Testing, Testing

As my ITRW friends know, I'm in my second "semester" of a graduate program, which means that I'm buying textbooks, frantically getting readings done ... and taking tests.  Last week was a doozy:  I had two weeks, and a maximum of two weeks, to pass the statewide online test certifying me as a "teacher-evaluator".  What did I learn from this process?

1. For starters, as high-stakes as this test is -- every principal, assistant principal, suburban department chair, etc. has to pass it OR LOSE THEIR JOB -- we had two tries.  That is, you could take any portion of the test, fail it, and after 24 hours take it again. The cynical among us would say "Of course you get two tries, otherwise there wouldn't be anyone left to turn on the lights in schools." But the reality is this: when it's really important to get person X up to a particular level of competence in skill Y, we almost always give them multiple tries. How many residents are dismissed for missing the vein the first time? And how many times do we give students the opportunity to retake a test at no penalty?
2. Second, we were encouraged to do the training together; in fact, virtually everyone from the network chiefs on down told us to take the tests together. Most of the hardest test consisted of watching videos and arriving at performance ratings (along the eight components of Danielson's Dimensions 2 & 3) for the class, and watching with other people--and talking with them about what we saw--was incredibly valuable. I wound up doing the videos on my own (have you tried to schedule a six-hour testing window during the day, with other people, when you have kids?) but the times I did sample videos with other people I learned much more than studying on my own. How often do we provide structures and encouragement for kids to work together on their tasks--and assessments?
3. Third, we didn't have to study: once you opened the training modules, you could go straight to the assessments. You could also dip into any of the lessons in any order. So when you felt ready, you could go ahead and try the test. (Remember, you get two tries.) How often do we give students this option?

But the most important thing I learned from the experience wasn't about designing assessments, or even structuring instruction. My big takeaway was this: I was terrified. Even with everyone I know assuring me that I'd pass, even knowing that my score beyond pass/nopass was irrelevant, even knowing that my practice tests were all well above the mark, I found the experience of waiting to take the test and then actually getting going practically unbearable. 

Now, we don't tell high school students that they'll lose their jobs if they don't pass Friday's math test. But we do tell them that they need straight A's to get into "top colleges" (and if we don't tell them this, they certainly hear it from everyone else around them), and so an A (or B+) is, for our top students, effectively the passing grade--a much higher threshold than I had to cross. And as adolescents, they're not as good at dealing with stress as most adults (or at least as the "optimal" adult). What I'm getting at is this: I left my office convinced that most of our students--and most of our strong students--find testing incredibly stressful. And while I may have "known" that before, I'm not sure I felt it. I'm not sure what to do about this, but I know that I'll think about testing very differently this year.

So maybe that's the pedagogical payoff for attending graduate school.

The Way, Way Back

As we wind up this year, I've been thinking about last summer's awesome movie The Way, Way Back, and not just because it's about a fourteen-year-old on summer vacation.  The movie starts with a long scene introducing Duncan (the aforementioned fourteen-year-old) as a kid who's just kind of, well, a shlump.  His mom's boyfriend thinks so, and while we realize that this adult's criticism is way too harsh, you have to see his point: Duncan is sullen, introverted, and, apparently, completely nonspecial.

Over the movie--and I won't spoil the whole plot for you--Duncan finds a second home at a local water park, where he takes on a new identity as "Pop 'n Lock", the park's indispensable factotum and MVP.  We see him going back and forth between "Duncan," still-awkward fourteen-year-old, and "Pop 'n Lock", master of every detail and every need in the park.  Although Duncan gains a little confidence at home, his mom (and his mom's boyfriend) don't get to see any of his alter ego until ... well, I won't give it away.  It's good.

The point is that I think we have a lot of students like Duncan, students who are mostly unremarkable, even substantially less than remarkable, at school, but who totally shine in some part of their life outside of school.  This is the kid who is super-responsible and on-the-ball at her job at Starbucks; or who's a realistically-aspiring professional dancer; or who keeps track of two younger siblings and three cousins, does the grocery shopping, and puts food on the table every night while mom is at work. These kids are stars. But what we teachers see is the late homework assignment, the "C" quiz, the half-checked-in, half-checked-out stare at school. We don't see the stars.

More often than not, these kids are not middle class, and not white. One of the privileges many (certainly not all) white, middle-class kids experience is not having these kinds of burdens, or if they have them, they often know that they're as much assets as deficits, and that the student's job is to alert me early about the constraints and plan with me to work around them. They send us emails like "Hey, Mr. K, I wanted to give you the heads up that we have rehearsals every afternoon and evening for the next two weeks, so I might wind up one or two assignments behind. Can you tell me what I should focus on the most if I have to do triage?"

I think other students don't know that we care, and often don't think that we necessarily should care.  Many of my minority students have an overt "no excuses" attitude, which is refreshing except for when there really are extenuating circumstances. Yes, if I'd known your sister was in the hospital all last week, I would have been happy to let you take Friday's quiz on Monday.  But on the positive side, I don't think they know that we want to see them at their best--even if their best isn't what we see at school.

I don't have an easy solution for this problem. I think it helps to tell kids what we look for and want to know about, and if we coach them on the kinds of things that might qualify as reasonable exceptions.  (A long time ago I stopped writing "late assignments will not be accepted" on my assignment sheets, and started writing instead things like "under ordinary circumstances, I won't accept this assignment late," with details that described some truly extraordinary circumstances.)  And I think it helps to ask kids about what's going on in their lives outside of school. But the most helpful thing may be to remind ourselves, when we see a kid who seems like a Duncan, that more often than we might think, there's probably a setting in which that kid is really a Pop'n'Lock.

Cutoffs, and the last week of classes

So now that CPS is in all-out last-week-of-classes mode, I have a few gripes. They all relate to cutoffs.

Remember cutoffs?  When you got a hole in the knees of your jeans, you'd just cut them off into shorts, and they'd look like this:

After a while, though, the ends would start to fray, and they'd look more like this:

So you'd trim up the shorts, and the cycle would begin again.  Eventually they would look like this:

OK, maybe not exactly, but you get my point.

The problem with the end of the year is that we have this urge to stop teaching just one or two days before the end--either because we're tired, or because we feel like the kids are tired, or because grades are already either submitted or essentially impossible to move much, so why bother giving another test, and why bother teaching when you're not going to give a test?  There are a hundred rationalizations, all of them bad.  Because then when there are three or four days left, you say "Oh, well, in a couple of days I wouldn't be teaching anyway, so ... " and the end of the year frays up a little more.  And so it goes, until suddenly you're spending an entire WEEK (or TWO weeks!) of instruction in games, "free time," movies, semi-reasonable documentaries ... anything but bona fide teaching.

What's actually wrong with this?  A few things:

• Not teaching because there's no test (or tests are over) just teaches the kids that the test was the only reason you were teaching in the first place.
• We all wish we had more classroom time.  Well, we do: this week, a solid 250 minutes per class.
• Just because the curriculum for the test is over and done with doesn't mean the subject is over and done with.  What kind of teacher doesn't have a favorite poem, theorem, artist, historical event, ... that just doesn't fit into the regular curriculum?  (In fact, for me, a life-changing moment was when, the last week of school, my Brit Lit teacher read us The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock aloud.) There's always more to teach--it's not like we're in danger of running out of poems, problems, or paintings.
• Finally, how is it fair that we make kids go to school and then waste their time?  My kids can play video games, watch movies, read books, doodle, and mess around with their friends just fine on their own--they don't need state-compelled school attendance to do any of these things. If the law is that kids are compelled to be in school this week, then fairness and respect for them as human beings demand that we make it worth their while.

It's not so hard.  This week, my students are finishing up a discussion about "shape space", where we measure the distance between different shapes to talk about fractal limits; learning about Markov chains and why regular Markov chains converge; and giving short presentations about explorations they did with fractional linear transformations, queuing theory, and hyperbolic geometry. They're advanced.  In other classes, I've used the time to read a cool book (like Arcadia--thanks, Mary, for the idea!), or do interesting problems we never saw before, or think about mathematical puzzles.  Or you could just get a head start on one or two interesting ideas that the kids will see the next year.

I know I'm spitting in the wind -- Emma told me yesterday that she'd "figured it out: when teachers don't want to teach, they just go on Netflix, put in a documentary, and voila--instant lesson!" That experience makes me sad.  But if we all just held the line ... or the hem ... 

Gender Games

Two issues of gender and games that have come up in the last weeks ...

1.  My oldest daughter reports some frustration that in one of her classes, the teacher divides them into teams every day to play games (no, this is not PE, so be kind) and that, every day, one of the iterations is boys versus girls.  This way of forming teams seems like no big deal to most people, and to me that's a pretty big deal. It bothers my daughter because most of her friends are boys, but even more so because it reinforces our society's idea that there's a huge inherent difference between boys and girls.  We wouldn't separate kids by short and tall, or straight hair versus curly hair -- so why does boys versus girls seem to "make sense" to so many people?

A radio show I listened to a long time ago made the point that even in addressing classes as "boys and girls" reinforces that preoccupation with gender roles.  Don't believe it?  Imagine replacing "boys and girls" with "white children and black children".  If describing the kids by gender doesn't make a difference--as many people seem to think it doesn't -- then why does it feel so funny to use race?  Only because when we separate boys and girls in this way, we are reminding ourselves that gender differences are crucial in ways that we're less comfortable reminding ourselves that race differences are crucial.  (Although if we were honest and not all "it's the end of racism", we'd have to admit that race plays a huge role in kids' experiences in school.  But that's a different blog post.)

The point is this:  dividing kids up by gender except for activities that require gender separation (bathroom use, for example) is just lazy; it makes some kids uncomfortable, and should make all of us wonder why this difference is the one we keep reinforcing in our schools.  Don't do it!

2.  It's the end of the school year and my kids are handing in portfolios; the assignment includes a short essay on "How I got here", namely, into a hyper-advanced college-level post-calculus class while still in high school.  This year's crop follows a trend I first noticed four years ago.  Virtually every boy says something like "The first time I really loved doing math was when I was competing against [my best friend/my classmates/my archenemy/another school] in [some math competition]."  Whether it's a simple race to finish multiplication tables or a full-blown Mathcounts meet, this experience is clearly one that has turned the boys I teach on to mathematics.  On the other hand, almost none of the girls even mentions competitions; when they do, it's almost always negative.  (One girl--now a math major--once wrote "I decided I hated math when my teacher had us play this stupid game called 'Around the World'.")  And my own daughter loves math but hates competition.  So there's some interesting data.

My friend Cathy O'Neill, aka mathbabe, wrote on this issue a couple of years back, "math contests kinda suck."  As a contest author, I have to agree with the majority of her argument: our society's reliance on math contests for identifying and encouraging mathematical talent discourages a lot of girls, who either don't like contests, or don't like doing math the way that you have to in order to be successful at most math contests.  That's why we need more math circles and other places where girls can get their hands dirty doing awesome mathematics--Chicago's new math research symposium is one such.  There's a place for math contests in the pantheon of cool, challenging math activities--but the pantheon has got to get a lot bigger than that.