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Written July 29, 2006

Belated Blog – written in the pre-internet age at the new house. Posted in the pirated wireless age.

This have been pretty quiet this past week. The parents came down, and helped me move into the new place. It was nice to have them down here for the week and we got a lot done. The house is starting to feel like a home. I’ve got a bed, a desk, a dresser, even a filing cabinet. There’s a woman who lives down on old 61 who buys people’s things out of old storage units and then trucks them back to her place and sells all the junk. There are some pretty good deals down there, for all who might be interested. We cleaned up the kitchen pretty well, and the one bathroom at least, and now all I have to do is actually start teaching.

I went down to my school Thursday and Friday. The counselor was nice enough to print out my rolls for me, and imagine my surprise when I looked at them and saw that I am scheduled to teach algebra one (two sections) and algebra two (one section). Until Thursday, I had been under the impression that I was teaching two sections of geometry and one section of advanced algebra / trig. No big deal. Wednesday night I had just reached a breakthrough about how I was going to start the year with geometry, skipping what my students would recognize as math entirely for the first two weeks and working solely with logic. We’d start out with simple if-then conditional statements, work our way up to a implies b, get some biconditional statements, converses, inverses, contrapositives, and then make proofs, all without even thinking about numbers. No review required, to start that, because we’d be doing brand new stuff, without any foundation, in fact, we would be laying the foundation. Then, we could move on and build mathematical proofs, once we had the framework from working with purely logical proofs. I was excited. Plus, I taught advanced algebra this summer during TEAM, so I had a slew of lessons planned out for that. I’ll just toss out all those hours of deep contemplation, and start again.

But there is some good news as well. When I was talking to some of the teachers, I asked them what the class size limit is? I had remembered hearing 27 from someone in the administration, and they just laughed at that, and said yes, that was the official limit. The new guy fell for that one. But then, I looked at my class lists. Algebra one, section one: 17 students; section 2: 16 students; algebra 2: 13 students; homeroom, or FAP as they like to call it: 7 students. Grand total of 53 students. Changes my whole perspective on what the year is going to be like, and what sort of things I’ll be able to do with my classes. I had thought, at one point, about having an oral component to a test, at least once during the semester, but I had tossed that idea out because it would be impossible with 25 students. But with 13? I might be able to work that in at some point. And my piles upon piles of homework to grade? Now it’ll be just one large stack, less than 50, even if everyone hands things in. I think I’ll start off without rolling the die, I’ll start off with a homework bin, everyone’s homework goes in the bin in the beginning of class. Then, if I think it’s appropriate in a couple of weeks I’ll go to the die system. When I presented my CM plan, Ben said the die is fun, and you want to make sure you’re established first before you have fun. Even though I want to establish that my classroom is a place that we will have fun, the first priority is that we will do math. Then, as I get my footing, I can get to the point where the classroom is a place where we can have fun while doing math, and while acing the state tests.

The state tests. Maybe this is a little weird, but I am excited to be teaching a state test. First, I think I like algebra more than I liked geometry, and second, I really like the fact that I’ll be getting some measurable results. I’m an extraordinarily competitive person, and my goal is a 100% pass rate. I know at the end of the year, I’ll have more important things to celebrate than test scores – survival, the relationships I’ve built with my kids, seeing how much they have learned, independent of the tests, and maybe even a successful soccer season – but it will be nice to have something with a number on it as well.