Reflecting on Another Year

This month marks another full calendar year teaching in a juvenile corrections facility. To compare this  current moment to last year on this day is a lesson in contrasts. My current roster shows only three students I had on this date a year ago. The classroom has been upgraded with a projector attached to the  ceiling, a new Smart Board and wireless internet (password protected and only for use by myself or with myself and a student for a specific learning purpose). I use iPads and can seamlessly integrate technology and mathematics. I'm now teaching the second iteration of my video game design class.

It's not only the tangible changes that exist, there are also changes invisible to the eyes. In a word, I feel a lot more confident, perhaps even comfortable. I don't say this in a way that makes it seem like I know everything, or just sit back and rely on a curriculum (I don't), but as a way to say, I can do this job and I do it well.

One of the most important changes over the past year has been to consistently seek out trainings which pushed me to become more creative, and blend together technology and education. It is really easy to say, let every kid use a computer or iPad. The question then always becomes how do I make this meaningful in my classroom, and how do I squeeze out the best of what these technologies offer.

It isn't easy. It took a training in Limestone, Maine at the Maine School of Mathematics and Science for me to really rewire my brain with all these technologies. It took another training at the conference for New England Mathematics Teachers in Vermont to connect the dots with Common Core.

All of these changes over the past year has improved the quality of education here greatly, and make this an exciting place to teach and learn. The nature of teaching in corrections though is it can all change suddenly, as a result nothing is taken for granted. I have to stay flexible and open minded to be successful here.

The evolution of being a teacher here has really run the gamut over the past couple years. I started out in a classroom with no technology, where our only resources were textbooks and each other. Piece by piece technology was added, then training and support.

My hope also by writing this is to help demystify a bit what education can and should look like in a corrections facility. There is no doubt it can be difficult, but I believe it can and does work effectively for a great number of students. My plan is to write a bit more about this in the coming weeks.

Using Illustrative Mathematics

Illustrative Mathematics is a website I have been using on a near daily basis to focus on specific standards and concepts with students. The advantage of using this website is I can easily pull up a problem for each student. Each student I teach is on their own individualized curriculum, thus it is time intensive designing activities and assessments for every student on every day.

www.illustrativemathematics.org

Illustrative Mathematics provides guidance to states, assessment consortia, testing companies, and curriculum developers by illustrating the range and types of mathematical work that students experience in a faithful implementation of the Common Core State Standards, and by publishing other tools that support implementation of the standards.

Typically I will search through their database, find the right illustration and print out the first sheet to the size of an entire piece of paper. The problems have 3 or 4 parts usually so they can be time intensive, draw upon numerous skills and involve having to make charts of graphs. Here are a few examples:

1. Kimi and Jordan

This problem I use with students who are beginning to make the transition from Pre-Algebra to Algebra. The rates have context. The tables are laid out in a readable format. Students with experience generating equations won't have much trouble. When it comes to sketching the graphs, students can use the tables or the equation.

2. Adding Fractions with Common Denominators

It is easy enough to give students a worksheet with 20-30 problems adding fractions with common denominators. Once a student realizes the mechanics of the exercise, this should be done rather quickly without much thought. I love how this problem slows that process down. There is again a context, the answer isn't a whole number, the answer has to be translated into a meaningful number and then a picture has to be drawn which should clearly determine whether the student is comfortable with adding fractions or merely grasps the mechanics of adding the numerators.

I highly recommend checking out this site and adding it to your teaching repertoire. It is a definite time saver and comes with high quality questions that demand going beyond the simple mechanics of mathematics.

A New Year, A New Puzzle

Hello everyone and Happy New Year.

I thought I'd start us out light today with a problem that has been giving some of my students all sorts of fits. As usual, I try to offer absolutely no help, but if you have a struggling student who is just about to give up, ask them how much each section should add up to. That might do the trick.

The Bank or the Mattress?

A large proportion of students I teach have personal finance experience. I use this term loosely of course, the experience tends to be related to illicit activities and usually ends unsuccessfully. Unsurprisingly then, pretty much everyone I am teaching is either broke or owes money in the form of restitution payments to victims and/or the government. One of my goals in this facility is definitely to teach students how to manage money efficiently, and this works perfectly in tandem with Pre-Algebra and Algebra students.

I provide a number of scenarios for students.

Scenario 1

You are given $10,000. You decide to keep $5000 in cash and hide it under your mattress. You take the other $5000 to the local bank and open a savings account that promises a 5% interest rate a year for 15 years if you don’t touch the money. 

I love this scenario because my students have an idea in their head that cash is king and using banks means you could lose your money. I love to watch their reactions as they calculate how much their $5000 is worth after the 15 years.

Some questions for them to consider:

1. At what time during the 15 years does your bank account grow the fastest?

2. What would happen if you left the money in the bank for another 15 years?

3. What are the pros and cons of having your money in the bank? Under the mattress?

The last question can really be the most interesting. Students live under the misconception the bank can take your money, or if someone robs the bank you will lose your money, or the bank could simply steal it. This is a great opportunity to investigate what the FDIC guarantees. Then take all these ideas suggested about banks, and show how they really apply to the mattress, plus the associated lump you have to feel everytime you lay down.

Scenario 2

This one is a bit more realistic

You are currently broke but interested in saving money in hopes of becoming a millionaire. When you are released from the facility you begin working full-time hours and decide to put $100 a month in a bank account no matter how much you need it. The bank gives you a 5% interest rate compounded annually.

1. How long will it take for you to become a millionaire?

2. After 10 years, what is the difference between the amount of money set aside in the bank, and that same amount of monthly money if it hadn't been put in a bank?

3. What if the interest rate increased to 8% after 5 years?

4. If you started with $1000 in the bank, would this make much of a difference twenty years later?

I love the direction of the these graphs, students see right away what is happening and then quickly start introducing hypothetical situations. They start saving $200 a month at the beginning, change it to $500 a few years in the future when they figure they have a higher paying job. Pretty soon the "million dollar date" is dropping from 50+ years down to 36 years, and maybe below 30. Strangely becoming a millionaire doesn't seem so far fetched.

A lof of skills are included in this lesson. Percents, linear equations, non-linear equations, forecasting, budgeting, graphing. This is the type of mathematics that really gets me excited with all the questions we can ask, test out the new scenarios, and see how it turns out.

Last but not least, don't forget to mention they have to pay taxes on all this interest. I have no intentions on being called out for missing that slight detail years from now!

Fun with the Olympic Rings

I'm constantly in the process of generating content for mathematics class. I like to focus on one problem which incorporates a lot of different skills and comes with a number of questions exploring the problem. This type of problem solving is more aligned with the Common Core, and ties in learning from all over the curriculum. The belief is it creates learning environments which engender thinking, and move away from the more formulaic mathematics courses.

This type of teaching in a juvenile corrections facility can be a bit of a struggle at first. Many students I meet and teach are struggling learners who need to relearn the foundations before embarking on such tough problems. These open ended problems can be confidence killers, and students want to shutdown before they even start because there isn't an obvious solution with an obvious pattern of strategies to follow.

To this I say, too bad. If there is one thing I am preparing these kids for upon their departure from the facility, it's the real world. And we are not talking about the type of world where everything will be easy and readily available for them. It will be a struggle. They will have to work harder at both school and jobs to just keep up with their peers. They will have to constantly be making decisions and looking out for themselves, because there is no support for them.

When students start with me they will be challenged, they will have to think, be creative, explain how they are approaching tasks, ask for more information, ask for resources, in essence, makes things happen. This means as a teacher you have to be flexible, you have to let students test ideas even when you know they are wrong. You have to keep them motivated to keep working through the problem after experiencing failure. It's not easy.

Today's problem is another geometry problem. It's a simple diagram of the Olympic Rings with questions attached. There are no numbers provided, no strategies delineated, nothing except a few challenging questions. I'll offer little to no assistance to students, unless they ask for resources. I imagine a ruler and some trigonometry can do the trick. The first challenge I foresee is deciding whether the rings are equal, then where the midpoint of the circle is, then how to decide how to measure the length of the arcs, and then the angle of the arcs. Every student should have a different solution at the end of class.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

The first question I get when I tell students we are reading a novel in mathematics class goes something like this, "Mr. Cimato, this isn't English class, why are we reading?" There is typically agitation in their voice. They can hardly believe I would consider violating the sacred silos of education. Most mathematics classrooms subscribe to this theory, maintaining dutiful focus on the concepts they are tasked with. This game occurs in schools across the country, with teachers pretending only their subject exists, and students going along as to minimize the thought and effort required to succeed.

When our classrooms operate in this manner, we are making one of the biggest mistakes possible. We are tasked with bringing the real world into the classroom, integrating with technology, and making meaningful connections in our classrooms. While reading a book as part of a mathematics class isn't exactly ground-breaking, it provides a different access point for students, and ties together two unlikely subjects.

The post of this title, "The Housekeeper and the Professor" is a book by Yoko Ogawa. It takes place in Japan and tells the story of a housekeeper, her son and the housekeeper's client, a mathematics professor. The professor is anything but ordinary, an accident has crippled his short term memory, allowing him to only remember the prior 80 minutes. This part of the book is the hook, students are immediately drawn in on this rhetorical situation. What would my life look like if this happened to me? What challenges would I face? What would be advantageous about this?

Ogawa writes in such beautiful prose, the housekeeper has to introduce herself and start anew everyday with a man who can't remember her face. The professor uses mathematics as a way to break the awkwardness of the situation. The housekeeper, a poor mathematics student all her life, plays along to appease the the professor and hope to stay in his good graces. Along the way she realizes something most every mathematics student wishes. She can ask him to clarify certain topics, can ask him to explain examples repeatedly, and doesn't feel the wave of embarrassment from not catching onto a topic straightaway.

Many students identify with the housekeeper because they also struggle and are maybe hesitant to ask for help when their peers are already moving ahead. One of the advantages of reading this book is the professor actually teaches and lays out the mathematics. The levels oscillate from simple operations to highly complex mathematics.

I have found reading this book with struggling students has produced great results. Students want to learn and use the mathematics from the book. Students also enjoy the story which makes for excellent literary discussion.

In Loco Parentis

  Quick quiz for all of the teachers out there - WHAT DOES "EN LOCO PARENTIS" MEAN?  What is this little phrase all about?  What types of burdens and blessings does it carry?  At first sight, and embarrassingly enough, during my first education class in college it appeared to mean 'the crazy parent.'  The most reliable resource on the internet, Wikipedia, indicates that 'in loco parentis' refers to the assumption of some degree of parental responsibility of a an institution or non-biological parent.  By the end of this post, you might favor my original definition!

  I teach Biology and Environmental Science to the greatest group of students anybody could ever imagine.  Granted, some of my students have attempted murder, some have attempted rape, others enjoy a good fire every now and again (at the expense of others), and the majority of them have lived their lives on some type of mind altering substance (not to mention shared their blessings with others for a small fee)- but, hey, we all make mistakes.  I walked into my Biology classroom with the idea that I was going to change some kids!  I was going to make a difference in their lives.  These kids were going to be better off because of me!  I would liken my first day teaching youth in a detention facility to the births of my children.

  Susan Maushart speaks of birth as, "...the only way to gain control is to lose it..."  On my first day of teaching, as well as the birth of my first daughter - I HAD A PLAN!  My plan was great, NO my plan was AMAZING.  There wasn't going to be a student that could escape my grips without totally converting to the societal definition of success and happiness.  My plan was scheduled, my plan was flawless, I had truly thought of all of the little bends and curves that might befall me during class.  My plan was weak, hummm, nope it was just SHIT.  My attempt to control my situation, my surroundings, my classroom, my students' learning was not going to be successful on that day or any other.  I'm not sure if you are seeing a pattern in my writing, but the underlying theme was "my."  I was the center of my planning on that first day, and on that first day one of my first students let me know that I was not going to be the first person to control her actions.  She flew the coup, I hit my 'man down' button, and resigned myself a failure at teaching the 'hard-to-teach.'

  The birth of my first child had more similarities than differences.  At the birth of my first child, I had a date all picked out for the induction, I had a plan to avoid medications and interventions, I relied on myself for my planning and thought little of the advice of others, and stepped up to bat with confidence.  It wasn't less than 28-hours later that I had my daughter by my side in the warmer after multiple interventions, increased Pitocin doses, an epidural, and a quickly developing bought of post-partum depression.  I had relied on myself, my plans, my ideals, and discounted the opinions, experiences, and expertise of others.  I had ruled out the natural plan of the little person inside and the inability to control her.

  In class, I quickly learned to absorb the advice of everyone surrounding me.  Beware, this is DANGEROUS.  Absorbing something doesn't mean that you don't discard it later if you don't find it to be helpful - and discard bits you must!  Above and beyond listening to my principal, receptionist, maintenance men, fellow teachers, and guards I learned to listen to my students.  I dropped the pride, picked up a solid brick of humility to keep my feet on the ground, and started fresh.  I listened to their stories, I listened to their past experiences in school (or HUGE lack thereof), I listened to their desires, their interests, and I listened closely to them on the days that they told me to, "Fuck off."

  As my journey 'in loco parentis' went on, both with my children and my students, I learned that being a parent, or in lieu of a parent, is not about control.  My classroom became student centered, student directed learning (with a little guidance from  me - hey, I'm a little controlling), and I fell in love with their strengths and their weaknesses.  My students and my children have taught me more than I have taught them.  It's not just a corny saying.

  While I sit out on leave, I continue learning through my children at home while awaiting the birth of my newest child.  But, there is a piece of me that longs to be with these students that I have grown to love like my own children.  I miss the lessons that they taught me every day.  I miss the growth that I experienced at their very able hands.  I can only hope that my time with them has helped them learn a lot about science, a bit about relationships, and a smidge about the crazy parent that lives by the moto "in loco parentis."