Teacher of the Year: Stevie Wonder

When I was about 12 years old, my parents took my brother and I to see Stevie Wonder in concert.  It was my first real concert experience and most of it is now a blur.  But 25 years later, the one thing that sticks out in my mind turns out to be something that had nothing to do with Stevie Wonder’s music.  It had to do with a lady in the front row who couldn’t carry a tune if it were strapped to her back. 

About half way through the concert, Stevie (or is it Mr. Wonder?) interacts with the crowd and decides to hold a singing contest.  He gets three volunteers from the crowd and they each get a turn singing Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones.  The winner gets to sing the song of his choice with Stevie Wonder himself.  Talk about the opportunity of a lifetime. 

Two of the three could sing very well, but I don’t really remember much about their performances.  However, the third contestant was very sharp.  So much so, that even my untrained ear could tell that this lady couldn’t sing.  Here is the impressive part:  in the middle of her singing, Stevie Wonder stops the band and has them adjust the key of the music to fit her voice.  He recognized the exact key in which she was singing and made the adjustment to fit her.  It did’t work–she still stunk, but that isn’t the point. 

As teachers, we need to do the exact same thing every day.  No matter how well we construct a lesson, we need to be ready to adjust to the kid who continues to sing off key.  You can’t plan for that.  The band didn’t practice the song in every possible key just in case they had someone who couldn’t sing with them.  They knew their song, they understood the progression and understood what to do if they started somewhere different than where they had planned. 

I believe that an effective teacher is going to be the one who can recognize where a student is in relation to where the objective is, meet him where he is and adjust the plan accordingly.  It’s not so much about having a great engaging plan all the time.  We can plan a symphonic lesson plan in which all the small parts fit together into a wonderful investigation or lecture.  But it’s what we do when the kid playing the oboe doesn’t hear what everyone else hears and plays the wrong notes that really matters.

Dear Sam,

Just read your post about being a fraud and you hit the nail on the head.  But you may not have hit the nail you were aiming at.  You a fraud?  Come on!  I have never met you but I can hear your voice with every sentence you write.  You can’t fake that.

You know what I’d expect if I came to see you teach?  I’d expect to see a guy who cares about his students both in and out of class.  I’d expect to see a teacher who does his best to reach his students where they are, lift them to where they need to be and encourage them to become what they could be.  I’m pretty sure Socrates didn’t have lesson plans and we’re still talking about him.  All he did was ask questions. I’m pretty sure you do that too. 

Don’t worry about putting your best stuff out there for all of us to see.  We all clean up the house when we have company over.  Every time you post,  you are inviting us to your classroom.  Thanks for that. 

So before you beat yourself up about not being where you want to be, remember this: None of us are!  That’s the nail you hit.  We all keep striving in this game and none of us has completely figured it out; we merely get glimpses of what could be.  And anyone who tells you otherwise is the real fraud.  It took me 14 years of teaching to get to where I am and I still make rookie mistakes, have lessons that flop, get irritated with kids who won’t engage and still don’t exactly know what to do with kids who are bored.  

So thanks for the honesty, but sometimes we get tangled up in the accidents and forget the essence.  At your essence, you’re a teacher; plain and simple. 

Best to you this year. 

David

p.s. Now if I find out that you’re not really a teacher and all you did was stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, then I’m gonna be pissed.

Whatever It Takes

Our campus has been having some great conversations centered on developing tiered lessons that allow for differentiation depending not only on ability level but on learning modality.  How can we reach a student at their appropriate cognitive level while respecting whether they are an auditory, visual or kinesthetic learner?  Now, I am no cognitive scientist nor am I an expert at developing curriculum.  But I do know that meeting kids where they are is a good idea.  How we implement that is a different story.  Haven’t figured that one out.

Last year I had a student who would have bounced off the walls if I didn’t keep him engaged.  Getting this kid to do homework was nearly impossible because it interfered with his gaming time. 

“Look over your notes tonight,” I’d say.

“Yeah, right,” he’d think.  “What do I want to do that for? I gotta date with Xbox Live!”

But then I started a channel on blip.tv where I would upload any mathcasts I created so students would have access to them from home.  Dang it if this kid didn’t subscribe to the RSS feed.  It hit me when one day after a test, he told me:

“Hey Mr. Cox, that test was easy.  I watched the examples on my PSP last night.” 

Do these digital natives process information differently?  Is this a new modality?

Is This What I Do or Is It Who I Am?

I really have to hand it to you people. Man, some of you guys kept the great conversations going from the time school let out ’till the opening bell of this school year. I know some of you actually still start in September, but great conversaions nonetheless.

I just couldn’t do it. I meant to, but I couldn’t. Sure, I had a bunch of ideas of what I wanted to work on during the summer but they all got trumped by four little boys who kept wanting to wrestle. How can you pass up on getting dog piled by these guys?

So needless to say, I didn’t get much school stuff done. I kind of felt bad about it; especially when I thought of all the teachers out there who put in 60+ hours per week and hammer out curriculum over the summer. I see the Tweets and blog posts–you people are amazing. The question has come to mind: Is This What I Do or Is It Who I Am? Is teaching my job, or is it my essence? I struggle with that all the time. I struggle because I realize that everytime I say yes to an extra hour of planning, that is one less hour I have to spend with my wife and boys. I want to be one of those teachers who can put in an extra four hours per day planning great lessons, but I simply can’t. Does that mean someone is gonna pull my teacher card? Hope not. This is a great job. And the one thing I know for sure is that the better dad I am, the better teacher I become.

Stretch Factor

What does a normal parabola look like again?

And what about one with a stretch factor of 7?

And how about 1/10?

Nice job folks. 

Now get out some paper and get to work! 

And quit smiling…math ain’t that fun.

Intro to Quadratics: 7th Grade Style

Can I just say that I love middle school kids.  I mean, sometimes keeping them on the same page is like trying to herd a bunch of cats, but I love them.  Now that testing is over, it is time to start preparing my 7th graders for the wonderful world of quadratics.  We have been doing a bunch of activities on linear relationships and the results have been pretty good.  My kids have a pretty firm grasp of the following:

• Slope and rate of change mean the same thing.
• If the rate of change remains the same, then we have a line.
• The initial condition is the y intercept.
• If the initial condition is 0, then we have a direct variation.

They like lines; they are comfortable with lines.  It is time to take them out of their comfort zone.  So here is how it went down:

We had already done some activities on linear relationships like:

• Farenheit vs. Celcius
• cm vs. inches
• km vs. miles
• start height vs. rebound height for a bouncing ball on concrete between 75 and 80 degrees with no wind resistance. (Alright, we didn’t control the experiment that much, but they still saw that the ball rebounded to about 70% the original height.  Daniel learned that baseballs don’t bounce very high when you drop them from 1 meter and the seams mess up the bounce.)

The latest installment was to have them bring in a few circular items and then find the relationship between radius vs. circumference.  This led quite nicely into, ‘Well, since you have some circles here, you may as well calculate the areas too.  Graph those compared to the radius and see what you get.”

It was interesting to see how many kids tried to force it into a linear relationship. 

Angel recognized that “choosing a bunch of circles with around the same radius doesn’t tell us much, huh, Mr. Cox.” 

“Nope, next time we may want to expand our sample space.”

Regardless, by the end of the activity, they understood that sometimes we have relationships that are “curved” or “non-linear.”  Fareen recognized that we get a “half of a parabola.” 

So from there we do some work with the side length vs. area of a square.  Hey, we may as well start at the beginning, right?  But it was the simplicity of the exercise that produced the magic that I never saw in 10 years of teaching high school kids the same thing. 

“Hey, Mr. Cox, it isn’t a line because the slopes don’t stay the same.”

“Yeah, so what?”

“Well the areas increase by 3, then 5 then 7.  But the increases all increase by 2.”

“Okay, so what does that mean?”

“The rate of change has a rate of change.”

At this point I get goosebumps.

This is when Abel, asks: “What will happen if we cube x?  What happens to the rate of change then?”

Couldn’t pass this one up, so we drew up a chart and did it.  The kids concluded that for a cubic: the rate of change of the rate of change has a rate of change. Oh, and the number of times we have to check the rate of change tells us what the exponent is.

Moral of the story: Don’t assume that your lesson objective is the right one.

or, Sometimes it is better to follow the herd of cats.

The Never Ending Question

Teacher: So what is the value of f(x) if x =3?

Student: Does f(x) mean f times x?

Teacher: No, no, no…f(x) is a function of x. 

Student: Oh, it is a function of x?

Teacher: Right.

Student: Oh, okay,  I think I get it.  So we can plug in a number for x and find out what f equals. 

Teacher:  Yeah, that’s pretty close.  Do you have another question? 

Student: So, then is f like the slope of the line?

Teacher: *slaps forehead*  Uncle!

Student: Well you said it is a function of x and of means to multiply.

Alright, so that didn’t just happen in my class.  But similar dialogues do take place right around the time I first introduce things like f(x) or sin(x).  Kids always think that means that we are multiplying something by x.  We usually end up discussing how often times functions need to have names like f(x) or g(x) so you can tell them apart.  We don’t spend too much time on function notation in middle school, but when it comes up, I would like a better way to explain it.

Don’t act like that hasn’t happened to you.  

So how do you explain it?