrid in each class. (Unfortunately, I can only see the three classes that meet today -- oh how I wish I'd discovered this yesterday when all classes met.) Notice that the co-teaching classes are also visible to me:
Period 3 (seniors)
A Hybrid: 11
B Hybrid: 11
A Online: 4
B Online: 5
Total: 31
Period 5 (sophomores)
A Hybrid: 8
B Hybrid: 7
A Online: 8
B Online: 5
Total: 28
Period 7 (special ed juniors)
A Hybrid: 2
B Hybrid: 5
A Online: 3
B Online: 3
You would think that the higher grades are more likely to opt out -- when both parents work, they are more likely to leave older students home alone than younger students. Yet the seniors here have the most hybrid students -- only a bare majority of the sophomores will attend in person.
Special ed students are also a group that you'd think would perform better in person, yet just like the gen ed tenth graders, only a bare majority of them choose hybrid. That means that of those thirteen special ed juniors who turned off Zoom once the lesson required them to think, six of them will be on Zoom the entire year. I wonder how much they'll learn at all.
This also explains why the hybrid plan must be concurrent. It's for the benefit of those students who are opting out of hybrid -- they must be able to Zoom in to see the lesson. And so I wonder, is there a better way to implement a hybrid plan that incorporates the students who opt out, yet doesn't make teachers deal with in-person and online students at the same time?
I'll have to wait to see how my old district implements the hybrid plan. One way might be, if it's already known which students will opt out, to let some teachers opt out of hybrid as well (older ones, perhaps, who are more at risk for the disease) Assign the students who opt out to the teachers who opt out, and then let them have full distance learning. Then the teachers who opt in to hybrid get only students who also opt in -- they only have to teach the in-person students. The hybrid students on days aren't in class get asynchronous learning, and can still contact the teacher during academic support through Zoom if they need any additional help on those days.
Also, notice that if enough students opt out, the remaining class might be small enough that it can attend class everyday without need for an A/B hybrid plan at all. This is definitely true for the special ed class above, where there will be only two students in person on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It's possible for all seven students to attend everyday (even though concurrent would still be needed for the six students who are at home). But this will be awkward -- even though special ed classes are smaller, they might have certain mainstream or elective classes that are larger, so there would still need to be an A/B hybrid plan.
Again, I don't want to comment on what's the best hybrid plan until I at least see what my old district does -- but since it's in LA County, that might not be for some time.
Today is the Chapter 1 Test. But there's one more thing to say about the test before I post it -- is it wise to give students tests during distance learning, when it's much easier to cheat? I mentioned this during the Day 10 "Benchmark Test," but today's Chapter 1 Test is presumably one that will be graded, so avoiding cheating matters more here.
Then again, since we already know that schools will be opening for in-person learning on September 29th -- just in time for the Chapter 2 Test -- we can justify skipping the Chapter 1 Test and avoiding any graded summative tests until the 29th. We might still give the students these questions as an additional review of what they learned in Chapter 1, but we grade it as a regular assignment rather than a test.
This is what I wrote about the test last year. [I preserve some of the old discussion here about whether this is a "quiz" or a "test" -- this actually goes back to the blog's earliest years. But this year, it's neither a "quiz" nor a "test," but merely an assignment during distance learning.]
I am now posting my first test. It is actually the Chapter 1 Quiz that I posted in the past, but now I'm considering it to be a "test." This is mainly because in my semester plan at the start of the year, I refer to the first day of school up to Labor Day as the first "unit," and then the month starting with Labor Day as the second "unit." Each test that I post corresponds to one of these "units." Still, I don't want to overburden the students with a hard test at the start of the year, so this still has only 10 questions.
Even though my series "How to Fix Common Core" is over, I will often use these quiz and test days to post links to articles about the Common Core debate, including recent traditionalist arguments. I will start by rewriting what I wrote last year about today's test (including my rationale for including the questions that I did), and then link it back to the Common Core debate.
There is a Progress Self-Test included in the book. But even if I threw out the questions based on sections 1-6 through 1-8, there are some questions that I chose not to include.
For example, the first question on the Self-Test asks the students to find AB using a number line. This is very similar to some of the questions that I gave on the Wednesday and Thursday worksheets. But there is one crucial difference -- this one is the first in which both A and B have negative coefficients.
Now I know what the test writers are thinking here. The test writers want to know whether the students understand a concept. There's not enough room on the test to give both easier and harder questions. If a student gets a harder question correct, we can be sure that the student will probably get a much easier question right as well. But if the student only answers an easier question correctly, we can never be sure whether the student understands the more difficult question. Therefore, the test should contain only harder questions, since anyone who gets these right understands the simpler concepts too.
But now let's think about this from the perspective of the test taker, not the test maker. Let's consider the following sequence of hypothetical conversations:
Wednesday:
Student: The distance between 4 and 5 is 9.
Teacher: Wrong. You're supposed to subtract the coordinates, not add them. The distance is 5 - 4 = 1.
Student: Oh.
Thursday:
Student: The distance between -4 and 2 is 2.
Teacher: Wrong. When subtracting, change the sign. The distance is 2 - (-4) = 6.
Student: Oh.
Friday:
Student: The distance between -8 and -4 is 12.
Teacher: Wrong. You forgot the negative in front of the 4. The distance is -4 - (-8) = 4.
Student: Oh.
And we can see the problem here. The teacher wants the student to be able to find the distance no matter what the sign of the coordinates are -- not just when they're positive. But the problem is that the instant that a student finally understands how to solve the first problem, the teacher suddenly makes the problem slightly harder, and the student becomes confused.
Of course, you might be asking, why only give one problem on Wednesday? Why can't we give more problems to check for student understanding of the all-positive case, then move on to negatives? But you see, I'm imagining the above hypothetical conversations as occurring during, say, a warm-up given during the first few minutes of class -- and warm-ups typically contain no more than one or two questions. The student is never allowed to taste success, because each day a little something is added to the problem (like a negative sign) that's preventing the student's answer from being completely correct. The student never hears the words "You're right." And that's just with negative signs -- the U of Chicago text includes questions with decimals as well. I immediately threw all decimals out of my problems -- since decimals confuse the students even more, most notably when we draw number lines and mark only the integers.
Well, I don't want this to happen, especially not on the quiz or test where most of the points are earned. I want the student to taste success -- and this includes the student who's coming off of a tough second semester of Algebra I and is now in Geometry. Sure, if you feel that some students need to be challenged, then challenge them with all the negatives and decimals you want. But I don't want to dangle the carrot of success in front of a student (making them think that they've understood a concept and will get the next test question right), only to jerk it away at the last moment (by adding extra negative signs that will make the student get the next test question wrong), all in the name of challenging the students.
And so my test questions are basically review questions rewritten with different numbers. My rule of thumb is that the test contains exactly the same number of negative signs as the review. Some teachers may see this as spoon-feeding, but I see it as setting the students up for success. Any student who works hard to prepare for the test by studying the review will get the corresponding questions correct on the test.
Of course, some questions about the properties are hard to rewrite. I considered using the question from the U of Chicago text, to get from "3x > 11" to "3x + 6 > 17." But notice that the correct answer -- Addition Property of Inequality -- is difficult to remember and will result in many students getting it wrong. So even here I changed it to the Addition Property of Equality. After all, the whole point of learning the properties is to be able to use them in proofs. The Addition Property of Equality is much more likely to appear than the corresponding Property of Inequality. All including Inequality on the test accomplishes is increasing student frustration over a property that rarely even appears in proofs.
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