Snow Day!

I always liked snow days when I was a student. In my last year of college the governor even closed my school for a blizzard; that was the only time during my first degree stint in which I had a snow day. I guess it was fair since there were no snow days when I was a high school senior, the only year of my 1-12 schooling that I had no snow days to be off. Anyhow, today is an official snow day at my school, and that is the theme of today's blog.

Tom Batiuk put it right in his comic strip "Funky Winkerbean" when he had the teachers more enthused about a snow day than the students. Most teachers at my school really enjoy the occasional snow day -- the operant word being "occasional". Too many snow days makes education a difficult task because the students lose their focus. Back to the topic.

When I taught in the public schools, only teachers who had enough years in the public schools to have more "vacation" days than the school year allotted could stay home on snow days. Since I did not have those extra days, I had to risk my neck getting to the school at the normal start time. For those of you in private industry, like I was for 14 years, schools are unforgiving. If you're in private industry and know that you may have trouble getting to work, you call in and make adjustments. In the public school system, you basically cannot do that; you must be at the school at the usual start time -- when I was teaching in the public schools, my high schools started between 7:15 and 7:45 a.m. depending upon the system. It's a bit perilous driving into school when: (1) you are ahead of a lot of the snow plows in your area; and (2) there may not be anyone to open up the school for you (Yes, Virginia, most teachers do not have keys to their own places of work.). Thank God, that in my non-public school the faculty do not have to come to the school on snow days. The principal believes that we are professional enough to do our work at home. Considering how much of our work is on the internet, it's much easier to do schoolwork at home. (In fact, I have suggested that we have school on the internet on snow days when there are a lot of them. My suggestion has not been taken up as of yet.)

When I moved from the Pittsburgh area to the Southeast, I thought that people holed up when it snowed because they simply did not have enough experience driving in the snow. That's a little true (I had never lived in an area before where people did not know what studded tires were.). What's really true, though, is the fact that most snow down here is wet. Cars slide on the wet snow because it gives no traction. Then, it gets really cold, and that wet snow becomes ice with no cold, dry snow in between. Ice storms are an occasional problem here, too, with the loss of electricity. Of course, we do get the cold, dry snow also, but that is the exception, not the rule.

Hence, on our presidential inauguration day, I will be sitting at home watching the inauguration while grading papers. I hope that my students will be watching the inauguration, also, but that's an iffy hope. We had the okay from the principal to have our classroom monitors tuned to the inauguration prior to this week, but I would have missed much of it because the monitor faces the students and not the teacher. My suggestion for the future: either make every presidential inauguration Tuesday a school "holiday" or have a special school function to take it in by all students and staff. Just an idea.

Boredom attacks!

I just finished giving the first semester exams this past Friday, so I've been very busy. However, I did notice something about myself when I was doing the exam review for my 3 functions and modeling classes: I discovered that I was bored. I make my math exam reviews as animated PowerPoint slide shows and tweak them from one year to the next; hence, there was nothing new in them for me. Plus the said 3 classes I teach in a row (periods 2, 3, and 4 to be precise), so I guess that going over the same stuff in the same way 3 times in a row just bored me silly. I am thinking this over because I realized that I've probably been unconsciously bored all along. It's definitely time to put some spice into my teaching!

New Year's Resolutions

I remember (even if it's a false memory) my mother saying that what one did on New Year's Day, one would do all year, so I try very hard to do things each January 1 that I want to do throughout the year. That's really how I deal with my resolutions. School resolutions I make every summer based upon what worked and what didn't work during the prior school year. So what am I doing today?

1) I am back to exercising. I got out of the habit in late October when I had a cold. Illness does that to me. I kept on trying to start up again, but lethargy is so much easier. I actually started working out on weekends and continued during Christmas break, but my lack of practice/exercise definitely showed up. Hence, I already exercised today. By the way, for those couch potatoes and teachers who already have no time to exercise, let me tell you a secret: exercise is one of the best panaceas around. I sleep better, I have more energy to do any and all work including grading papers (my anathema), I do everything faster, and I do not have as much trouble with depression over time. Better than any pill available. Teachers, find the time to exercise, and you will have more time available for everything else!

2) Talking about procrastination, I will get those projects graded today! I plan to be teaching all year, so I need to do some teaching activities today. I also have a few quizzes and tests to grade plus the always-popular make up work.

3) There are other things I'll be doing, but they are the home things involving my husband and my adult son, so I will not include them here.

Happy New Year!

Breaktime chores

I am about to write 2 recommendations for students that must be postmarked before January 1, 2009. I would say that I'm procrastinating, but recommendations require some serious thinking, at least for me, since I want to be honest and positive at the same time. In these 2 students' cases it's not a problem because they are good students who do well in their work. One I've had for 2 years, the other I've only had for this year. The latter asked me for a recommendation mainly because he is applying to my alma mater, and he thought it wouldn't hurt to get one from an alumna. I agree, especially since I've worked to get any student to look at my alma mater over my years of teaching, and he's the first one I hooked. It helps that about half of his family also went to the same university, but I like to think that I am such a good influence that he was drawn to that school. Now, if I can only convince the admissions people that he's a keeper.

After that I get to start grading projects that were due on the last day before Christmas break. I'm glad that I have such specific rubrics since they keep me honest and actually make it easy for me to grade them. I figure that will keep me busy for the remainder of this morning.

Where did I go?

I have been considering giving up on having a teacher blog over the past few weeks. My brother, however, says that he continues to check out my blog hoping to see a new post. I guess that I will shelve the idea of quitting and start anew, so to speak. Meantime, here's a silly story about a student:

I had her last year in one of my math classes. She was hard-put to get quiet and work, but her work was fine. She was one of those students I was glad to pass on to the next math teacher. She showed up early in this school year asking for a college recommendation. I agreed with unspoken reservations, but I wrote an honest, if somewhat short, recommendation. In October, I confiscated her cell phone because she had it out during school hours and gave it to the dean of students. After that, every time she saw me, she loudly said to any and all around, "I am not talking to you." I would just smile and continue on my way.

Early in December, she showed up in my classroom during my planning period. She commented on my music (Bach played by the late Virgil Fox) then asked if she could borrow a calculator from me for a test she had to take during that period. I responded, "I thought you weren't talking to me." She said, "I wasn't, but I am now. May I borrow a calculator for this test?" I loaned her a calculator, and she zipped back to her test. When I walked down the hall past her classroom, I just chuckled. She did return the calculator. She also returned to saying, "I'm not talking to you." whenever she sees me, but she isn't so loud. As for me, I'm still chuckling when I see her.

Homework Confessions

I am just sitting at my computer procrastinating as usual. It's usual in that I have a stack of homework, tests, and make up work to grade. I absolutely hate to grade homework! So I procrastinate since it is the homework that I need to grade the most.

I am trying some self-psychology at this point. I am reminding myself of how much better I feel whenever I am caught up in my grading. It is true that I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of me whenever I have all the grading done, but I still hate to do the grading. Hence, I procrastinate. Even writing this confession is a form of procrastination. Yet, I want my students to do everything in a timely fashion. I am such a hypocrite!

There is a reason why I hate to grade homework and classwork. In order to save the school money and myself time plus make the expense of buying the textbooks worth their while for the parents my homework assignments are usually out of the textbooks. This means that the students will put their work in various sheets of paper requiring some effort on my part to figure out what is what. I do require that all problems be numbered even if they were done out of order; I am not going to spend my time trying to figure out which answer goes to which problem. I also require that the student's name be on the first page of the homework, I allow my students to use my stapler in order to keep homework with more than 1 page together, and I take the "teacher's prerogative" of determining what different characters and words are if they are difficult to read -- I refuse to argue on those points because it is the student's responsibility to insure that his/her work is legible. Frankly, saving the school money by not making and copying worksheets is messy for me. I have fellow math teachers who are absolute fiends about copying worksheets partially to make the grading easier. With the economy the way that it is, I wonder how long they will be allowed to continue that.

Now, there is another way to deal with the said homework grading, and I have used it. It is to put the answers on the board and go around checking that the students did their work while they check their answers. It is faster, but the students learn to make marks that look like work when skimmed by the passing teacher when, in fact, they had done no work at all. I found that this method did not do much in the way of helping my students learn the subject. So I collect their homework and grade page by page .... and I procrastinate when it piles because I have not had time for it.

There is another way to deal with homework that is accumulating. That is to just chuck it in the trash without looking at it. I knew a principal who said that he gave daily quizzes when he taught and he would throw away occasionally ungraded quizzes when time was short. I do not give daily quizzes, so those I do grade, but I do trash some homework and classwork at times. The caveat for me is to check every piece of paper so that make up work does not get trashed also.

I do not have the same distaste for grading tests and quizzes that I do for homework, and there is a reason for that. My tests and quizzes are all done on photocopied sheets so they are not messy in form. It is much easier to go through them, so I usually do them rather quickly.

There is one other thing regarding how I grade both homework, tests, and quizzes. I mark every answer whether correct or incorrect. Correct gets a check mark, and incorrect gets circled. I also write notes and examples on their work so that I can do a little one-on-one in their work that gets returned to them. My intent is for them to learn no matter what; it is not just to "give" them a grade for their effort. (I have noticed that students "earn" an A, but they are "given" a D or worse. It is amazing how their viewpoints change about their work based upon their grade. I guess they do not realize yet that they are fooling no one, especially their teachers and parents, with their words.)

New teaching tip from old exceptional children's teachers

In the South, just about any amount of snow or ice on the road means either a snow day or a one-to-two hour delay or a one-to-two hour early dismissal. Well, for the first time in the 24 years that I have lived here, we had snow before Thanksgiving. Hence, on Friday we had a two hour delay to the start of school. Normally, that would not be a problem for me, but the math department was assigned Fridays for tests and major projects, and I had planned to give tests all day. I had already printed the tests for my first 3 math classes with the intent that they would take the better part of our usual 47 minute periods. What to do?

I did not want to completely reprint the tests since that would be a waste of paper, so I went through them and crossed off 4 problems, leaving 37 to do. In the first class, there were a lot of complaints about the lack of time and the students' desires to move the test to Monday. Knowing the principal's opinion of such an action, I said no to their request and had them start. At the end of class I had agreed to the following: those who wanted to finish their tests later in the day could, and the others' tests would be graded on what they already did with the caveat that each problem would be worth more. The students were satisfied, but I was not. I had 2 more classes taking the same test, so I needed to think quickly.

When the next class started, I told them that I decided to give them their tests one page at a time. They would do one page, hand it in, and receive the next page. That way if they did not finish within the shorter class, they could finish on Monday (As another math teacher pointed out early on Friday: we cannot give tests on Monday, but we can complete them then.). All but one student finished the entire test within the time allotted. That one student was upset because she had to do one page at a time, so she only worked on the first page. I assume that she had talked with students from the first class and believed that her class would get the same deal from me. I will not go back on my word for any particular class, but that does not mean that I have to offer the same to the remaining classes. Every teacher knows that one makes the most mistakes on the first class in the day of a particular subject, and I did that in this case. By the third class, everything was running smoothly for this test.

I learned this technique from our learning support/exceptional children/special education teachers. We have students with diagnosed requirements of extra time to take tests, so what our LS teachers do in those cases is give the tests one page at a time. That way the students do not know what's on the next page if they have to finish their tests later in the day. I offer this tip to all teachers who, like me, find themselves having to give an already printed test in a shorter time frame than originally planned. It works. Now, if I could only go back on my word to my first class ... ;-)