Introduction
I'm naming each of these winter break posts after something special that happens that day. Today is the first full day of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. I don't always acknowledge the holiday during my winter break posts, since it often falls earlier. Indeed, last year, the first candle was lit on the last night of Thanksgiving break.
This year, the first candle was lit last night and the second candle tonight. The last candle won't be lit until Christmas night. It means that the Mexican celebration of Las Posadas (mentioned in an earlier post) and the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah largely overlap this year.
Yule Blog Prompt #3: A Peek into My Classroom...
This is the third day of winter break, so I ought to do the third prompt from Shelli's list. But this topic is "A Peek into My Classroom...," and I assume she intends us to post photos of our classroom. Yet as I've said before, I have neither a smartphone nor any easy way to get classroom pics -- so many I should skip this topic altogether.
Well, I can still talk a little about my classroom environment even without pics. I have many posters on my classroom walls, including some with PEMDAS and other math pointers. All four walls of my room have dry erase boards, providing me with several opportunities for VNPS in groups.
The one thing I don't have on my walls this year is student work. Last year, there was a poster project that we did in Stats classes, and I left these posters on the wall the entire semester. This year, we did only one project in Math I class, on drawing designs and finding the slopes of the drawn lines. But that project didn't go the way I wanted it to -- in fact, I was considering having the students draw their designs on poster, but we never got there.
Of course, I did point out on the blog that done properly, the focus of that project should have been on Desmos, not poster paper. In a class where most work is done on Desmos (or online in general), it's understandable that there's wouldn't be much student work on the walls.
Then again, if you were to peek into my classroom, there's one thing you'd see that I'm not proud of, because there's too much of it in my room. And that thing is argument. I've been involved in far too many arguments lately -- indeed, I've been devoting many blogposts this year to my arguments and how to reduce or eliminate them.
There were many arguments during the project of course, due mainly to both my own and my students' frustration with the project. I was hoping that there wouldn't be too much arguing once the project ended, but there are still a few conflicts worth noting.
In particular, my birthday was nearly two weeks ago, on December 7th. I used the day to discuss my own past -- my education, my teachers, and the rules I had to follow. My own teachers were strict with me regarding tardiness and food in the classroom, and of course phones in the room weren't a problem at all back then. I pointed out that I'm only enforcing the rules that I had to follow back then.
But this led only to arguments. I was careful not to compare my young self to my students, since I'm already aware that this leads only to arguments. Instead, I was comparing my current self to teachers I had when I was younger. Yet all of my students' arguments can be summarized in just three words -- "that was different" -- to show why they shouldn't have to follow the rules I had to.
One source of distraction was, of course, the World Cup. But I was considering using the World Cup to make another sports analogy. Many of my students don't enjoy math because they've been struggling at it ever since elementary school -- they've never been good at it, so they should just give up. But then consider Team Morocco -- it was first formed in 1928, and they'd never made it past the round of 16 going into this year. In other words, they've been failing at soccer for, much, much longer than my kids have been failing at math. Thus if Team Morocco had acted like my students, they should've given up and not even traveled to Qatar for the World Cup -- meaning that they would never had made it to the semifinals this year.
I never made this analogy in class, though. I knew that it would have only led to more arguments.
The closest I got to a sports analogy was in one of my Math III classes. There were two students, friends who had just taken the Chapter 5 DeltaMath Test. One of them had a perfect score, while the other had been caught cheating and earned a zero. The guy who got a zero saw a noticeable drop in his grade, while the guy with 100% saw his score barely move at all, and they wanted to know why.
I tried to explain that since the midpoint of the 0-100 scale is still an F (50%), it means that it's easier for a grade to go down significantly than to go up significantly. The sports analogy I made is that in baseball, seasonal batting averages (and quarterback completion percentages in football, and scoring percentages in basketball) don't move as much late in the season as earlier.
(As it happens, grade weighting was also partly to blame. Many students' grades dropped due to poor performance on the midterm, which is in its own category separate from chapter tests. Thus one could get 100% on every several chapter test and yet it won't erase a low midterm score.)
The guys then asked me why they should even have had to take the Chapter 5 Test if it wouldn't raise their grade very much. Continuing my sports analogy, I asked them why professionals should play baseball in September, football in December, or basketball in April, if their stats can't improve very much and they're stuck in last place. Their response was, "because it's fun."
At this point, I ended the argument, since it's easy to see where this is going. Sports are fun, so last place teams should keep competing and never give up. On the other hand, math surely isn't fun, so last place math students should be allowed to give up math as soon as possible.
How to Avoid Arguments in My Classroom
I've been trying to base my arguments on logic. Why should students have to learn math? It's because math will keep their doors of opportunity open, while failing to teach them math closes those doors. I don't wish to present my own generation as the perfect generation, which is why I often go back to the Generation of Heroes born in 1955 (Jobs, Gates, and Berners-Lee, who invented technology) and, since my birthday was also Pearl Harbor Day, the Greatest Generation who fought in World War II.
But my students aren't moved by such logic. No matter how sound my analogies are, they will counter with "that was different."
And when I step back, I can see why any logical argument is doomed to fail. People aren't Vulcans (Spock's logical species from Star Trek). So people aren't swayed not by logic, but by emotion.
When I was in second grade, my teacher saw that I was doing great at math -- so much that she ordered a Pre-Algebra text from the seventh grade room and let me study it independently. Now compare this to the experience of the typical math haters in my class. When they were in second grade, they were doing poorly in math -- they knew that their teachers always said "You're wrong" to them, especially during math lessons.
So they began to hate math. And no discussion of the utility of math would sway them -- inform them that many jobs require math, and they'll reply that they're certain that they won't work at any job that requires any math beyond what little they already know. They'll say that they'd much rather shut the doors of opportunity, if the only way to keep them open is to learn that subject they hate so much.
People are swayed by emotion, not logic. In fact, as much as I'm ashamed to say this, I've likely convinced more female students to study hard in my classes because they thought I was cute than any discussion of 1980, 1955, or 1920 did. I've already mentioned one such occurrence here on the blog (back at the old charter school), and it might have once or twice before I started blogging.
Of course, for a student to have a crush on a teacher is very inappropriate. And as I get older, I'm developing male-pattern baldness and losing my teeth, so no one finds me cute now. Still, this shows that I've swayed more students by emotion (however inappropriate those emotions may be) than I've ever swayed by talking about 1955.
Recall that there's a teacher who uses appropriate emotions to get her students to learn. That teacher is Fawn Nguyen:
https://www.fawnnguyen.com/teach/dear-new-teachers
Tell your students an everyday story. Did anything happen in the last 24 hours (or over the summer) that you’d want to share? Be spontaneous. Make it quick. How was your dinner? The drive in this morning? Something funny your child/partner had said? This is not something you force or make up. You either have something light to say or you don’t. Here’s mine: Last week I asked my husband to teach me how to dive into the lake from the dock. (No, I had never done this before. I kinda know how to swim, meaning I don’t really know how.) He demonstrated, talking me through the motion. My turn — I assumed the proper dive position — and before I could change my mind, I did a belly flop. He laughed hard and asked me to try again. So, I gave it another shot. And I did it! I perfected the belly flop in my second attempt! My tummy and face hurt from the impact. I’d never seen my husband laugh this hard. He told me I was a champ.
And Shelli, the leader of the Yule Blog challenge, writes this in her challenge post today. She refers to another big MTBoS name, Sarah Carter:
http://statteacher.blogspot.com/2022/12/student-engagement-strategies.html
After the "pandemic teaching" of the past few years, my school is mostly back to pre-pandemic times and I was determined this year to bring back more active learning to my classroom.
Last summer, at the OKCTM Conference, Sarah Carter (@mathequalslove) was the keynote speaker and her topic was about Embracing Joy.
Joy -- that's clearly an emotion, not logic. In other words, the way that Fawn, Shelli, and Sarah get students to work hard in their classes is to get them to enjoy their classes. On the other hand, endless arguments about 1955 don't lead to any amount of joy at all.
Instead, I should have little conversations with my students, of the type that Nguyen describes. But I always get worried -- sometimes students might want to have a conversation with me about a non-math topic, and I'm afraid that they're trying to derail the class so that no math is taught at all. Furthermore, Nguyen herself warns us:
This is not something you force or make up. You either have something light to say or you don’t.
And I seldom have anything spontaneous to say, so anything I'd say would be forced or made up. One of my biggest weaknesses (if not the biggest weakness) is communication. When I was my students' age, I had trouble speaking to both teens my own age and to teachers, and now that I'm an adult, I still have trouble speaking to both teens and to fellow teachers.
I did talk about my young self on my birthday. It's OK for me to discuss the rules that my own teachers enforced and that I even broke once or twice each -- and then end the discussion there, without any attempt to compare it to my current rules for my current students. The week before was the anniversary of my suspension, and so I talked about that in my first period class.
Also, my birthday week was also when the freshman Health classes gave a classic assignment, the one where students must carry an egg around to simulate carrying a baby. So I told my Math I classes that I had to do this project myself as a young seventh grader -- and I failed it. In particular, I carried my egg from second period Health to third period PE -- then placed the egg in a locker as I had nowhere else to put it. Then I dropped the egg between third period PE and fourth period Algebra I. So if my students' eggs lasted one full day, then they'd already beaten me on this project. Notice that it's OK to compare myself to my students if the comparison is favorable for them. (Although I've written about my seventh grade year here on the blog, I doubt I ever mentioned this project on the blog.)
While all of these are fine conversations, Nguyen also wrote "in the last 24 hours," so I want to talk about 24 hours ago, not 24 years ago. Well, the World Cup would have been a prime conversation topic during the last three weeks of school. Each day, I could have talked about the previous days' matches and how teams or players did without tying it to math class. (For example, there's no saying that if my students would work as hard at math as Morocco or any other team did in soccer, then my kids would be doing better.) If I do attempt to tie soccer to math, make it a word problem rather than a discussion about their habits in math class.
Looking back, I'm surprised at how popular Team Argentina -- the eventual champion -- was in my math classes. I knew that most of my students were Hispanic, presumably of Mexican descent. So once Mexico was eliminated, I thought I could get my students to focus more on math. Argentina mattered only in that the team was in the same group as Mexico.
But Argentina continued to draw my students' attention during fourth period in the knockout rounds. Of course, the popularity of superstar Lionel Messi was a factor. Yet it's also likely that, though few if any of my students are of Argentine descent, many Hispanics would rally around Argentina as the only Latin American team still standing.
I'd like to believe the next World Cup in 2026 (in North America) will be less of a distraction for my students than this one, since 2026 will be in the summer. Still, the first day of that tournament will be June 8th, which could be slightly before Day 180 in many schools. My current freshmen might be trying to take their second semester finals in their senior year and be distracted by soccer.
Conclusion
Well, that's enough for this post, but it does leave me much to think about. People are creatures of emotion, not logic. And so if I wish to avoid arguments and get my students to follow my rules and work harder in my class, I must appeal to their emotions. I need to instill in them a sense of belonging, so that they'll want to do better.
This is the only way to convert a student who's turned off by math to one who is turned on. And just as importantly, it's important avoid students moving in the other direction.
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